Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill May 19, 2021
Hip-hop producer Khrysis has spent two decades behind the boards for some of North Carolina’s most successful acts. On his new album, he steps into uncharted territory: the leading role. BY RYAN COCC A, P. 14
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"Beulah's Baby," by Primrose Paschal, is part of the NCMA exhibit To Be Young: Coming of Age in the Contemporary, p. 16
VOL. 38 NO. 18
IMAGE COURTESY OF NCMA
CONTENTS NEWS 7
Could a philosophy shift address racial disparities that arise in police traffic stops? BY LEIGH TAUSS 8 For many, the effects of COVID-19 linger long after they've recovered from the virus. BY MELBA NEWSOME 10 Rolanda Byrd, Akiel Denkins' mother, discovered her purpose as an advocate for police reform. BY JANE PORTER 11 Education advocates criticize a GOP bill that would increase penalties for minor classroom infractions. BY THOMASI MCDONALD
FEATURE 12
Wrongfully imprisoned North Carolinians are entitled to compensation but often wait years for an official pardon. BY GEOFF WEST
ARTS & CULTURE 14 Hip-hop producer Khrysis steps into the leading role. BY RYAN COCCA 15 The graphic designer pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a creative. BY KYESHA JENNINGS 16 An NCMA exhibit remembers what it's like to be young. BY SARA PEQUEÑO 17 For his debut feature film, the filmmaker Prashanth Kamalakanthan returns to his Triangle roots. BY ZACK SMITH
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BACK TA L K
Last week, writer Thomasi McDonald penned a piece about the Durham Nativity School’s plans for a soccer field for its students. Members of the Old North Durham community have some complaints about those plans, including proposals for astroturf, lighting the field, and the potential for the school to rent out the field to other soccer leagues in town.
But these residents want us to know they’re still supportive of the school’s plans to have a field for its students. “... all residents I know of support the school building a soccer field for the students,” writes neighbor ADAM HAILE. “I stated, ‘At the Friday meeting I attended, there was much expression of support for the school’s mission and for their general goal of providing a field for student use.’ “I have not heard one resident, at all, oppose it. Residents are working through issues with the school around potential rental use, but as far as I’ve seen there is universal support for use by students. Everyone, school and residents, thinks that’s a great idea. ...” Neighbor VIRGINIA SEITZ says our headline, “Durham Nativity School Wants a Soccer Field for Its Students. The School’s Neighbors Have Other Ideas” is not accurate. “ … We support the school, its mission, and its intention to provide students with a soccer field. To imply otherwise is either questionable or careless reporting. … It does not appear that you spoke with anyone on the block whose homes are opposite the soccer field and lights.” Seitz reiterated the neighbors’ concerns about “the expected high cost of this redesigned state-of-the-art field with astroturf and the lights” and added “we are very concerned about the potential for frequent and late use through rentals to other teams. In this compact neighborhood of mostly small homes, the associated issues of noise, traffic and trash can really reduce the quality of life of neighbors.” We also wrote about the Triangle’s gasoline shortage for the web this week. A Facebook commenter has some logistical concerns: “I’m just worried about what will happen to all the hoarded gas in 6 months (less in non-standard containers) when it starts to go sour (if it hasn’t leaked out or exploded by then),” wrote MIKE LING.
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e
15 MINUTES Julius Feguson, 35 Ninja coach at Rock Solid Warrior and five-season competitor on NBC’s American Ninja Warrior
PHOTO BY AISHA BUTLER
BY JANE PORTER jporter@indyweek.com
How did you get into ninja training? As a kid, I was fascinated by ninjas and martial arts. I was naturally athletic and used to dream of being an actual ninja. I was a big fan of Power Rangers and karate movies and all that stuff, Karate Kid, all the old Bruce Lee movies. I was just really enamored with that. In 2015, I saw a video of a girl who was five feet tall, the first woman ever to successfully complete a full course on the TV show. And the video went viral online. It was my first time seeing a course run on the show and I immediately applied for the show and ended up competing that next season. I was a dedicated gym rat before, training every day for nothing in particular because I loved training and exercise. So it was a natural fit for me.
How do you train for something like this? I started training in rock climbing, gymnastics, parkour, and calisthenics. I combined those disciplines primarily to hone all the facets of what the skill sets entail for the show. Now that I basically live at a ninja gym, I train on obstacle runs every day. But those four disciplines cover a lot of the skill sets involved.
It seems like there’s a wide range of ages among the competitors. The oldest person who has successfully completed a course is 56 years old. There’s a very big spectrum in age, especially now that they have teenagers on the show. It is really very individualistic. Obviously, it’s not a team sport. It’s on the person, the individual, to be prepared and be in shape. It really varies. There are guys in their 40s stronger than competitors in their 20s. One who may
be older had kept up a consistent routine and high level of fitness where some younger guys may be naturally skilled but maybe not as disciplined. I have trained a lot of people who have been on American Ninja Warrior and there is a kid’s show now, American Ninja Warrior Junior, and I actually trained the kid who was the champion, and the runner-up of that show.
