TCB May 24, 2018 — Literary Lions return for Greensboro Bound by Triad City Beat

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point May 24 - 30, 2018 triad-city-beat.com

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Lee Smit h & Michael Parker Lions return for Greensboro Unbound

PAGE 13

Banking time PAGE 7

Whither the N&R? PAGE 10

Hip-hop happenstance PAGE 11

May, 24 - 30, 2018

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

Trevor and George Trevor is not allowed into the house. George is not allowed out of it. And neither is happy with the arrangement. George is by Brian Clarey our house cat — as opposed to our three other cats, who have been granted privilege to leave the house whenever they can convince someone to open the door. But not George. The reasons for his imprisonment are vague, dictated somewhat arbitrarily by my wife and, to a lesser degree, our youngest: He’s too sweet, too trusting to survive out there. His toe beans are too soft, his grey pelt too fluffy to camouflage him from the dive-bombing birds in the backyard, his penchant for snuggling not likely to help him out there in the wild. Still, he’s always lobbying for his release, always lurking near a door about to be opened, always issuing plaintive cries when the other cats are granted their leave, always showing us how fast he is, how sharp he keeps his claws. Trevor is a different story. For one, his name isn’t Trevor, and for another he’s not even our cat. Our… abundance… of felines sometimes attracts other cats, quite often

strays. The first Trevor was like that: a wild-eyed ginger tabby with something to the shape of his head that made us think he might be related to some of our cats, fathered by a feral neighborhood tom. This Trevor wears the same color scheme as his predecessor — dirty orange, like the basketballs at a public park — and is similarly unsterilized, the evidence of which he seems to enjoy displaying, almost tauntingly. And this Trevor wants in the house, bad enough to deny his independent nature and distrust of humans. Not at first. At first he would scram as soon as we got within 10 feet of him. Then we’d find him lounging on or beneath our cars when we came outside. Now he runs to us as we approach the front door, writhing against our ankles and rubbing his face on the concrete footpath, trying to squeeze past us to the inside, where no doubt he will begin spraying in every corner and then dare us to kick him out. George and Trevor know each other only through the glass of the back-patio screen door, where sometimes they hiss at each other and sometimes try to touch noses and sometimes just regard each other dreamily. Each wants what the other has so badly, it’s tempting to just swap them out one night and show them how miserable they’d be.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

We had one [victim] in the office a couple months ago [who] had no clue. -Dare Spicer, executive director of Family Crisis Center of Randolph County.

BUSINESS PUBLISHER/EXECUTIVE EDITOR Brian Clarey brian@triad-city-beat.com

PUBLISHER EMERITUS Allen Broach allen@triad-city-beat.com

EDITORIAL SENIOR EDITOR Jordan Green

ART DIRECTOR Robert Paquette robert@triad-city-beat.com SALES

KEY ACCOUNTS Gayla Price

gayla@triad-city-beat.com DISTROBUTION MANAGER

jordan@triad-city-beat.com

Jen Thompson

lauren@triad-city-beat.com

CONTRIBUTORS

STAFF WRITER Lauren Barber

1451 S. Elm-Eugene St. Box 24, Greensboro, NC 27406 Office: 336-256-9320 Photo of Lee Smith by Stanley ART Dankoski.

jennifer@triad-city-beat.com Carolyn de Berry, Spencer KM Brown, Matt Jones, Kat Bodrie

May, 24 - 30, 2018

CITY LIFE May, 24 -30 by Lauren Barber

THURSDAY

Up Front

Soil-to-Soul @ Venture Café (W-S), 7 p.m. In Turbine Hall of the Bailey Power Plant, leaders of local organizations partnered for Regenerate Forsyth discuss their effort to establish “soil-to-soul” connections in order to link food to entrepreneurship and health in Triad communities. Learn more at venturecafewinstonsalem.org.

Vega Varia @ Common Grounds (GSO), 8 p.m.

News

Sycamore Bones @ Foothills Brewing (W-S), 7 p.m.

Opinion

Acoustic punk and folk artist Lauren Andrews joins Greensboro’s singer/songwriter Vega Varia. Find the event on Facebook.

SUMMER VEGAN FESTIVAL

Black Box Theory @ Monstercade (W-S), 9 p.m.

FRIDAY

UniverSoul Circus @ Greensboro Coliseum, 9 a.m.

Culture

Presented by the Triad Vegan Society and Deep Roots Market

JJ Hipps joins folk Americana band Sycamore Bones on blues guitar for covers of John Prine, the White Stripes and Bob Dylan. Find the event on Facebook.

Shot in the Triad

Sunday, June 3rd Animal Rights Day 11:00 am–4:00 pm Deep Roots Market, 600 N. Eugene, Greensboro

Family Friendly! Music and Speakers all day.

