INDY Week 1.19.2022

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill January 19, 2022

Restoring

the Faith Innocence Projects in North Carolina have been vital to winning the freedom of those falsely convicted, like Dontae Sharpe. But prosecutors' reticence to reopen cases is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving true justice.

by keith t. barber, p. 10

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

"The whole record felt a little bit wild—beyond my control," says Durham musician Jake Xerxes Fussell, p. 14

VOL. 39 NO. 3

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

CONTENTS NEWS 4

Meet Justin Poindexter, the former teacher who cleans some of Durham's most violent neighborhoods, perhaps to reckon with a tragedy that changed his life. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

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Raleigh residents and business owners in some of the city's last affordable neighborhoods surrounding Dix Park face permanent displacement as the City of Oaks booms. BY JASMINE GALLUP

8

North Carolina hospital leaders plead with the public to get vaccinated, boosted, wear masks, and take protective measures as Omicron packs ICUs.

BY ROSE HOBAN

FEATURE 10 Innocence Projects in North Carolina investigate and litigate convicts' claims of innocence. But reticence among prosecutors to reopen cases is one of the greates obstacles to achieving true justice. BY KEITH T. BARBER

ARTS & CULTURE 13 In a PlayMakers Repertory Company production, director Tia James reimagines As You Like It. BY BYRON WOODS 14

Jake Xerxes Fussell shines on his standout fourth album, Good and Green Again. BY NICK MCGREGOR

16 Crook's Corner may be closed, but it lives on through its prize for debut Southern novelists. BY SARAH EDWARDS

THE REGULARS

3 Quickbait

17 Culture Calendar

CORRECTION In our story about the NC-06 congressional race last week, we misstated that candidate Wiley Nickel is a state representative. Nickel is a state senator.

COVER Photo by Brett Villena

WE M A DE THIS PUBLI S HE RS Wake County

MaryAnn Kearns Durham/Orange/ Chatham Counties

John Hurld EDIT ORI A L Editor in Chief Jane Porter Managing Editor Geoff West

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January 19, 2022

Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards

Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods

C RE ATI V E

A D V E RTI S I N G

Creative Director

Senior Writer Leigh Tauss

Contributors Will Atkinson, Madeline Crone, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Layla Khoury-Hanold, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Anna Mudd, Dan Ruccia, Rachel SImon

Annie Maynard

Wake County MaryAnn Kearns

Staff Writers Jasmine Gallup Thomasi McDonald Editorial Assistant Lena Geller Copy Editor Iza Wojciechowska

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Jon Fuller Staff Photographer

Brett Villena

Durham/Orange/ Chatham Counties John Hurld Sales Digital Director & Classifieds Mathias Marchington

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BACK TA L K

We continue to get mail about Sarah Edwards’s story from November about Pioneers Durham, the homophobic Methodist churchslash-coffe shop-coworking space that opened last week on Geer Street.

In our paper last week, we published a letter from Julia Webb Bowden, a pastor at Elizabeth Street United Methodist Church, which is located about a half mile away from Pioneers Durham.

Bowden notes that all are welcome at her church, but one reader, BRANDON DORN, found Bowden’s letter to be somewhat self-serving. Dorn writes:

As a Christian in Durham following news about Pioneers Church, I was interested to read a local pastor’s perspective when I saw your piece in the Indy.

I was hoping to find something that furthered the conversation in a helpful way, so was disappointed to instead read what essentially amounted to a free advertisement for ESUMC. Instead of using the open letter as an opportunity for dialogue with Sherei and others from Pioneers, or even using it as a moment of public instruction on differing theologies of same-sex marriage, you instead used your piece to signal the virtues of ESUMC. In fact, you don’t even mention Pioneers once, beyond the first sentence, and implicitly make them out to be a judgmental, homophobic community as you extol ESUMC under the guise of “telling your story.”

Ultimately, your piece just adds to the noise surrounding the topic. Instead of seeking dialogue or reconciliation, you publicly communicate a clear division, as though winning denominational turf wars and increasing church attendance were more important than showing nonbelievers what it looks like to love people who hold different views. What disappointed me most about the piece, I think, is that it contributed to the perception that the church is mostly concerned with judgment. Your piece joins in on the culture wars and divisions at play in our nation rather than seeking a way to transcend them.

I’m not defending Pioneers’ position or the things Sherei or others have said. I have no connection to them. And I’m personally not sure where I stand on the topic of same-sex marriage—it is something I am actively reading and thinking about. So I write this to you not to condemn your position, much less your congregation or the work that ESUMC is doing in the community, but rather in hopes of encountering better dialogue on a complex topic.

Q U ICKBA I T Opportunity Gaps

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

I

n an effort to reduce opportunity gaps in schools, the North Carolina State Board of Education is taking a look at race-based data from past school years. Numbers from 2018-19 show we have a long way to go.

Black students were suspended

7.3x

more than white students.

% of students taking AP exams

Key Black Students White Students

% of students chronically absent

45.9%

18%

22.6%

5%

Subject proficiency in 2018-19 Math and Reading

Science

Is the topic really that complex, though? We don’t think so.

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January 19, 2022

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Durham Justin Poindexter

Coming Clean A former teacher cleans the streets of some of Durham’s toughest neighborhoods, perhaps to come to terms with a tragedy that changed his life. BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

E

arlier this month, on a chilly late Saturday morning, Justin Poindexter shows up to clean a wide, browngrass lot beside a Dollar Tree store in the Lowe’s shopping center in Southeast Durham.

The tall, solidly built man wears baggy jeans, with a limegreen-and-orange vest over his black zipper coat and sweatshirt. A black toboggan perched atop his head, he wears sunglasses with mirror lenses that reflect the bright orange sun. A black neck gaiter covers his face. A patch reading “RUN DURM” emblazons one of the vest’s chest pockets.

In the spirit of “no one can do everything, but everyone can do something,” for the past three years, Poindexter has used a long-handled grabber and large trash bags to haul away trash and debris—wine and liquor bottles, beer cans and cigarette butts, heroin needles and baby diapers, fast food bags, and used condoms—from some of Durham’s most violent communities. One of his cleaning stops is near the intersection of Guthrie and Holloway Streets in East Durham which accounted for nearly a third of the city’s record 49 homicide victims last year.

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“The main message is to restore the love back to the community,” Poindexter says. “We count, and we can clean up on our own …. It goes back to mental health, and keeps [property value] appraisals up. There are studies that show a clean environment improves self-worth …. If an area is clean, it’s less likely to be a negative narrative about it.”

Poindexter—a 43-year-old native of Long Island who moved to Durham in 2002 for a job teaching third graders with the public schools—wants to send this message to the community, and to a city ravaged by deadly gun violence.

Owing largely to shootings in East Durham that took the lives of 17 people last year, including two 17-year-olds and two 15-year-olds, the predominantly working-class community is beset by a negative perception.

Last month, shortly after a mass shooting in East Durham killed two teens and wounded four others, newly elected mayor Elaine O’Neal issued a citywide challenge to halt what is essentially Black fratricide.

“Law enforcement and the government can’t tackle this issue alone,” a clearly distraught O’Neal said during a hasti-

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

ly called press conference at the downtown Durham Police Department headquarters. “We need every member of the community to join us in this fight to save lives.”

Newly elected city council member Leonardo Williams noted an uncomfortable truth about the city’s gun violence epidemic: “The majority, or almost all of the people getting killed are Black, and the majority, if not all of the people doing the killing are Black,” he said during his first city council meeting last month. “So, as a Black man I’m saying we have a problem that we as a community need to address.”

“It’s all of us,” O’Neal said. “You are your brother’s keeper. And if you do nothing you are part of the problem. So we need help.”

Two years before O’Neal was even elected, Poindexter figured he could make a difference and alter the trajectory of deadly gunfire by simply picking up trash in several of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.

“The new mayor is amazing. That touched me,” he says.

“There has to be people who want to stand up for what’s right. We have to care.”

Before starting on the dormant field, Poindexter cleaned the asphalt lot next to the Dollar Tree.

“Lots of heroin needles here,” he says while working.

“People deserve to shop in a clean area. A lot of older people, mothers, shop here. I just feel like they are queens and don’t need to see trash in the parking lot.”