How do you prepare mentally? The mental aspect is by far the most important part. It’s the biggest separator between competitors. Confidence is paramount. It’s called the hardest obstacle course in the world for a reason. Focus is huge. You can be prepared from practicing and you can have all the skills and be confident but just a moment of misplaced focus can end a season and you have to wait another year. So you have to have unshakeable confidence and focus and a level of fearlessness. The obstacles are challenging but you’re also 20 feet above a pool of water. You train a whole year for one moment, your run is just a couple minutes long. If the fear of failure is in your head then that’s going to be a huge disadvantage. There are just several layers of fear you have to destroy before you can set foot on the course. W American Ninja Warrior is a show where athletes compete on the world’s hardest obstacle courses to go as far as possible. Ferguson, who made it to the national finals in 2019, returns to the show June 7.
Q UIC KBA I T
Boom Times Total N.C. Population:
BY LEIGH TAUSS
ltauss@indyweek.com
10,439,388
S
ometimes it seems the end is nigh, especially if you look at the headlines. In 2020, birth rates plummeted, and deaths spiked due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But in North Carolina, the population actually increased by about 100,000 people in 2020. That’s larger than the city of Asheville. While the growth rate has slowed compared to previous years, the Old North State is still competitive nationally when it comes to migration, especially in major metros like Wake County, which grew by nearly 26 percent in the last decade. The state’s overall growth was enough to earn an additional congressional seat, according to data released early by the Census Bureau. When it comes to population growth, the recipe is typically births, minus deaths, plus net migration. The final census data for 2020, including data on migration, hasn’t been published yet. We'll leave it up to you to do the math on that one.
+99,439 Population Growth in 2020
National Birth Rate
+116,674 New Births in 2020
4%
decrease
3.2%
(Birth rates have been declining by about 2 percent since 2015)
decrease
+112,519 Deaths in 2020
17% Increase in deaths over 2019
6,748 COVID-19 deaths in 2020 (Today the total is more than 12,891)
(95,951 deaths in 2019)
Fastest Growing Counties (growth since 2010)
25.7%
Wake County
21.7%
Mecklenburg County
20.6%
Durham County
10.9%
Guilford County
21.4%
Union County
Sources: WRAL, The News and Observer, stacker.com INDYweek.com
May 19, 2021
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OP - E D
Lakeside Bluegrass Series
Better Practices The Town of Fuquay-Varina should bring back the committee that was tasked with evaluating and recommending on public safety issues BY JENNIFER HOLT backtalk@indyweek.com
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T
he Fuquay-Varina Board of Commissioners voted in its April 6 meeting to suspend the activity of its Public Safety Committee, a group of three commissioners tasked with hearing and recommending on public safety issues. The committee was resurrected a month earlier following a racist policing incident in January involving a Black 14-year-old child wrongly accused of stealing a bike. At the meeting, the committee chair recommended that the town’s citizens form their own group for ongoing discussion of relevant issues. The mayor pro tem cited the town’s MoneyGeek ranking as the No. 1 safest small town in North Carolina as reason both to dismiss any issues raised regarding local policing and to disband the committee outright. Following suit, the mayor offered comments on the body camera footage from the January 2021 event, stating he felt “proud” of the young man who “listened,” and “did what he was supposed to do,” and of the officer whose demeanor “was respectful.” The mayor’s descriptions of the January incident footage are not entirely incorrect. It would be fair, for example, to say that the arresting officer proffered certain kindnesses—he appeared willing to adjust the boy’s handcuffs so that they hurt less, and he took some care to avoid injury to the child’s head as he helped him into the back seat of the police car. What is perhaps less noticeable in the video is that the arresting officer’s superior eventually arrives on the scene to question the very decision to handcuff the boy and to recommend that he be released from cuffs and car. Less noticeable still is that the arresting officer describes the boy as “mouthing off” when he attempts to establish that he has
a legitimate bill of sale for the bike in question. Even less noticeable is that the boy has been handcuffed and put into the back of a police car in front of his own home, just feet away from where his father, inside, is not notified of his son’s arrest until a good deal of time has passed. “We’ll get to that,” the officer repeats when queried. As the mayor’s comments focused on superficial markers of the interaction make clear, there is a version of racist policing that looks different from what we have become accustomed to seeing in the news in recent years. Regarding those familiar sights, we risk becoming inured to reports of the killing or abuse of Black and Brown people by police, so that when racist policing occurs that’s not easily recognizable as extreme violence or murder—when there is no shouting, no weapon brandished, no blood shed—many have a difficult time seeing it. A couple of months before the boy was arrested for a crime he did not commit, Fuquay-Varina police pulled over a young Black couple in front of my home. At least two police vehicles were present while the couple stood in the cold, the young man submitted to being searched, and both of them witnessed a tedious and thorough search of their entire vehicle—from under the front hood to the floor coverings to the trunk linings. One of the officers detaining them occasionally attempted polite chitchat: “Were they from Greensboro? Did they know of a restaurant there that he liked?” After 90 minutes, they were released without a citation. The young woman later told me that the event I witnessed was the fourth time she and her partner had been pulled over within a single week of their holiday travels.
