Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  It just goes to show how things have changed. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, “folk” sounded kind of subversive. Hadn’t that banjo-picking Seeger fella been some kind of a Communist? For folks around here, the very word raised mental pictures of peaceniks, funny cigarettes and un-American activities. And “festival”? Was that anything like those “fiestas” down in Mexico?

  Yes, for some, a folklife festival was alternative reality, but not alternative enough for all. The Festival for the Eno spun off an alternative counterpart, the Forklift Festival. It was only held for a while, hasn’t been for a gazillion years or so, it seems, but while it was going it was truly memorable, or would have been except that it was the kind of affair that, if you were there, you wouldn’t remember.

  The Forklift Festival was an after-party party at an old plantation. In fact, the hipsters who rented the abandoned Lochmoor, former country place of tobacco man E.J. Parrish, called it “the Plantation” in ironic salute to what they thought of as Southern heritage. According to the Durham Historic and Architectural Inventory, it was a “rambling two-story frame house” and “the most sophisticated farm complex within the city limits,” though those who partied hearty behind the convenient woods screening the house from view considered it just a great big hangout for hippies. While the Eno Festival went on just down the Roxboro road, the Forklift set were reveling nonstop. After the volunteers and music makers did their respectable jobs and acts for the river’s sake, they’d come over and join in. The name “forklift” came because there was one sitting long unclaimed in the yard.

  So for a while, we had the Forklift, but as time went on the alternatives weren’t so alternative and the flower children got MBAs. The hippies moved out, the owners had ideas about developing the Lochmoor property and the old house and its outbuildings have been torn down. The trees and weeds and creepers have grown back. They say the old Forklifters sometimes drift back there, commune with nature and their former souls, then get on back to work and raising their children to be upstanding and productive citizens.

  That’s kind of patriotic.

  PART VI

  SIC TRANSITS

  THE DRIVER

  Are you nervous?

  “Yes.”

  Flat statement. Snapped out. Definitive. She really is. It’s kind of nice for a change, a fifteen-year-old telling her old dad just how she really feels at the moment.

  “Good,” you say. She ought to be, and anyway, you are the authority figure here and she will actually acknowledge that. After all, you are about to start teaching her to drive. And you need any little reassurance you can give yourself.

  First driving lesson. You’re a father. You knew this day had to come, and you want it to come at the same time you wish it wouldn’t ever. Like the first sleepover away from the house; first day of nursery school; first day she gets on the school bus and, what’s more, manages to get home on it all by herself.

  There are so many of them, firsts: first creep at the door with nose rings; first college visits; first prom; first trip overseas without parents; first broken heart.

  You’re still needed, though, and so here you are in a church parking lot on a weekday afternoon. Nobody else—preacher’s gone, secretary’s gone, no organist come to practice nor penitent to pray. A church parking lot is just right for that first go-round.

  “This is your accelerator, that’s the brake. Gearshift, speedometer, temperature gauge, fuel gauge. If the idiot light ever comes on, stop! Move the seat so you’re comfortable. What can you see in the mirrors?”

  “OK, turn the key. Forward, neutral, reverse, park. Pull the lever toward you, pull it down until you feel it fall into gear. You’ll feel it, I promise. Now let’s go.”

  Now, you’ve gone and done it. And so has she. The baby girl you fell in love with as soon as you picked her up the first time, who still scares you every time she goes to cross the street—she’s in control of a ton or so of machinery that’s in motion, burning gasoline. She lurches around the shrubbery and you realize you’re getting older now. And so is she.

  And she, unlike you, can feel it. Having gotten accustomed to the essential stasis of middle age, you forget how it is when constant change is the inescapable fact of life. Every fall, a new grade; every year, another inch or two; passions come and go through dolls to dogs to soccer to horses to boys to life’s work, maybe. But it makes you think that, when you are in middle age, the changes will start again and every year, if not every month, will mean something doesn’t work like it used to.

