March 2012 Issue

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Fruits of their Labor A glimpse into the lives of North Carolina agricultural workers and their advocates

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ISSUE 6

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MARCH 2012

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Readers,

Tonight, as production ended, we had a sign of the 2012 apocalypse. In a few months we will graduate into a world that pop culture (and the Mayans, supposedly) have set to end in few more. Of course we should not believe such nonsense, though we did spend the Christmas break of fourth grade surrounded by neighbors hoarding bottled water and aunts stocking medicines, believing that the year 2000 would also bring the end of the world. But the sun rose and we celebrated the birthdays that brought our ages into the double digits. The locusts never arrived.

More than a decade later (though we are not actually concerned that the world will end this Dec. 21) ice caps are melting, tsunamis are swallowing coastlines and when we took you to the Outer Banks last issue, we saw the flatness of the land to the sea. Even more jarring, one of us just spent her first snow-less December in Michigan. And as we put these last pages together, we experienced something that further unnerved us.

Just as Michigan Christmases are white, Personal Checks in Krzyzewskiville are cold. Our necks are scarved, our legs doubly insulated in leggings and jeans and we sip whisky out of flasks to keep our teeth from chattering. We spent this afternoon in sundresses and drank lemonade at dinner.

An hour ago, we danced to reggae in light sweaters as the temperature came down from 78. We hope the planet will still exist in December, but until then, let’s consider the issues near to us today. In this Towerview we see Duke students fight against a North Carolina constitutional change that will ban gay marriage. We learn about the lives of the state’s migrant farm workers and about a Duke instructor who was a protest musician in apartheid South Africa.

Your Editors,

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c h r o n i c l e ’ s

n e w s

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m a g a z i n e

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Christina Peña & Rachna Reddy PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ONLINE EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Nathan Glencer Madeline Lieberberg Andy Moore Lindsey Rupp Toni Wei Melissa Dalis & James Lee Sanette Tanaka

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Ryan Brown, Brian Contratto, Sonia Havele, Ciaran O’Connor, Christina Peña, Indu Ramesh, Ben Soltoff, Connor Southard CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Nathan Glencer, Anh Pham, Tyler Seuc, JiSoo Yoon CONTRIBUTING STAFF Matthew Chase, Sonia Havele, Jack Mercola, Nicole Kyle, Tom Gieryn PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Lindsey Berlin

GENERAL MANAGER ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR OPERATIONS MANAGER RETAIL SALES MANAGER

Jonathan Angier Chrissy Beck Barbara Starbuck Mary Weaver Rebecca Dickenson

Towerview is a subsidiary of The Chronicle and is published by the Duke Student Publishing Company, Inc., a non-profit corporation independent of Duke University. The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of Duke University, its students, faculty, staff, administration or trustees. Columns, letters and cartoons represent the views of the authors.

To reach The Chronicle’s editorial office at 301 Flowers Building, call (919) 684-2663 or fax (919) 684-4696. To reach The Chronicle’s business office at 103 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811. To reach The Chronicle’s advertising office at 101 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811 or fax (919) 684-8295. Contact the advertising office for information on subscriptions. Visit The Chronicle and Towerview online at dukechronicle.com 2010 The Chronicle, Box 90858, Durham, N.C. 27708. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior, written permission of the business office. Each individual is entitled to one free copy.

TowerviewMag.com @TowerviewMag towerviewletters@gmail.com

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CONTENTS

March 2012

Up Front Q & A with Tom Ferraro

By Connor Southard

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Literature professor talks about jobs and education.

Creepy Crawlers

By Ben Soltoff

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Meet the non-cuddly research subjects of BioSci.

Left Standing

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By Brian Contratto

Contemplation in an abandoned warehouse.

Features On the Amendment

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By Ciaran O’Connor

As the referendum approaches we consider opinions on N.C.’s proposed constitution change.

Saxapahaw, N.C.

By Nathan Glencer and Indu Ramesh

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Hipsters in the woods: Discovering a community just south of Chapel Hill.

Food with Dignity

By Christina peña

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The lives of North Carolina agriculutral workers.

Roger Lucey

By Sonia Havele

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Cover photo courtesy of student action with farmworkers

The story of a South African protest musician.

Parting Words Wisdom

By Ryan Brown

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Q&A

A CONVERSATION with TOM FERRARO

By Connor Southard Beauty, courage, wisdom—sounds like a nice trio, but what are they and how do they work? Tom Ferraro, Frances Hill Fox professor of English and director of undergraduate studies, has made it his business to push his students to answer that risky question as thoughtfully as they can. If that sounds to you like high stakes stuff, you’re starting to understand why Ferraro teaches literature the way he does. To Ferraro, a liberal arts education is a powerful tool for living precisely because it involves asking difficult and essential questions.

You’re known among many students as one of the best teachers at Duke, and you won the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2010. What do you think a professor—especially a humanities professor leading discussion of complex texts—has to do at Duke both to draw out students intellectually and to help them build an emotional connection to the work they’re doing?

Reading can make stuff happen. What I’m after is to get students to inhabit the text to the point at which the text implicates them, so that they feel like it presses back—in Duke speak, it moves them beyond their comfort zone.

The teacher’s job is to figure out how to sponsor, how to induce, cajole, orchestrate and ultimately bear witness to that kind of critical inhabitation. What I’ve said in the past is that what I’m after is virtuosity, and virtuosity in many modes. I choose texts that do a kind of work, and then I ask the group to find a kind of alchemy of critical theater, of reading theater, where we discover that the very process of reading as a group replicates the tensions that are in a text. So, the text acts as a kind of mirror that reflects on what we are doing.

There is an old Kenneth Burke phrase that “literature is equipment for living.” And I think that’s part of what I’m after. It can happen precisely because it gives you access to both over-determined terror and ineffability. And the thing that saves us is the value other than the terror, the other half of the sublime. It’s the rush.

Photo by Tyler Seuc

How do Duke students reconcile our desire to encounter that rush in our educations with the practical need to, say, get ready to find a job?

The humanities for 30 years now has done a very poor public relations job. It needs to get the word out, sometimes to its fellow intellectuals, sometimes to itself, also to the students and especially to their parents.

Doing the kind of critical engagements with literature that we do produces a form of what an older generation used to call “critical thinking.” English students are among the two highest scorers on LSATs—along with econ majors—and GMATs, and on any of the ones designed to test your ability to think analytically. An astonishing number of the Nobel Prize

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winners in the sciences have undergraduate liberal arts educations. They can teach you to think better within the box because they can teach you to think outside the box. So that’s half the answer in effect—that it’s a stronger form of pre-professionalism.

The other half is the sort of value added that links a little to the old humanist vocabulary of enriching oneself. But I would put it another way. It raises the question constantly of, what is education for? For what purpose do you educate? For what purpose do you enter a profession?

For what purpose do you have a life? I’ve got my fingers crossed about reincarnation, though it might be as a rabbit or something else. But other than that, each and every one of us seems to only get one go-round.

What’s it for? And because that is part of every imaginative form of art, what it does is it provides access to things that are harder to codify. My short form of that is very old-fashioned. It has to do with beauty, with courage and with wisdom, and with what role those things might play in a dedicated life, and that doesn’t mean a selfish life.

You like to talk about what distinguishes this generation of Duke students from previous ones. Do all of the bad things we hear about ourselves—that we can’t pay attention, that we’re entitled, that we’re too pre-professional—paint a fair portrait of this specific generation of college students, or is the reality more complex?

I think it’s a tricky thing. I think that it is the case that an earlier generation took its entitlement more for granted, before the dot-com crash. I arrived in ’88.... We were at a moment when gloriously wellpaying jobs were available to students without particularly handsome GPAs. That was a form of freedom, so they could experiment more, or they could just cruise.