Everyone from older residents to drug dealers thanks Poindexter and encourages him to keep cleaning. City officials know about him, too.

Council member Williams says he first encountered Poindexter while campaigning for office.

“I never met him, but something I said while campaigning rang a bell with him and he started sending me pictures of him cleaning the streets,” Williams says. “So we have this anonymous relationship. I honor and support what he’s doing. There’s something in his heart that’s leading him to want to do something right.”

After picking up every single piece of trash littering the asphalt lot, Poindexter turns his attention to the field whose sides slope upward to Fayetteville Street and MLK Boulevard, using the grabber to snatch up discarded cardboard boxes and heavy plastic.

“I clean this whole thing,” he explains. “It could be my mother who comes here, my grandfather, my auntie.”

Poindexter’s transformation into a one-man cleaning crew echoes the words of the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, who asserted that “we must cultivate our [own] garden” to ward off the “three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.”

For Poindexter, it’s about deescalating the violence, and teaching young people to give one another a pass instead of reaching for the seemingly ubiquitous firearms in their waistbands.

Poindexter’s quest to clean neighborhoods he cares about started three years ago. It was Saturday morning in his Southeast Durham neighborhood and he decided

to take a walk. He walked outside and saw three empty vodka bottles on the side of the road. There was a dirty diaper to boot, and heroin needles.

“I thought, ‘Let me pick that up,’” he says.

Poindexter contacted the local chapter of NC Harm Reduction, which now supplies him with containers to properly store the discarded needles. He also asked for Narcan overdose kits.

Loftin Wilson, a programs manager with the Durham chapter of NC Harm Reduction, told the INDY that in addition to supplying Poindexter with overdose kits, Wilson regularly picks up needles he collects from neighborhoods throughout East and Southeast Durham. The biohazardous needles are incinerated, Wilson says.

“Justin is such a friendly and warm presence,” Wilson says. “People feel connected with him because he is very nonjudgmental.”

Wilson says Poindexter works in a “bunch of different communities.”

“He’s such a connector in the community,” Wilson adds. “And he’s always looking for ways to connect the community to groups. He’s so passionate about cleaning up neighborhoods.”

One of the agencies Poindexter connected with is Keep Durham Beautiful. The nonprofit works in partnership with the city to organize volunteers that help with litter prevention and community greening.

Tania Dautlick, executive director of Keep Durham Beautiful, says for a little over a year, the nonprofit has supplied Poindexter with trash bags, the ubiquitous grabber, and gloves.

“I remember him coming into the office and asking for supplies and sharing his vision for cleaning Durham,” Dautlick told the INDY last week.

Dautlick says the nonprofit’s hundreds of volunteers typically adopt one street. Not so with Poindexter. “[Poindexter] adopted a number of streets,” she explains. “He’s all over the place.”

Poindexter says something clicked inside him after picking up trash in his own neighborhood. He realized that collecting trash could be an opportunity to connect in the community with an authentic grassroots approach.

Formerly, Poindexter had made it his mission to teach third-grade English after reviewing studies that found children who had not attained reading proficiency by the fourth grade were less likely to succeed academically, graduate from high school on time, or do well in life and the workforce.

“Studies have shown that a Black boy who fails the third grade reading test has a greater chance of being incarcerated,” he explains.

Poindexter no longer teaches, but he’s still an educator. He gives out free books to children who live in the neighborhoods where he cleans.

“It’s mostly at the places where I clean,” he says. “If I see a Black father at the park with his child, I’ll give them a book.”

Poindexter’s zeal for cleaning up neighborhoods may be a metaphor for a quiet effort to come clean with a tragic episode in his own life.

In 2017, following a 15-year teaching career in Durham, Poindexter resigned from the profession after he was charged with a felony hit-and-run accident that killed 72-year-old Phillip Shaw. The accident happened just after 11 p.m. in the 3700 block of Fayetteville Street, near Hillside High School, not far from where Poindexter now cleans the Dollar Tree lot and adjoining field.

It’s not an easy subject for Poindexter to talk about. He says the accident happened on a Tuesday night. It was dark, he was not under the influence, and was driving the speed limit “when all of a sudden my front windshield was cracked and I heard a loud pow!’”

“I thought someone was shooting. I didn’t call the police. The next morning the police raided my house,” Poindexter recalls.

“How can I not feel compassion and empathy for what happened?” Poindexter says. “I was an elementary school teacher.”

“For me, my whole life was turned upside down for doing something I do everyday, driving down the street,” he adds. “Of course, you’re going to feel bad. But I’m not a victim. I want to change this narrative instead of being a victim.”

Shaw’s family was not immediately available for comment.

In 2019, Poindexter was convicted of felony hit and run causing serious injury or death and sentenced to three months in the Durham County jail. While in custody, Poindexter’s passion for cleaning was born.

“In jail, the biggest job is cleaning,” he explains.

Since 2019, Poindexter has supported himself by working at restaurants. But his passion is cleaning. And while using a grabber, gloves, and trash bags in his quest to make Durham a safer place, he dreams of funding that will enable him to someday start his own business.

“I’m gonna clean until somebody recognizes,” he says.

“It’s the American thing to do, to look out for one another, to help someone, just help, just help,” he adds. “I’m not an institution, but I wanna stop the shootings, and hire other people ... I tell people, ‘If you can put down the [gun] and pick up the grabber, you can’t get a felony for this.’” W

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e Bu s i n e s s L a w UNCONTESTED In c o r p o r a t i o n / L LC / DIVORCE Pa r t n e r s h i p MUSIC BUSINESS LAW Wi l l s INCORPORATION/LLC WILLS C o l l e c t i o n s SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c

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Raleigh Francisco Ceron-Sagastume and Migel Saldana at their old home, from which they were recently displaced as a result of development planned around Dix Park PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA tion on a 10-story apartment complex with businesses on the ground floor, dubbed Park City South. A few blocks south, 145 acres on either side of South Saunders Street are reserved for more 12- and 20-story mixed-use developments.

The rezonings, which were approved last year, would add more than 1,400 apartments to the city’s housing supply, all along a major transportation corridor, with many within walking distance of the bus system and farmers’ market.

But with so much housing demand, the units are unlikely to be affordable for those who previously lived along South Saunders Street.

Moving out

Slipping Through the Cracks As development comes to areas surrounding Dorothea Dix park, some of the last affordable neighborhoods in Raleigh, residents and business owners face permanent displacement from the city they’ve called home.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

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nevitable—that’s the word many Hammell Drive occupants use to describe the slow and devastating transformation of their working-class neighborhood into a multimillion-dollar apartment complex.

The gentrification of Raleigh seems inevitable to many living in formerly affordable houses. But that knowledge didn’t soften the blow when residents and business owners near Dix Park were told to abandon their homes and offices within 30 days.

“Right now, my partner and I, we’re technically homeless,” says Francisco Ceron-Sagastume, who was forced to move out after Christmas. “We’re living in a hotel until we find housing.”

Ceron-Sagastume and his partner, Migel Saldana, lived at their home overlooking the Raleigh skyline for two years before receiving a 30-day notice from new property owner SLI Capital in December stating their lease wouldn’t be renewed.

The Raleigh-based real estate investment firm bought 7.5 acres of open space plus existing homes and businesses at 6

January 19, 2022

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the corner of South Saunders Street and Hammell Drive with plans to turn the property into a high-end apartment complex. The first phase of the project will result in two 20-story towers containing hundreds of apartments. The company also plans to build new commercial and office space.

A city under construction Development around Dix Park has spiked in the past year, especially as the Raleigh City Council moves forward with an ambitious plan to turn the oft-underused green space into the city’s best public park. The first phase of the project is already under way, with landscape architects drawing up plans for a new plaza—complete with waterfall, playground, and picnic grove—just across the street from the Hammell Drive development.

Near the east corner of the park, off South Saunders Street, Kane Realty Corporation will soon start construc-

Ceron-Sagastume and Saldana weren’t the only ones pushed out by the Raleigh development. Another four families, who were subleasing homes from a nearby business owner, were also displaced, Ceron-Sagastume says.

“It’s not OK that people are displaced and pushed out so easily,” he says. “All these developers are just buying out all these homes in magnitude.”