Puzzles

Children’s Panel – 11:15 am Mask Making and Face Painting before Animal Rights Costume Parade at 1:00 pm Vegan Cooking Demonstrations. Learn about plant-based diets. In-store specials on many vegan foods. For schedule and more information, visit the Triad Vegan Society@

www.triadvegfest.org facebook.com/triadvegfest

Acts from Russian, Trinidad, South Africa, Mongolia, Cuba, China, Ethiopia and, of course, the United States, give larger-than-life performances through Sunday. Learn more at universoulcircus.com/greensboro. Leap! @ LeBauer Park (GSO), 8 p.m. UNCG presents a free community screening of Leap!, a kid-friendly animated film about best friends who escape their rural orphanage in rural France to follow their dreams. Café Europa and Ghassan’s kiosk provide Mediterranean eats. Find the event on Facebook.

Solo electronic musician and sound designer Black Box Theory brings deep rhythms and lush tones to his explosive live set. Lil Skritt, Edward Thompson and DJ E-line join the bill. Find the event on Facebook.

Live jazz & cats @ Crooked Tail Cat Café (GSO), 6 p.m.

Historic Reynolds Building lecture @ Bookmarks (W-S), 7:30 p.m.

SUNDAY

May, 24 - 30, 2018

SATURDAY

May ’68: A panel and discussion @ Scuppernong Books (GSO), 1 p.m. Up Front

Twisted River Junction @ Center City Park (GSO), 6:30 p.m.

Molly Stevens @ Muddy Creek Café & Music Hall (W-S), 2 p.m. The first in a summer series, this presentation focuses on the historic Reynolds Building and Cardinal Hotel. Learn more at bookmarksnc.org.

Opinion

Walk-ins are always welcome at North Carolina’s first cat café but if you love jazz and cats, this is a reservation you’ll want to schedule today. Find the event on Facebook.

News

Fifty years ago, French university students launched an uprising among the country’s working class. Though nearly one quarter of all French workers went on strike, the campaign fizzled out. Greensboro’s Democratic Socialists of America and International Socialist Organization chapters invite the community to a panel discussion on the strategic successes and failures of that brief movement. Teleconferencing and childcare available by request. Find the event on Facebook.

Matt Walsh @ Little Brother Brewing (GSO), 9 p.m.

Culture

Amanda Shires @ Gears & Guitars (W-S), 5 p.m.

Gather for craft vendors and the Zeko’s 2 GO food truck before the free 7:30 p.m. show featuring Twisted River Junction, a jam band based in High Point. Blues with psych-rock, reggae and funk influences. Find the event on Facebook.

Puzzles

Love4theLocals open mic @ People’s Perk (GSO), 7 p.m. Sip on tea or coffee as Greensboro-based singer/songwriter SunQueen Kelcey hosts an intimate open mic night for musicians, poets, storytellers and those who love to listen. Find the event on Facebook.

Shot in the Triad

Once featured in NBC’s “The Voice,” Nashville-based Americana country singer grew up in Macon, Ga., home to Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers. Stevens brings that Southern rock and soul sensibility to Bethania’s intimate music hall. Find the event on Facebook.

Statesville-based guitarist and songwriter Matt Walsh — formerly from High Point — blends hill-country blues, rockabilly, soul, garage rock and psychedelia at the Gate City’s newest brewery. Learn more at littlebrotherbrew.com.

Cap off the weekend with a dose of Americana fiddleplaying Texan Amanda Shires. Find the event on Facebook.

Opinion

News

Up Front

May, 24 - 30, 2018

Ashley Elementary

EVENTS Culture

Thursday, May 24th @ 8pm

Open Mic

Friday, May 25th @8pm

Lauren Andrews & Ally Lambeth Saturday, May 26th @ 8pm

Light Weight & Pete Paws Thursday, May 31st @ 8pm Shot in the Triad

Open Mic

by Jordan Green For 30 minutes on Tuesday evening, one speaker after another lambasted Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board members for the abysmal conditions at Ashley Elementary, an aging school in northeast Winston-Salem serving predominantly African-American students on free and reduced lunch where teachers have complained that mold is making them sick. Eunice Campbell, a parent who unsuccessfully ran for school board earlier this year, told board members that over the past 18 months she has been “amazed at the level of systemic racism” that she saw when they refused “to change policies that were blatantly unfair to subsets of children.” Campbell added, “You didn’t see what the problem was. And when people questioned it, you got offended.” Campbell questioned plans to spend millions of dollars on two suburban middle schools, and repairs to the stadiums at Mount Tabor High School and Glenn High School. Ashley Elementary is ranked as the lowest performing school in the state, but its bricks-and-mortar challenges have been known for years. Under the original $552.5 million bond proposed by staff to the school board in July 2015, Ashley Elementary was slated for replacement. School officials told community leaders in November of that year that they were trying to negotiate a land deal to secure property to build a new school. Then, in the spring of 2016, when the school board trimmed the bond package that would eventually go before voters down to $325.8 million, replacement of Ashley Elementary was dropped from the list. “That was something in our long-range plan that the board felt like all the pieces that would need to be in place wouldn’t fall into place for it to happen in this construction cycle,” Chief of Staff Theo Helm told Triad City Beat at the time. TCB reported in early 2016 that Ashley was 136 students over capacity, even taking into consideration students housed in mobile units. According to the district’s own numbers, the $325.8 million bond, which was eventually approved by Forsyth County voters in November 2016, wouldn’t keep up with demand for classroom space. A TCB analysis using numbers provided by the district indicated that the percentage of students housed in mobile units or overcrowded in classrooms would be reduced from 11.6 percent to 5.0 percent through construction financed by the bond. Asked what the district planned to do to meet the population needs at Ashley, Helm responded, “Make use of extra space, extra rooms in the building, and use mobile units.”

