27 Views of Chapel Hill
A Southern University Town in Prose & Poetry
Introduction by Daniel Wallace
27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern University Town in Prose & Poetry
Introduction by Daniel Wallace
Copyright Eno Publishers, 2011
All rights reserved
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Each selection herein is the copyrighted property of its respective author or publisher, if so noted on Permissions page, and appears in this volume by arrangement with the individual writer or publisher.
This books is also available in a print edition, sold at local booksellers or at www.enopublishers.org
ISBN: 978-0-9832475-0-0
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Acknowledgments
Eno Publishers wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Orange County Arts Commission in helping to fund the editorial and production costs of 27 Views of Chapel Hill.
The publisher also wishes to thank Gita Schonfeld, Katie Saintsing, and Speed Hallman for their careful reading of the views, and Daniel Wallace—writer, artist, friend—for his colorful rendering of Franklin Street.
A huge thank you to our twenty-nine writers (twenty-seven, plus two) who have created a literary snapshot of Chapel Hill, now and then.
Permissions
Some of the works in this volume have appeared in whole or in part in other publications.
A version of David E. Brown's "Chapel Hill: The War Years" originally appeared in the Carolina Alumni Review (September 1995).
A version of Nic Brown's "A Love Letter" was first published in the Chapel Hill News (2 June 2010).
A portion of the introduction from Mildred Council's cookbook, Mama Dip's Kitchen (1999, University of North Carolina Press), appears here courtesy of the publisher.
A version of "The Sisters' Garden," by D.G. Martin, appeared in Our State Magazine (April 2005).
A version of Michael McFee's "Fragrantissima" originally appeared in the Carolina Alumni Review (January/February 1997).
A version of "Where the Parking Lot Is Now," by Sy Safransky, was originally published in the Sun (April 1996).
Jim Seay's "Down among the Bones, the Darks, the Sparrows" was first published in the Independent Weekly, www.indyweek.com (10 November 2010).
A version of "Muslims in the Cul-de-sac," by Samia Serageldin, originally appeared in Love Is Like Water and Other Stories, published by Syracuse University Press (2009), and appears here courtesy of the publisher.
A version of Bland Simpson's "In Battle's Park" originally appeared in Wildlife in North Carolina (February 1995).
Elizabeth Spencer's "Rising Tide" originally appeared in the Oxford American, Spring 2010.
A version of Wells Towers's essay, "Life on the Hill," previously appeared in Garden & Gun (August 2009).
Daphne Athas's "The Library" is excerpted from Entering Ephesus, reissued by Second Chance Press (1991).
Will Blythe's "The Religion of the Forehead" is excerpted from To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, published by itbooks (2006), a division of HarperCollins Publishers.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Daniel Wallace
Jock Lauterer—Sweeter Still at Twelve
Linnie Greene—There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
Will Blythe—The Religion of the Forehead
Erica Eisdorfer—Poetic Justice
Samia Serageldin—Muslims in the Cul-de-sac
Mildred (Mama Dip) Council—A Life of Cooking
Moreton Neal—The Beauty Queen of Chapel Hill
Jim Seay—Down among the Bones, the Darks, the Sparrows
Paul Cuadros—The Cocineros of Franklin Street
Sy Safransky—Where the Parking Lot Is Now
Paul Jones—"In the Poetry Section of a Used Bookstore"
Bill Smith—Notes from the Bike Path
CJ Suitt —"I Grew Up in a City"
Bland Simpson —In Battle's Woods
D.G. Martin—The Sisters' Garden
Marcie Cohen Ferris—A Chapel Hill Walkabout
William Leuchtenburg—The Presidents Come to Chapel Hill
Charles L. Thompson—Standing Up by Sitting Down
Karen L. Parker—I Raised My Hand
Will McInerney—"Life upon Life"
Lawrence Naumoff—The Beautiful Couple, Everyone Says So
Preface
27 Views of Chapel Hill is just that: twenty-seven different stories and poems that capture some aspect of life in the eponymous Southern university town that many writers call home. Although this book turns out to include twenty-nine views, not just twenty-seven, it barely scrapes Chapel Hill's broad literary surface. But it's a start.
In some of the views, Chapel Hill is front and center; in others the town provides a backdrop. Some celebrate the town; others expose its complicated past and even more complicated present, its struggles with inequality, authenticity, growth, cultural change. Still others tell of personal connections to place and to one another. This collection offers a diversity of generations, ethnicity, life experiences, genres—fiction, essays, poems, even a letter written to the entire town.
Our hope is that this small chorus of voices creates a sort of genius loci, giving readers insight into who we are and who we were, how we think about where we live, how we see ourselves. Perhaps it also will inspire us to reflect on how the community informs the arts, and vice versa.
Most of all we hope all twenty-nine of our 27 Views of Chapel Hill provide a sense of place, the spirit of place.
—Elizabeth Woodman
Eno Publishers
Summer 2011
Introduction
Daniel Wallace
In the beginning, before there was anybody here at all—before Chapel Hill, before Carrboro, even before Historic Hillsborough; before Franklin Street, skinny lattes, even before Dean Smith—this postage stamp of soil we now occupy was just an undefined mass of pine trees, parakeets, possums, and dirt. It was not known for anything; it was not famous for anything; it was not named anything. People came here because they were on their way somewhere else, and this happened to be the place where their horse died and it was easier just to settle down than it was to get another horse. And that, in a nutshell, is how Chapel Hill came to be. (This is, of course, pure conjecture. Absolutely no research has been performed to determine the accuracy of this statement, and none ever will be, by this writer.)