The couple is now looking for another place to live in Raleigh, but like many, they’re having trouble finding a home they can afford in such a competitive market.

“The prices of rent are nearly the same for a mortgage, so we might as well own. [But] the market is crazy—it’s horrible,” Ceron-Sagastume says. “We’ve submitted multiple offers—no luck there.”

Businesses on Hammell Drive are having similar trouble, although the developer has given most an extra month to move after facing backlash.

“It’s just been hard in this market to find something,” says Johanna Fernandez, owner of building supply store Sun HS Warehouse. “I’m trying to look for a place around here, but I haven’t found anything. [There’s] not much available.”

Even if Fernandez does find a new location, moving will hurt her business, she says. She’s been at her current location for 10 years and has built up a good customer base.

“It’s terrible,” Fernandez says. “I’m gonna lose a lot of clients, and my business is gonna suffer.”

And that’s the best-case scenario. If Fernandez isn’t able to find another space for her business, “I gotta close,” she says ruefully.

Likewise, Dennis Carter, owner of Anything With a Plug Recycling, is having trouble finding a new space.

“I’ve had a broker helping me figure it out, but places he comes up with are either too far away, too big, too small, and everything’s expensive as hell,” Carter says. “The rent I have, I’ll never find that again.”

In the worst-case scenario, Carter will have to move his recycling business to another property he rents as he keeps looking for a permanent home. Overall, he doesn’t mind seeing new development, he says.

New town homes on South Street near Dix Park in downtown Raleigh bordering rent-controlled housing. PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA “Everybody enjoys that,” Carter says. “But you have to look at what the cost is to the people that are here. It makes [prices] go through the roof.”

Is there hope for tenants?

When it comes to moving, more time is always better. Ceron-Sagastume and Fernandez each said that having a few more months’ notice would have made a critical difference in their lives.

Under North Carolina law, however, landlords are only required to give a tenant 30 days’ notice that they don’t intend to renew an existing year-to-year lease agreement.

City officials can ask development companies to give tenants more time, but state law often swings in favor of landlords.

“We’ve had this happen on Garner Road, where an apartment complex changed hands, [and] people are given a notice saying you have 30 days to move,” Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin says. “We kind of stepped in and we were able to work something out by talking to people and encouraging them to work with the tenants and give them more time.”

But things don’t always work out so neatly. When the Hammell Drive property first changed hands, city officials talked with then owner Atlas Stark about gradually relocating residents and business owners.

Negotiations fell apart, however, when the property was sold to SLI Capital and Mack Real Estate Group of New York. At that point, talks about giving residents more time to move ended.

“Going forward, when we look at rezoning neighborhoods, one of the things we need to put in the conditions is, ‘OK, what’s your

plan for displacement?’” Baldwin says. “[We need to] deal with that proactively, so we don’t have a situation where someone is surprised by a notice saying you have 30 days. That isn’t fair to anybody.”

City council member Stormie Forte, whose district includes Hammell Drive, says she’s had several conversations with people who want the city to be more aggressive when it comes to preserving affordable housing. People have suggested the city make its own bids for properties such as those on Hammell Drive, where affordable homes already exist.

But, Forte says, “it’s hard to do that when you’re competing against investors in an open market under capitalism. Our pockets are just not deep enough to compete.”

Last year, Wake County approved a $10.5 million bond to protect such housing by buying apartment buildings and lots when they go on the open market. The city, on the other hand, is using $12 million from its affordable housing bond to buy both existing homes and land for future construction.

“We try to work with nonprofit partners and put as many resources into their coffers as we possibly can,” Forte says, “to help them [to build] more affordable housing.”

The bottom line is that housing in the city is market driven.

“Raleigh’s growing in leaps and bounds,” Baldwin says. “We’re a desirable place to live.

What we’re trying to achieve is some balance.”

With so many developers flocking to Raleigh, though, it seems, well, inevitable that some people will slip through the cracks. “[The developers] don’t care. All they see is the potential to win some money,” says Ceron-Sagastume. “And I get it, but we don’t have to lose empathy on the way.” W INDYweek.com

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North Carolina The nurses’ station in the “hot zone” portion of UNC Hospital’s ICU. PHOTO BY ROSE HOBAN

Scrambling to Cope NC hospitals put out public plea for people to get vaccinated, get boosted, mask up, and take protective measures as the Omicron variant breaks hospitalization records. BY ROSE HOBAN backtalk@indyweek.com

S

usan Paulsen started having chest pain on Monday.

The 60-year-old painter who lives in Chapel Hill waited four hours, thinking it was indigestion, hoping it would go away.

Besides, she didn’t want to go near a hospital.

“That seemed like a place I might catch it,” Paulsen said, referring to the Omicron variant of COVID-19 that’s been ripping through North Carolina’s population.

Omicron has driven up the daily numbers of North Carolinians testing positive for the coronavirus. Since January 1, the state has recorded at least 288,000 cases and had days of record-breaking case counts.

Hospital leaders throughout the state have taken to the airwaves to plead with residents to come to emergency departments only when absolutely necessary. Paulsen had heard those pleas.

“I didn’t want to be going there for a silly reason and adding to the crowds,” she said. But her husband convinced her to call his dad, a retired cardiologist, who told her in no uncertain terms to get over to UNC Hospital.

Good thing she did. She was having a heart attack.

Paulsen is the type of patient that hospital leaders across the state are worried will get lost in the shuffle as 8

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the state’s health care institutions scramble to cope with a flood of patients infected by Omicron. ICUs are full of people admitted with respiratory failure, and regular treatment beds are also crowded with those showing up for other problems but then also testing positive for the virus, even as staff are calling in sick and unable to come to work because they’re also testing positive.

ICUs full “Omicron, no matter what you’re doing right now from following guidelines to testing, it is saturating our community,” said Christopher DeRienzo, chief medical officer at WakeMed Health in Raleigh.

The WakeMed ICU is full of patients with COVID-19 respiratory disease, he said.

“The overwhelming majority of ICU patients are unvaccinated,” DeRienzo said, something echoed by health care leaders across the state.

DeRienzo was one of three Triangle-based health care leaders who held a joint call with reporters on January 6 to make a plea to the public to look somewhere other than

emergency departments for COVID-19 testing. Health care leaders across the state have held similar press conferences and on Wednesday, leaders from every North Carolina hospital issued a joint letter asking people to get vaccinated and boosted with another dose when eligible, practice social distancing, wear masks, and wash their hands to help relieve the pressure on overwhelmed hospitals.

This week, the state’s hospitals surpassed the record of COVID-positive patients set 12 months ago, in the midst of last winter’s surge, almost a year to the date.

On Thursday, 4,275 people were hospitalized across North Carolina with illnesses related to COVID, 741 of whom were in ICU beds, according to the NC Department of Health and Human Services dashboard.

“We are seeing as many ICU patients as we saw last winter,” said Shannon Carson, a pulmonologist and head of the intensive care service at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill.

During last winter’s surge, UNC Health had about 500 or so patients across its dozen inpatient facilities. By the beginning of this week, that number had topped 600 patients and kept growing.

Members of the community Further complicating the situation is that nearly 1,000 of the 30,000-plus staff are out, according to Alan Wolf, a UNC Health spokesman.

“These are people who are either testing positive, and not getting too sick, because we have a vaccination requirement, or they’re testing positive from exposure in the community,” Wolf said. Those who test positive have to be out for at least five days, Wolf said. If an employee does not have symptoms after that, they can return to work. If they’re still sick, they need to stay away.

“A thousand people missing is a big crisis for us,” Wolf said.

“Just like other hospitals in the area here, our team is exhausted,” said Andrea Fernandez, regional chief medical officer for the Atrium Health/Wake Forest Baptist system. “We have had to, as part of that COVID-versus-nonCOVID-care balance, we’ve had to stop all elective surgeries, and really are having to prioritize and triage our time-sensitive cases.”

On Wednesday, according to Fernandez, there were a total of 236 hospitalized COVID patients, with 53 on ventilators, in the system’s hospitals in Winston-Salem, Davie County, North Wilkesboro, and High Point. On Thursday, the Triad region of the state—which includes Fernandez’s system—had the most hospitalizations of any region, with close to 1,100 patients.