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Old people love to vote. They put on their best matching separates, pull out the electro-scooters and walkers with the tennis balls at the bottom, board buses at churches and senior-living facilities and shuffle right on in there, excitedly chirping about their right to choose — or, as is more often the case, grousing angrily at the choices the rest of us make. And sometimes I think: Why do they even care? They’ll be dead soon. So I’m just gonna say this out loud: There is such a thing as being too old to vote. Generally speaking, old people have already reaped most of the benefits their taxes afforded them: Their kids have already gone through school, their homes are paid for, their economic circumstances dictated by the stock market and whatever Golden Corral coupons they can scrounge each month. And as voting records show, they are all too eager to pull up the lever, voting against social programs that gave their families stability after the Depression, deploying the same slurs and fallacies against immigrants that were used on their ancestors three or four generations ago, tilting the tax structure to suit them at the expense of their children. Let’s not forget that the Baby Boomers — who today make up a huge bulk of senior Americans — were handed after World War II the most potent economic engine the modern world has ever known, and they have spent the years since plundering it. Generally speaking. And they vote — in 2016, 70.9 percent of Americans aged 65 and over voted in the presidential election, compared to just 58.7 percent of 30-44-year-olds — you know, the ones who actually do the things that make this country and its economy move forward. And who do you think those olds voted for, anyway? There’s probably no way to official take the vote away from old people — it being a Constitutional right and all. But we can take examples of other voter-disenfranchisement methods and apply them here. Instead of a literacy test we could demand that every voter be able to order an Uber on their phone. Instead of a poll tax we could ask every voter to do a single burpee. Or we could just start holding our elections after 7:30 p.m. After we effectively disenfranchise senior voters, then we can start to go after their guns.

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NEWS

Winston-Salem’s time-banking exchange, which uses person hours as currency in place of cash, is the sixth largest in the country and the only active program in North Carolina.

Up Front News

Arleatha Patterson, who manages the Winston-Salem time-banking program for Neighbors for Better Neighborhoods, browses the program website.

Puzzles

CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

Shot in the Triad

volunteers. On a personal basis, Ward has banked hours from providing a free workshop on how to start a nonprofit. She said she has yet to redeem any of her personal hours. Through the Winston-Salem timebanking program, Stephanie Hurt said she was able to find someone to take her disabled husband to the gym and walk with him while she was at work. Hurt serves as finance officer for Neighbors for Better Neighborhoods and also owns a faith-based theater company, Royal Curtain Drama Guild. As a theater producer, Hurt was familiar with a kind of informal time-banking long before she was introduced to the term. “The things that would be costly [to produce a play] were in-kinded,” she said. “An individual says, ‘I’ll do that.’ It could have been a hindrance if those individuals weren’t willing to help. I may not have been able to put on that play.” Hurt has a saying about swapped labor: “Favor ain’t fair, but it’s very fulfilling.” “If you need this strength that I have, here it is,” she said. “If I need a strength from you, I can go out and grab it. No one has to operate on a weak link in a time bank. It’s a true Biblical principle: We are all our brothers’ keepers. Those kind of things work in that system.”

Culture

work students at the University of Utah. on certain skillsets versus other skillsets,” In London, the concept has been applied Patterson said. “We value all skillsets. A by refugees and asylum seekers working doctor might make a lot of money, but to rebuild their lives. they want to make their yard look great, The model redefines what types of so someone who can do landscaping is labor are valued and even what age going to be valuable for them.” people are conventionally understood to TimeBanks USA, a nonprofit that supbe productive. ports time-banking programs, estimates In Winston-Salem, third grader Josiah there are 30,000 to 40,000 people using Polite read to a younger child at the the system in the United States. AccordCarver School Road Branch Library ing to the nonprofit’s directory, the NBN on Monday afternoon to earn credit Neighborhood Network in Winstonfor Hoops4Lyfe, a youth mentoring Salem is the 6th largest time-banking program in the nation, and the 10th largest program. Brittany Ward, the nonprofit’s in the world. Five other programs have CEO, said students have worked in registered in North Carolina, includa community garden, boxed food for ing in needy Durham, families, Carrpicked up To learn more about NBN Neighborhood boro and litter and Asheville, served Network, Winston-Salem’s time bank, visit but only as line nbnneighborhoodnetwork.timebanks.org. one — marshals Western monitorNorth ing their Carolina younger Writers Time Bank in Bryson City — peers to earn credit for Hoops4LYFE. In has logged a single exchange, making all turn, the nonprofit, was able to redeem of them essentially start-ups. some of its credits to secure a bounce In the United States, time-banking house for four hours from another programs have been used by teenagers time-banking member during a recent in juvenile justice systems in Washingcommunity event. ton, DC; patients and family members Ward also spends hours banked by in hospice in Allentown, Pa.; and social her nonprofit to pay for tutors and