But I think that part of the pre-professionalism [this generation has] is also fear. It’s not just that we spent $50,000, but it’s that I spent the last

four years working my bloody tail off. And I think there is a confusion between the quality of your first job and the quality of the job you will ultimately get if you take risks. I think that there’s a kind of narrow preprofessionalism as opposed to a capacious pre-professionalism.

When I sat on the [accreditation committee], there were representatives from all of the professional schools, and they were all interested in an expanded liberal arts curriculum for the undergraduates as a way that would produce better doctors, better Nicholas School scientists, better lawyers, better computer scientists. One of the computer scientists [on the committee] once said, “Students think that writing is just bullshitting. They manage to avoid somebody teaching them the distinction between precision in language and self-condemning flotsam and jetsam in language.”

Your own scholarly work has frequently focused on the way ethnicity works in the United States. Why home in on ethnicity like that, as opposed to other parts of identity?

As an arts guy, I have a long-standing interest in ethnicity, because if you trace the arts—the high arts, but particularly the popular arts— in the 20th century, what one sees is the African-Americanization of American culture. You see the Yiddicization of American culture. You see the Irish and Italianization of American culture. An older generation would call this a kind of “immigrant gift” thing. I have a more complex understanding of this, because I think it’s dialectical and it’s interactive.

But the Marx brothers transformed the world—it is unimaginable without Jewish theater. The writers of Tin Pan Alley songs were Jewish guys working with African-American musical forms and the forms of the Viennese musical stage. It’s synthesis of the first order, but it’s an ethnicized synthesis of the first order. And when it works, it captures something that speaks to all of us.

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Creepy Crawlers

BY BEN SOLTOFF It’s a basic rule of biology that the cute and fuzzy critters get all the attention—just compare search results for “Duke lemur” and “Duke insect.” Towerview has been no exception, with our latest issue including one article about lemurs, one article about wild horses and zero articles about an animal with more than four legs. Well, now we’re going to give the not-so-fuzzy creatures their time in the spotlight. Some of them captivated our imagination, though others sent our photographer into a fit of terrified hysterics. Take a look at Science Drive’s most unusual animals…

tobacco hornworms, Manduca sexta

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These plump, green caterpillars would eat each other if Fred Nijhou, professor of biology, didn’t keep them in separate plastic containers. In their larval stage, the tobacco hornworms eat rapidly and indiscriminately. “They’re just eating machines, and they’ll eat anything they run into,” says Nijhout. Their goal is to grow as much as possible in a short period of time. Nijhout studies this growth and the hormones that spur and stop it. His research suggests that oxygen is a key factor. “That’s their size mechanism—growing too big for their oxygen supply,” he says.

This might explain why giant insects used to roam the earth in prehistoric eras, when oxygen was more highly concentrated in the atmosphere.

It wasn’t quite a prehistoric era when Nijhout started his research more than 30 years ago, but things were still different for the tobacco hornworm. Its primary source of food, tobacco, was one of the region’s most plentiful crops. Since then, both tobacco and the hornworm have become less common, but hornworms still thrive on garden-variety tomato plants, close relatives of tobacco.

caribbean anoles, Anolis spp.

When Manuel Leal, assistant professor of biology, grew up in Puerto Rico, he could find these brightly colored lizards in his backyard. Now, he keeps them in temperaturecontrolled chambers on the second floor of the Biological Sciences Building. Anoles have very high visual acuity, allowing them to perceive color and motion far better than humans. One of the ways they use this skill involves the dewlap, a retractable flap of skin beneath the neck. The dewlap is more pronounced in males, and they use it to attract females and ward off competing males. In researching anole communication, Leal has found that the lizards, which can observe light at higher frequencies than humans, display UV patterns on their dewlaps. “Not only do they have sensitivity,” he says, “They also seem to use it.”

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Photography By Jisoo Yoon

sea urchins, Strongelyocentrotus spp.

Before they develop sharp spines, a tough outer shell and hundreds of suction-cupped tube feet, sea urchin embryos have much in common with human embryos. David McClay, professor of biology, takes advantage of this similarity to learn about the process of embryonic development. “We work at a molecular level to figure out how cells become organisms,” he says. Over the course of 40 years at Duke, McClay and his lab have identified multiple genes responsible for forming anatomical patterns. He is particularly interested in a process by which embryonic cells become migratory, much like cancer cells in a malignant tumor. If McClay can better understand this process in sea urchins, the results might be applied to cancer treatment in humans.

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common cuttlefish, Sepia oficinalis, and California two-spot octopuses, Octopus bimaculoides

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Cephalopods are well known as masters of disguise. They can drastically alter their color and texture to match their surroundings. Sarah Zylinski, a postdoctoral associate in biology, studies this camouflaging ability to understand how cephalopods view the world. She primarily works with squid-like cephalopods called cuttlefish. By researching how the cuttlefish blend into different backgrounds, she can determine if they perceive incomplete shapes as obscured wholes, like humans, or as separate parts, like most invertebrates. “Cuttlefish tell us what they can see through the body patterns they display,” she says. So far, it appears that cuttlefish are more similar to humans in their perception, which is surprising because they are evolutionarily distant.

Zylinski also researches octopuses, and she keeps two of them—Donald and Moana—in the same room as the cuttlefish. Notorious escape artists, the octopuses have to be kept in enclosures surrounded with mesh sacks so that they don’t get out and wander into other tanks. Both cuttlefish and octopuses are also known for their ability to spray ink as a defense mechanism. One cuttlefish did not hesitate to demonstrate this ability when this reporter got too close.

swamp sparrows, Melospiza georgiana, and song sparrows, Melospiza melodia Although most people, including many dedicated birdwatchers, disregard sparrows as nothing more than “little brown birds,” Steve Nowicki, professor of biology, finds them fascinating. He is especially interested in their songs and how singing relates to other aspects of evolution. Zebra finches are typically used for this sort of work, but Nowicki prefers sparrows because he can study them in the wild. “You really need to work with a real animal out there in the real world,” he says.

Because Nowicki also serves as the dean and vice provost of undergraduate education, he doesn’t spend as much time as he used to on his research. His wife, Susan Peters, an associate in research, runs the lab from day to day. She explains that the lab has linked a male sparrow’s repertoire size—the number of songs he can sing— to his cognitive abilities. In addition to the practical benefits of studying sparrow songs, Nowicki also appreciates them on an aesthetic level. “They’re just gorgeous songs,” he says.

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By Brian Contratto From the top of the rust-and-white-paint water tower fixed to the roof of the Liggett & Myers building, I saw a few wisps of white smoke rise above East Campus, then morph into a threatening black billow.

Could make out dancing fingers of yellow-orange lightglow, maybe actual flames, maybe their reflections in the nearby building windows. I kissed the person sharing my cold, precarious stoop. The moment was romantic and obvious.

We speculated that mutinous first-years in Lilly Library were to blame and watched as a half-dozen fire engines and more police cars were dispatched from downtown, speeding up Main past the Point Break ambience and underaged students spilling out onto the Devines patio. After we climb down both ladders of the tower, down from the roof, down 12 flights of stairs to leave Liggett & Myers, we follow a latearriving truck to its destination and discover that it’s a guitar shop on W Markham that’s in flames.

——— Back at my apartment, downstairs living room, “music corner” near the record player, speakers, iPod dock: orange powder residue accumulates where the carpet meets the red brick walls, where the floorboards would be if there were any. My thoughts are a little troubling: my walls continue to crumble, and I ought to vacuum more frequently. But the other part is the reminder—the specialty of living in a city where the buildings are often dusty old things, reincarnations.

My temporary home at the Erwin Mill, a one-time cotton mill; the West Village apartments, also Liggett & Myers factories in a past life; local restaurants and downtown microbreweries, Brightleaf Square.