Many of the Atrium Health/Wake Forest Baptist staff are out sick, too.

“That’s really where the challenge is for us is that as we have more and more staff out, we don’t have the ability to keep hospital beds open,” Fernandez said.

Because of COVID and with COVID David Wohl from UNC Health said that COVID is so widespread in the community right now that it’s not uncommon to be treating someone who had a traumatic injury and after swabbing their nose, learn the patient is also COVID positive.

“There are people who come in [not] for COVID-19, who get progressively more ill, from mildly symptomatic to actually having symptoms while in the hospital,” Wohl said.

What adds to the workload, Wohl said, is that often they need to treat the COVID along with the thing that brought them to the hospital in the first place.

But a large majority of patients in UNC’s intensive care unit who are COVID positive are there because the virus has sickened them, not because they tested positive incidentally while seeking other care, hospital administrators say.

At WakeMed, DeRienzo said it was likely some “incidental” COVID patients are arriving with issues that were exacerbated by their COVID diagnosis.

For example, someone may have COVID and their risk of heart attack goes up three times during the first week of illness, DeRienzo said, citing a Swedish study.

“After that diagnosis, it gradually falls but it stays up for stroke and for COPD exacerbations, for asthma, you name it, there’s a whole range of other things,” DeRienzo said.

That makes it a “folly” to try to distinguish whether people are in the hospital “with COVID” or “because of COVID,” DeRienzo added.

“If someone has diabetes, and they go into diabetic ketoacidosis, you know, a very serious sequela of diabetes, we know that viruses can trigger that,” DeRienzo said. “Is that COVID related? Who makes that call?”

For those patients who arrive with other problems and are then diagnosed with COVID, the intensity of care increases.

“We wouldn’t want to mix those populations if at all possible,” Fernandez said. “We bring them to one of our COVID units, we manage the disease process.

“Our nurses do have to spend a lot more time gowning up, putting on their goggles, putting on their N95s to go in those rooms. The care that’s delivered is just more arduous.”

Expecting even more All of the hospital leaders estimated that fewer than 20 percent of patients are “incidental” COVID cases. Even at that percentage, with soaring hospitalizations, the number of people in beds because of a COVID diagnosis is likely to go up more before trending downward, they added.

“Test positivity is the first thing to crest, and then several days, a week later, maybe seven to 10 days, hospitalizations begin to crest, and then ICU comes after that, and then, unfortunately, deaths follows that,” DeRienzo said. “If past is prologue, then I would certainly hope we begin seeing a crest in the case wave over the course of this week. And I’m sort of looking towards the end of next week as a point where I’m hoping to begin seeing a stabilization in hospitalization numbers.”

In the meantime, DeRienzo said that he hopes people experiencing chest pain such as Paulsen do continue to make their way to area hospitals to get the emergency care they need. He was disturbed to hear about her hesitation. Fortunately, she was treated with medicines and released after one day.

“I’m sure there are folks out there right now who need care for something and are scared and are going to delay,” DeRienzo said. “We are all working tremendously hard to maintain access to the full spectrum of care.” W This story was originally published by NC Health News. NC Health News is an independent, nonpartisan, not-forprofit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. Visit NC Health News at northcarolinahealthnews.org.

h t

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ke up w a W i

A bright spot for Fernandez has been that because of the vaccine mandate for staff, many of those who tested positive for the disease are returning to work pretty quickly.

That’s not the case for all, though.

“This is not a cold,” Fernandez said.

“They can have fever, they can have a bad cough, they can have significant fatigue, that doesn’t allow them to care for their families and care for their patients. And so that’s why we need to keep them out until they’re well.”

Another light amid the darkness, Fernandez said, is that the community is starting to heed the hospitals’ calls to take precautions. Several large events planned in Forsyth County over the past week were canceled or postponed, Fernandez said, showing a commitment to try not to add to the virus spread.

“People are starting to get the fact that this is worse than the flu, this is worse than a cold and can actually have significant implications on chronic conditions, and can worsen chronic conditions and can have effects that last well beyond those five days,” she said.

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January 19, 2022

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Dontae Sharpe speaking outside the Governor’s Mansion in September 2021 in support of his own pardon and those of others who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes

FE AT U RE

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Since 1989, there have been close to 3,000 exonerations of innocent individuals nationally, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Innocence Projects not directly affiliated with the nonprofit Scheck and Neufeld founded have achieved the majority of those exonerations.

According to the American Association of Law Libraries website, there are 68 innocence organizations in the United States. In North Carolina, the NC Center on Actual Innocence, Duke’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, and Wake Forest University's Innocence and Justice Clinic are part of the Innocence Network. But students in clinics at several other North Carolina law schools are also learning invaluable lessons about ensuring justice for those entangled in the criminal justice system, whether or not they’re working on cases directly.

Innocence Projects in North Carolina

Restoring the Faith In Duke and Wake Forest law school clinics, students investigate and litigate convicts’ claims of innocence. Local law scholars differ on how innocence work should be approached but agree that reticence among prosecutors to reopen cases is one of the greatest obstacles to achieving true justice. BY KEITH T. BARBER backtalk@indyweek.com

"J

ustice is not postponed,” the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his 1841 essay "Compensation."

But the stack of handwritten letters on Jamie Lau’s desk says otherwise.

Lau, a professor at Duke University School of Law, attributes the influx of mail to national publicity surrounding the exoneration of Ronnie Long more than a year ago.

“It’s had a big impact,” Lau says. “The mail all begins, ‘After reading about Mr. Long’s case in Prison [Legal] News, I’m writing to you about my case.’”

Screening handwritten letters from North Carolina inmates is the first stage of an arduous process that 10

January 19, 2022

INDYweek.com

sometimes takes decades. It begins with a Duke Law student assessing the credibility of an inmate’s claim of innocence, then sending out a questionnaire to the letter’s author to gather more information about their case. After they get the completed questionnaire back, Duke Law students participating in the Innocence Project, a national network often based in law schools, consult with their cohorts before referring cases to the school’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic.

Attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded the Innocence Project in 1992 at Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Over the past three decades, the flagship Innocence Project has achieved 375 DNA exonerations.

James E. Coleman Jr. has served as director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke since its inception in 2007.

Back then, Coleman and now-retired Duke Law professor Theresa Newman advised students participating in the Innocence Project. In 2001, Coleman and Newman were instrumental in creating the NC Center on Actual Innocence—a collaborative effort between Duke University and UNC–Chapel Hill.

The purpose of the NC Center was to prevent duplicate efforts by law-school-based Innocence Projects and to serve as a central hub for all claims of innocence made by incarcerated individuals in North Carolina’s prison system.

Duke Law relied on the NC Center for 20 years to perform the initial screening of letters from inmates, until this past spring. Now, Duke Law students screen all the letters with claims of innocence.

The NC Center on Actual Innocence has evolved over the past two decades, from being a clearinghouse for claims of innocence to performing reinvestigations and offering legal representation to inmates.

“It actually goes back to what we intended in the beginning, in that the [NC] Center would be involved with the students in screening cases and doing a preliminary review,” Coleman says.

Rich Rosen, a retired UNC law professor, and Pete Weitzel, a former UNC journalism professor, worked with Coleman and Newman to establish the center.

Rosen characterizes its evolution as inevitable and necessary given the prevalence of wrongful convictions. He argues there is value in both the law schools' and the center’s approaches to reinvestigating cold cases and filing legal appeals on behalf of clients.

Coleman lauds the center’s executive director, Christine Mumma, for the results she and her staff of attorneys have achieved in securing exonerations.

“But as a result of her basically doing investigations and representations, we don’t have someone who is doing the screening and working with our students on that,” says Coleman.

Rosen says that now, there are two different models of innocence work in North Carolina.

“The law school model is really good,” he says. “I also think the Center model is really good. Frankly, there’s enough need out there for all the different ones to have an impact.”

Six law schools in North Carolina have Innocence Projects—Duke, UNC-CH, NC Central University, Campbell University, Elon University, and Wake Forest. However, only Duke and Wake Forest support law school clinics that directly address wrongful convictions and so are officially part of the national Innocence Network.