JORDAN GREEN

Opinion

When Arleatha Patterson was experiencing homelessness, she was struck by an insight about herself. “I lost everything,” she recalled. “Time was something that could not be taken away from me. It was something innate that could allow me to go from nothing to something.” Many years prior she had served as an intern at Neighbors for Better Neighborhoods in Winston-Salem, and a contact there thought she would be a perfect fit for a new position to run a proposed time-banking program at the nonprofit. The nonprofit, which provides technical assistance and organizing support for community leaders, starts by identifying the assets rather than the needs of challenged neighborhoods, and the timebanking concept fit its mission. Time is money, as the old adage goes, and Patterson makes the case that everyone has “gifts, skills and talents” that can be leveraged into value. “Even when I went through homelessness, I didn’t like handouts,” Patterson said. “While I was at the shelter I began to talk to my roommates about timebanking. If you’re not rooted in yourself, you can develop a negative sense of yourself.” Since Neighbors for Better Neighborhoods’ time-banking program was launched in November 2016, the program has signed up almost 380 members with more than 2,000 service hours exchanged. Time-banking emerged in the 1980s as a concept and practice developed by Edgar Cahn, a social-justice lawyer who had previously worked as special counsel and speechwriter for Attorney General Robert Kennedy under the administration of President John Kennedy. The model replaces money with a person-hour as a unit of currency. Under time-banking, all labor is valued the same, so that an hour of dental work is equal to an hour of landscaping or an hour of childcare. In contrast to a oneto-one swap of labor, an hour of service rendered under the time-banking model can be banked and redeemed through services received from a third person. “Normally, in our society, we put value

May, 24 - 30, 2018

Person-hours replace cash in Winston-Salem’s time-bank program by Jordan Green

The Preview

News

Up Front

May, 24 - 30, 2018

G r e e n s b o r o Fa s h i o n W e e k p r e s e n t s

(mill entertainment complex) Doors open at 5pm

Puzzles

Shot in the Triad

Culture

Opinion

June 23 816 S Elm Street

Greensborofashionweek.com for ticket information

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7 Members of the NBN Neighborhood Network can go to the time-bank website to post offers for services along with requests, and to log hours. Recent offers include marketing, computer coding, craft classes, conflict mediation and massage. Members have requested car maintenance classes, Yorkie grooming, tax services, hair-braiding and home visits to elders. NBN Neighborhood Network has signed up one lawyer, a recent graduate of NC Central University School of Law, but on the whole Patterson acknowledged that the network has had more difficulty attracting people in professions that traditionally command high hourly rates. “I try to appeal to reciprocity,” she said. “Most people who are rich are volunteering. This is a way to give, but also value what other people can do.” The reciprocal dynamic of timebanking makes it different from charity or social service. “I want to use it with churches,” Patterson said. “Churches are always ridiculed about not doing enough community engagement. They have a lot of vans that can be put to use. People

in churches have a lot of gifts, skills and talents. But they can also find out the people in the community have a lot of gifts, skills and talents as well.” Patterson said when she tries to sign up new members, people often tell her they’re already doing a form of timebanking in their own communities. She said trust is key to building an extensive network with a membership that represents a wide of array of skills and interests. The system allows for smaller, contained circles, but Patterson encourages members to branch out and engage with people in the community whom they may not know. Winston-Salem is saddled with the highest level of poverty among North Carolina’s five largest cities. Brittany Ward, the CEO of Hoops4LYFE, noted that reducing dependency on cash can be a way to effectively leverage collective resources. She hopes that more people will buy into time-banking and build a stronger, more resilient community. “It’s gonna come a time when we rely more on our neighbors,” she said. “That’s the way it’s been in previous years. Why stray away from something that’s not broken?”

Community leader Jim Bronnert chats with (from left) Teresa Hinkle, Becky Yates, Shay Harger and Dare Spicer.

advance what community resources are available. “Once you have the conversation, knowing how to help someone or get help is important,” she said. “And giving people the space to get help is really important.”