But some of these remain in post-industrial purgatory—Liggett & Myers ne plus ultra—neither preserved for historic posterity nor involved in any visible conversion process, commercial or residential or otherwise. A real estate sign fixed to the sidewalk outside the building’s NE face too enthusiastically declares, “Space

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available!” At the corner of W Main and S Duke, the building spans an area nearly the size of the entire Duke undergraduate bar complex of Shooters, The Federal, James Joyce, Alivia’s and Devines.

Despite a common history, its present is unlike its neighbors’, which bustle drunk with life. Not that the outside is deceptive—the utilitarian 12ish-story heft is uninviting, unwieldy, crowned with an inelegant L&M sign where the comparatively quaint Chesterfield cigarette billboard once perched—but the interior is colossally terrifying, the genuine embodiment of horror film emotively tuned to the paranoia of urban decay.

Start with the control room, a 6’x10’ space, large enough for one to two security guards. Absurdism exhibit A) two shelves drooping under the weight of about 20 extant CCTV monitors which, the first time I saw them, were mostly powered on and flashing solid blue, buzzing screens or humming with dark static. In huge stacks strewn about the desks and floor, Polaroids split into identical quarters, Warhol-style, with one quarter cut out, presumably for an employee badge.

Blank, early ‘90s-looking faces of various gender and ethnicities, all showing the general enthusiasm one would expect from a factory worker’s employee badge.

Eerie and dusty, I pocketed a few, then moved on.

Note—artificial light needed to navigate floors 1-3.

This is more for mental than physical security; these bottom floors are mostly cleared out and vacuous.

But not cleaned out. One room’s floor is covered with thousands of unfinished cigarettes, filters stuffed in papers with no tobacco. Wall paint peels away and flakes at every possible vertical surface, and the areas of ceiling that are not rotting holes are stained dark with flood residue. The drywall is crumbled, still crumbling, and a powdery asbestos aroma in the air. Cheap wood doors are prostrate on mildewed carpet or torn twisted

Left Standing house scheduled for demolition. Her endearingly hairbrained protest against gentrification—she wanted to repurpose the space as a non-commercial community center—describes the affect called melancholia in the Freudian lexicon; feeling the tug of a loss of some unnamable thing. It’s abstract because an attachment to a building is hard to source. Is the affection related to our use and experience or the physical thing itself, down to the brick walls that sustain it? We construct meaning and get meaning back from our constructions. Until we leave them to die.

West Campus is the quintessential bubble, insulated by forest and captivated by that beautiful, monstrous phallic center and landmarked by the equally unnatural feminine counterpart in the form of the gardens.

Though I’m not won over by the neo-Gothic fetish of university architecture, I am consistently bowled over when I step off the C-1 during the “magic hour”, circa 5:30 p.m. lately, when all these contrived, rough-hewn stone buildings blush with ruddy light and direct their scintillating shadows right at my gut.

But East Campus is superior, I’ve long maintained.

I may be partial to walking among unthreatening, starry-eyed first-years, arts and humanities students and intensely academic-attractive types. But the buildings!

The seamless blend of red brick and white wood that colors Durham. And the bucolic ease with which willow oaks and grass fields melt past the low stone wall into Old West Durham, Trinity Park, 9th St. and Main.

Photo by Nathan Glencer

off their hinges.

Like a video game, floors 4+ are unbelievably worse. Wooden floors so warped by floodwater they undulate sinusoidally across the factory floors. Rows and brutal rows of heavy metal machinery, conveyor belts studded with six-inch metal spikes, industrial-medieval torture devices with no apparent connection to cigarette production. Skeletons and half-decomposed birds, unable to navigate their escape.

Even the miscellaneous graffiti is spooky—mangled cartoon faces completely dissimilar to any conventional gang-type tagging.

I entered its belly for an unconventional first date.

Emotional manipulation includes: initiating a sense of mutual reliance from the sheer thrill of the fear; an eventual end to anxiety by way of the wide-open roof, that Godly, rustic water tower and panoptic view miles into the Triangle.

It’s unlikely that more than a handful of people will experience the place in its current condition. Maybe ask a realtor for a tour. Across the street there is a Liggett & Myers Research Center, and Duke’s library archives include expansive records on the history of Durham’s factories and mostly defunct industries.

This, all information I’ll never pilfer through, though I abstractly ponder the origin of the blotches of seafoam green paint left on my bedroom’s brick walls.

—— A former matron saint of the Duke Coffeehouse (her likeness is painted on its walls) is a nymph-like, idiosyncratic figure rarely chanced upon at Duke U. She took her building love to the fringes of conceivability when she performed a “gay marriage” to a Seattle ware-

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Amendment None

by Ciaran O’Connor

As North Carolina prepares to decide how it wants to define marriage, Duke is setting itself firmly on the side of equality.

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Photography by Tori Powers and Tyler Seuc

On May 8, registered North Carolina voters—including Duke students who hail from outside the state—can vote on

Amendment One, a change to the state constitution that would define marriage as strictly between one man and one woman.

The amendment, which provides that heterosexual marriage be the only domestic partnership recognized by the state, is stirring passion and prompting activism on both sides of the debate. Although recent polls show that a majority of North Carolinians support the proposed amendment, Duke, as a campus and an institution, is coming down squarely against it.

On Feb. 17, Duke University and Duke Medicine released a joint statement saying they “stand alongside the LGBT community in seeking a more equal world.” In a recent email to The Chronicle, Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, wrote that the University “thinks it is vital to support, celebrate and affirm Duke’s commitment to a society free from discrimination of any kind... and believes it is essential that we continue to offer benefits to same-sex partners and work toward an environment of equality and inclusion.”

Were the amendment to be approved, North Carolina would no longer recognize the civil unions that guarantee domestic partnership benefits for both gay and straight unmarried couples. Because it is a private institution, Duke can continue to provide a wealth of benefits to same-sex couples—including providing health insurance and welcoming same-sex unions at the Duke Chapel and the Duke Gardens—even if the amendment passes. But public employers like local governments and the University of North Carolina system could no longer offer domestic partnership benefits to unmarried couples—benefits that affect hospital visitation rights, end-of-life arrangements, medical and financial decision-making and domestic violence protections.

Supporters of the amendment say it is high time to put the question to a popular vote, arguing that the definition of marriage should be up to the people to decide, rather than state legislatures or activist judges.

“It is too serious a topic for a handful of people [legislators] to make a decision like that,” Rep. Larry Brown (R, Davidson, Forsyth) told the Winston-Salem Journal.

Behind the effort to let the people decide is a concerted campaign to enshrine traditional marriage—between one man and one woman—into the state’s constitution. The referendum committee in support of the measure, Vote for Marriage NC, is attempting to frame gay marriage as a threat to the “traditional family structure” that best meets the interests of children. They argue that the amendment’s passage would protect the timetested values that allow for safe and healthy family units.

“While many people would like to believe that proposals to allow same-sex marriage are simply about allowing a different form of marriage to coexist alongside traditional man/ woman marriage, they are wrong,” states the committee’s website. “The impact that same-sex marriage will have on society is much deeper and more far-reaching than a modest change in the word’s definition. We will have an inevitable increase in children born out of wedlock, an increase in fatherlessness, a resulting increase in female and child poverty and a higher incidence of all the documented social ills associated with children being raised in a home without their married biological parents.”

Conservative leaders across the state repeatedly stress that the amendment is not seeking to discriminate against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

“It’s not the anti-gay amendment,” emphasized Bill Brooks, president and executive director of the North Carolina Family p.10: Students register to vote during the Duke Together Rally on Feb. 24.

Policy Council, a research and education organization dedicated to the preservation of the family and traditional family values.

“It’s the marriage protection amendment.”

Opponents, though, see the measure as discrimination— plain and simple.

“We’re extremely against the amendment,” said senior Ari Bar-Mashiah who is president of Blue Devils United. “Imagine being a 16-year-old homosexual in North Carolina right now.