For Lau and Coleman, the immersive experience helps achieve Duke's overarching vision of shaping the next generation of lawyers.

“I hope that we are training the lawyers who will replace us eventually,” Coleman says. “I hope that the clinic will continue as long as there are people who are wrongfully convicted in prisons in North Carolina. The work and the skills that we develop will be important in the practice of law into the foreseeable future.”

The case of Dontae Sharpe There may be no better example of the law school model as a means to overturn a wrongful conviction than the case of Dontae Sharpe. In 1995, a Pitt County jury convicted Sharpe of the murder of George Radcliffe in an incident police described as a drug deal gone bad.

In 2010, Caitlin Swain was a second-year law student at Duke working in a leadership position at the Wrongful Convictions Clinic. Sharpe’s case captured her attention as she began reading about the circumstances surrounding the police investigation and subsequent prosecution.

Joined by law school colleague Nikita Cuttino, Swain first met with Sharpe at Harnett Correctional Institution in Lillington that spring. The experience confirmed Swain’s belief that Sharpe had been railroaded by the criminal justice system.

“What [Sharpe] told me and [Cuttino] at the time was ‘I don’t want you all to be sad or disappointed if you can’t get justice, because there’s so many people who have come before you, and I know they’ve all tried their best,’” Swain recalls. “‘But I’ve given up on there being justice in this justice system.’”

Sharpe had good reason to feel discouraged. After he won his 2009 appeal, the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office fought a lower-court decision,

Two different approaches

Duke Law professors Jamie Lau (l) and James E. Coleman Jr. and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ultimately ruled in favor of the state. It appeared all was lost, but a visit from the two Duke Law students marked a turning point in Sharpe’s quest for justice.

“I was at a low point in my life at that time,” Sharpe recalls. “But they came and that was like an answer to my prayers.”

Swain and Cuttino began their reinvestigation in earnest after that initial face-toface meeting with Sharpe.

“There was a lot of fear and wariness among many people in Greenville who had tried to tell the truth about this case in the past, and one of the things that was important to [Cuttino] and I was to try to start fresh in this investigation,” Swain recalls.

Persistence ultimately paid off as Swain and Cuttino went door-to-door in Sharpe’s old neighborhood to try to persuade residents with information about the case to come forward. The breakthrough moment occurred when Charlene Johnson, the state’s primary eyewitness at Sharpe’s trial, agreed to speak with them.

Johnson was 13 years old when she implicated Sharpe in Radcliffe's murder, but within a few months of Sharpe’s conviction, Johnson recanted her testimony. No forensic evidence ever linked Sharpe to the crime scene.

Swain recalls joining Newman, the clinic's then codirector and Sharpe’s attorney as of 2010, to visit Sharpe in prison reg-

PHOTO BY YULY MARTINEZ.

ularly over the course of nine years as his appeals wound through the system. Coleman says the fact Swain continued to join Newman, who advised Duke Law students in the clinic until her retirement in 2021, on those visits reflects the enduring strength of the program.

“All of our cases are litigated by the clinic as a team,” Coleman says. “Although each case has a lead counsel, [Newman], [Lau], and I play active roles in all of the exonerations. We don’t have any case in which that has not been true.”

Throughout Sharpe’s appeals, Swain says she never lost hope, and ultimately her hope was rewarded. On August 22, 2019, a superior court judge in Pitt County granted Sharpe’s motion for appropriate relief, vacating his 1995 conviction. In November, Governor Roy Cooper granted Sharpe an official pardon of innocence, meaning Sharpe is entitled to seek compensation from the state for wrongful incarceration.

Over the course of 11 years, Swain and Sharpe formed a strong bond, which Swain credits as her inspiration for launching Forward Justice, a nonprofit that works with social justice organizations, coalitions, and networks to pursue criminal justice reform.

She hired Sharpe as the nonprofit’s first Returning in Service and Excellence leadership fellow.

“I now get to go to work with my first client, which is a phenomenal, incredible outcome,” Swain says.

Sharpe’s case is one of 10 exonerations the Wrongful Convictions Clinic has achieved over the course of its 14-year history. The NC Center on Actual Innocence has achieved eight exonerations in its 20-year history, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Mumma says the NC Center on Actual Innocence maintains a close working relationship with the law schools at UNCCH, NCCU, Campbell, and Elon, but students don’t take active roles in reinvestigating criminal cases, crafting legal briefs on behalf of the center’s clients, or doing active casework.

“I often have to make the decision not to take a case forward despite the fact that I feel strongly that the inmate has a credible claim of innocence and will likely die in prison,” Mumma says. “I also make a decision to take cases forward where there is no clear avenue for new evidence but there may be ineffective assistance of counsel that [led] to a wrongful conviction. Those are not decisions law students are equipped to make.”

Mark Rabil, director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at Wake Forest School of Law, takes a different approach with his law students. Rabil, who is acclaimed for securing the freedom of Darryl Hunt in 2004, has officially led the clinic as its full-time director since 2013.

Wake Forest law students review and investigate North Carolina inmates’ claims of innocence and pursue legal avenues for exoneration and release. Students work closely with Rabil and attorney Emily Thornton to screen, evaluate, and litigate innocence cases. The Innocence and Justice Clinic has screened cases for many years rather than relying on the NC Center on Actual Innocence, Rabil says.

“We currently have about 20 cases with pending motions or litigation,” Rabil says.

“We have litigated cases at every level, from NC superior courts to NC appellate courts to federal district court and on to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Student participation in the appeals process on behalf of the clinic’s clients is a hallmark of the Wake Forest program. In 2019, Raquel Macgregor, a Wake law student, represented John Robert Hayes—a Winston-Salem man convicted of two counts of second-degree murder in 1994—before the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia. The appeal was denied, but Rabil and Thornton recently filed a motion to order new forensic and DNA testing in Hayes's case.

Rabil says demand from North Carolina inmates with legitimate claims of innoINDYweek.com

January 19, 2022

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cence far outstrips the supply of law students participating in clinics at Wake Forest and Duke, so at times, it feels like they’re only scratching the surface. At Wake Forest, Rabil says, there’s currently a two-year wait list for case screenings. About 500 cases are in various stages of review or litigation, Rabil says, and the clinic has had to reject “well over 2,000 cases.”

But the effort is clearly worth it.

“In the last year, we have been successful in winning release for two of our innocent clients through parole,” Rabil says. “One person had been incarcerated for 42 years and the other for 29 years.”

Righting a horrible wrong Marissa Bluestine helped achieve 17 exonerations during her 10 years as director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

Bluestine, now assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, cited a 2018 study authored by her Penn colleague criminologist Charles Loeffler as even more evidence of the urgent need for criminal justice reform. The study estimated that 6 percent of incarcerated individuals in Pennsylvania state prisons are innocent.

Extrapolating based on the current U.S. prison population, Loeffler’s findings indicate that roughly 108,000 innocent people are currently sitting behind bars. Altering public perception about the issue of wrongful convictions is the key to bringing forth change, Bluestine says.

“If overnight, somehow we were able to identify all 4,500 people in Pennsylvania who were wrongly convicted or innocent and they all walked out of prison on the same day, there would be an outcry—just outcry and outrage of ‘We’ve got to fix this,’” she says.

Law school clinics are not the only effective approach to the issue of wrongful convictions, but educating future lawyers on the flaws inherent in the system is vital, Bluestine adds.

“It is incumbent upon us as professors and practitioners to be able to ensure that students who are in law school now understand these issues of wrongful convictions and how we’ve gotten them and how we kind of work our way around them,” Bluestine says.

Shoshana Silverstein screened the 2006 HBO documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt, which chronicles Hunt’s 19-year fight for justice, during Duke Law School orientation in 2017. Silverstein learned of Hunt’s case when he died by suicide in March 2016.

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“The video ended, we all looked around, and we were all in a little bit of shock at how wrong the system can go,” Silverstein recalls. After participating in the Duke Law Innocence Project in her first year of law school, Silverstein joined the Wrongful Convictions Clinic in 2018. That’s when she was introduced to Ronnie Long’s case.

On October 1, 1976, Long, a Black man, was convicted of sexual assault, burglary, and unlawful entry by an all-white jury in Cabarrus County. He was sentenced to life in prison but steadfastly maintained his innocence.