Opinion Culture Shot in the Triad Puzzles

within family units, and there’s typically a history of child sex abuse. When we talk about that, the road to healing can be quite long because the family may not be supportive…. Sometimes parents don’t want to believe their husband, their new boyfriend did this to their family member. It can get incredibly complicated for a family, and sometimes the allegiance is to the new boyfriend instead of the child.” The reality is that people are typically more than willing to talk about domestic violence and child sex abuse when it’s someone else’s problem, but get uncomfortable when it affects someone they know. Spicer urged the audience at the Oak View Recreation Center to summon the courage to confront a family member if something doesn’t seem right. “You need to be courageous enough to risk a relationship or risk someone being upset with you,” Spicer said. “Call ’em out. Which is difficult. But we need to be okay with someone being upset with us because we are concerned about a person’s safety and well-being.” All three panelists agreed that it’s important for advocates to remain supportive of victims of domestic violence, even when they continually go back to their abuser. “When you [call someone out], you have to do it with love and you have to do it with kindness, or they will not receive the information,” Spicer said. “When you’re challenging them, you have to be soft to a degree, but you have to get your point across as well or they’re not gonna receive it.” Hinkle added that it helps to know in

JORDAN GREEN

News

women who are in a relationship where substances are being used or abused are likely to have been victims of domestic violence. “There’s also a little bit of a chickenand-an-egg thing going on here,” she said. “A lot of times domestic violence will cause substance abuse, and a lot of times substance use leads to domestic violence…. You get on this pattern where you are being victimized, and then you’re using, and then you’re opening yourself up to more victimization.” Domestic-violence fatalities disproportionately affect women of color, Harger said. Victims of human trafficking “tend to be marginalized young women” who are attracted to offers of companionship and nice things like jewelry and clothes, she said. “When I say ‘marginalized,’ they could be marginalized for any number of reasons, whether it’s parents that don’t pay attention or parents that are unavailable,” Harger said. “Marginalized because they might look different. Marginalized because of race. Marginalized because of a personality quirk. I mean, you name it. That makes this person, this child, this teenager vulnerable to that type of advance.” Spicer said she wants to spend the next couple years doing community education to prevent human trafficking. “When it rains, when you see five or six teenagers take off from high school, you know why they’re doing that?” Spicer asked. “Because they have appointments with construction workers who are also not working that day.” Another potential sign of human trafficking might be seeing several teenage girls in a car with a man who doesn’t look like their father, Spicer added. Hinkle mentioned “hand-offs,” where girls are seen moving from one car to another in a large parking lot without going into a store as a red flag. Spicer added that trafficked girls tend to wear backpacks so they can carry a change of clothes, as opposed to purses. A teenage girl doing her makeup in a McDonald’s bathroom at 6 a.m. would be another tell, Spicer said. But child sex abuse is often perpetrated by someone within the family unit, Harger said. “Let’s just talk about it like it is: It’s usually — not necessarily in this order — but it’s usually a parent, a step-parent, a grandparent or someone the child knows,” she said. “It’s usually contained

Up Front

In Season 1, Episode 2 of the legendary HBO series “The Wire,” a Baltimore port officer stumbles on a gruesome cargo: the bodies of more than a dozen young women from Eastern Europe in a shipping container that slipped past inspection thanks to a payoff from a shady smuggler to the stevedores’ union. In reality, human trafficking — essentially any situation where someone is profiting from another person’s sex or keeping a person in a position of servitude — is typically far more banal than television and movies portray. “We had one [victim] in the office a couple months ago [who] had no clue,” said Dare Spicer, executive director of Family Crisis Center of Randolph County. “Had sex for rent. Not being able to do anything but work in that facility and have her rent paid and not being able to do anything else — was trafficking. Had no clue.” Spicer provided another example that doesn’t comport to the transnationalsmuggling narrative: “A mother, for lack of a better word, pimping out her daughter. This is their work…. It’s not necessarily the truck full of undocumented folks or the people doing your nails on Saturday morning that we have been led to believe this is what human trafficking looks like. There’s a lot more to it.” Spicer participated in a panel discussion on human trafficking, domestic violence and child sex abuse with three other area nonprofit service professionals at Oak View Recreation Center in High Point on Monday. Human trafficking is not new — nor, for that matter, is domestic violence or child sex abuse — but Shay Harger, the director of victim services at Family Service of the Piedmont, observed that the offense is considered “kind of an emerging trend right now.” Family Service of the Piedmont, which serves Guilford County, is adding a new position in October for a humantrafficking advocate, who will work in the field to assist victims. Caring Services, a local agency that provides substance-abuse treatment to people who lack insurance, is similarly expanding to assist those who have been involved in domestic violence and sexual abuse. Caring Services will launch Healing and Exploring Trauma, a six-week pilot program for both victims and perpetrators, in August. Teresa Hinkle, a social worker with Caring Services, said 40 to 60 percent of

May, 24 - 30, 2018

Advocates: Look for human trafficking, child sex abuse in same places by Jordan Green

May, 24 - 30, 2018 Up Front News Opinion Culture Shot in the Triad Puzzles

OPINION

EDITORIAL

Placing blame for the Greensboro fire Nobody sets a house fire on purpose.