No amount of “pride” in polite-seeming conduct should keep us from noticing the racist assumptions and power dynamics played out beneath the surface of civility in both these instances. Routine events like these hint at why it’s been so devastating for some Fuquay-Varina residents to learn that just after the Public Safety Committee’s third meeting— and the first at which the public was invited to comment on the work remaining for everyone to feel safe—the town’s leaders boasted about its safety rating and suspended the committee tasked with listening to its residents’ safety concerns. At the final committee meeting, several callers made a plea for more and ongoing dialogue to repair and build trust between the town’s leadership and its citizens. Others requested greater overall transparency; a cultural assessment of the police department as well as bias training for police personnel; funding for community safety initiatives addressing those directly influenced by systemic racism; and targeted attention to the ways in which issues like housing, education, and healthcare are further determinants of a public’s safety. Reinstating and reconstituting the Public Safety Committee seems like the very least the mayor and the town’s Board of Commissioners could do toward entertaining the input they claim to value. Whether they will prove capable of creating and sustaining an actual conversation regarding public safety or of taking direct action on behalf of citizens who do not yet feel safe are matters that we should see addressed within a formally established municipal committee— rather than hear that these issues are best addressed by concerned citizens. W Jennifer Holt is a freelance writer and resident of Fuquay-Varina.
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North Carolina
Road Rules Black men in North Carolina are pulled over and searched more than any other group. Could a shift in philosophy be the answer? BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com
I
n 1999, before North Carolina Senator Jay Chaudhuri was a politician, he was a law student at North Carolina Central University in Durham when he noticed the red and blue lights of a police cruiser light up behind him. Chaudhuri, who is Indian-American, pulled over his car and waited anxiously as a police officer approached him. His alleged infraction? Turning on his left turn signal too early. “I was alarmed and shocked,” Chaudhuri says. “I was completely unaware of his charge and I had to challenge his reason for pulling me over.” Chaudhuri was lucky; he was a third-year law student who understood his rights and walked away without even a citation. But the incident didn’t sit well with him. Nearly two decades later, a study would elaborate why: “driving while Black” was a very real phenomenon, especially in Durham. An analysis of 18 million traffic stops in North Carolina between 2002 and 2013 revealed young Black men were pulled over, searched, and arrested far more than any other group despite the fact that contraband was discovered less often among those drivers. Racial bias was driving the traffic stops, the study found. Even worse: the racial disparities in policing appeared to be getting worse over time. “Daunte Wright was pulled over because of a non-moving violation and I think it raises a host of questions as to whether traffic stops are worth the cost or not,” Chaudhuri told the INDY. “I think the evidence certainly suggests that it is not.” Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was killed by a white police officer after he was pulled over for having expired registration tags. A struggle ensued and the officer, Kim Potter, claims she thought she was deploying a taser when she fatally shot Wright. While police training and accountability are necessary to address the over-use of force by police, Chaudhuri believes reworking policy and ramping up the state’s data reporting could stop the problem at its source: the traffic stop. Last month, Chaudhuri, along with Durham Senator Natalie Murdock, filed a bill that would formally designate a racially profiled traffic stop a civil rights viola-
PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA
tion, and aim to curtail the use of racial profiling through state-mandated studies and policy changes. “That’s the most common police-citizen interaction that takes place. When you overlay that with the disproportionate number of drivers are people of color that are pulled over, it certainly increases the risk,” Chaudhuri says. “Studies show that a fraction of traffic stops are really for the purpose of traffic safety. A traffic stop occurs either because there’s a need to raise revenue or a minor traffic stop is used as a pretext to investigating people for something completely unrelated to traffic safety.” Most of the time, Chaudhuri says “few traffic stops result in the public safety purpose.” If the police were no longer allowed to pull over anyone for non-moving violations that don’t threaten public safety, how many instances of police brutality could be avoided? Furthermore, what would happen if those resources were redirected toward public safety—pulling over only vehicles that posed a direct danger to the public? The answer to that experiment already played out in Fayetteville. Former Chief Harold Medlock gained national attention for dramatically changing the role of police within his community. After he was hired as chief in 2012, Medlock found a community distrustful of the police department and decided to take a new approach, partly motivated by his tenure overseeing Charlotte’s traffic unit. He’d seen his fair share of death and destruction on the roadways from drunk drivers and speeding. Expired plates
or tinted windows, on the contrary, weren’t killing anyone. “I determined that we were going to stop making traffic stops based on regulatory or equipment violations,” Medlock told the INDY. “We were going to focus on the things that kept people alive and kept them from being injured.” It was an unwritten policy—more a philosophy—but it worked. Over time, the result was not only fewer fatalities on the road, but the racial disparities in traffic stops began to lessen. Furthermore, with officers spending more time building relationships in neighborhoods rather than pulling over everything that moves, community trust began to rebuild. Chaudhuri hoped what was learned in Fayetteville could benefit the police departments throughout the state through increased data analysis and policy reformation. Unfortunately, like the majority of Democrat-sponsored bills in the North Carolina legislature, Chaudhuri’s bill was referred to the rules committee where it was not taken up before the crossover deadline, leaving it functionally extinct unless a Republican chooses to take it back up. He’ll likely refile the bill in two years in hopes that lawmakers can push it forward then. In the meantime, there’s nothing stopping police departments and sheriffs from adopting their own internal policies to combat racial profiling. “It has to be the leader’s will, it has to be the leader of the agency who says, ‘We need to take a hard look at who we are and what we’re doing,’” Medlock says. “Change is hard. It’s hard to change, especially after you’ve been doing it one way for years or even decades.” W INDYweek.com
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The Long Haul For many people, the effects of COVID-19 linger long after they’ve recovered from the virus BY MELBA NEWSOME backtalk@indyweek.com
O
ne day in late April, Perdensal Springs took longer than usual getting ready for her job transporting seniors for the nonprofit PACE of the Southern Piedmont. Lately, it’s been little things that get her tangled up: where she put her keys, had she made her lunch, what was her first stop. Prior to this job, Springs had worked in transportation for the Charlotte Housing Authority because she enjoyed helping seniors. But after being out with COVID for two months, Springs returns to work with the residents—some of whom have dementia—that is a reminder of her own struggles with confusion and forgetting. “Today, I took some medication to a lady’s house and forgot that she was supposed to sign the papers, so I had to go back,” says Springs, 62. “It should have been one trip but it ended up being two. “My memory is just like a person with dementia. It’s like I’m falling into dementia. I have a grandson who’ll be turning 14. I want to make sure that I remember him. I worry about forgetting him.”