Duke Law’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic filed Long’s third petition for a writ of habeas corpus—a legal recourse through which an inmate can report an unlawful imprisonment before a court— in 2016, which was ultimately denied by a federal magistrate. In January 2020, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Long’s appeal of the magistrate’s decision by a 2-1 vote.

Silverstein recalls receiving the news.

“I was standing in line at the grocery store and I got the email,” Silverstein recalls. “I began reading about what we were going to do.”

Lau and his students would pursue a very narrow legal avenue—en banc review—in which a petitioner requests a rehearing before the full panel of judges.

Cutting her winter break short, Silverstein flew back to North Carolina the next day. Sitting in airports, Silverstein strategized on the phone with law school colleagues about how they would craft a legal appeal in roughly two weeks.

On May 7, 2020, Lau argued Long’s case before the Fourth Circuit. Silverstein recalls feeling a wave of emotions as she listened in her kitchen in Vermont to Lau’s live presentation on the court’s website.

“It was a combination of nerves and confidence,” she says. “I just remember feeling in that moment that bit of hope taking over the nerves and saying, ‘The [judges] understand it. We have a chance here. We have a real chance to right a horrible wrong that has just continued on for decades.’”

On August 24, 2020, the court reversed the dismissal of Long’s habeas petition by a vote of 9-6. Three days later, Long was

a free man, and once again Silverstein was overcome with emotion.

“I was just standing in the kitchen shaking,” she recalls. “It really seemed or felt at times impossible, so to have it succeed—again especially in that time when the world seemed like everything was going wrong—to have this go right was the best thing that could possibly happen to me or to our team.”

Today, Silverstein works as an assistant district attorney for the City of Philadelphia. She likens her role to that of her defense team’s adversary in the Long case— the NC Attorney General’s Office.

“I am now very much a part of the system,” Silverstein says. “I decided to take up the role of the attorney who was opposite us in the [Long] case to try to create the change that I would hope they create.”

"I want them to go out there and be ambassadors for justice in the criminal justice system."

Ministers of justice

Mumma, Rabil, and Coleman may disagree on the best model for achieving exonerations of wrongfully incarcerated individuals, but they are in accord in one respect: they point to the NC Attorney General’s Office as the greatest impediment to real reform.

Lau speculates state law enforcement officials irrationally fear that admitting the criminal justice system is deeply flawed, and miscarriages of justice do occur, will somehow make it harder for them to obtain convictions in the future. Lau argues there’s a flip side to that coin—specifically, if state attorneys general and local DAs cooperated with law school clinics and other innocence organizations to get to the truth in actual innocence cases, it would inspire greater confidence in the system.

Lau addressed the issue directly during oral arguments in the Long case before the Fourth Circuit. Citing overwhelming evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the original investigation, Lau called upon NC Attorney General Josh Stein’s office to simply acknowledge the facts of the case.

“If the state was interested in justice—this is a problem with the culture of the attorney general’s office in North Carolina,” Lau told the 15-judge panel. “If it was interested in

justice, it would’ve [begun] an investigation into the conduct of these [police] officers to determine what went wrong here.”

Ultimately, leadership matters when it comes to criminal justice reform, Lau says.

“We’ve long maintained that while the attorney general’s office has a duty to represent the state in these cases, its duty to represent the case is not limited to fighting to defend the conviction against all evidence that’s presented to it,” Lau adds.

Stein's press secretary Nazneen Ahmed pushed back on Lau’s contention that the state Department of Justice isn’t interested in seeking the truth in cases of documented misconduct by police and prosecutors but rather upholds convictions at all costs.

“As attorney general and co-chair of the Governor’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, Attorney General Stein has supported several recommendations to create a fairer criminal justice system, including recommending that North Carolina establish and fund an independent Conviction Integrity Unit and improving policing practices and enhancing accountability for law enforcement officers,” Ahmed said in a statement.

But Lau and Coleman have long lamented the lack of cooperation from local district attorneys’ offices and the state’s justice department in their reinvestigations of cases where there is a legitimate claim of innocence “There is a space where we could be working together both with prosecution and with law enforcement which would provide greater confidence to the public at large that their interest is in doing right in these cases and is not in protecting people who have done wrong in these cases,” Lau says.

Coleman says his greatest hope is that the young attorneys graduating from law schools across the nation will ultimately transform the criminal justice system, whether they pursue criminal law or not.

“I want them to go out there and be ambassadors for justice in the criminal justice system,” Coleman says.

But in the meantime, real reform is needed if ministers of justice like the state’s attorneys general expect to maintain public confidence in the system, Coleman argues.

“What happens eventually is that people do not accept the system as being legitimate, and when they don’t accept the system as being legitimate you will get juries drawn from those communities that won’t give a damn about whether they’re going to let a person go who committed a crime,” he says. “Eventually, you’re going to lose them as people who support the system.

And if we do that, then we are all in serious trouble.” W

STAGE

AS YOU LIKE IT

PlayMakers Repertory Company | Online, through Jan. 21 | playmakersrep.org Raleigh's Community Bookstore

A still from As You Like It PHOTO COURTESY OF PLAYMAKERS

Latest on Bookin’

REPERTORY COMPANY

Shaking Up Shakespeare In a risky, rewarding gambit, director Tia James takes Shakespeare’s tale of warring brothers and questing lovers out west. BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

I

t’s a picture of contentment as Duke Senior steps, satisfied, into the cool of a midsummer night for a smoke at the end of his day. The sounds of the crickets soothe the successful Black businessman surveying his domain as he strolls through a marble colonnade.

Then the peace of the evening is shattered. A gang with torches surrounds the duke; one brandishes a club, another, a rope. All are wearing hoods while they beat him up and drive him to his knees. As a white man pulls off a bull mask and cocks his shotgun, one thing saves the military hero’s life: a torn newspaper clip from a Tulsa, Oklahoma, newspaper, showing that he once saved the life of the man with the gun.

In a rough, midwestern accent, the assailant, Duke Frederick, bellows, “Get you from our court,” and Duke Senior flees for his life.

No, director Tia James hasn’t placed us in a 16th-century palace in the south of France in the prologue she’s devised as a new opening for As You Like It, a theatrical and motion picture hybrid that PlayMakers Repertory Company is touting as the troupe’s first film. This daring reframing of the Shakespearean play, streaming online through January 21, situates the tale uncomfortably closer to home: among people caught up in the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the most horrific incidents of racial terrorism in American history.

On that day—May 31, 1921—deputized white mobs razed the houses, businesses, churches, and schools of Tulsa’s Greenwood district, an area known at the time as being a Black utopia and one of the most prosperous communities in the United States.

More than 300 residents were killed in the attack; thousands more were placed

in internment camps and driven from their homes.

James was tapped to direct the work for PlayMakers in the summer of 2020—a momentous time to consider a production of Shakespeare in which Black actors are fully represented.

“It was the time of George Floyd, and I was in a pretty depressed and demoralized state,” the Black director recalls. “It was also the third time in my life that I’d heard about Tulsa. The other two times, older Black men would say, almost in passing, ‘Hey, you know there was a Black Wall Street, right?’”

“I’d never heard of it. And during that summer, when it came up again, I said ‘I have to look into this.’”

When James learned of that brilliant and prosperous community from the start of the 20th century, she found a bridge to bring Shakespeare’s world closer to our own. After the lands of Duke Senior (noble Samuel Ray Gates) are taken by the white, usurping Duke Frederick (an acerbic Jeffrey Blair Cornell), he and his people seek shelter in a forest in the countryside.

From that point forward, James’s adaptation, which reshuffles the scenes in the play’s second and third acts, focuses on the possibilities of healing, and even love, among a cast of characters that have suddenly been displaced.

AhDream Smith’s Rosalind, disguised as a confident cowboy, beguiles Khalil Gibran LeSaldo’s Orlando, who’s been banished by his warring brother Oliver (Anthony August), and comic Touchstone (Sergio Mauritz Ang) takes up with the roughhewn Phoebe (Omolade Wey) before multiple weddings end the tale.