But over time everywhere gets to be known as something. Beaver, Oklahoma, for instance, is known as the Cow Chip Throwing Capital of the World. The Bratwurst Capital of the World is, of course, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. (The list goes on. The Red Flannel Capital of the World is Cedar Springs, Michigan; the Sock Capital of the World is Fort Payne, Alabama. Et cetera. To list them here in their entirety would take minutes, perhaps an entire hour.) And though Chapel Hill is not officially the capital of the world of anything, it has, over the years, become the home of more writers than any other single town in the world. (This is not a fact, inasmuch as it has been proven, tested, or studied. But I’m not aware of any other town, except Historic Hillsborough, that makes this claim, and we might as well be almost the first.)
They come here—novelists, poets, writers of nonfiction and historical fiction, of Southern fiction and Northern fiction, television writers, movie writers, and radio commentators, writers of history, scholarly tracts, James Bond thrillers, all kinds of writers, dead and living alike. Even the guy who writes the ingredients label on the side of cereal boxes—he lives here. (Also not a proven fact.)
Some Chapel Hill writers toil in near-anonymity. Many, though, are exceptionally famous, and to mention them by name would be no more than a chest-thumping braggadocio. What the hell. Let’s chest-thump: Just turn back to the Table of Contents of 27 Views of Chapel Hill. And names aren’t important anyway: Everybody knows this ground is fertile with ink-stained wretches of every stripe. (What does that mean, "every stripe"? I have no idea.)
The question is why? Why here and not there? What is so great about Chapel Hill that writers want to live here, in such numbers that it has been said by swinging a dead cat (don’t try this at home), you are likely to hit or offend one, or at least get written about by one of them as the crazy guy who swung a dead cat that day?
Why did they come, these writers, and why did they stay?
Here is my theory: Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. They’re the reason. Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville, and he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, matriculating when he was fifteen years old. William Faulkner wasn’t born here, and he didn’t go to school at Carolina. As a young man though he came here. He visited. Apparently he was drunk every second. It's reported that he even lost a page of the manuscript he was working on—Light in August. But sober or not, he was here. Much later, Faulkner said Wolfe was his generation’s best writer—listing himself as second, which is a kind of humility, I guess. It also may well be true. (I don’t really know.) They are, indisputably, among the greatest of American writers.
Carrying my theory through to its logical conclusion, the presence of Faulkner and Wolfe in Chapel Hill caused something to happen: germination. There’s a picture of Faulkner at the old Intimate Bookshop, sadly no longer extant, a place Wolfe doubtlessly visited himself, post-graduation. The magic of their talent was so prodigious and original, so fecund (a word both were known to use on occasion) that as each passed through the same place—maybe walking past shelves stocked with Fiction: Southern, where maybe they sat in the same chair—something amazing formed. A seed was planted and a flower grew, and it’s this flower—the scent of which is irresistible to any writer worth his or her salt—that draws so many of us to Chapel Hill.
And here we are—ninety years after Wolfe graduated from UNC, seventy years since Faulkner strolled down Franklin Street—a town full of writers, a town full of stories. 27 Views of Chapel Hill offers up some of that prose and poetry. It doesn't even try to be comprehensive, which is really a testament to this—yes—fecund environment. So many wonderful writers live here, it's impossible to fit them all in one volume. To do that, Eno Publishers would have had to change the title to 27,000 Views of Chapel Hill. Because everybody has their own view, every writer, every reader. Here are a few of them. Enjoy.
—Daniel Wallace
Summer 2011
Daniel Wallace is a Chapel Hill writer and illustrator. He has written five novels, including Big Fish and, most recently, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. He writes a monthly humor column in Our State Magazine. He is director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His illustration of Franklin Street appears on the cover of 27 Views of Chapel Hill.
Wells Tower
Chapel Hill is a town I wish I loved less than I do. I have lived in Louisiana, New Zealand, Oregon, Canada, Connecticut, Scotland, and New York City (where I presently dwell), yet I have never been entirely happy in any of these places, because, like the fool who can’t rid his head of memories of the girl he adored in eighth grade, I cannot let go of my hometown.
Sometimes described by its boosters as “the pat of butter in a sea of grits,” Chapel Hill (and its adjunct community, Carrboro) lies on a belt of high and wooded ground two and half hours from the Atlantic Ocean and three east of the Appalachian range. We are 140 miles east of Charlotte, and twenty-five minutes north of Raleigh, our capital. But Chapel Hill’s citizens understand that what makes our town so agreeable is not that it lies in the gravitational field of other destinations, but that it is politely and resolutely a distinct place with an array of magnetisms (often counterpoised) entirely its own.
Chapel Hill’s Southernness is fitful. Our cosmopolitan vanity is wounded when friends in New York or Los Angeles say insufferable things like “Well, it all sounds very nice, but I could never live in the South." We retort heatedly with examples of our village’s urbanity: its art house movie theaters (we have two!), our socialist bookshop (it occupies the lower floor of a venerable massage parlor), and the roster of dining establishments of which the James Beard Foundation has taken notice. Or we mention that, thanks to the University of North Carolina (America’s first public university), Chapel Hill has the highest concentration of PhDs in the United States. They have fetched up and washed out here in such numbers that you can hardly get your oil changed without the Jiffy Lube attendant offering his maunderings on Kierkegaard. We talk about the magicians of science out in the Research Triangle Park, designing snazzy new antibiotics and long polymers. We mention our cherished nightclub, Cat’s Cradle, and our indie music boom in the 1990s, when bands like Superchunk, Polvo, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers convinced hundreds of young hairy people to load their cars with guitars and amplifiers and drive to our town. Or we quote the late, long-reigning right-wing troglodyte Senator Jesse Helms, who, when asked his opinion about construction of a new state zoo, said, disdaining our un-Dixielike political tendencies, “Why do we need a zoo when we could just put up a fence around Chapel Hill?”