Not an exclusive club Experiences like Springs’ have become alarmingly common among COVID survivors. According to a study published in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, even after the acute infection cleared, an overwhelming number of people who contracted the virus—but were never hospitalized—report a string of neurological problems including brain fog, fatigue, dizziness, headaches, numbness, and tingling. Brain fog is the most common. Commonly called post-COVID syndrome or Long COVID, this condition was only 8
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recently dubbed “Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” or PASC, by the National Institutes of Health. Experts are still working to define it. Some consider patients to have the syndrome if they remain symptomatic four to six weeks after their initial infection resolves; others say 12 weeks. The seriousness of SARS-CoV-2 has been discounted among some because of what they say is a relatively low mortality rate, even as that death rate is actually orders of magnitude higher than for seasonal flu. Now, there is increasing evidence of people who had less severe cases of COVID being waylaid by this lingering, life-changing disease up to a year later. A study published by researchers from the University of Washington suggests that 10 to 30 percent of COVID patients have one or more symptoms of long COVID, including intense fatigue, chest pain, brain fog, shortness of breath; loss of taste and smell are most common. Springs’ most persistent complaints are brain fog and shortness of breath. That means that in the United States, where there are more than 32 million cases of COVID-19, as many as 9.6 million people may still be experiencing long-haul symptoms after they no longer test positive for the virus. In North Carolina, Blacks account for approximately 175,000 of the total coronavirus cases. If 30 percent of those survivors become long-haulers, that would have a deep and lasting impact on the physical, emotional, and economic health of the community, a population that has less access to health insurance, care, and treatment than whites. Researchers are still exploring what’s behind this mysterious disease. One the-
Perdensal Springs was diagnosed with COVID-19 seven months ago. PHOTO COURTESY OF NC HEALTH NEWS
ory says symptoms are due to the damage caused by the infection and subsequent inflammatory response. Because long-haulers exhibit a variety of different symptoms, doctors, hospitals, and researchers are challenged to find the best way forward. “We don’t have a lot of specific, scientific answers because it’s just all so new,” says John M. Baratta, co-director of the UNC COVID Recovery Clinic. “Through research, that’s what we and others have to figure out. Hopefully, as time goes on, science will catch up and we’ll have more to offer.”
Getting COVID Springs noticed her first COVID symptoms in early November. “I didn’t run a fever but I struggled to breathe. Trying to go upstairs was a job. It really took a toll on me,” she said. “Even just trying to get out of the bed and walk was really hard. I couldn’t sleep, or I slept at odd times.” Two days later, Springs tested positive for the coronavirus. “I cried. I had my asthma under control for 15 years, and I was trying my best not to get COVID because I knew it was gonna be hard on me. I’d tried my best to keep myself well, keep myself protected.” Springs knew that working with a vulnerable, high-risk population also put her at risk. Nonetheless, she was shocked when she got sick.
“I played it over and over again in my head and kept trying to figure it out because it just didn’t make any sense,” she said. “But you work with the elderly and they have family members come and visit them.” Fearing she may have blood clots and because she lived alone, Springs’ doctor pushed her to go into the hospital, but she resisted being admitted because her family wouldn’t be able to see her. Instead, she made two trips to the emergency room for oxygen. The scans showed her lungs looked like ground glass, a radiologic finding that has become a diagnostic marker of COVID infection. Having lost two family members—an uncle in Charlotte and a cousin in Lancaster, South Carolina—to the disease, Springs can’t understand the laissez-faire attitude many still have about COVID. Even after the devastating impact of the virus on the Black community, there are still Black people who think it’s no big deal, she said.
Treating the long-haulers For doctors looking to treat the longterm effects of the disease, it feels like they’re back in the early days of the pandemic, learning what works as they go. Despite the staggering numbers, there’s no clear way to diagnose long COVID and no standard treatment protocol. Some long-haulers feel better after a couple of
weeks following the initial infection but then fall ill to old or even new disease-related symptoms that may affect multiple organs and systems, weeks or months later. For others, like Springs, their symptoms never fully abate after the initial infection; they just linger. PASC is sometimes compared with misunderstood ailments, such as chronic fatigue syndrome. Similar to those patients, many long-haulers struggle to have their symptoms recognized and taken seriously. Sometimes clinicians take a full medical history and assess all COVID-19 symptoms from the beginning of the infection. They may also run a battery of tests to rule out any other possible causes of the symptoms. Post-COVID recovery clinics like the one at UNC are springing up across the country to address COVID-19 aftercare issues. These clinics typically take a multi-disciplinary approach to caring for the myriad problems that can plague survivors. Pulmonologists treat lung and breathing issues; cardiologists are onboard to handle heart problems; social workers and mental health professionals weigh in on the best way to address mental health problems.