Noted regional musicians Yolanda Rabun and Emily Musolino create a soulful soundscape for the lyrics Shakespeare wrote in the original text, before exuberant song and dance sequences raise spirits in the second and last act.

“It’s so important, especially when telling Black stories, and it’s something I’ve wrestled with in my art: We see a lot of Black struggle, but for me, I want to see more Black joy,” James says. “We journey toward a more hopeful, adventurous place … to have those given circumstances root us in something really real.” W

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M U SIC

JAKE XERXES FUSSELL: GOOD AND GREEN AGAIN RELEASE SHOW

Nightlight, 405 ½ W. Rosemary St., Chapel Hill | Friday, Jan. 21 | 8 p.m. | $15-$20

Green Pastures Jake Xerxes Fussell revisits familiar emotional landscapes of love, loss, and labor on his standout fourth album. BY NICK MCGREGOR music@indyweek.com

A

fter a legitimate winter storm and the Omicron surge sucking the wind out of our almost-post-pandemic sails, the Triangle could use some good news.

Luckily, hope lies on the horizon: hints of spring and contemplative optimism on Jake Xerxes Fussell’s new album, Good and Green Again.

Out this week on local label Paradise of Bachelors, Fussell’s fourth LP packs diametric punches. Equal parts earthy and ethereal, melancholic and hopeful, its nine songs also deliver several career superlatives for the Durham-based folk song interpreter, guitarist, and singer. It’s his most sonically adventurous record yet, contains his first songwriting credits for original compositions—and marks the first time a rug has served as source material for an adapted and rearranged tune.

“Washington” rises and falls on Fussell’s hypnotic fingerpicked guitar, as parlor piano, French horn, and violin 14

January 19, 2022

INDYweek.com

add stylistic flourishes to a single, simple verse: “General Washington, noblest of men / His house / His horse / His cherry tree / Him.” Fussell first spotted those words in the 1992 book Hooked Rugs: An American Folk Art, which included a picture of a circa-1890 rug produced by an anonymous Virginia craftswoman. The words stitched verbatim on the rug proved intriguing.

“That piece struck me as interesting,” Fussell tells INDY Week while being warmed by the sun along the banks of his beloved Eno River one balmy December afternoon. “I kept reciting the rhyme in my head, and there was something comical and plain but also powerful and melancholy about it. Maybe we should be a little suspicious of that myth of the cherry tree and George Washington as a leader, you know?”

The last song, that plaintive dirge about our nation’s first president, is a purposeful counterpoint to the

“Frolic” a reflects F turally b Columbu River oys Jake Xerxes Fussell as Appala PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA ingly, he to any on “The id says. “Wh represent one is ‘e make the album’s opener, “Love Farewell.” Fussell’s warm baritonemunity? cracks and quavers on the haunting roundelay with Rev-sentative olutionary War roots. Yet his requiem sounds relevant— Fussell even modern—thanks to subtle sonic textures and unde-his own a the album niably emotional delivery.

“I’m fairly picky about what songs I’ll put on a record,of-contex so the first line of business is making sure they feel legit-one of his imate for my voice and my presentation,” Fussell saysHumanity of his song-finding process. “It has to have some kind “I like a of pull on an emotional level. When people tell me mystuck wit music feels present-day or convincing, that’s because ited a sho Art Rose passed that test for me.”

This straightforward principle extends to Fussell’slongtime album notes, which read like the citations section ofthe album an academic folklore study. Take “Breast of Glass,” fora sense o instance, which is rooted in the traditional “Handsomelittle unh Molly” family of songs, with traces branching out fromgled gree Arkansas through Appalachia and across the Atlantic to Concep East Anglia. “Carriebelle” comes out of a centuries-oldoeuvre: c Georgia Sea Islands tradition, while “Rolling Mills Areeveryday Burning Down” is based on two Tar Heel field record-cally conn ings—one of Marshall’s George Landers recorded in 1965and desp and one of Siler City’s Chick Martin recorded in 1971—out: Fuss release s that lament the loss of a town’s economic heart.

Meanwhile, “The Golden Willow Tree” is an ellipticalin Chape narrative about a cabin boy trying to impress his cap-Triangle tain—only to be jilted after carrying out that captain’snational and Euro very orders.

“I never anticipated ‘The Golden Willow Tree’ becom- Brenda ing a major part of the record,” Fussell laughs. “At onesell’s lab point, I didn’t even know if I wanted it to be on there!Good and Now this monster of a nine-minute song has taken onfect soun a life of its own—and I gave in to that.” ic-plague In fact, Fussell says, the album’s overall cohesion “It’s an stems from that sense of surrender. blues in “The whole record felt a little bit wild—beyond mykey,” Grea control. In some ways, it’s the least intellectual seriesnebulous of songs I’ve ever recorded,” he says. “They had beena way t sitting around with me for a long time, below theunstuffy— surface in a very natural way. There’s a deeper feelingunpreten to them.”

In that The truly impressive leap came during the recordingof today’s process. Before entering Overdub Lane in Durham, Fus-where lay sell worked with longtime friend and first-time collabo-mingle an rator, the Chicago polymath James Elkington, to formu-a wildly d late a deliberate production plan. Tasteful instrumenta-undeniab tion was then provided by Piedmont standouts Casey “I love Toll, Libby Rodenbough, Joe Westerlund, Anna Jacobson,“The mus collabora Nathan Golub, and Joseph Decosimo.

The result? Sensitive, seemingly effortless crafts-There’s n manship—especially on bouncy original instrumentalsYou can

“Frolic” and “In Florida.” The latter song reflects Fussell’s geographically and culturally broad Southern upbringing in Columbus, Georgia, where Apalachicola River oyster runs were just as common as Appalachian Mountain jaunts. Accordingly, he resists pressure to wed himself to any one folk tradition.

“The idea of ‘folk’ is problematic,” he says. “What’s authentic, and what’s truly representative of a community? If someone is ‘extremely authentic,’ does that make them representative of their community? Or are they freaks—just representative of their own self?”

Fussell is equally averse to overthinking his own artistic presentation. Asked about the album title, he cites a snippet of outof-context conversation overheard during one of his shifts working at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Hillsborough.

“I like alliteration and I like colors, so it stuck with me,” he laughs. It also provided a showcase for a pastel landscape by Art Rosenbaum—a folklorist, painter, and longtime mentor of Fussell’s—who lends the album its beautiful cover art. “There’s a sense of order in there, but it’s also a little unhinged,” Fussell says of the tangled green visual.

Conceptually, that mirrors his entire oeuvre: clear-eyed in its description of everyday love, loss, and labor while cosmically connected to deeper threads of hope and despair. (As of press time, hope wins out: Fussell still plans to play an album release show on January 21 at Nightlight in Chapel Hill—with support from recent Triangle transplant Rosali—followed by a national tour that stretches into February and European dates in May.) Brendan Greaves, cofounder of Fussell’s label, Paradise of Bachelors, thinks Good and Green Again provides the perfect soundtrack for our strange, pandemic-plagued times.

“It’s an incredibly rare skill to play the blues in a major key or a jig in a minor key,” Greaves says. “Jake operates in these nebulous realms of vernacular music in a way that’s remarkably unfussy and unstuffy—complex and challenging yet unpretentious and accessible.”

In that sense, Fussell is representative of today’s changing Triangle—of this place where layers of complicated history intermingle and creative freedom blossoms in a wildly diverse artistic community—yet is undeniably himself.

“I love living in this area,” he says.

“The music scene here is cooperative and collaborative—a real dream come true.

There’s no pressure to be a certain thing.

You can be your own solo weirdo.” W INDYweek.com

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PAGE

Whole Hog Crook’s Corner may be closed, but its endearing literary prize for the best debut novel set in the American South lives on. BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

I

f Crook’s Corner had never existed, one of the many writers associated with the restaurant might have cooked up its fictional analog anyway.

Imagine a writer pitching something like this: Just after World War II in a small Southern town, an eccentric, academic local woman is murdered near the fish market she owns. The murder is never solved and over the years, the market changes hands, serving as a taxi stand and pool hall before a former town council member opens a barbecue joint and names it in honor of the deceased fishmonger.

In the early 1980s, the restaurant changes hands once more and, in those hands, transforms into something special—something thoughtful, inventive, and unpretentious with national renown.