  “Past the sanctuary, turn up the hill, speed up a little around the parish hall and now do it again. Press on the brake. Stop, look, left, right, left. OK, go on.” She’s not gripping the steering wheel so hard. She’s getting it and soon it will seem as natural as talking on the telephone, without her realizing when it happened.

  Like the minute she was already riding her bike, by herself, away from you. Like the minute she forgot she was scared of water and swam away toward someone she recognized across the pool. Because you gave the push and let go.

  It’s a cliché, but they don’t stay little long. Playing dolls with grandmother, running after bunnies and ducks at the Museum of Life and Science’s barnyard, winning the scholarship to college. Moments don’t last long at all. Even if you take the car back over to go home, you know she needs you a little bit less than she did an hour ago. And that’s the whole point of being a parent, even daddy to a little girl: to bring them up so they won’t need you any more. You love them so much, you have to raise them so they’ll leave you.

  THE PORCH

  So fast, the changes. Durham, we hardly knew ye. You blink once or twice as you’re riding along some road that not that long ago was country and wham! You’ll have missed the emergence of “neighborhoods.” That’s what they call subdivisions now, “neighborhoods,” or, worse, “communities,” as if those were something you could whip right up with a dozer blade and a set of homeowners’ association Thou-Shalt-Nots. There is just such a “community” right where D.L. Bishop used to go scoop up his fertilizer and, friends and neighbors, it’s enough to put a tear in your beer.

  Half a lifetime ago, in 1974, Friday evenings meant get-togethers on D.L. Bishop’s front porch. D.L. lived out in what was the country then, so there wasn’t anybody close enough to bother when the banjo got a little twangy and the singing got a little loud; when fiddlin’ Dave McKnight, fresh off work in Raleigh, announced his arrival with a viola version of “Orange Blossom Special” and someone else had just enough tall Budweisers and broke out in “Wabash Cannonball.”

  Spring and summer, along about sundown, Ed and Natalie would roll up in their purple Capri, Johnny Carroll in his ‘64 Chevy, Phrog in his VW convertible. Patsy would go pick beans, the boys would fling around a football until the sky turned purple. By that time, somebody would have a fire going in the barbecue grill; Ed would pluck a note on his autoharp and John on his guitar; and D.L. would give up any pretense of managing things, pick up the banjo he had made with his own two hands in the hills of Tennessee and start picking the “Bragtown Blues.”

  D.L. Bishop on banjo and Ed Martin on autoharp make music by firelight at the old front porch, May 1974.

  There was a sweet young couple who brought an old Methodist hymnal, and it was just amazing what grace it brought back to children of the ‘60s who thought they’d sworn off church forever. But in the firelight and under the stars—the sky actually went black enough you could see thousands—the night had mystical powers. Faces were warmly sidelit. One night someone’s cousin showed up, a hard-living, red-haired woman whose ex-boyfriend had run his Camaro into her new boyfriend just to show how much he loved her. There was a couple who worked late and came out around midnight—they’ve been married more than thirty years now.

  So it passes. We came from other places and have gone on. D.L. went to Nashville, and his oldest boy’s grown and the younger one just about. Ed and Natalie went to Charlotte, and they haven’t
been heard from in a while. Johnny C. made a career in newspapers when such a thing could be done and is a grandfather now. Fiddlin’ Dave’ ran for the U.S. Senate, finished fifth of eight in the Democratic primary and plays music on the sidewalk these days. There is a church, of all things, where Patsy used to pick her beans, and the cow pasture out back where D.L. gathered cow patties for plant food metamorphosed into quarter-acre lots. Where we tossed the football, the trees that were just saplings have grown the size of defensive tackles. It hurts a little, to see the places we camped, caroused and courted turn into just more real estate.

  Yep, we do hate to see the cow pastures going condo but that’s not really the point. If we’re really honest with ourselves, what we really hate to see is that now we are going gray.

  THE BREEZE

  Even now, if the air is just right, an odd breeze may bring back a trace of Tobacco Row.