Recovered but not well After nearly eight weeks, Springs no longer tested positive for the virus. She returned to work in early January already knowing that there’s a difference between no longer being infected and being recovered. She struggled to do the things that had once been easy for her. “I didn’t know where I’m going. I was in the house for so long, I didn’t know how to drive. I had to get comfortable with driving again,” Springs says. “When it came to the people that I knew so well, I knew their faces, but I couldn’t remember their names until somebody said it.” Springs says her pulmonologist told her that it would take six months before she got completely better. She’s into her seventh month and still struggling to breathe. “Now, coming up and down the stairs is hard even after doing the inhalers.” She pauses and sobs softly. “Sometimes I think maybe I’m being impatient but it’s taking too long for me to get it together. I have to get it together.” Nobody really knows how long that will take. W North Carolina Health News is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. INDYweek.com
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Raleigh
A Mother’s Mission Rolanda Byrd discovered her purpose as an “accidental activist” and advocate for police reform BY JANE PORTER jporter@indyweek.com
T
he first time I met Rolanda Byrd was outside of a community meeting at the Bible Way Temple in southeast Raleigh following the fatal shooting of her son, 24-year-old Akiel Denkins, by RPD officer D.C. Twiddy in February 2016. It was a sunny day but Byrd wore the mantle of the brokenhearted. Standing next to her younger son, Travon, she smiled weakly at media members, clergy, and neighbors as they streamed inside. Her eyes were lowered, her shoulders hunched; she seemed exhausted from the weight of grief. It would be easy for a parent who’s lost a child in such a way to drown in a kind of all-consuming despair. That isn’t to say that Byrd is not still angry or hurt, but she isn’t consumed by bitterness or pain. Instead, Byrd has put a voice to the injustice that claimed Akiel’s life and, today, uses it to fight for police reform. A new two-part report from Frame, a digital magazine that publishes interactive documentaries on political and social issues from the perspectives of those affected, follows Byrd from her life with her family in Raleigh before Akiel’s death to the day of his shooting, its aftermath, and the work she’s done since with the Raleigh Police Accountability Community Taskforce (PACT) advocating for changes in the capital city’s police department. Raleigh native Chelsey Brejanee reported the short message service (SMS) documentary, which uses local reports, social media posts, video footage, and interviews with Byrd herself to tell an interactive story about police violence. It took Byrd five months after Akiel’s death, the documentary tells us, to work up the will to go speak before the Raleigh City Council for the first time. 10
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“I was so nervous,” Byrd says. “My gut hurt. Like, scared to even talk about myself or my son and just asking for change from them that first time.” That day in July 2016, Byrd told the council members who she was and who Akiel was. She asked the council to implement a body camera policy for officers. The documentary reveals that Byrd believes she would know for certain which version of how her son was shot and killed—the officer’s version or the one reported by neighbors—was true had Twiddy been wearing a body camera. But it quickly became clear to Byrd that the council wasn’t going to engage. “They went from my period, at the end of my three minutes, to the next person without [conversing] with me, without responding to what I had just read to them,” Byrd says. “And then realizing after that first meeting that it was going to continue to be that way.” Byrd kept showing up to the council meetings with PACT and kept speaking out, even when new rules of decorum the council members instituted dictated how speakers were allowed (and not allowed) to address them. A jarring moment in the documentary highlights, absurdly, how disconnected some government bureaucrats and elected officials are from the victims of policing. Byrd, again, spoke before the council to ask that officers wear body cameras and that the council create a police accountability oversight board. The council listened and then spent the next 20 minutes of the meeting talking with residents who wanted a pool in their community and needed a rezoning. “They have these dialogues with these folks,” Byrd says, “but can’t have a life or
Rolanda Byrd PHOTO CREDIT: ERICA HAWKINS/FRAME
death conversation with these parents that come before them, with these sisters and brothers, family members, children who’ve lost their parents, come before them and there’s no conversation. It’s dead silence.” As executive director of PACT, Byrd helped influence the city to finally adopt a body camera policy in early 2018. The policy was updated the next year, following the shooting of Soheil Mojarrad, a 30-year-old man killed by an officer who was wearing a body camera but failed to activate it. Then, last spring and summer, the George Floyd protests in downtown Raleigh took Byrd’s activism to a new level. More than 5,000 people converged downtown and Travon, Akiel’s younger brother, confronted officers with a blown-up photograph of Akiel. Raleigh’s city council agreed to assemble a police oversight board. It was a symbolic gesture, more than anything, as the board, due to state laws, doesn’t actually have investigative or subpoena power or the authority to discipline officers. Still, PACT’s membership grew last summer, and PACT and five other local social