Well, sometimes they do, but that clearly was not the case in the Greensboro house fire at the Heritage Apartments that claimed the lives of five children, an entire generation from this family who emigrated to the city from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Still, there is plenty of blame to go around. The Agapion family, owners of the property, have been cited numerous times over the years for squalid conditions at some of their more affordable rental units, and in 2006 paid out a settlement to a family whose child got lead poisoning in one of their apartments. The father of the deceased children told the News & Record he had complained that his stove would set small fires in his kitchen. According to the article, smoke detectors that are required by law to be in the place never went off. Police told the N&R that no work orders exist for this unit, meaning there has never been any intention to repair any of these things. Greensboro once had a citywide rental unit certificate of occupancy ordinance, requiring landlords’ The only innocents buildings to pass are the five children inspection before renting the units who perished. They inside. It passed can no longer speak in 2003, and was threatened by for themselves. councilmembers and developers for years. Perhaps all who opposed it now might reconsider their position? RUCO went down in 2013 — the result of a new state law enacted in 2011, shortly after the Republicans took the majority of the state legislature for the first time since the 1800s. The law, sponsored by Sen. Harris Blake (Harnett, Lee, Moore; died in 2014), Sen. Andrew Brock (Davie, Iredell; retired in 2017), Sen. James Forrester (Iredell, Gaston, Lincoln; died in 2011); Sen. Ralph Hise (Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Yancey; serving his fourth term) and Sen. Jerry Tillman (Moore, Randolph; now the Senate majority whip), May the smell of charred flesh never leave their nostrils. We can also blame real estate lobbyists like TREBIC, who pushed for this law, developers large and small who supported their efforts, voters who supported the politicians who voted for the law and plenty of other parties. The only ones who were innocent were those five children who perished in the blaze. And they’re not here to speak for themselves.

CITIZEN GREEN

Dangerous housing, evictions, supply all go together

No experience could be more cruel or heartbreaking for a parent to endure. A couple from the Democratic Republic of Congo lost all five children, according to reporting by the News & Record about the horrific Heritage Apartments by Jordan Green fire. Their mother was working an overnight shift at a chicken plant several counties away, as reported by Nancy McLaughlin. A neighbor told McLaughlin she saw the children’s father climbing the side of the building to get to a window on the second floor as fire consumed the apartment. The fire began in the kitchen, Greensboro fire officials said. There were smoke detectors with batteries in the apartment, but they didn’t activate, Assistant Chief Dwayne Church said, adding that it’s not clear whether the batteries were dead or the detectors just malfunctioned. The fire department responded at 3:54 a.m. on May 12. Friends and family say the children’s father repeatedly complained to management about fires breaking out around the stove, the News & Record reported. The fire department is examining the stove to try to determine the cause of the fire, but Church said there are no work orders or other physical evidence to support the claim. Whatever the validity of the claim, the aging Heritage Apartments, which is located at the busy Summit AvenueCone Boulevard intersection in northeast Greensboro, has a track record. A 2008 profile by Lorraine Ahearn, then the News & Record’s metro columnist, indicates that at the time city code inspectors were “unaware that a majority of the units still had rotting floors and electrical problems.” When Ahearn visited the complex, tenants — many of them immigrants with limited command of English — eagerly invited the code inspector in to show multiple violations, including “crumbling bath tiles, broken doors, stoves and overhead fixtures that didn’t work, eaves set to collapse.” Then, as now, Heritage Apartments was owned by the Agapion family, notorious for blighted conditions and health hazards; one led to a 2006 settlement with a Montagnard tenant whose daughter suffered from lead poisoning, according to Ahearn’s reporting. McLaughlin’s recent piece in the News & Record reports that after the tragic fire resident Tamika Muse told Councilwoman Goldie Wells that her refrigerator hasn’t worked since she moved in three months ago. Her sink is infested with mildew, and water trickles around the sink whenever someone uses a shower in the apartment upstairs. Wells asked why she continued to live there. “It’s affordable,” Muse reportedly responded. “The rent is $525, and I don’t have a good background for renting. I have an eviction in my past. But they let me move in.” We wonder why people, especially children, are forced to live in dangerous housing conditions. As the neighbor of the devastated Congolese family attests, part of the answer has to do with evictions and the limited options for people with poor credit histories. And a high number of evictions has everything to do with a lack of affordable housing.

Only two days before the five children perished at Heritage Apartments, Stephen Sills, director of the Center for Housing and Community Studies at UNCG, spoke on North Carolina Public Radio’s “The State of Things” about why GreensBYRON Five children died in a fire at boro ranks No. Heritage Apartments. GLADDEN 7 on the list of top evicting cities in the United States. Sills’ center estimates there are 20,000 cost-burdened families in Greensboro that spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing. “So they’re desperate to find any housing that they can at the lowest rate possible and are willing to take some pretty negative conditions of the properties in exchange,” he said. The seasonal ebb and flow of evictions explains what triggers the calamity of displacement: Families don’t have any extra income to cover unexpected expenses. “We see peaks in January, February, when they’re paying their electric bills, trying to make the decision between do I pay Duke Energy or Piedmont Natural Gas, or do I pay my rent?” Sills said. “We see stressors in the family over medical bills and transportation. And then we see a valley in the eviction rates around April as people are getting tax returns. Then the highest month: May. Kids are back out of school, the cost of childcare, the cost of food increases, and families don’t have the fat really in their budget to maintain month-to-month rents.” The Center for Housing and Community Studies just completed an 18-month study that showed a significant correlation between neighborhoods with high numbers of evictions and those with a high number of emergencyroom visits for pediatric asthma. “The same numbers where rents are low, but poverty is high, where there’s a high proportion of renters to homeowners, and it’s the most impacted,” Sills said. “We see negative health outcomes for children. We see for adults with long-term impacts from being in food deserts and medical-supply deserts, or obesity and Type 2 diabetes.” Affordable housing may seem like an expensive investment, but the alternative is even more costly: asthma and death by fire.