Soon, writers and artists and academics begin to haunt the space, toasting PBRs and sharing plates of shrimp and grits.

Nothing is perfect, but there is community and creativity. Twelve feet above the restaurant, a fiberglass sculpture of a pig looms, a pink avatar for that gentle sense of possibility.

It sounds like a gothic backdrop plucked from a Barry Hannah story, but that is the story—at least in part—of Crook’s Corner, a restaurant so storied that it was perhaps inevitable that it would one day be tied to a literary prize. And that’s exactly what happened: in 2013, the restaurant established its sponsorship of the inaugural Crook’s Corner Book Prize for the “best debut novel set in the American South.”

Original Crook’s Corner head chef Bill Neal was an avid reader and writer, as is his successor, Bill Smith, who retired from the restaurant in 2019.

The prize is intended to “encourage emerging writers, whether published by established publishing houses, small independent publishers, or self-published by 16

January 19, 2022

INDYweek.com

the author,” and for many years has included $5,000 and a gratis glass of wine at the restaurant every day for a year.

Last June, Crook’s Corner quietly closed its doors, another restaurant casualty of the pandemic, taking with it a certain vision of an older, open Chapel Hill and that romantic promise of 365 glasses of wine. Nevertheless, its prize, for now, lives on.

“I’m happy to say that the Crook’s Corner Book Prize will continue, despite the closing this year of the restaurant,” Crook’s Corner Book Prize Foundation president Anna Hayes told the INDY in an email.“The prize was modeled after the prestigious book prizes awarded for many years by famous ‘literary cafés’ in Paris, and when we created the prize for the best debut novel set in the American South, the obvious and perfect partner was Crook’s Corner Restaurant, renowned for its Southern cuisine. Maybe the restaurant will re-open one day.”

On January 11, at a virtual prize ceremony, organizers announced that writer Eric Nguyen is the 2021 recipient of the prize.

Nguyen’s debut novel, Things We Lost to the Water, follows a Vietnamese mother and two sons as they immigrate to New Orleans and try to build a life and maintain ties with Cong, the family patriarch who stayed behind in Vietnam.

Nguyen’s novel was one of 36 entries; other shortlisted titles, announced in September, were The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. and The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian. Celebrated South Carolina novelist Ron Rash, author of the novels Eureka Mill and Raising the Dead, served as judge for the 2021 prize.

“There is much to admire in Nguyen’s novel, but two aspects stand out to me,” Rash says. “The first is his ability to reveal the inner lives of his characters. Their moti-

The exterior of Crook’s Corner

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

vations and actions are distinctly individual, but they always feel true to the vagaries of the human heart. Equally impressive, and rarer in a first novel, is the novel’s superb structure, which moves the characters and the reader toward a climax that is both surprising and inevitable.”

Past prize winners include Wiley Cash, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, and Sion Dayson; past judges have included Randall Kenan, Lee Smith, Tayari Jones, and Charles Frazier, who once called it the “coolest book prize in the country.”

“Winning the Crook’s Corner Book Prize is an absolute honor,” Nguyen told the INDY. “The prize is so important in not only highlighting emerging writers but showcasing the diversity of Southern literature as well. The South has such a rich history of storytelling, and this prize shows how alive the literary scene is in the region. I’m proud to be able to add to that.”

Next year, Ben Fountain, author of National Book Award finalist Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a title also longlisted for the inaugural Crook’s prize, will serve as judge for 2022. That there will be future judges and prizes is something to celebrate.

Book awards don’t exactly grow on trees. The literary world is a famously closed one, and its prizes often go to a

recycled list of well-pedigreed and connected writers; the designation “emerging writer,” too, is often shorthand for someone with a book or two already under their belt. Opportunities for writers trying to find their footing—especially Southern writers, especially writers self-publishing or publishing outside of a mainstream press—are scarce.

“The only thing harder than writing a first novel is writing a second, but you need that bridge from one to the other,” says the writer Daniel Wallace, a restaurant regular and the author of Big Fish, over the phone. “This prize gives the writer the confirmation that they’re on the right path.”

If Crook’s was haunted by the memory of Rachel Crook (and later Bill Neal, who passed from AIDS in 1991 at the young age of 41), then perhaps the changing landscape of Chapel Hill—with its Franklin Street Target, homogenous juice chains, and the current squeezing of arts and library funding out of the town’s public university budget—will be haunted by the spirit of Crook’s. Maybe the book prize will make sure of it.

“It is rare for a prize to be established and then to be successful, and the Crook’s Corner Prize has really quickly found a place in the landscape,” says Wallace. “Having something like this out there is vital.” W

CULTURE CALENDAR

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity screens at NCMA Cinema on Saturday, Jan. 22 PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA

Bruce Dickinson comes to DPAC on Monday, Jan. 24.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DPAC

stage Stick Fly $20+. Jan. 19–Feb. 6, various times. PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill.

art PARALLEL/SHIFT Jan. 12–Feb. 27, by appointment only.

Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill.

Mindful Museum: Virtual Slow Art Appreciation Wed, Jan. 19, 7 p.m. Online, presented by NCMA. Minnie Brown and the Illustration Art of Ron Weisenfeld Jan. 19–Feb. 19, various times.

Margaret Lane Gallery, Hillsborough.

JP Jermaine Powell: Breathe, Back to Life Jan. 20–Mar. 1, various times. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Virtual Artist Talk: Athlone Clarke Thurs, Jan. 20, 6 p.m. Online, presented through the Gregg Museum of Art & Design.

600 Highwaymen, A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly Jan. 21-23, various times.

CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio, Chapel Hill.

Jim McKeon: 5 Points Featured Artist – Public Third Friday Reception Fri, Jan. 21, 6 p.m. 5 Points Gallery, Durham.

Family Studio: A Creative Twist $8 (members), $10 (nonmembers). Sat, Jan. 22, 10 a.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

NCMA CINEMA: M.C. ESCHER: Journey to Infinity $5 (members, youth 7-18, college students), $7 (nonmembers).

Sat, Jan. 22, 2 p.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

The Anniversary Show Sun, Jan. 23, 1 p.m. Triangle Cultural Art Gallery, Raleigh.

Comedy Showcase Thurs, Jan. 20, 8 p.m.

Bottledog Bites and Brews, Cary.

Open Mic Stand-Up Comedy Fri, Jan. 21, 8 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing, Durham.

CC & Co. Dance Core & Fusion Showcase $15+. Jan. 22-23, various times.

Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Trey Kennedy: The Are You For Real?

Tour $35+. Sat, Jan. 22, 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Arts Discovery Educational Series: The Movement, an Acapella Musical $8. Mon, Jan. 24, 9:45 a.m. and 11:20 a.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

music Jphono1: Rectify Mercy Album Release Show $10.

Wed, Jan. 19, 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Free Throw SOLD OUT. Thurs, Jan. 20, 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Scotty McCreery $36+. Thurs, Jan. 20, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Dan Tyminski Band $22+. Fri, Jan. 21, 7:30 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Desert Hearts: Mikey Lion and Lee Reynolds $20.

Fri, Jan. 21, 9 p.m.

The Fruit, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: The Best of Broadway $18+. Fri, Jan. 21, 8 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Parker McCollum $85+. Sat, Jan. 22, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Raleigh Gives Back Benefit Concert $20+. Sat, Jan. 22, 7:30 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

An Afternoon of Beethoven Sun, Jan. 23, 3 p.m. Person Hall, Chapel Hill.

An Evening with Bruce Dickinson $27+. Mon, Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

MAN ON MAN $14 (advance), $16 (day of). Mon, Jan. 24, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Two Friends $20+.

Mon, Jan. 24, 7 p.m.

The Ritz, Raleigh.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR: INDYWEEK.COM INDYweek.com

January 19, 2022

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P U Z Z L ES

ALL RE A LTHC T HEA ERS GE K R WO

FF O % L 10 ON ALKS

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages” at the bottom of our webpage.

BOO

In-Store Shopping Curbside Pick Up www.regulatorbookshop.com 720 Ninth Street, Durham, NC 27705 In-store and pick up hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10a-6p

su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box.

The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered.

Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages.”

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com solution to last week’s puzzle

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