And yet: while Red State Carolina may scoff at Chapel Hill and Carrboro’s dubious Southern bona fides, I submit that we have salvaged most of what is good about the Southern way of things and left the unpleasant bits at the curb. Our schools are excellent, and yoga is a local epidemic, yet on a summer night in Carrboro, you need not look far to find porches stocked with people plucking banjos with utmost sincerity. In our downtown, million-dollar green-built condominiums are springing up like kudzu shoots, but we still have springtime eruptions of old-growth azalea and dogwood blossoms to gobsmack a Savannahian. Free parking is increasingly hard to come by, but drive three miles to the north or west, and you are in swaying cornscapes and pasturelands comely enough to stop your heart. We have three “progressive” grocery stores and uncountable espresso peddlers, yet we are, to a citizen, people who will clench fists and go red in the face if told there are ways to eat pulled pork other than in a rinse of vinegar and pepper flakes.
Even as sprawl metastasizes at our margins and Priuses eclipse Ford pickups in the vehicle registry, we are a people nearly wretched with nostalgia. “How many Chapel Hillians does it take to change a light bulb?” runs an old joke. “Ten: one to change it and nine to moon about how great the old light bulb was.” The antique rites of village life are important to us. To pass an acquaintance on the sidewalk without saying anything is to gravely breach the social code (you’re acquainted with the entire phone book if you’ve been here more than two years). Urban transplants scorn our sociability as fraudulent Mayberryism, but we understand that the health of a community sometimes depends on listening to news that you are not interested in while the milk goes warm in your grocery bag. Sentimental bootleggers still sell moonshine in the outer county. Whole-hog cookery remains a cherished rite, and you cannot ascend to plenary status as a Chapel Hill native if you have not thrown at least one pig-picking.
Not long ago, I roasted my first hog with my friend Matt Neal, son of the great, departed chef Bill Neal, whose restaurant Crook’s Corner reintroduced shrimp and grits to the world. It was a chilly evening, and we stayed up all night, drinking bourbon, shoveling applewood embers into the cooker’s belly. We dared not open the cooker’s top, for fear we’d lose precious warmth and sour the meat. When we lifted the lid the following morning, we were surprised to find that the pig was on fire and had been that way for eight hours at least. We hosed it off. It looked like a fallen meteorite, but dressed out at eighty pounds of good flesh. These days, Matt operates, contrarily, Neal's Deli, a New York–style deli in Carrboro. His sandwiches surpass any I’ve found in my Brooklyn neighborhood. He does not sell barbecue.
Many of our citizens would tell you that the town’s most essential tribal marrow lies in our hatred of the sports teams and athletics fans of Duke University in Durham. (“Hatred” is not too strong a word. Multiple books have been written about the purity of our loathing.) However, I think we privately adore Duke. Duke, which is exclusive, and expensive, and chiefly attended by people from New Jersey, allows us to feel like up-from-the-red-clay salt-of-the-earthers when we root for UNC, which is also exclusive, but a good value for its tuition, and which admits at least a token quota of North Carolinians. We might think the emerald quads and oak-limb vaultings of the UNC campus a bit too glorious and prepossessing if it weren’t for Duke’s architecture, built, supposedly, to replicate Princeton when Princeton could not be bribed into renaming itself “Duke.” The result is a gaudy fantasyland of leaded glass and Gothic spires raised in vulgar inversion of our state’s fine motto, Esse quam videri: “To be, rather than to seem.”
To my mind, Chapel Hill’s highest virtue is not its brittle preoccupations with sports or provincial tradition but the limberness of the place. It is a Shangri-la of indeterminacy: neither fusty Old South sanctum nor soulless New South suburb, neither metropolis nor boondocks. To live easefully in New York or New Orleans, one must strive to be a New Yorker or a New Orleanian. In Chapel Hill, a town too genial to demand much of its people, one can simply be.
In Chapel Hill, life is at once simple and civilized. I look forward to one day moving home to a town where basketball season and tomato season at the farmer’s market arrive to nearly equal fanfare, a pony-size city where you can catch a performance by a superb garage band or a world-class orchestra without worrying that your car is being stripped in the parking lot, a place to wake on weekend mornings to the sound of a police siren that on second hearing turns out to be a mourning dove moaning in the pines.
Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and many short stories. His feature articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's and GQ. He was named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40," the nation's luminary fiction writers under forty years old.
Sweeter Still at Twelve
Jock Lauterer
I wasn’t able to attend the gala at Memorial Hall a few years ago when UNC awarded James Taylor, my childhood chum, with a lifetime achievement award.
But even if I had been there and he had seen me, I’m certain JT wouldn’t recognize his old guitar bud. See, both James and I have changed a wee bit since the late Fifties when we were twelve and fourteen, respectively. His hairline has receded and I’ve had a major recession.
But when we were kids, we were spend-the-night type of friends. On warm autumn evenings when I'd be invited to sleep over, we'd go to bed with the windows open, listening to the distant frat party music wafting from campus, the smooth black combos crooning "Handy Man," "Up on the Roof," and "How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You."
James lived with brother Alex in what I considered to be Boy's Heaven: a modern, A-frame building with lots of glass and wood, actually separate from the family's contemporary-style main house in the Morgan Creek neighborhood.
James was an intense, thoughtful kid who didn't say a lot but whose dry sense of humor mirrored that of his eclectic family. In those days James was not so much into guitar as he was cello, though he took lessons in both. (I remember a polished honey-wooded cello sitting grandly in his room.) When I mentioned that my mother had an old guitar, James, in his typically generous fashion, offered to teach me.
It happened one bright January morning after I had spent the night at James's and a two-inch snowfall had forced the schools to close. But instead of the normal high spirits that accompanied a snow day, I became increasingly nervous as we tromped across town.
That James couldn’t spend the night at my house was a great source of shame for me—and the very act of letting him into the house represented the sharing of a dark secret, cementing our bond. For nobody was allowed in our house. Nobody.