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ap duo Speak N Eye tops the list might at first sound bizarre, the of working musicians. Speak N Eye creates a dark web of Hailing from Winston-Salem, layered tones, bringing together Speak N Eye has successfully built several unrelated sounds to create a scene in a town lacking in much hip something completely different, hop. The duo’s latest record, Cypher at much like a psychedelic, hip-hop the Gates of Dawn, which comes out on ode to Tom Waits. Baltimore-based Cold Rhymes Records “As far as writing, we have a on June 18 from, pushes their sound to strange process,” Brookshire said. new depths. “Sometimes we hold onto songs, The duo is made up of brothers Aaron like we have hard drives full of and Joshua Brookshire, who perform unreleased stuff and ideas to use under the monikers MCN Eye and Unfor later or we will resurrect ideas, speakable. Since 2011, the pair has put but this entire project was a fresh out eight records and EPs, with their last start for us. We wrote all of the effort released in early 2016. For the past songs over two Sundays and were year, the duo worked side by side with in the studio right after we wrote producer and mentor, Height Keech. them.” “This project started about a year The proximity of the writing to ago with our main man/mentor Height the laying down of tracks fits with Keech sending us loops to pick through, the overarching concept of their just really awesome cuts to use as time spent in Winston-Salem, skeletons,” Aaron Brookshire said in which the album explores. an email to Triad City Beat. “We took Songs like “In the Hills” find these loops into the studio with Grant their lifeblood from driving backCOURTESY PHOTO Brothers Aaron and Joshua Brookshire, aka MCN Eye and Unspeakable, Livesay behind the boards and basically beats, with smoothly laid verses make up the Winston-salem hip-hop duo Speak N’ Eye. just went in over these samples and sent that call to mind acts like early them back to Height to build around.” Mos Def and Outkast. The tracks of, to be freaky, dig? Why not make an anthem?” Cypher at the Gates of Dawn keeps “In the Hills” and “Rock Rock” are where they find their center, Beyond simply using the city as a metaphor and title of a Speak N Eye’s raw, keeping the rhythm at the backbone of few tracks, the album also features Winston-Salem rappers punk-rock apthe songs, each of them alternating efincluding Grant Livesay, OG Spliff, among East Coast acts such proach to hip hop, fortlessly between verses. as Height Keech, P.T. Burnem and Darko the Super, many of To pre-order Cypher at the but with a new Speak N Eye are certainly veterans whom will perform with Speak N Eye at the album release in level of profeshaving been performing and recording Gates of Dawn, visit June at Monstercade in Winston-Salem. sional sound and since 2010, and they are familiar with all “Something me and my brother learned while making this speakneye.bandcamp.com. maturity. aspects of writing an album. But with Cyalbum is that collaboration is a give-and-take thing,” BrookThe album opens pher, the concept which runs throughout shire said. “All the MCs on this record just destroy, each one with the track came to them a little differently. without hesitation, [they] knew what to do and went in hard. “Winston Freaks.” The song blends a “We wanted to make an album that wholly represented the The music end was a little different, sometimes you have to unique melding of ’60s surf-pop percuscity that supports us,” Brookshire said. “[A city that] helped us make these artistic decisions with a producer. In this case, one sion, complete with tambourine and and hip hop grow in it. Winston is such an amazing place and of our best pals, that can sometimes seem ugly at first, but wailing harmonica, with heavy-hitting it has a truly unique music and arts scene. We book a lot of when you take a step back, it can really sharpen the sword.” vocals, reminiscent of early Beastie Boys out-of-town acts on tour and the sentiment is usually like,‘Yo and Wu-Tang. And while such a mixture y’all wild.’ I feel like that sort of always was a thing to be proud

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CULTURE Speak N Eye’s prolific hip-hoppery