Your state is basically telling you, ‘you’re an other who doesn’t deserve the same rights as heterosexuals.’ And not only [would the amendment] discriminate against LGBT individuals, it would affect heterosexual couples as well. It changes domestic abuse laws, it changes adoption laws for both gay and straight individuals.”

The latest Public Policy Poll, conducted in January, found that 56 percent of North Carolinians support the amendment while 34 percent are opposed; ten percent are unsure. At the same time, however, opinion polls consistently show that a majority of state residents support some type of legal recognition for same-sex couples, whether it be civil unions or marriage.

Amendment opponents see this disconnect as evidence that some voters may not be fully aware of the proposed ban’s wideranging consequences, notably the prohibition of civil unions and domestic partnerships.

Elena Botella, a junior and co-president of Duke Democrats, said her organization will work to increase voter awareness of the amendment in the next 10 weeks.

“A big part of the statewide campaign will be reminding people that civil unions will be made unconstitutional by this amendment, not just marriage,” she said.

At Duke, the campaign against the amendment is also focusing on raising voter turnout. Botella said Duke Democrats will sponsor phone bank dates on which Duke students can call other students to remind them to vote and correct any misconceptions they might have about the amendment. Duke will provide an early voting site on West Campus—open Monday through Saturday from April 19 to May 5—that will allow students to cast their vote before the referendum May 8.

Other campus activists are working to present a unified front against the amendment. The Duke Together campaign is a coalition of student groups, faculty and staff working together to defeat the measure. The organization plans to release a video called “Make it Better,” a montage of Duke community leaders speaking out against the amendment. David Winegar, a freshman and a director of Duke Together, wrote in an email that the video will include, among others, President Richard Brodhead; Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta; Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education; Dean of Duke Chapel Sam Wells and Nancy Andrews, dean of the School of Medicine and vice chancellor for academic affairs.

Duke College Republicans has decided not to take an official stance on the amendment, said DCR Chair Chloe Rockow, a junior, adding that the organization’s executive board is divided on the issue.

“We’re trying to raise voter awareness in a non-partisan manner... especially since we don’t have a solid single opinion on the amendment,” she said, noting that DCR is attempting to redefine its organization on a campus whose conservatives may not always agree with the Republican Party line on social issues.

Duke Student Government President Pete Schork, a senior, said he thinks the vast majority of students who are fully informed about the amendment are opposed to it. Still, he acknowledged, “there’s quite possibly a silent minority in favor of the amendment­—but they’re not visible at all.”

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The May 8 ballot initiative will be an important bellwether for the national gay rights movement. While several states have legalized gay marriage—Maryland’s state legislature became the latest to approve such a measure Feb. 23—North Carolina is the only Southern state without a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. If the measure were to fail, it would send a powerful message that the gay rights movement has begun to find traction in the South.

The amendment was referred to the ballot by the N.C. General Assembly—a legislature whose two houses are both controlled

by Republicans for the first time since 1870. The GOP rode into office in the 2010 midterm elections on a powerful wave of voter discontent with both a sagging economy and a Democratic president whose aggressive fiscal stimulus and domestic agenda were successfully maligned as ineffective, big government intrusions bankrupting America.

Although Republicans swept into office promising to cut spending and restore jobs—and they successfully overrode Democratic Governor Bev Perdue’s veto to pass a budget that cuts taxes and slashes spending, particularly in education—they have aggressively pursued a social agenda as well.

“There was within the Republican Party a lot of pent-up demand not just to change the state budget but to bring up issues that had been derailed or put on the back burner during the years of Democratic majority,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill and an expert on Southern politics. “Having a near veto-proof majority set in motion a dynamic that allowed the Republican caucus to elevate issues like gay marriage, issues that had been pent up for so long.

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Rather than govern from the center, the Republican legislators as a unit decided to govern from the right.”

Besides voter turnout, the passage of the referendum on the amendment will hinge on the state’s political context in May. Perdue has decided not to run for re-election, meaning that the ballot will include a Democratic gubernatorial primary election, theoretically increasing turnout among Democratic voters. At the same time, however, the national Republican presidential primary—which looks anything but settled—may still be competitive in May, which would presumably drive up the Republican voter turnout.

Regardless of context, however, the activism efforts on both sides of the debate will play a large role in determining the amendment’s fate.

Duke Together believes it can turn out 8,000 members of the Duke community, a large majority of whom the campaign expects will vote against the amendment, Botella said. Relying on previous early voting turnout numbers in similar state primary elections, this would amount to approximately 1 percent of the vote, a substantial portion considering that ballot initiatives are sometimes decided by less than 1 percent.

DCR president Rockow said she thinks that regardless of how Duke students vote, it is important that they go to the polls.

“We think it’s more important to get people to vote for whatever they believe in, not to tell them, ‘this is how you should vote,’” she said. And even though she considers herself a staunch conservative, Rockow acknowledged that she along with several members of DCR’s executive board­will be voting against the amendment.

Saxapahaw

North Carolina

text: Indu Ramseh photos: Nate Glencer TOWERVIEW 13

1. The Haw River ballroom by day: Members of a hula-hoop dancing class exhibit their talents on the open concert floor.

2. Owner Suzanne Collins stands in front of her favorite exhibit at Saxapahaw Artists Gallery.

3. Inside an airy room of the Haw River Ballroom, the members of the Johnny Folsom Four have left their supplies out for everyone to see.

4. The Haw River Ballroom by day: an effortless combination of new and old; of soft, aged brick and new-age staircases, elevated on a hill that topples to the banks of the Haw River.

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he town of Saxapahaw, N.C., may sound more like a sneeze than a name. Yet for a town nobody has heard of, it has its wondrous rustic charm, one that effortlessly combines the old and the new. Half artsy hipster and half pure backcountry North Carolina, the town ensconces about a three-mile radius, interrupted by a bridge across the grand Haw River. The feeling of the town is one of enduring openness—in people, activities and space. Buildings are constructed with old-age brick and hardwood floor, but brim with modern technology and style. Doors are perpetually open, buildings are lined with porches replete with white-washed rocking chairs, every third room is an open food-and-wine-stocked kitchen, and people— including outsiders like Nate, my photographer, and myself, are allowed to explore as we please.

The day-life of the town centers on artsier pursuits. There’s an

3.

2. art gallery with three stories that is a veritable museum, featuring exceptional local art—“so much more than country art,” according to owner Suzanne Collins—within a 30-mile radius. There’s a puppet gallery, Paperhand Puppet Intervention, which features room-sized puppets, used for shows around the Triangle area (there’s one soon at Morehead Planetarium, apparently). During the summer, the town ripples with free live music and farmer’s markets, and down the banks of the green hills and fields that crest throughout the town, the Haw River flows enthusiastically—open for hiking, kayaking and doing

4.

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5. whatever else you would like. Apparently, the only thing you’re not allowed to do here is litter.

At night, Saxaphaw transforms into the shorter, more risqué “SXPHW.” The town illuminates itself with Christmas lights. Not a single dark window is to be found; every railing and balcony softly glows. The town flows with wine, beer, good times, from the vineyard to the pub to the airy concert hall of the Haw River Ballroom.

On concert night, the venue pulsates with the sounds of the Johnny Folsom Four, a Johnny Cash revival band, a perfect aesthetic for the charmingly contrasting town of Saxapahaw and its simple yet modern charisma. The line-up for the rest of this season includes Megafaun and Archers of Loaf. At only 45 minutes drive from Durham, it’s definitely worth a visit—or two, or three or 10. Nate and I are already looking at apartment listings. n

5. An acting troupe rehearses for an upcoming puppet performance at Paperhand Puppet Intervention while a large bull’s-head puppet glares at intruders.

6. The back room of Paperhand Puppet Intervention is stocked with papier-mache heads of all shapes, sizes and colors—wouldn’t want to go there in the dark!