While bike riding three years prior, my older brother, Nick, had been struck and killed by a drunk driver. My mother, convinced that Nick was running away from home, blamed herself for his death, and dealt with the self-condemnation in her own way. From the day Nick died, she never touched the house again, except to put something down.
Thus, over the years, the rooms piled high with the detritus of guilt: old clothes, newspapers, books, Life magazines, layers of dust, unopened junk mail, papers—the effluvia of daily living covering, disguising, and burying any trace of my brother's presence. Windows became opaque with dust; trails between mounds of newspapers led from room to room; chairs became indistinguishable blobs of old stuff, stratified according to whenever Mom threw something down, where it lay until it, too, was covered by the next thing.
Into this forbidden Dickensian warehouse of a home, I admitted my buddy James.
He seemed not to notice the chaos, but went straight to the old 1930s guitar I dug out of a murky corner of the living room that doubled as my mom's bedroom. Sitting on my mother’s unmade bed, he tuned the old guitar, his long, supple musician's fingers guiding me through G, C, and D7, my first chords played there in that dark childhood house of shame.
It's been over fifty years since that bright January day when James Taylor taught me to play the guitar. I lost touch with him the next year when his family sent him to private school. Since then, I’ve entertained the fantasy of reconnecting with JT, but always lose the nerve to make that phone call.
Still I have this wild fantasy that James will read this piece and phone me up: “Hey Jock, remember me? It’s James—James Taylor. . . .”
Yeah right, and Roy Williams has just recruited me to play for the Heels.
But James, if you do get this: “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Jock Lauterer teaches at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of six books, including Wouldn't Take Nothin' for My Journey Now and Runnin' on Rims. He is a monthly columnist for the Carrboro Citizen.
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
Linnie Greene
We did it every weekend. Piling into the black jeep—mix CDs stacked high on the dashboard—the four of us would roll the windows down and yell our favorite songs out of tune. By that point, we’d exhausted most options that were suitable for a bunch of high school seniors on a Saturday night. We had already tried the hookah bar, which made our voices sound more sickly than sexy. We had stolen beers and swigged them in the tree house, until our parents discovered that their supply was dwindling. We had come up with plenty of unsuccessful schemes. The Nightlight was a last-ditch effort: open to all ages, low door charge, low expectations.
Most of the time, we didn’t know any of the bands that played there. A few hours before, there’d be a cursory search on MySpace, and even if the headliner described itself as “new-wave doom proto-metal with a Neil Diamond influence,” we’d usually go anyway. We were not the kind of kids who got invited to parties, and on the rare occasions that we were, we still couldn’t find anybody to buy us a case of beer. So there we were—driving down Highway 54 to the Nightlight, digging five bucks out of our pockets and hoping that we wouldn’t feel quite so out of place.
It’s a peculiar thing to discover a scene for the first time, and I can’t say it was love at first sight. I felt awkward, too unhip to hang with the shaggy-haired musicians manning the bar and the waif-like girls wearing thrift store clothes. The only shows I’d caught at Cat’s Cradle were the ones I saw with friends from school—young hot things with John Mayer vocals and minimal talent, the kind of shows marketed to high school girls and no one else.
The Nightlight was smaller, weirder—at that point, there were still a few bins of books in the corners and paintings hanging on the walls that looked like some anarchist had tried his hand at folk art. I was as intrigued by the place as I was by the music; the low-ceilinged space with no stage felt like I’d intruded into an artist’s bedroom or an opium den. Sitting on a vinyl sofa between my three best friends, I felt like a fly on the wall, uninvited but unable to stop staring.
The show that still sticks in my memory is a set from Run Dan Run, a pop and electronic three-piece from Charleston, South Carolina. When they played a cover of Bjork’s “Isobel,” I felt a shiver run up my spine. There were probably only twelve people there, and it started to hit me as lead singer Dan McCurry whispered the vocals—“My name Isobel, married to myself”—we’d found something beautiful, something rare, something that didn’t exist too often outside this town. We’d found a community of artists and fans and freaks, all of whom were trying to find a place in this world through their art.
Since then, I’ve fallen in love with this music scene. I moved just down the road to get my degree at the University of North Carolina, and the relationship only got more intricate in the years since I moved from my parents’ home to my dorm room to my own apartment. Boyfriends have been fickle, majors have changed, but every weekend (and most week nights), there’s a constant—a handful of venues with a handful of bands that end up surprising me time and time again.
There’s something stirring and startling about the things that live music can do to your body and your brain. I’ve seen my favorite local bands more times than I can count, but with each new show, I’m stunned. Sometimes the most talented musicians in the area play to a crowd of ten. Sometimes, they play to a crowd of 150. Some of the best shows have been the least attended, but that’s rarely the point. Most of the area’s musicians know that even if they veer far out of left field, there will still be a place for them, a stage where a few people will shuffle their feet and listen with undivided attention.
As a journalist, I often ask myself this question: “What makes this music scene different from other towns?” In truth, I probably ask it because it’s something I have so much trouble answering. I can’t pinpoint that exact moment when I knew that the music that comes out of this place would make such an indelible impression on me. It was a slow and unconscious immersion, but here I am, irrevocably lovelorn, just like many others. What is it about this place that draws you in? What makes you turn down dates and walk to the Local 506 by your lonesome, all for the sake of a show? What about the chords of “Lalita” makes your spine tingle and your feet shuffle like they have minds of their own?
These are questions I still can’t answer, probably because Chapel Hill and I have had such a lengthy and passionate tryst. But until I know the answers, I’ll be standing at the Nightlight or the Local 506, an older version of the girl who found love in a low-ceilinged club.