justice organizations formed the umbrella group Raleigh Demands Justice. Raleigh Demands Justice advocates for more police reform measures in a city where six people— four of them Black—were shot and killed by police between 2013 and 2020, and where 58 percent of drivers pulled over are Black versus 20 percent who are white—despite Black people comprising less than a third of the city’s overall population. In a scene at the end of the first part of the documentary, Byrd stands outside a corner store on Bragg Street, near where Akiel was killed, and describes how she came to realize her new mission in the wake of her son’s death. “I started to understand that my purpose now, because of what happened to my son, was to be that voice for our community,” she says. “To be that mother that can stand up and fight for other mothers because of what’s happening to our family members. … Our story means so much to the people in our communities. … This is our hood, this is our city. And one way or another, we’re going to take it back.” W
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North Carolina
Harsh Punishment Education advocates criticize state GOP bill that could increase penalties for minor classroom infractions BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com
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n March, state Rep. John Torbett, a Republican from Gaston, sponsored House Bill 247, which would open the door to stiffer penalties for public school students who commit classroom infractions. The bill is counterintuitive during a period when youth advocates are calling for restorative justice measures to reduce students’ contact with the criminal justice system. Yet, the bill passed the House on a 66-49 vote without any Democratic support and is awaiting action in the Senate. An analysis of the bill by the General Assembly’s legislative analysis division determined that the legislation would, among other things, require school boards to consult with local law enforcement agencies, along with teachers, school administrators, and parents when adopting student conduct policies. But more important, the bill would allow four types of school infractions to be punishable by stiffer penalties, including long-term suspension. These include inappropriate language, noncompliance, dress code violations, and minor physical altercations. Critics say that if the bill is signed into law, it will disproportionately impact Black and Brown students, who already account for a disparate rate of school complaints, and any increase in suspensions could exacerbate both drop-out rates and the schoolto-prison pipeline. “These are all minor, vague, and subjective ‘infractions’ that will be used to disproportionately place Black and Latinx students on long-term suspension, disrupting their education while fueling the school-to-prison pipeline,” Tyler Whittenberg, the chief counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a press release last week. Whittenberg pointed to the SCSJ’s annual Racial Equity Report Cards that show Black and Latinx students are already more
likely to be suspended than their white classmates are. “Part of making sure these students are safe from racial bias and discrimination begins with keeping safeguards in place that minimize the likelihood of inequitable treatment,” Whittenberg added. “Longterm suspensions, especially for minor infractions like those outlined in HB 247, delay and undermine the process of identifying and addressing the root cause of legitimate behavioral issues while placing an unreasonable burden on working families. This is a step in the wrong direction for a state where most people would rather walk toward equity.” Torbett, the bill’s sponsor, did not respond to interview requests last week from the INDY. Durham County school board member Natalie Beyer told the INDY that she shares the concerns expressed by the SCSJ regarding the bill. “At a time of growing concerns about disproportionalities in school discipline nationally, it is imperative to be transparent about these disparities and bring school and community leaders together to eliminate the school to prison pipeline,” Beyer wrote in an email to the INDY. “Progressive school districts in North Carolina are revising policies to focus on restorative practices and equity as we work to make improvements. HB 247 is not a reflection of those best practices.” Beyer added that she is also “concerned about the proposed requirement to involve law enforcement officers in setting school discipline policies because in some districts young people are criminalized by school resource officers.” The on-campus presence of school resource officers (SRO) from the sheriff’s office, contracted by Durham Public Schools, was a major concern for mem-
Former Youth Justice Project member Aissa Dearing PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
bers of the Youth Justice Project (YJP), a student-led initiative to implement change in the county school system. As previously reported by the INDY during the George Floyd protests in Durham last summer, YJP members say that a central part of their mission is to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The presence of SROs on public school campuses, the student activists say, increases the likelihood of students ending up in juvenile court and students under the age of 18 being charged as adults for classroom altercations. Former YJP member Aissa Dearing wrote a petition letter last summer that circulated on social media and was forwarded to the county’s school board members. In the letter, Dearing said school funding for SROs would be put to better use by hiring “more school psychologists, more guidance counselors, school nurses, therapists, and substance abuse specialists instead of members of law enforcement to create a safe school climate.” Dearing added that the school system “should have more appropriate disciplinary techniques (that include restorative practice centers), that are more equipped to handle any school issues than any intervention from law enforcement.” “In extreme situations, it is then that schools should ask for peacekeeping intervention,” she said. The SCSJ report made public in March found that nearly 30 percent of juvenile court referrals statewide came from schools in 2019-2020.