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body with an original vision of the world — you can’t really teach that.” For his part, Parker praised Smith’s “interrogative” teaching style, recalling a story he wrote as a student in which a character consumes 47 Little Debbie snack cakes. Smith wrote in the margin, “I think seven?” “But it’s the question mark which is a testimony to what a great teacher she is, because she’s not, ‘Do this, do that.’… She asks questions and she pushes you that way.” Both writers are also first-rate storytellers. Recalling the childhood experience that provided her first glimpse into the larger life of the community — and the theme for her memoir, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life — Smith told the audience in Greensboro: “Daddy’s office was one story up from the whole floor of the dimestore, and so I was up in the office all the time looking out. And I could see everybody; they couldn’t see Lee Smith signs books with her former student, Michael COURTESY PHOTO me. Parker, at Greensboro Unbound. “I saw fights and embraces, and people slapwho’s with him?’ Then we think: the pedicure girl from asping children,” Smith continued. “One time sisted living. So that’s the plot.” I saw a big old woman with a big old overcoat get a whole Parker reflected that a good novel can hinge on a single idea. Philco radio, which were huge then, and put it between her “You really just need one image that you can ask questions legs, and just waddle out of the store. I stood up so I could about, like this guy in a Porsche and a silver alert,” he said. watch her go. For some reason I never told my daddy. And I “That’s enough to get a novel about. Or a trilogy maybe.” would never tell him now if he hadn’t died. Because that was against being the dime-store owner’s daughter. But I was kind of rooting for her.” Parker read from one of the micro-short stories that make up his recent collection, Everything, Then and Since, and supplies its title. The discipline for the stories, Parker said, was to boil down an idea that might potentially contain a novel into Playing May 25-29 a single page. “Deep Eddy” concerns a young man courting a Geeksboro’s Saturday Morning Cartooon Cereal Breakfast is back with a new linewoman who is trying to forget an unspecified painful past, and a nighttime skinny-dipping respite. up that includes Scooby-Doo, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, Sailor Moon, Justice League, “So I told her something true that I thought she might and Adventure Time! Cartoons run at 10 a.m. and 12 pm. on Saturdays! Free admission! misinterpret as the first line of a joke: ‘Today, I saw part of a Bowls of cereal are $2.50 each or $5 for a BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CEREAL! snake,’” Parker read. “If she said, ‘What part?’ I would swim to shore pull on my clothes and leave. If she just said, ‘Which?’ I would stop fighting the current and allow it to deliver me to her. Everything, then and since, hinged on a single word. There was no answer, just a gurgling in the dark water, laughter from the eternal circle of poor, drowned whores, the baby in the dingo den, the short end of the snake.” Parker disclosed to the Greensboro audience that he “tried to capitalize” on a kind of ubiquitous “rural legend” involving bridges where babies meet tragic ends. But the reading also provided an allegory for how fiction — or music, or journal--OTHER EVENTS & SCREENINGS-ism — can hint at the outlines of something bigger and more Board Game Night 7 p.m. Friday, May 25th. More than 100 Games FREE TO PLAY mysterious by what it leaves out. Midnight Radio Karaoke Admission is FREE with a drink purchase! Parker’s teacher showed how the writing process can work The event starts at around 11:15 p.m. Saturday, May 26th. in the opposite direction while discussing her forthcoming Totally Rad Trivia 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 29th collection, whose working title is Silver Alert or Bucket List. The $3 Buy-In! Up to Six Player Teams! idea came from a trip in which Smith and her husband tracked Dragonball FighterZ Tournament League a silver alert for an elderly man in a Porsche Carrera north 5 p.m. Sunday, May 27th $5 Venue Fee! $5 Entry Fee! from Florida. “We made up this idea that it’s some guy that’s gotten this Beer! Wine! Amazing Coffee! terrible diagnosis and he’s just gotten the hell out of assisted 2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro living,” Smith recalled. “And then we started asking, ‘Well, geeksboro.com •

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ichael Parker, the novelist, was working as a night watchman in 1981 when he took an evening creative-writing class at UNC-Chapel Hill with the renowned author Lee Smith. The uniform freaked his classmates out a little. “People would say, ‘Well what does he do?’” Smith recalled during a conversation between the two writers at the Van Dyke Performance Space during the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival on May 19. “I said, ‘I just don’t know.’…. Everybody thought you were staking us out. For drugs. Or whatever.” Considering the two writers’ natural gifts for storytelling, command of language and native eccentricities, virtually anything they wanted to talk about during their allotted hour at the festival would have been fascinating. But for the audience, including many working and aspiring writers, writing technique was a natural topic. Both writers have constructed enviable bodies of work and approachable personalities; Smith and Parker drew rapt attention from audience members eager to absorb some of their magic. Smith excels, as Parker noted, at “wringing the poetry out of everyday speech” in novels like Devil’s Backbone, Oral History and Black Mountain Breakdown that mine the mythology and music of her native Appalachia. Parker, a professor at UNCG, has written several novels, the focus of which has shifted from North Carolina to the arid south-central plains. Smith noted that Parker has been compared to Walker Percy and Cormac McCarthy. “It’s interesting to me the way Cormac McCarthy started in the South — you know, started in Knoxville — and then went west. And you know, you’ve done that same trajectory, I think. This sort of mysterious loner-ness of so many characters, I think there’s that, too.” Parker replied with wry wit: “My body count is a little lower than his.” During their conversation in Greensboro, Lee said that from the start Parker seemed to possess “this skewed vision that was incredibly original and interesting, as well as an enormous ease with language.” Lee added, “And these are things that you cannot teach as a writing teacher; you can encourage them when you find them…. You can teach technique; you can teach point of view. You can teach a lot of stuff, but some-

May, 24 - 30, 2018

CULTURE Greensboro Unbound’s student-teacher relationship

by Jordan Green

May, 24 - 30, 2018

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