7. The inside of the Saxapahaw Artists Gallery looks at once like a museum, shop and comfortable home.

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7.

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1. Baristas at the Haw River Ballroom coffee shop are up-todate with iPhone-supported credit card swiping technology.

2. A family enjoys a locally grown dinner at Saxapahaw General Store.

3. The Haw River ballroom at night: Christmas lights illuminate the perimeter, furthering the ethereal feel of the concert venue.

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2.

6.

4.

4. Sun sets on Benjamin Vineyards—wine tastings are only five dollars, including a special star wine made from 100 percent fermented strawberries—and that’s without the Groupon deal!

5. Even at 6:30 p.m., the local pub, The Eddy, is packed. Families enjoy local cheese, meat and vegetables alongside a selection of North Carolina beer and hard cider.

6. The drummer of The Johnny Folsom Four rocks out!

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R o o t s of

Change STRIVING TO MAKE DIFFERNCE IN NORTH CAROLINA AGRICULTURE

by Christina Pe単a

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of these individuals 18 TOWERVIEW

W

hen Diego* was two years old, he immigrated to the United States with his parents from Oaxaca, Mexico. When he was 12 years old, he began working in the fields of North Carolina picking blueberries at five dollars per bucket. Years later, Diego’s family and countless others remain part of an industry with a long history of exploiting disenfranchised workers.

19 percent of North Carolina’s annual income—about $74 billion—comes from the agricultural industry, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Yet farmworkers remain one of the most economically disadvantaged and legally vulnerable. According to a 2006 study, half of farmworker households in North Carolina could not afford enough food for their families. And on the job, workers are susceptible to falls, heat stress, dehydration and pesticide poisoning, yet are not covered by the same federal safety laws that protect workers in other industries.

“People don’t actually know what is going on,” said Diego, now a high school senior. “People don’t see it because they don’t live it—they just see the food [at stores] ready for them, ready to eat.”

85%

of our fruits and vegetables are still harvested by hand.

Special to The Chronicle

TOWERVIEW 19

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onald Bacilio Castro and his family came to North Carolina 10 years ago, fleeing Guatemala’s bloody, 36-year-long civil war. The military executed two of Castro’s uncles for being associated with a rebel group they had not joined. Upon arriving in the state, Castro briefly became a poultry worker for Case Farms, and he looks back on both experiences of oppression as motivation to advocate for laborers’ rights.

Working for about a year at the processing plant in Morganton in western North Carolina, Castro worked on a production line removing cuts from whole chickens to be packaged for consumers.

Case Farms processes 1.8 million birds per week, with the help of more than 2,500 dedicated “team members,” according to the company’s web site. On average, a poultry worker makes more than 20,000 cutting motions during a shift to gut, clip, de-bone and slice chickens for stores, restaurants and cafeterias across the country and abroad. This tough work often leaves workers riddled with nerve and muscle damage in their hands.

In the plant, Castro recalled, most of the workers were Hispanic and many were from his native Guatemala. Because so many employees are undocumented, Castro said the company had little regard for workers’ well-being. “You have to work like a machine,” Castro recalled in Spanish. “Many people get hurt because they’re trying to find ways to cut with the knives while the line is moving quickly. When this happens, the company simply sends them to the nursing office and gives them aspirin and a band-aid and sends them back to work. The company doesn’t care if the person is injured or not. All they care about is the production.”

Serious and often permanent in20 TOWERVIEW

juries are not uncommon in this line of work. A study released by Duke researchers in 2007 found that 43 percent of laborers interviewed reported symptoms of musculoskeletal disorders. Some experience such debilitating pain that they can no longer pick up their children or perform simple

Fed up with the mistreatment, Castro united with another worker to push for change. At first, workers did not know what a labor union was or what it might mean to defend their rights, Castro noted.

When the company learned that Castro and the other workers were trying to organize, it threatened to reduce the employees’ hours and check their immigration paperwork. Although too many workers were intimidated by the threat of retaliation, Castro was not discouraged, and he and fellow advocates have since won many small victories. Most recently, they submitted a complaint to the OcSpecial to The Chronicle cupational Safety and Health Administration because the company was not giving people bathroom breaks.

Inspired by the success, Castro has since moved on from poultry processing to work for the Western North Carolina Workers Center educating people about their rights and organizing workers to boycott unfair treatment. “If anything, the most valuable thing Special toThe Chronicle was the fact that they realized that their efforts can be fruitful,” Castro said. “Things have gotten better, but there are still things that need to improve.”

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ow, Castro can be seen discussing poultry worker conditions in a new documentary called HarSpecial to The Chronicle vest of Dignity. The documentary was produced in 2011 by the N.C. Farmworker Advocacy Network, a statewide system of organizations tasks such as bathing. seeking to bring to light to the hardWhen the pain does not go away, the company fires the workers, Castro ships of the 150,000 migrant and seasonal workers and 28,000 poultry said. “It is a company that doesn’t workers in the state. have a heart,” he said. “The company One of these groups is a Duke is growing every day with mostly imorganization, and many connected migrant workers who are cheap laborwith the Duke community have ers and I know firsthand. I suffered taken it upon themselves to bring this through it and saw what was happeninvisible population into the pubing while I was there.”

lic eye. Interns from the nonprofit up in a rural farming area in the Mis- That’s a reality because it is expensive, organization, Student Action with sissippi Delta, and her grandparents and we didn’t have the means to do Farmworkers—founded by Duke stu- and parents were sharecroppers. “In it.” dents—collected documentary photos Mississippi, things are very different Gámez attended California State and interviews from farmworkers, because it is now mostly crops that University, Long Beach, where he advocates and educators in order to are harvested by machine, so I didn’t received degrees in Theatre Arts and provide the in-depth portrait of the know that we still had so many folks Translation and Interpretations Studpeople who harvest our food today. working out in the fields and that ies. He incorporates these skills into The documentary reveals the unsetmost crops were still hand harvested,” his work with the Levante Leadertling reality that little has changed Wiggins said. Because of agriculship Institute, a program that utilizes since the original documentary on the ture’s importance to North Carolina’s theatre and arts to provide migrant subject, Harvest of Shame, was released economy, Wiggins said lawmakers and farmworker youth in rural North in 1960. and businesses are reluctant to change Carolina opportunities to build selfAlthough officially unaffiliated labor laws and farm regulations that esteem, develop leadership skills and with the University, SAF is located in could make business more expensive. prepare for higher education. the Center for Documentary StudStill, the cost of improving workers’ “A lot of them just go to work and ies and has strong Duke roots. It was conditions is small, she added, and do what they’re told to do, but they established by Robert Coles, a former worth fighting for. don’t analyze, don’t stop to think that Duke professor, and Bruce Payne, forPart of the group’s effort is to help they have a voice,” said Gámez, who mer director of the Hart Leadis in his third year overseeing the ership Program. In the 1970s, program. “By doing this youth they led a summer-long Migroup, we’re giving them a space grant Project in which 12 Duke where they can come and not be students investigated the condiafraid to speak up.” tions in North Carolina migrant The groups compose plays based camps, testified before OSHA on their own journal writing and -Ronald Bacilio Castro, a discussion of issues the students and successfully lobbied for the creation of N.C. Farmworker former poultry worker at Case Farms care about. Eventually, they perLegal Services. These connecform these plays in a number of tions helped facilitate funding venues, including at Duke. for further documentary projects, The group came to perform one sent students to work with advocacy workers advocate for themselves. of this year’s plays for a University groups and inspired a service-learning SAF’s Migrant Youth Director Raúl Spanish class March 1. Based on one course at Duke.