Linnie Greene is a music journalist and former editor of "Diversions" at the Daily Tar Heel. She will graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Spring 2012 with honors in Fiction. Until then, you can find her in area rock clubs until the wee hours of most mornings.
Harry Amana
Chapel Hill has grown on me over the three decades since I moved here in January 1979. It wasn't an easy transition. When I told friends and relatives back in Philadelphia that I had applied for a position in North Carolina, they gasped, “That’s Jesse Helms’s state." They were further alarmed when I later was chosen as a finalist for the job and was asked to come to Chapel Hill for an interview. “Don’t go,” some advised ominously.
I had been in North Carolina before. My mother's family was in New Bern, where we visited sometimes. I'd also stopped in a North Carolina town (maybe Rocky Mount) in August 1961 en route from Philadelphia to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, as a volunteer in the U.S. Army. I made the mistake of entering a train station eatery for whites only. . . . But that’s another story.
And as a reporter in the mid-Seventies, I spent a day in Raleigh covering a national demonstration against racist repression in support of Ben Chavis and the Wilmington Ten, and death row resident Joan Little. I took photos of the demonstrators, of Central Prison, and of some local residents dressed in Klan robes who protested the protesters. Still another story.
But in early 1978—because of the huge cost of a last-minute plane trip to get to the interview at UNC—I took my second train ride to North Carolina, to Raleigh, which I thought was reasonably close to Chapel Hill. Wrong. The train arrived hours behind schedule, late at night. To get to Chapel Hill, a taxi was the only option.
When the cab left Raleigh, we embarked on a dark, empty Interstate 40. I became apprehensive. I remembered circuitous, touristy cab rides in Europe to get to hotels that, as it turned out, were half the distance the cabbies chose. But my driver assured me that I-40 was the fastest route to the university. He didn’t tell me that the interstate had not yet been completed, and when we exited in Research Triangle Park and drove the rest of the way on a pitch-black, two-lane Highway 54, those Philadelphia warnings danced in my head.
At that point, the cab ride felt like some Star Trek ship sucked into a black worm hole. Nothing, I mean absolutely nothing of interest could be detected out the window—no development, few vehicles, an occasional closed gas station or small store, and trees! Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. The lyrics from Billie Holiday’s song rang in my ears. Where the hell was Chapel Hill?
When we finally arrived at the Carolina Inn and were greeted by black men in what appeared to be antebellum garb, I thought that the worm hole had dumped me somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Was I really going to be housed in that old plantation mansion? “This was a mistake,” I thought. “There’s no way I’m moving here, no way!”
That was my first view of Chapel Hill. It would be reinforced that night as I slept in a room unlike any hotel I had ever visited—more like a plantation bed and breakfast, homey and oh-so-folksy. And the next day I walked through the beautiful green campus, adorned with spacious quads canopied by huge trees while the campus bell tower chimes played dreamy plantation ditties. No way!
But decades later, here I am, having served twenty-eight years as a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. What happened?
What happened was Sonja Haynes Stone, and basketball—women's basketball. Stone was the legendary black professor who cofounded a cross-disciplinary journalism/black studies institute. I was there that day to interview for the position of the institute's director. My interview committee included Dr. Stone and representatives from Afro-American studies, the journalism school, the English department, and other university entities. It was an interracial group of progressive thinkers and scholars who genuinely seemed to like the university and its town, which boasted that it was a pat of butter in a sea of grits.
I didn’t get that job—fundraising was a key part of it and I hated fundraising, as the committee quickly discovered. But Don Shaw, the journalism representative, asked if I would be interested in applying for a job at his shop. I was, I did, and I returned to Chapel Hill for an interview. I was hired for that position, which included being the liaison to Dr. Stone’s institute.
Over time, I learned more about Chapel Hill’s history: It was a relatively forward-thinking community that had elected a black mayor during the 1970s, had broken a campus speakers ban by having a Communist speaker stand on a public sidewalk and speak over a low wall into the campus, and whose basketball coach, Dean Smith, had broken the color barrier with the first black player in the ACC, Charlie Scott. The university also had an established press with a long history of publishing scholarly books on racial issues and a campus library that housed what is arguably the most extensive repository of materials on Southern history and culture.
Something else happened during my tenure here that made me fall in love with Chapel Hill. I discovered Carmichael Auditorium, the arena that hosts many of the women’s sports activities. A beautiful field house—bathed in Carolina blue, with no bad seats—Carmichael literally vibrates with noise when the fans get busy. Even when there are only 3,000 fans there, it’s a wonderful, three-ring circus. (Carmichael was the home of the men’s teams before the Dean E. Smith Center was built.) And, like Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium or Philadelphia’s Palestra, it’s always been hard for visiting teams to win at Carmichael.
The fans are what really make this a truly Chapel Hill experience. School kids from Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and everywhere else in North Carolina come in droves, with teachers, parents, siblings, and friends. Many of them are girls. They wear their Carolina blue jerseys and T-shirts, shake pom-poms, hoist handmade signs and banners, and have a field day. They know all the Tar Heel cheers and songs, their energy level is tuned to extreme, and their lungs are strong.
At the big games against perennially ranked teams like Duke, Connecticut, and Baylor, thousands of these energetic young people form what one local writer described as “one of the most devoted segments of the women’s team’s fan base.” In 2003, they helped match a Carmichael record of 10,180, with standing room only.
I’ve been interested in women's basketball since the rules changed in the 1970s to allow them to play the same fast-paced version as the males. And I’ve been a UNC women’s fanatic since Charlotte Smith (now a women’s assistant coach) sank a rainbow three-pointer that won the NCAA championship game in 1994 by a single point at the buzzer. It’s our first and only women’s basketball championship, and the championship banner hangs auspiciously in Carmichael.
