Day 8ish: Reflective and Sensitive

It was so nice to talk to my dad on dad's day. Growing up I didn't really like him because I was a teenage boy with very little social graces or skills to human in a healthy way. I still lack some of that, but at least I know it!

A lot of yards 
in Durham, NC.

These were in a lot of yards
in Durham, NC.

I met Dudley in Durham. He's
too adorable!

There was a Robert Motherwell
exhibition. Huh?!

Full sours from NY. I got them
in Durham. You figure it out!

Some of the art was not good.
Melt all of these down!

There was a lot of art in Asheville, NC!

I got to see these two. Tikva I've
not seen in about 15 years. She's
a former student who is on her
third book! The oodles of cuteness
is her daughter. They're in Asheville.

Just art.

When I got home I had to take a nap. Andre slept at my head. He rarely does that! He missed me. And when I went to sleep sleep the boys had to both be on me. I love 'em.

Tomorrow I'm off to Westminster, MD for classes at Traditions Week 1, which are given through Common Ground on the Hill. If you don't know about this even check it out. They do so much good in the world in a practical, pragmatic way. And they give back to vets, but not in some trite way like parroting "Thank you for your service." This year they are bringing 30 vets to do workshops grounded in humanity, which is just what many of us need after becoming reflective and sensitive to our actions during wartime.

Day 6: UNC and the End

Today was our trip to UNC Chapel Hill, where we went to the Wilson Library to peruse original sources--actual documents from the Antebellum Period. Their collection is amazing, and I got to do research on gourd banjos. I even got some leads!

Getting there, well, let's just say it was a party. Or, at least, we were on a party bus!

The library, like the National Archives building I went to last year, was really impressive. The security wasn't as tight--the paranoia was definitely absent. But the structure itself was magnificent, and, as I later found out, necessary for all of the stuff.

We sat through three lectures from professors there, and the information was important and interesting. Dr. Juanita M. Holland spoke about enslaved others crafting their artistic expression.

One of my favorite artists of the time was Dave the Potter. The remarkable thing for me was that he wrote lines of text into his pots. This is mid 19th century when slaves were prohibited from reading and writing. Clearly he was enslaved, and clearly he was writing. Dr. Holland suggested that the pots were intended for use by other enslaved persons, and, therefore, Dave was instigating those persons to learn to read and write.


Another artist I felt an affinity with is Harriet Powers.  According to the linked site, she was born a slave near Athens, Georgia, on October 29, 1837. At a young age, she married Armstead Powers and they had at least nine children. Some time after the Civil War, they became landowners. Eventually, circumstances forced them to sell off part of the land but not their home. The date of Harriet's death, Jan. 1, 1910, was recently discovered on her gravestone in Athen's Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery. The remarkable thing to me is the resolve and perserverance, not to mention the wonderful art making. It is easy to see the earliest artists in the tradition that Faith Ringgold works in so wonderfully--Ms. Ringgold is one of my favorite artists.

Dr. Michele Ware talked about writers and poets, including Harper, Horton, and Chesnutt. There were many more literate slaves than I imagined. These three created some amazing texts beyond slave narratives.

The last lecturer was Dr. Peter H. Wood who gave a new perspective on John Brown and the five blacks who died at Harpers Ferry. I could have sat through a few more hours of this, but my main takeaway is that even though history about the institution of slavery in the British colonies and later the US is read differently today than just thirty years ago that history is still steeped in white supremacy.


We took a lunch break and walked over to a Mediteranean place. It was so delicious. And we saw this muffin-cake on the way back. I'm sure she didn't draw anyone into the store!

And we realized we were twinzies.

Then we got back and started on the good stuff--the research involving original documents. Now if you recall from last year this is a very exciting thing for me because I love spirited materials. And original documents are that!

We got to see where Thomas Day worked; we even held his tools on his workbench. And we got to witness an actor reenact one of Day's letters. And then we get to the library and we get to hold one of the letters that Day wrote!

It was a long and full day. There were so many wonderful and exciting folks participating in this workshop, and I got to talk to many, even if in just a cursory way. But there were two trouble makers with whom I spent a lot of time with.

One was my roomy, so that was just natural. He teaches high school history, civics, and that kind of stuff. It was great because if I couldn't wrap my head around something he was there for me. He was really saddened and angered by the trip to the Chapel Hill campus, though, because his NC Winston-Salem apparently doesn't get the same love. He couched it as not enough white folks at his campus. I got nothing for that.

This other knucklehead, though, turned out to be just someone I could hang with. We had too much fun. It may have been a FL connection!

The night ended with a long walk and a dip in the pool!

Day 5: It's All About Chubbs!

This morning we had an hour to tighten up our presentations, which we did. But it was pretty tight to begin with. This was a tough morning because some groups didn't follow the format of the project and other groups went over and some folks were just lecturing about the information rather than the form of the presentation. Definitely not one of my favorite mornings!

Then we heard from Dr. William L. Andrews, who's an expert in Slave Narratives. It was a nice lecture, and it is clear he is knowledgeable and passionate--he's been doing this since the early 70s, before the form made it into the American Literature Cannon. He gave us a bunch of examples and some really interesting and terrible information!

Dr. Andrews says that there are five founding institutions, and that slavery perverted four of them. The fifth was slavery itself. The others are these: marriage, Protestant Christianity, capitalism, and representational democracy. Think about it.

But this afternoon made it all worth it! Today we got to meet to crafters and artists. One is a woodworker who makes furniture in the vain of Thomas Day, except this guy, Jerome Bias, was self taught. He says his story starts here, when he and his soon-to-be wife were bed shopping. They found a Thomas Day reproduction for a mere $11,000, and he refused to buy it. Instead he made it as a wedding gift. Wow! The bed is so pretty, and I'd bet his now wife absolutely loves it!