  It’s kind of nice to think so, though the whiff you think you catch from the open doors of Liberty Warehouse could just be one of memory’s tricks, or wishful thinking about the old days when tobacco was the heart and soul of Rigsbee Avenue and the auction houses were smack in the middle of town.

  Come fall now, there are no piles of yellow-brown leaf, no farmers waiting with a patience positively surreal, no buyers picking their teeth from lunch at Green’s Grill or the Little Acorn and no government graders scampering from pile to pile, marking and dealing out price cards with the dexterity of riverboat gamblers. No more auctioneers who would arrive in their Cadillacs to the sort of acclaim that rock stars get these days. No more “Sold American!”

  Liberty Warehouse, 2000. When conditions favored, an aroma of golden leaf remained long after Durham’s “Tobacco Row” markets closed in the 1980s. Courtesy of the author.

  In seasons past, the air on Rigsbee Avenue would have been literally fragrant and figuratively electric. By mid-July, the price reports would be pouring in from the earlier-harvesting “belts” in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. From late summer through fall, hundreds of farmers would haul millions of pounds of leaf into Durham to sell at a dozen or more warehouses. Market season was the time when money flowed. The newspapers proclaimed “Welcome Mr. Farmer” from the fronts of special sections full of ads for furniture, appliances, hardware, work clothes, Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, tires, loans and everything else the farm folk had been working toward all year. Politicians would come to be noticed, lenders to find out how prices were holding up and shopkeepers to see how much merchandise they might expect to move. Outside, on the sidewalks, there would be a veritable carnival of snake-oil salesmen, card sharks, bootleggers, gypsy fortune tellers and black men playing the Durham Blues.

  Durham’s record year was 1947, when the warehouses sold fifty million pounds of tobacco. There were were Roycroft’s 1 and 2, Liberty 1 and 2, Mangum 1 and 2, Star 1 and 2 and Star Brick in three blocks of Rigsbee, and Planter’s around the corner on Chapel Hill Street. There were more than half a million square feet of sales floors, wide and open and skylighted so buyers could judge leaf color right. Durham’s tobacco market ran 117 seasons. It ended in 1987, the same year that the American Tobacco Company left town. The last warehouse was not on Tobacco Row, but a couple of miles away in an industrial district at the edge of town, near the poignantly named dirt lane Tobacco Road.

  Tobacco Row in its glory years, when millions of dollars traded hands and auctioneers, snake oil salesmen and sidewalk music makers made market season a carnival.

  The end of Tobacco Road, a dirt street in an east Durham industrial section. Durham’s last tobacco sale was held nearby in 1987. Courtesy of the author.

  Now, the old warehouse district is called “Durham Central Park.” There is a farmers’ market and public art, and a walking/cycling trail runs through. The Liberty is the only warehouse left on Rigsbee Avenue. Part of the building is now a sculpture studio and part a nonprofit that deals in scrap for art projects. On the worn wood auction floor you’ll just see piled-up stuff. A developer owns the place. For years after the last tobacco was sold on that floor, in 1983, a painted sign just inside one of the truck-wide doors still read, “You’re Always Welcome at Durham’s Shopping Center,” and above it hung a faded poster advertising Kool cigarettes. But there’s little left to hint at what there was.

  Except, once in a while, that aroma. A sweetish, heavy scent like that you meet in old small-town courthouses, evocative of cuspidors, dark wood, old varnish, old men, old times. If the air is just right, and you’re in the mood, you might catch a whiff of time gone by. But just a whiff.

  THE WHISTLE

  Sometimes in the night, you can hear the sound of a train. Not the clackety-clack of steel on steel, nor the rumble and roar of displaced air and mighty engines—no, just a lonely moan in the distance that comes to the ear like a ghost.