I point it out to my granddaughter, who plays basketball in Chapel Hill schools and goes to each of the games with me. “I know, Papaw Harry,” she says, rolling her eyes and sighing. “You show it to me every time.”
Down the street from Carmichael is the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, a stately building named after the late professor, who was instrumental in my moving to Chapel Hill. I experience a quiet, personal pride each time I see it. I was a member of the advisory board that wrote the proposal for the building. It is a symbol of change and hope.
Other things have changed. At the Carolina Inn, the plantation uniforms are gone. For more than three decades I have eaten at the inn's restaurant and attended scores of gatherings in its meeting rooms, ballrooms, and patios amidst much fellowship and camaraderie. And when my retirement party was held there a few years ago, I smiled to myself, thinking about my 1978 arrival. No way!
Harry Amana is an emeritus professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is former director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. Parts of this essay were previously published in the Chapel Hill News.
The Religion of the Forehead
(Selections from To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever)
Will Blythe
Raising his children in the International Brotherhood of Duke Haters was the natural and one of the more enjoyable aspects of my father's master plan, though "plan" is probably too intentional a word for the improvisations of child rearing. His intent, let us say, was to develop his children into good Southerners of the North Carolinian persuasion. He wanted us to embody the values of our family, going back generations. To an observer, a foreigner in our midst (say, like me), it may have appeared that my father intended to turn us into younger versions of himself.
But there were obstacles. My siblings and I were growing up in Chapel Hill, a university town in which cosmopolitan toxins pervaded the air like the odor of dogwood blossoms. Or was it the scent of Thai stick? Ours was the town that Senator Jesse Helms had suggested surrounding with a chain-link fence in order to build the state zoo. Or so we liked to brag. It wasn't necessary to go to New England every summer and visit my mother's family to absorb dangerous diction, hard consonants, and mean vowels. That could come to us every day from our teachers and coaches and friends and their families, and from that demonic television set in the breakfast room that spoke a liltless tongue called Middle American.
And so began our supper-table lessons in how to talk right. Notice that I said "supper," not "dinner." North Carolinians of my father's generation did not sit down to dinner at night. They sat down to supper. Dinner took place in the middle of the day.
"How do you say F-O-R-E-H-E-A-D?" my father asked us many a supper, spelling out the word lest he give away the answer. He and my mother sat at opposite ends of the kitchen table with the four children between them, my sister, Annie, and I on one side, my brothers, John and David, on the other. My mother listened to the interrogation with bemused and anxious forbearance. My father monitored our answers like a detective taking a suspect's statement.
"F-O-R-E-H-E-A-D. Come on. How do you say it?"
Most Americans these days would answer for-head, rhyming the word with oar-head. But that was not the answer my father was seeking. That was wrong. Only ignorant barbarians said for-head. Or people from other states, who probably had no choice but to be ignorant barbarians. We had a choice.
Sooner or later, someone (the younger siblings usually succumbed first) would chime in with the correct response, which was far-red, the first syllable rhyming with tar, which was appropriate for young Tar Heels like ourselves. To answer otherwise, as I sometimes did out of sheer perversity and because in fact my father was teaching us how to stand our ground in the larger world (I just applied the lesson at home, too), was to witness him shake his head mournfully and tell us (me) that we just had to rebel, a tendency which must have come from my mother's side. Why couldn't we just accept the truth of certain things, like the proper way to say F-O-R-E-H-E-A-D, instead of disputing or making fun of them?
I sometimes ventured that a word might be pronounced one way in one part of the country and differently in another. He would tell me that in the case of F-O-R-E-H-E-A-D I was wrong. And that even if I had been right, it was hurtful to the discriminating ear to hear for-head rather than far-red.
"How do you pronounce F-L-O-R-I-D-A?" he asked.
"Flar-da." Resistance was useless.
"F-O-R-E-S-T?"
"Far-rest."
"That's the ticket! Hotcha!" Oh, how happy he was when we gave him the pronunciation for which he yearned. He beamed with family happiness. He ushered us warmly into the exclusive club of good North Carolinians, true Southerners.
"You all seem so close," more than one person has said about my siblings and me.
"We had a common oppressor," I tell them.
And yet, drilled though we were, watched over like prisoners in the yard, hectored and pursued like lovers who might spurn their suitor for another (for that is what this was really all about), I understand now with great sympathy what my tyrannical father was after. He wanted his children to be able to speak with the ghosts of our ancestors, to preserve through language a realm outside of time. He desired that we speak that ancient tongue to him. And in doing things in the old way, we would link ourselves to family members both dead and gone and yet to come. Saying "forehead" was like lighting a candle in our religion.
And so was hating Duke. It was part of who we were, how we defined ourselves in a world unmoored.
The Betrayal
On Christmas Day, 2004, we gathered around our balding tree, opened presents, and remembered Christmases past. My father's absence was still palpable; we missed his joy in the yearly rituals, his fireside sermons on the religion of family and home. He had regarded my life in New York as a betrayal, one forced perhaps by circumstances, but a treachery nonetheless. In his eyes, my domicile made my credentials as a Southerner somewhat suspect. All I had to do was eat supper at eight o'clock—"New York hours," he grumbled—and I was a turncoat. A true Southerner ate supper at 6:30, which, as it happened, was when my father liked to eat.
One Christmas in the late Nineties, not long before he died, I sat across from him in the living room, both of us arrayed in the same positions we'd taken twenty-five years before, during The Years of Teenage Rebellion. I can't recall why (maybe it was the punch we were consuming, which contained four different types of liquor), but for some reason, I started enumerating the things I missed about North Carolina. There wasn't anything exceptional about my list. It included such Southern staples as the sound of June bugs on a blistering July afternoon; the politeness to be had at the 7-Eleven, where the manager was always ready to pass the time of day with you at the expense of speedy service; and the slow-cooked wisdom of the state's old liberal avatars, such as Judge Dickson Phillips, a friend of my father's whom we both admired. Judge Phillips had once cut through my angst at deciding where to go to college by asking me a simple question: "Will, are you a happy person?" I suspected that I might be, and I told him so. "Well then, you'll be happy wherever you go," the judge said. Case closed. Time to watch football.