Granados Gámez was born and raised child’s experience, the play tells a “These incredibly privileged Duke in Mexico where he and his family story about a teacher who insisted to students in the ’70s made the decision owned a small farm. He moved to meet with a student’s mother in order to document the lives of farmworkers California in 1997, where his mother for him to pass. Desperate, the stuto see what their experiences were and packages carrots for Bolthouse Farms. dent called his mother and begged her to share their stories.... They didn’t Gámez, now living in North Carolina, to come even though, as an undocuignore it, they shared what they saw used to spend summers in California mented immigrant, she did not have and that helped SAF start,” said SAF helping his mom pick green tomatoes a driver’s license. On the way to the Advocacy and Organizing Director and apples. Although worker condischool, his mother is pulled over and Nadeen Bir. tions in California are better than ultimately deported. The student sits Capitalizing on the momentum and in North Carolina, his mother still sullen in the classroom finally explaininspiration from other activists, in experiences poor treatment. Gámez ing to the teacher and the audience 1992 a group of students mobilized attributes his opportunities to the the constant fear he and his family farmworkers, their advocates and sacrifices his mother made. endure as a result of their immigracommunity members to incorporate “It is sad and infuriating... they want tion status.

SAF as a nonprofit. The organization to keep them quiet by threatening “We can communicate with each celebrates its 20th anniversary this them because most people come here, other without regret or awkwardness,” November. For many SAF board and it’s not a secret, because they want a Diego said of the program. “We can staff members, these issues hit very better life,” Gámez said. “If I hadn’t pretty much do anything around each close to home. Executive Director come to the United States, I probably other because we feel like we’re famMelinda Wiggins, Divinity ’94, grew wouldn’t have gotten a college degree. ily, and we have these strong bonds

“It is a company that doesn’t have a heart.”

TOWERVIEW 21

because you know other people feel the same way you do.”

After the performance, documented and undocumented students discussed their dreams of becoming doctors, veterinarians, engineers, artists or simply getting the right to go to college. Upon completion of the one-year program, students receive a small scholarship toward their higher education goals, and SAF continues to assist students on that journey.

“Seeing students that were part of the program and that are now in college is one of the biggest rewards,” Gámez said. “Also, getting students who are very quiet and very timid, who don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of people, and then seeing them perform or do a presentation in front of 100 people, it’s like ‘Wow.’”

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orkers across the agricultural industry are put at risk by their environment.

Many of those affected are children—approximately 400,000 children across the United States work in the fields harvesting fruits and vegetables. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 includes exemptions that allow children as young as 12 years old to work unlimited hours in fields and orchards with the consent of their parents. “One student said to me, ‘I’m 12 years, I still want to play. I still want to read and do things that I want to do that I can’t because I have to go to work,’” Gámez said. “If at McDonalds, at 14 you can’t handle the hot oil because it is dangerous, but at 12 or 14-years-old you can drive a tractor, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Workers of all ages are subject to living conditions that lack privacy and sanitation. Picture a room with no air conditioning crammed full 22 TOWERVIEW

I stayed in the field for 10 hours trying to fill up a big bucket for $4.50 with little tomatoes. I don’t think it is fair.... A lot of adults have died in the field, and here are kids like me running around working as fast as they can to fill up buckets to help their families.”

During the workday, Jorge said he only got one break from the hot and muddy task to eat lunch, with no water or bathroom breaks. He remembered the “weird” smell and feel of pesticides on his skin after a long day of work. “It doesn’t look like that, but the plants have chemicals that harm your fingers and damage them,” he said. “When I got home, my fingers were all yellow, so I had to take a shower and scrub them really hard, and it still wouldn’t leave.”

But Jorge said he does not blame or resent anyone for the hard work he and his family do. Before his field work, Jorge said he, too, would go to the grocery store and just pass by the food without thinking about where it came from.

“I would just pass by and Photo by Jisoo Yoon say, ‘Oh, I want a strawberry pack and just put it in the cart,’” he said. “But now I know downturn, the North Carolina Department of Labor has only been able that people who pick them are out in to keep seven inspectors for the entire the burning sun helping us get food.”

Many organizations are workstate. They are working to provide ing to raise awareness about the information both for growers and health hazards of pesticide exposure. workers to improve their conditions.

Dolores Quesenberry, a spokeswoman Abigail Lee Bissette, a senior at Warren Wilson College and 2011 for the department, emphasized a SAF summer intern, worked with number of training workshops and informational materials that they pro- a nonprofit in Raleigh called Toxic vide. For the system to work, however, Free North Carolina on such a campaign, specifically in a farmworker workers and advocates need to alert documentary project. Bissette saw the agency to violations. conditions at different farmworker The fields also present a health housing sites and vividly remembers hazard to workers. Fifteen-year-old an evening when she accompanied Jorge*, a Levante Leadership Instia migrant education worker to look tute member from Clinton, N.C., for homes that might have children. has worked in the fields during the They found a 21-year-old woman, summer since he was 11. “One time, of 20 or more workers. Toilets and showers are not separated by stalls, if they are provided at all. Companies are not mandated to provide washing equipment, so laundry facilities for 30 people may consist of a single bucket and soap. The government did not require companies to provide mattresses until 2007. Many of the workers are men separated from their families for months at a time, forced to live in close quarters and squalid conditions.

While workers are often afraid to report conditions, North Carolina doesn’t have the resources to check every labor camp. Since the economic

pregnant with her fourth child, living “a stone’s throw away” from a tobacco field. “As we were talking to her, we asked if they told her when they spray the pesticides,” Bissette recalled. “She shook her head. I looked around and saw that two of her boys were playing and running around grabbing tobacco leaves and hitting each other with them.” Bissette was shaken. The leaves didn’t look like they had been recently sprayed, but you couldn’t know for sure. “You don’t really know how it’s affecting future generations,” she said. “This woman is pregnant and being exposed to pesticides and carcinogens. You don’t know what effect they’re having on children as well as farmworkers.”

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our Duke students that are a part of the Student Organizing School, another SAF program, are working to raise awareness about issues of child labor, pesticide exposure and poor work and housing conditions. Through the program, SAF trains, mentors and supports a small number of college students to take leadership roles in the farmworker movement. For example, the students hosted a Valentine’s Day event to write cards to North Carolina Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry telling her that the lack of adequate enforcement of labor or housing standards laws “is breaking their hearts.”

In conjunction with SAF, the students are planning a number of events for National Farmworker Awareness Week March 25-31.

“Coming into college, I came in with the false belief that my achievements, my work or my intelligence were the things that made me worthy of an education, but I think doing this work with farmworkers has showed me that it’s nothing I’ve done,” said junior Alison Khoo, a Duke student organizer. “It’s about how much privi-

in some ways, but when Duke students get onto a cause they carry through with their commitment and like with SAF have made a huge impact.”

Durham and Duke are very conscious of their food choices with regard to the organic, local and sustainable movements. Bon Appétit Management Company, which operates many of Duke’s eateries, is working to expand from those initiatives to the concerns of farmworkers. Carolina Fojo, an East Coast fellow from the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, contributed to the comprehensive report released by the foundation examining the practices of the growers they buy from. The report has sparked further investigation because issues Photo by Tyler Seuc that seemed clear cut when put into context were more complex.

Unlike local, organic or sustainable lege I’ve had. I’ve had time to study, movements, farmworker welfare data time to focus because there were is hard to quantify and verify. people picking my food or making Despite this, organizations like Bon my food or cleaning my house. I was Appétit and SAF, continue to believe taking these things for granted, and that farmworker justice is a important [I] see this as a chance to really give back and to try to right some of these and worthy cause.

“It is the myth of the small farm, injustices.” [that] we can’t hurt our small farmIt is important that Duke students ers when the fact is that these are continue to work toward issues that not small farms anymore, these are are important to them and the surcommercial farms,” Bir said. “We’re rounding community, said Charlie trying to bring to light that all people Thompson, director of the underare human beings, and it is not nine graduate program at the Center for Documentary Studies and SAF board numbers that tells the difference between who deserves to have human member. He is currently teaching rights and who doesn’t.” n a recurring course that produces documentaries about farmworkers.