The report also found that 49 percent of all juvenile complaints were filed against Black students even though they make up a quarter of the North Carolina public school population. The report notes that the criminalization of youthful misbehavior has immediate and long-term consequences. The report’s authors point to studies that show young people who come into contact with the criminal justice system are more likely to commit other crimes and become ensnared and hobbled by the criminal system for the rest of their lives. The authors also note another grim reality: a child’s involvement with the court system will likely impede their access to quality-of-life benefits including education, employment, housing, public benefits, and voting rights, along with other sources of opportunity and support. Durham County school board member Frederick Ravin III wondered why the bill was written in such a divisive manner and asked what was the goal of the proposed legislation. “Is there a goal and intentionality behind splitting communities apart?” he asked in an email to the INDY. “Is there a goal to figure [out] another way to increase the amount of damage inflicted upon communities by expanding the [school-to-prison] pipeline system?” Ravin added that, “These types of bills would make more sense if [the] change agents admitted that their goal is to sabotage the work and efforts that communities invest in by improving living conditions and quality of life standards overall.” W INDYweek.com
May 19, 2021
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FE AT U RE
Howard Dudley PHOTO COURTESY OF LINDA HAWKINS
Rectifying the delay
Seeking Compensation Those wrongfully imprisoned are entitled to compensation but often wait years for an official pardon BY GEOFF WEST gwest@indyweek.com
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n the grounds of an affordable housing complex in Kinston, Howard Dudley finds peace sitting on a swing early in the morning, watching the sunrise. Gone are the late-night hollers of convicts who kept him awake, the commands of guards, and the shutter of prison bars. Sometimes he calls his sister and tells her how good the air feels. “Things we take for granted,” his sister, Linda Hawkins, says. After nearly 24 years in prison, Dudley, now 64, was exonerated and released in 2016 for a crime he didn’t commit. The senior living facility is a place for Dudley to rest his head because it’s all he can afford. His family hopes it’s temporary. After waiting more than two decades to win his freedom, he’s now waiting for justice. 12
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Thirty-six states award compensation to those wrongfully imprisoned, generally on a sliding scale depending on time served. In North Carolina, an exonerated person is entitled to $50,000 for each year spent in prison, up to a maximum of $750,000. Dudley is entitled to the full amount— but there’s a snag. North Carolina is one of only four states that require an official pardon of innocence from the governor—little more than a stroke of a pen—before an exoneree can apply for compensation, an extra step that can delay the process for years. Maryland, one of the four states, recently passed legislation that removed the step. In North Carolina, meanwhile, a bipartisan House bill sought to do the same. The bill would provide an alternate route for exonerees to qualify for compensation by allowing a court to determine whether the vacated conviction was erroneous, a ruling to mean that no reasonable juror would have found the person guilty. The governor could still issue a pardon to provide for compensation. House Majority Whip Jon Hardister, a Republican from Guilford County, says he sponsored the bill in recognition of the impact that being falsely convicted can have on a person’s financial stability and the notoriously long wait exonerees face in seeking their just compensation. He criticized both the process as well as Governor Roy Cooper’s history of issuing pardons during his tenure. “The current process is cumbersome and it can take many years for an exonerated person to receive their due compensation from the state,” Hardister said in an email. “For whatever reason, the current Governor seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time to issue pardons for people who have been exonerated, which has placed many people and their families in a very difficult situation. This bill seeks to streamline the process so that the courts can effectuate the process of vacating the sentences of a person who is exonerated and allow that person to seek restitution without waiting for gubernatorial action.”
The bill was introduced late in the session, however—too late to meet the so-called “crossover” deadline of May 13, when legislation passed in one chamber must be sent over for the other chamber to consider. But Hardister said the legislation isn’t necessarily dead. It’s possible it could be introduced as an amendment to another bill, he said. Rep. Marcia Morey, a Democrat from Durham and cosponsor of the bill, agreed the current process needs reforming. “No amount of money can buy back the lost, painful years of incarceration,” Morey said, “but legislation should be enacted that affords swift compensation to the wrongfully convicted.” In an email to the INDY, Dory MacMillan, a spokesperson for Cooper’s office, noted the governor has issued six pardons, but ignored related questions, including whether the governor supported the bill and why Cooper waited nearly four years in office to issue his first pardons to exonorees. Dudley’s petition, meanwhile, is “under review by the clemency office,” MacMillan said, without elaborating.
‘A black box’ Duke law professor Jamie Lau represented Dudley in his appeal as part of Duke Law’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which advocates on behalf of those wrongfully imprisoned. Lau says the process of requiring a gubernatorial pardon to qualify for compensation needs reforming. Under the current system, an exoneree can seek a pardon by applying through the Governor’s Clemency Office, which reviews petitions and provides recommendations to the governor. But the process is opaque, Lau says. A page on the clemency office’s website designed to show pending applications, for instance, hasn’t been updated since Cooper took office. “It’s really a black box,” he says. “Once the request is made, you don’t know anything about what’s happening or where it stands.” That’s the case for Dudley, who was convicted in 1992 of sexually assaulting
“The prior administration was much better in making these decisions and making them in a timely fashion to actually help someone” his nine-year-old daughter based solely on her account to police. She later recanted her story. Dudley’s application for pardon went to the governor’s office shortly after his release, where it’s lingered without resolution for five years. And Dudley’s not alone. “I know of five people who have pending requests in front of the governor,” Lau says. “I can’t tell you if there’s more because those are just the people I personally know have made requests.” Lau said former Governor Pat McCrory acted with “quite a bit of speed” in granting pardons, particularly in the case of LaMonte Armstrong, who was exonerated in March 2013 and by December 2013 had received a pardon that provided compensation. “In comparison, the prior administration was much better in making these decisions and making them in a timely fashion to actually help someone coming out of a long-term incarceration who really needs some assistance and help with their immediate needs,” Lau says. Cooper, meanwhile, went nearly his entire first term without any acts of clemency. In December, he finally granted pardons to five people including Ronnie Long, one of Lau’s clients. Long was exonerated in August 2020 and received his pardon in December, but his case was unique. “There was a huge push for that act to be taken in Ronnie Long’s case,” Lau says. “It shouldn’t take moving mountains to get these quick decisions.” The four other men pardoned last December waited longer: “Those people had been exonerated for five years and had had their requests pending for years without any action and had no idea whether or not they would ever receive a pardon of innocence.” Cooper recently pardoned Darryl Howard, but again, he had waited nearly five years before receiving the pardon that allowed for compensation. “The fact is, these men need the money as soon as they come out,” Lau says,
Marcus Anderson
pointing to the case of Charles Ray Finch, who was exonerated in May 2019 after 43 years in prison. “We pushed him out of prison in a wheelchair at 80 years old, and he’s still not received a dime from the state for those 43 years of wrongful incarceration.” The governor, whose pardons could be held against him during a reelection bid, shouldn’t be the gatekeeper, Lau says. “It’s too political a process to have the governor as the gatekeeper when an impartial court could trigger the compensation itself in an open hearing with a transparent review of all the evidence in the case.”