My father listened quietly as I talked that night, and I thought nothing more of the conversation until the next morning, when he came to the bedroom where my wife and I were packing to head back to New York. He stood at the door, watching us and weeping.
My wife and I looked up from the suitcase we were at the moment coincidentally stuffing with MoonPies, a nutritious Southern staple made of marshmallows, chocolate, and all sorts of delicious hydrogenated grease that I liked to bestow upon my friends and coworkers in New York. The easiest place for me to be a Southerner, I had discovered, was in Manhattan. Give a Yankee a MoonPie and they look at me like I am Robert E. Lee. Or Hank Williams. Or Bear Bryant. "What is it?" they ask.
"Why, chile, that's a MoonPie," I say.
"What's in it?"
"I can't tell you what's in it. But I can tell you that it'll put hair on your chest and lead in your pencil."
So here we were, packing our MoonPie contraband into our luggage, and here was my father at the door, crying. "I wish all of you could live down here," he said. He had frequently offered us a patch of land behind the house, a little perch on the hillside, where he hoped we would build a residence and establish a compound of Blythes, all within hollering distance of one another.
"I wish we could, too," I said.
"That meant a lot to me, what you said about North Carolina last night," he said. "I didn't know you felt that way."
"Well, I do," I said.
"Why don't you move back, then?" he asked.
"Can't right now. Work and all. But I'd like to."
"I don't know about that. I doubt you're ever coming back," my father said. Now he was returning to another one of his roles: skeptical victim of his children's incomprehensible decisions. The King Lear of 114 Hillcrest Circle. He turned to trudge down the hallway, the tears still pearled on his cheeks, his frame looking suddenly smaller and swallowed-up in his khaki pants and his worn white shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
The Family That Hates Together
A family that plays together is a family that stays together, but a family that hates together is a family that really loves each other, everyone glopped together like a ball of sticky rice. Let me show you what I mean. It is game night this season at the Blythe household. Through the wind-swayed winter woods, the lights of University Mall flit and twinkle in the distance.
Inside, Sheba the dog slumbers on the rug in the TV room. But as tip-off approaches, she hauls herself into the kitchen in anticipation of the tumult to come. Like many animal species, dogs are said to have a sixth sense when it comes to impending earthquakes.
There on the sofa to the right of the TV is my mother, silver-haired and dignified, more kindhearted than anyone I have ever known. Her bills and church-circle correspondence are stacked beside her, and if North Carolina's lead is a comfortable one (for her, around 40 or 50 points), she might even get a little work done. She is a good Presbyterian woman. And she hates Duke.
On the big sofa across the rug from my mother, you will find my sister, the reporter. Objectivity is her middle name. She lectures me about being faithful to facts. She is concerned that I might play too loose with them. I tell her she is a real journalist and she is kind to be concerned but that I am something else. When she's not writing her objective accounts of local citizens, my sister lives the genteel life of a gardener, tending her flowers and trees, worrying over her peppers and tomatoes. She might say about herself that she is naturally shy but that she has learned how to talk to people, which indeed she has. She cooks an occasional meal for my mother and me, and in my time in New York has become an extraordinary cook. How did this happen? Soon, my shy, pepper-growing sister will unleash upon the television set a harangue that would brush back Don Rickles. She, too, hates Duke.
I sit next to my sister on the big couch, though "sitting" is an imprecise term for what I actually do. For me, the next couple of hours will be all about the positioning, about the spin I can put on the game by contorting my body into necessary postures. Really, it all depends on the flow of the game. As coaches like to say, you shouldn't decide all of your tactics ahead of time. You need to remain sensitive to every shift in the action. So, as you can see, I am a reasonable man. I try to do right in this world. But I, too, hate Duke.
Were my brothers, David and John, available, they, too, would cluster here, one on the rug, one parked next to my mother. Wives, girlfriends, children moving in and out of the room: They knew that this was not their fight and that it was hopeless to try and impose normal standards of etiquette on the proceedings.
One family, united in the dark sacrament of disdain, facing the world together, side by side, couch by couch. We've got each other's backs and we're ready for the game to begin.
The Beast Is Alive
Tonight we are watching Duke play Clemson. We are monitoring our adversary for cracks, structural defects, familial dysfunction. We want to know who mopes, who snaps under pressure, who misses. We are scholars of the slippery slope, the January weaknesses that portend doom in March—the point guard who can't shoot, the two guard who can't defend, the center who clanks free throws.
The new year has arrived but when it comes to hatred, the beast is already in midseason form. He lives not just in me, his favorite host, but in my mother and my sister.
"How can anyone stand to look at him?" my mother asks, staring at Mike Krzyzewski.
"It's a mystery to me," my sister says. "One that is simply beyond our human capacity to understand."
"My friend Nina Wallace can read lips," my mother says. "She says you ought to see the kinds of things he says."
These are the kind of things we say. The game is ugly, too. At one point, the commentator compares it to a root canal. Both teams are building a brick wall of missed shots. With 7:34 to play in the first half, the score is deadlocked at an unimpressive 10 to 10.
The second half is more of the same: turnovers, fouls, neither team shooting over 35 percent. "Why do they get to foul so much?" my sister asks of the Blue Devils.
"Because they're Duke," my mother says.
"That's another one of those profound mysteries," I tell my sister.
"Sit down," my mother instructs Mike Krzyzewski.
"Miss!" I shout at Lee Melchionni. His three-pointer ripples through the net and he runs down the court, fists clenched, screaming.