In addition to this, students this semester are gathering materials for an exhibit celebrating the 20th anniversary of SAF. “People tend to say that Duke is not an activist school,” Thompson said.

“Maybe that is true Special to The Chronicle

TOWERVIEW 23

Special to the Chronicle

Photos by Nathan Glencer 24 TOWERVIEW

Lucey in the Sky with Diamonds

By Sonia Havele

R

oger Lucey sits thoughtfully on a quilted mustard armchair in his quaint Durham home. Having been built and restored mostly by its owner, it reflects a life of South African adventure. Splashes of exotic color—from the red swinging bench on his front porch to the vibrant paintings which hang among hand-crafted flutes and acoustic guitars—offer hints about his inspiring and evocative past.

TOWERVIEW 25

Special to the Chronicle

L

ucey’s life before arriving at this Durham house has been anything but ordinary. One of the most important political musicians in apartheid-era South Africa, now an instructor at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, Lucey wrote confrontational songs about the grueling injustices of an oppressive political regime. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lucey’s songs served as a voice for an underground movement that reached its peak with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994.

Lucey’s music was born long before that seminal moment in world history. His political views were molded at a young age, stirring mischief as a kid on the streets of Durban, South Africa.

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ucey was raised in an average, middle-class household in Durban. His family—with the exception of his free-thinking father— rarely questioned the apartheid regime. This passive indifference was further reinforced by his early Catholic education, which encouraged discipline and obedience. For Lucey, school was a place where “little boys kind of believed what 26 TOWERVIEW

they were told about what this apartheid thing was all about.”

Unlike most of his peers, however, Lucey had firsthand experience with the injustices of the system. He developed a close relationship with the black son of a neighbor’s maid that spanned his childhood. This friend, Jabula, took Lucey to the township Photo by Nathan Glencer where he lived, located on the outskirts of Durban in a poor area destured the attention of the administration, who ignated for the black populations that disciplined and later expelled him for his rebelserviced the white cities.

“I saw a life [in the townships] that didn’t lious behavior. For Lucey, the motivation was correspond with the story I had been told,” personal and deeply emotional.

“I was politicized on the street,” Lucey said, Lucey said. “I was seeing things. I was seeing a world that I had no idea existed. It was awful adding that he neither finished high school nor and ugly, and I saw it as being hugely unjust, attended university. “I was politicized from the heart, not from head. And that was important even at an early age.”

What began as child’s play eventually be- for me. When one goes through that process, came an incredibly moving and deeply disturb- you often get things wrong, and you often reing form of education for Lucey. At age 15, spond to things very emotionally. And that’s he made a bold statement. He wrote a paper how it was for me.”

A few years later, Lucey wrote his first on the evils of apartheid and posted it on his school notice board. The subversive outcry cap- song.

Special to the Chronicle

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hile in high school, Lucey first learned how to play the guitar from a cousin.

He had already become proficient on the flute, and with his cousin on guitar, the two began performing mostly covers at small, local venues. Then, at 18, Lucey began writing his own music.

“I started on a mission with writing songs that would reflect my South African reality,” Lucey said. “I felt that it was important. And because I wasn’t successful academically, I found from an early age that music was a voice for me.”

Emerging from the 1970s folk scene, LuLucy, on the other hand, challenged the cey drew inspiration from Bob Dylan, as well system head on, writing explicitly and openly as Chilean musician-activist Víctor Jara and about the cruelties of apartheid. His music British alternative rock bands like Jethro Tull. and message began to spread, and by the earThis politically-charged, folk-rock fusion be- ly 1980s, he had become extremely popular. came characteristic of Lucey’s early style, and However, for Lucey, fame was short-lived—the was epitomized by his first album, The Road is apartheid government performed swift actions Much Longer, released in 1979. to terminate his career. “[Folk music] was the kind of music that “There were many ways you could be on was easy to play,” Lucey said. “The acoustic the opposite side of the state, and whichever guitar and the voice beway that was came this very powerful you were ofthing. And it still remains ten lumped like that.” into the same During the late sevkind of catenties and early eightegory,” Luies—a period Lucey decey said. “So scribes as “the pinnacle of if you were apartheid”—most South just a mav—Roger Lucey African musicians curbed erick, just a their political opinions. If young kid their music reflected anti-apartheid views, they doing your own thing and up to no good, you conveyed their messages indirectly or symboli- could easily be lumped in with the politicos at cally, not only to preserve their careers, but also the time. And, in many ways, that’s what haptheir personal safety. pened.”

“I was politicized on the

street. I was politicized from the heart, not from head.”

TOWERVIEW 27

Of the many steps taken to silence Lucey, stuff—and the other stuff was going up to the the most extreme was the assignment of Paul battle front in Angola with, say for instance, Erasmus, a South African police officer, to the a Swedish journalist from Swedish television task of ending Lucey’s career. Erasmus worked and going and covering a more extensive tirelessly—tapping Lucey’s phone line, inter- story and actually making a documentary for cepting his mail, canceling shows and confis- them,” Lucey said.

Working as an operative in the field, Lucating Lucey’s records from stores.

“It was a peculiar situation, because really, cey created numerous documentaries, expeI was on a roll,” Lucey said. “I had become riencing worlds and adventures previously unknown to very popular in him. Yet during South Africa. I this period of his had a band that life, Lucey made was playing and very little, if any, touring around music. Personthe country. And ally, he worked we were really to reinvent his doing well. And career and put within a short music behind span of time, this —Ingrid Byerly him. Practically, whole thing sudhe needed to denly stopped.”

Soon after authorities began shutting support two children and an ex-wife with the down his shows, his record company dropped steady pay that came with the WTN job.

However, the most daunting ghost of his him and his album was banned. If a person was caught with his record, he or she could past, a man he never even knew existed, revisbe jailed for up to five years. For Lucey, the ited Lucey’s doorstep in 1995—14 years after Lucey had been silenced. experience was devastating.

In line with the kinds of sentiments be“[Music] was more than just a hobby, something that I did in my spare time. Music ing expressed through South Africa’s Truth was my voice,” Lucey said. “And when it was and Reconciliation Commission, designed to help the nation deal with and move forward taken away, it was extremely painful.”

Lucey was forced to give up his music, his from its ugly apartheid past, Paul Erasmus recareer and life as he knew it—without fully signed from the police force and wrote a book knowing what had happened. He was blind describing his experiences in the security to the steps the government was actively tak- branch. Burdened with genuine remorse, Ering to dissolve his career. He only knew that asmus reached out to Lucey, knowing that he venues would no longer take him, and that owed him an explanation for why his musical career ended so abruptly, Lucey said. Erasmus stores had stopped stocking his albums.

“By stopping playing, there was a sense told Lucey about the steps he had taken in that I was acknowledging a defeat of sorts,” the early 1980s. Initially, Lucey was outraged.

Lucey said. “Even though I wasn’t completely But he used the opportunity to put down his aware of the enemy that had defeated me. thoughts in lyrics, and he returned to his first career.

That came later.

“Because Roger was so

Special to the Chronicle

Special to the Chronicle

early and courageous in what he was doing, he managed to be silenced most severely.”

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t was only after his music career collapsed that Lucey began filmmaking. From 1982 to 1995, Lucey worked for Worldwide Television News—at that time one of the biggest television news agencies in the world—in Johannesburg. His new job required him to travel all over Africa and later, across Eastern Europe, to places like Bosnia and Chechnya.

While working for WTN, which provides services for ABC News in America in addition to the majority of large broadcasters in Europe and Asia, Lucey pursued stories and began making documentaries.