  Perhaps it is a spectral sound, for it may be heard miles as the crow flies from any corporeally operating railroad, actually best close to an abandoned spur of the Norfolk & Western track that once connected Durham with Willardville, Bahama, Rougemont, Roxboro and points farther north. In fact, eerie lights and sounds of unseen locomotives have been reported from around the line’s old Hamlin Road crossing at Catsburg—the country-store crossroads so called for nearby resident “Cat” Belvin, who, as county sheriff, could move quiet as a feline, if not a ghost, when sneaking up on a moonshiner. But then, there’s something ethereal about any railroad nowadays, isn’t there? Particularly in a town midwived by them, whose disused tracks lead only to long ago.

  Rusty rails are not too busy any more, but cinder and creosote fragrances linger among the weeds. The cotton mills and silk works that the railroads ran to meet are long gone from Durham’s Station, and the tobacco business is only memory. But go down to the parking garage where Julian Carr Street ran by the American Tobacco factory turned mixed-use project. The street once ran through the town’s only underpass there, affording safe access from the Bull plant to the business district. Later, the underpass was filled in and the street dead-ended into the railroad embankment, but if you look carefully you can find a flight of wood-beam steps leading up to a sloping terrace, where weathered crossties mark the route of a vanished sidetrack that ran not far from where the original Durham’s Station stood.

  Morning fog adds a spectral aspect to abandoned railroad tracks. A railroad brought Durham into being, but that past has mostly passed away. Courtesy of the author.

  Many people in Durham want to bring back the trains, but railroads will never be what they were, much less what they are in fond memory. Maybe, one day, they will be something else. In the meantime, miles of steel go to rust and weed instead of anywhere; cedars and pines grow up along ghost tracks; and eras go by like whistles from the dark.

  THE REMINDER

  The late George Pyne, architect, nature lover and raconteur, once described our town’s old business district as a “medieval warren.” The image is kind of romantic. It sounds jostling, busy, eternally varied, with surprises to be discovered around every odd corner, mystery down every cloistery alley and intrigues working from the cellars all through the maze. Also fitting, if you look at a map.

  Locals who have been around some time still think of the district in terms of crowds, the congenial busyness of downtown as it was: rushing when the shifts changed at L&M and American Tobacco, cozily congested among the gritty confines of the CCB Building and the Jack Tar Hotel, the place to be on a Saturday, if for no other reason than to see what everybody else was up to.

  Five decades on, the innermost district is in the process of urban renewing again to suit a new set of fashions in how a city ought to be and how it will best serve the residents of five decades hence—make that five quarters hence to allow for future shock—as well as the aesthetics of designers and the morality of eco-stewards right here and now. Then again, our town has been reinventing itself constantly since the end of World War II—when a coalition of open-minded Democrats, labor leaders and the already-
powerful Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People challenged the old guard of cigarette- and cloth-factory interests and broke politics in our town wide open. Our town remains in a condition of perpetual revolution, as Chairman Mao would say.

  Keeps your attention, at least.

  Back uptown, the old urban coziness has been given up in favor of vacant lots (“open space”) where nobody’s had use for land cleared under urban renewal, and on a weekend afternoon, even on a springish day that just demands one get outdoors, the sidewalks are a place to find solitude and peace, if a touch of wistfulness. You can’t look at the monolithic Liggett & Myers plant, abandoned for cigarette manufacture and in transition to an apartment-office-retail complex called West Village, and not wish the old billboard up top was still advertising Chesterfields. It had personality. The Chicken in the Rough, which once waved its trademarked golf club from the Ivy Room wall overseeing the Do-Nut Dinette—it’s gone, the brick left featureless on a corner building renovated and awaiting occupation.

  Even most of the old signs that had survived have been cleared of their honest grime and gang logos and brightened to make the remodeled downtown look more like it’s been remodeled. “Don’t forget Doublemint Chewing Gum after every meal.” “Drink Pepsi Cola at founts or in bottles.” There are murals on some exposed walls, some of local relevance, and exposed walls that could use them, but there are some actual-factual relics of the district’s former life remaining: the shields of Nash and Studebaker dealers, for example. The dealerships are gone, replaced by newer enterprises, but the signs remain.