"They're so lucky," my sister says.
"I hate the way he screams after every shot," I say.
Clemson makes a game of it, pounding the boards. The Tigers actually take a 38-to-35 lead midway through the second half. Our misanthropic band cheers. "Whip their sorry asses," I say.
My mother appears to suppress a smile. She doesn't ordinarily like that kind of language, but there is a time and a place for everything. "Come on, fellas," she says to the Tigers, which I think is her way of saying something similar.
"Wouldn't it be great if they won?" my sister says.
But they don't. JJ Redick scores 20 of his 24 points in the second half. He's not bashful about putting it up, even though he's only four of 11 from three, eight of 19 from the field overall.
"They don't look that good," I say.
"They're beatable," my sister says.
"I hope you're right," my mother says. "Because I can't stand them." That's our family. Sweet right up until tip-off.
I remember the spring afternoon my girlfriend watched me in horror as I ventilated my darker passions while watching Duke play Carolina. I sought to quell her anxiety. "I'm having fun," I told her.
"That's what that is?" she asked.
"Yes, most assuredly," I said.
"I don't think I'd want to see you not having fun," she said.
"But you have," I said. "It looks sort of like this but different."
"Right," she said.
"The key thing is not to take it personally," I reassured her.
"I don't."
"Good. You shouldn't."
"Your whole family," she said. "They seem so civilized. So nice."
"They are," I said. "They're really nice."
"But when you guys watch basketball . . ."
"Yeah, I know. That's when the beast comes out."
Listen, I'm not really justifying this. I'm explaining, not excusing. I mean, there's a reason or two, or maybe a couple of dozen, why I am this way.
Mostly, I'm well-behaved as a journalist ought to be. Mostly, I am studying myself and those around me from a cool, interstellar distance. It's curious how this Duke-hating and Carolina-loving became so intense.
But every now and then, I can't help it. The old impulses reemerge. I watch a game and I go bonkers. It seems the whole universe is tied in to the game. But I worry that by such deep immersion in this obsession over the next few months, I may start to dissolve it. That can happen—it's the smoke-ten-packs-of-cigarettes-the-day-before-you-quit theory of killing an addiction. I can't quite imagine life without basketball, however.
I told this to a friend and she said, "Oh, that's good. Maybe this will cure you somehow."
"But I don't want to be cured," I said.
The Pleasures of Hatred
At times it troubles me a little to be so full of piss and vinegar. A man of my age ought to be seasoning into acceptance like a salt-cured ham. The study I've done of Buddhist literature (such study being much easier than the actual practice of Buddhism) suggests that not only is hatred bad on a cosmic level, but it is also bad for us personally. We are going to pay for our bad deeds and our evil thoughts by being reincarnated again and again, swirled from one life to another like dirty clothes on endless spin cycle. Although it isn't very Buddhist of me to worry about ending in the karmic washer for a few billion extra millennia merely because I have the odd hateful thought—I should be more concerned with others ending up in such straits—I can't help but fret about my fate. One North Carolina–Duke game alone probably costs me several millennia of rebirths.
And yet, how I hate.
From across the centuries, I recently found good company in the English essayist William Hazlitt, who died back in 1830, nearly friendless, it is true, and with hardly a tuppence in his pocket. But no one ever said hatred is the best way of winning a man friends and money. Samuel Coleridge, one of Hazlitt's erstwhile friends, described him as "ninety-nine in a hundred singularly repulsive." Hazlitt's wife left him on returning from their honeymoon. And yet as he lay dying in a tiny room, Hazlitt said, "Well, I've had a happy life."
Could hatred, like prayer or Prozac, have been the secret? In 1826, Hazlitt wrote an essay called "On the Pleasure of Hating," a profound work that expresses what we might call a holistic view of hatred. He puts the noblest face possible on a snarl. "Nature seems made up of antipathies," he proposes. "Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action." This struck me as quite likely—that every bit as much as love, hatred moved a person to ponder and to act. And that such hatred needn't even be personal. It might be disdain for injustice, for poverty, for drunk driving. Hate the sin, not the sinner. Or so it seemed upon first reading. Things actually got more complicated.
Hazlitt had detected the boredom inherent in goodness, the totalitarian features of the standard-issue heaven. "Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit," he writes. "Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal." I knew marriages like that, kept alive, if not flourishing, by endless campaigns of attack and counterattack, animosity an apparently inexhaustible fuel of togetherness.
Hazlitt's final estimation of the dynamics of hatred, "the wild beast," proves fascinating. Hatred alights on conditions such as injustice to express itself. Hazlitt takes a swipe at religion as one of the prime venues for this basic human need for antagonism. "What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces . . . ?"
The author expresses himself in that English manner we've come to think of as commonsensical. "Public nuisances," he writes, "are in the nature of public benefits." That is, they not only excite the body politic, they sting it into collectivity. "How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon!" Had they done us any harm of lately? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon.
Yes! I know just how that misanthrope felt. Substitute Duke for the Pope, et al., and, well, Duke had sopped up a lot of superfluous bile in my day. In the early Nineties, for instance, I seemed to have hated Bobby Hurley, the short and skinny Duke point guard. Yes, frail Bobby Hurley, whom by all rights I should have identified with for his striving against the odds, his fearless adventures in the lane among the giants. Bobby Hurley who cried when North Carolina point guard King Rice muscled him around his freshman season.
Hurley even made certain American virtues suspect because he was the one embodying them. Grit, for instance. Hurley definitely had grit. You didn't need Dick Vitale to point it out a thousand times. You could see it yourself, watching this New Jersey white kid blaze up and down the court like a Chevy Camaro about to throw a rod. He drove the lane with the bony eclat of an overachiever unafraid of a pounding. And at least he cared enough to cry.