He showed us some zebra wood veneer. Look how thin this stuff gets cut! I cut instrument tops and bottoms down to less than an 1/8th of an inch and these cuts are 1/4th of that! That is some serious skill! You can barely see it when I turn it sideways.

He explained how the veneer is used on the pieces that he constructs, but it was cool to hear him talk about the woods that he likes to use. He loves black walnut. But who doesn't, really?

But the highlight was, without a doubt, Nellie "Chubbs" Miles, a seamstress who, using old-school methods, doesn't take measurements when she makes clothes. She just looks, cuts, and sews!

And the stories! Damn, those stories! Not only has she lived over 70 years, but she grew up as a sharecropper with her family. She did a slide show of where she grew up. It was a mix of pictures that her family took and those that were taken by Dorothea Lange on her way through where Ms. Chubbs grew up! It was an amazing anecdotal tale told in the vernacular. It was amazing and wonderful and I couldn't get enough. She was so engaging that she went 50 minutes over and nobody complained or left!

And we got to do some sewing with her!

There is nothing more to say that this video doesn't!

Day 4: Smooching for the Cause

Well, I'm not really sure it was for THE cause; it was really just because. But that's good enough, right?

In the morning we got a bit of a breakdown of what the intention of the workshop was. There are a lot of folks in the group who teach history at some level, so they probably didn't need it. I think it was more for the likes of me who does not know a lot of this history. So...

We're using this definition of entrepreneur: the pursuit of opportunity beyond one's resources controlled, beyond what one should be able to achieve. This, I'm coming to find out is a large part of the enslaved population, a group who didn't even own themselves! In fact, these folks made something out of less than nothing! Even the "free blacks," which has to be in quotes because even these persons were socially and legally circumscribed. Because "free blacks" were not a threat to a white supremacist society they were tolerated. In fact, it seems that whites used the "free blacks" to prove that there is equality--which is just absurd!

Afterwards we broke up into our smaller groups. We were tasked to produce a 20 minute presentation on a curriculum from the Crafting Freedom web site. Our three goals were to describe the enslaved person, give an overview of the curriculum, and then customize that curriculum in some way. Our group was on task and divided up into three partnerships.

For my part, I had to come up with a historical overview of him, Mr. William Henry Singleton. Mr. Singleton was an amazing man who endured and overcame much, including running home to his mother after being sold and bought, a trip of over 100 miles away. When he was 7! I was picking my nose, crying, and couldn't find my way to the bathroom when I was 7! He fought for the Union Army after escaping from his servitude in the Confederate one. He taught himself to read and write after the war. The list of the impressive deeds of this man just go on.

We came to the conclusion that this man would have been remarkable regardless of how he came to the planet! Here is our presentation.

After a BBQ lunch--who's lucky enough to get barbecued turkey?! Oh yeah!--we went to Burwell School in Hillsborough, NC. The building alone would've been pretty cool because it is so old and pretty. But there was a lot more to see than just the building.

The big house in front of this beautiful little brick schoolhouse was just as pretty! It is amazing to think that it was a boarding house for 10-25 girls per year because it was originally a two bedroom house. It was eventually expanded so that there was a master bedroom added and two rooms downstairs added. Still, it would have been so tight!

The schoolhouse had these adorable slates in there. Yeah. I'll use them, thank you.

Another great thing about the house is that one of the persons to whom this study is molded worked here. Ms. Elizabeth (Hobbs) Keckly came here when she was about 17. She was a dressmaker who eventually had a troop of girls working for her. She was so good at making dresses look good on women that she became really desirable. In fact, she made dresses for both Mrs. Jefferson Davis and Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln.

The dresses were made up of at least five layers. One of the participants got to dress up in one of the outfits from the mid 19th century. It was no small feet, and it took two other folks to help her get into it! The layers just kept coming, but she didn't even put on all of the the layers that there are! She definitely didn't put on the stockings.

When she was done she asked the docent how much the close weighed. The docent turned it back on her. The girl replied, "Girl, I think I'm a thick 150 now!" We all laughed for a while at that!

I won't lie, there might be something to that modesty thing that can drive a guy crazy. Maybe it was the nice porch or the beautiful weather or just a pretty woman. A boy just couldn't resist a smooch.

Ms. Keckly was absolutely an enslaved person who crafted her freedom, as well as that of her son. Beyond that, Keckly went on to teach women to design and sew so that they could find their own independence. Another truly remarkable person!

An interesting project that is going on is that the Smithsonian gave details of a Keckly dress that was made for Mrs. Lincoln so that it could be reproduced by a dressmaker here and put on display at the museum. The designer is keeping to the design as much as she can, but she is using machines to do the sewing.

That is kind of disappointing, I think. Why go through all of that. It would be much more impressive to do it the way Keckly originally did. The woman who is doing the project said that she just is incapable of doing it that way. Well...

The grounds are really nice, too. There is a nice garden where the kitchen building used to be; they had separate buildings so that there houses wouldn't burn down if the kitchen did. After the house was renovated the kitchen was moved inside. There was the most beautiful smelling gardenia bush. I love gardenia. At times jasmine is my favorite, but not this one!

After we were done I went for a nice run. It was a street route, but there were few cars. It was a pretty neighborhood once I got out of the apartment complex. It was hot and wet and sunny. Perfect for running!

I stayed up until after midnight having a great conversation about religion and love and life. There was so much disagreement, even to the point where one woman thought me incredulous. But there was so much empathy and compassion between us all that I definitely grew from the experience. I didn't see that coming!