“Part of it was just daily news—the hard

28 TOWERVIEW Photo by Nathan Glencer

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ucey first arrived at Duke in 2008 to pursue a Master of Arts degree in liberal studies. He was introduced to the University by long-time friend and colleague Paul Weinberg, a South African photographer who also taught at CDS. Weinberg encouraged him to pursue further studies abroad, and Lucey took advantage of the opportunity, graduating from the program in 2010. Since 2009, Lucey, who previously taught short mentorship courses with universities and broadcasters across southern Africa, has been teaching a spring documentary studies course on South Africa at Duke.

“I’ve enjoyed [Duke] enormously,” Lucey said. “It’s been absolutely fantastic for me. [My class here] has been sort of more academic than the classes I teach at South African universities.”

Looking back, Lucey can say that wherever life has carried him, he has always returned to music. Almost every meaningful experience, including his years abroad as a cameraman, has been translated to lyrics in his songs. And his reflections on his legacy are strikingly humble.

“I’m always very moved by how often people tell me in South Africa that my music meant an enormous amount to them,” Lucey said, describing the series of surprisingly successful performances he had during his last visit to South Africa. “And how they’ve remembered me now that so much water’s under the bridge, and we’ve survived the intervening years.”

Ingrid Byerly, ethnomusicologist and senior lecturing fellow of cultural anthropology, became fascinated by Lucey’s story while conducting reasearch on influential South African musicians in the transition from apartheid to democracy.

“Because Roger was so early and courageous in what he was doing, he managed to be silenced most severely,” Byerly said. “It was the story of a freedom fighter that was silenced—effectively silenced.”

Lucey, like many of the apartheid protest musicians of his time, was lucky enough to have been exposed to the other side of the apartheid issue. And those early experiences playing in the streets of the Durban township shaped his music in an incredibly earnest and enabling way.

“Musicians had the fortunate privilege of

seeing the potential of everybody being part of the same community,” Byerly said. “[They] could hear harmony where other people couldn’t. They could hear all the voices—[but] more importantly, they were prepared to listen.”

More than three decades later, Lucey has found friendship in the unlikeliest of places. After confessing to his weighty role in curtailing Lucey’s career—and later meeting as gesture of reconciliation and forgiveness—Erasmus and Lucey have actually become friends. Following Lucey so painstakingly all of those years, Erasmus developed a strong liking, and even admiration, for his music. After confiscating Lucey’s records and tapes, he would regularly play them back. Even his children have become fans, Lucey said.

“He’s become a friend,” Lucey said. “There’s

he was back then­—creative with his time and passionate about life. He has just completed an autobiography. He holds an impressive collection of Irish and Indian flutes, many of which he has handcrafted himself, using bamboo from the grove off of East Campus. The numerous projects he has completed on his cozy Durham home—building a front porch, beautifully re-tiling his bathroom floor, painting the living room walls deep red, to name just few— are small accomplishments, which make him beam contagiously with pride. Lucey lives in this home with his wife Karen Glynn, a visual materials archivist for the Special Collections Library who shares his love for South Africa.

The two first met in 2008, when Lucey performed odd jobs around the house in exchange for a place to stay. Since moving to Durham, Lucey has also had the opportunity to see some of his “all-time musical heroes,” like John Hiatt, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, perform. He and Karen have enjoyed the Durham music and culture scene tremendously, attending shows at Reynolds Theater, Page Auditorium, the Cat’s Cradle and other local venues.

In October, the two will rent out their Durham house and return to South Africa, where they hope to settle down. Though the future is open-ended for Lucey; he is determined perform his music more frequently once he returns home. Other plans include buying and renovating a cottage with Karen, opening their own music venue, and dabbling in theater—an old and enjoyable hobby—with a few friends.

“We’re really sort of following our hearts,” Lucey said. “You get to a point where you take it a bit easier.” n

“Musicians had the fortunate

privilege of seeing the potential of everybody. They could hear all the voices—[but] more importantly, they were prepared to listen.” ­—Ingrid Byerly no other way to say it. I’m in constant contact with him, I get regular emails from him, and when I travel around the country, I always stop in and stay with him. As peculiar as it sounds, that’s what it is.”

At 58, Lucey is very much the same man

TOWERVIEW 29

WISDOM

Saying

By Ryan Brown The first thing I did when I moved to Johannesburg, South Africa last October was buy a car, and the first thing that car did was break down. Just after 8 p.m. one evening, I was driving down an unlit highway off-ramp when my newly purchased 1987 Toyota Corolla shuddered, heaved and then lurched to a dead stop. At the time, I had been the owner of this fine vehicle for approximately 35 minutes.

As darkness pooled in the space where the glow from my headlights used to be, I fumbled for my hazards and ticked off a quick mental list of people who couldn’t help me at this moment: 1. Pretty much anyone I’d ever met.

That was because two weeks earlier I’d boarded a plane and flown 8,000 miles away from home and all its comforts to spend a year doing research in a place most people I knew regarded as either an indistinguishable corner of a gangly, undernourished continent or else—if they were a bit more Africa savvy—the most insanely dangerous place they could imagine.

Suddenly, this seemed like a less-than-spectacular life choice.

As I was reflecting on all this, I looked out over my dashboard and saw for the first time the thin cloud of smoke rising from my hood. Behind it, a cluster of street children had gathered, chattering loudly to each other in Zulu, giddy with the excitement of the unfolding drama. As they all stared blankly at my car, awaiting my next move, a white Mazda hatchback pulled up in front of the Corolla. The driver cut the engine, opened the door, and began to 30 TOWERVIEW

“Yes”

walk forward.

“Hey,” he said, “do you need some help?”

Have you ever wondered if you’re about to make the decision that will get your life turned into a public service announcement?

And that’s why, the narrator would say gravely, you never accept help from a stranger on a dark street in one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world.

No? Me neither.

“Yes,” I said to the stranger advancing toward me in the dark in one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world, “I do.”

South Africa is a nation of staggering contrast. Nowhere else in the world—with the exception of Brazil—do so many of the world’s poorest people live in such close proximity to so many of its richest. The wages of masses of store clerks, domestic workers and security guards amount to less than $300 a month, but the roads are clogged with BMWs and Audis speeding toward private schools and security-patrolled suburbs. Five bedroom houses flanked by electric fences sit 10 minutes from corrugated metal shantytowns.

This vast gulf in wealth has given rise to a fearsome and violent crime epidemic. Some 24 percent of the adult population is not employed in the formal sector, and most who don’t work never have. So the world of crime is organized, methodical, overflowing with a country’s unused talent. Nearly everyone I know in South Africa has had their house robbed at least once. Many have had cars hijacked or stolen, often in broad daylight. And all this despite an arms race of security measures—electric fences, personal guards,

Special to the Chronicle

anti-hijack immobilizers—that throw up literal walls between the country’s rich and its poor.

But there is a strange thing that happens when you turn your country into a security bunker. People become worried not just for their own security but for their neighbor’s. A black man in a little Mazda hatchback will stop for a hapless white American woman in a broken-down Toyota Corolla, eventually spending two hours trying to fix it, simply because he is so worried about what will happen if he does not.

Johannesburg is a city parceled, divided by the clean lines of apartheid’s geographers and the scars they have left behind.

But across its history and its present, it is also a city of individuals reaching beyond those borders, straddling the fault lines and stepping across them. Crime statistics and common sense say that the man in the Mazda should not have stopped for me, and that I should have refused his help, called the police, locked myself in my car. I knew all that, but for some reason over the din in my head of reason telling me to stay away, I heard something louder. It was the man’s voice calling out across the dark highway off-ramp. Hey, he said, do you need some help?

Yes, I do.

Ryan Brown graduated from Duke in 2011 and was a former Chronicle columnist, staff writer and Towerview associate editor. She is currently living in South Africa on a Fulbright research grant and is happy to report that her car still functions. Most of the time.