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A home of his own The two-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of the Kinston Towers is “basic … nothing flashy about it,” Hawkins, Dudley’s sister, says. “Just a place where he can lay his head until he can do better.” And that’s his dream, she says. (On the advice of Dudley’s attorney with a police misconduct lawsuit pending, Hawkins spoke on her brother’s behalf.) “When he went in, he was a young, vibrant man who held down a job. He had a wife. He had a relationship with his kids,” she says. Now his children are grown, and his wife died before his release. His mother, too. A monthly Social Security check, which covers Dudley’s rent and a little food, goes only so far, his sister says. “He has to stretch that money the whole month.” Dudley talks about owning a home, a yard. Something peaceful. Something he had been working for before his life was ripped away from him. But her brother still has hope, Hawkins says. “He should be compensated for the life that he wanted before they locked him up,” she says. “He wanted to work. He wanted to retire. He wanted to raise his kids. And do things like normal people do. And they took this away from him.” W
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KHRYSIS: THE HOUR OF KHRYSIS
[Jamla Records; April 21]
Khrysis
PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
Higher Frequencies Hip-hop producer Khrysis has spent two decades behind the boards for some of North Carolina’s most successful acts. On his new album, he steps into uncharted territory: the leading role. BY RYAN COCCA music@indyweek.com
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n his home studio in Raleigh, flanked by keyboards and turntables, the music producer and recording engineer Khrysis is shaking his head in disbelief. “This is dope. This is really dope... like...” he trails off, taking a long pause. “I had a hard time imagining that I’d get something like this.” We’re nearing the end of our second conversation in as many weeks, and a new EP from the Raleigh-based rap group Kooley High, mixed entirely by him, has just been released. A song by Buffalo, NY, rapper Conway The Machine, titled “Jesus Khrysis” (a nod to its producer) is also nearing two million hits on YouTube. And, most important, The Hour of Khrysis, the artist’s fifth album—chock full of guest features from Busta Rhymes to De La Soul and inspired by the albums of old-school, soul-chopping masters like J Dilla and Pete Rock—is just two weeks old. But by “this,” Khrysis doesn’t mean any of that. He means this. As in, this article. It’s hard to blame him. For casual hip-hop listeners over the past 20 years, Khrysis, 39, hasn’t been a name you’ve seen, so much as a sound you’ve heard—the unheralded jack-of-all-trades behind the boards for everyone from Lit14
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tle Brother and Rapsody to Black Thought and Talib Kweli. But if being one of the most perennially slept-on producers in hip-hop is weighing on him, it doesn’t show. “My name might not be in the marquee, but it’s in the credits,” he says. It’s a fitting analogy for a career defined by the relationships below the surface, and by the twists of fate that have kept one opportunity leading to the next for nearly two decades. He has his own word for those twists of fate. “We all move at our own frequencies,” he says. “A lot of times, frequencies match. [When you do the work], eventually, somebody’s gonna notice.” For Khrysis, the frequencies started matching in the fall of 2001. Back home and living with his parents in Durham, after dropping out of Winston-Salem State University, he was listening to Duke’s student radio station, WXDU 88.7, when the DJ’s voice caught his attention. It was Patrick Douthit, a former North Carolina Central University student he’d bumped into years before and exchanged music production tips with. Tyson called the station and said he was back in Durham and making beats. Douthit invited him to come by Missie Anne, the studio he was working out of at the time.
What Douthit (or 9th Wonder) was working on—an album with the rappers Phonte and Rapper Big Pooh under the group name Little Brother—would eventually release in 2003 as The Listening. The album would become an early-internet, underground hip-hop sensation, launching not only the careers of its core members, but also of the entire Justus League collective that surrounded it. Before long, Khrysis was officially voted into the crew’s sprawling ranks. “I had blinders on,” says Khrysis, who was soon producing not only for Justus League acts but also underground veterans like Brooklyn emcees Sean Price and Masta Ace. “I had a lot to do.” When the Justus League splintered just a few years later, he became a staple of 9th Wonder’s Jamla Records—handling much of the in-house recording, mixing, and engineering at the nascent label—a place where he would find community, and help catapult careers. “We just clicked,” says Raleigh rapper/producer Mez, who in 2010, as a teenager, spent countless nights in the Jamla studio. The following year, the pair released a six-track EP, The King’s Khrysis, creating some of the young rapper’s earliest buzz. “That was the first time I had record labels reaching out to me,” says Mez, who has since gone on to work with J. Cole, Dr. Dre, and Kanye West. Within Jamla, Khrysis would play a similarly invaluable role in the ascent of the label’s flagship artist, Rapsody, contributing to every one of her releases. The Snow Hill native has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim in recent years, including a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album in 2017. “For me, it’s not about business, it’s not about the money, it’s about finding like-minded individuals,” says Khrysis. “That goes for Jamla and beyond.” It’s thanks to that spirit of collaboration that he describes his first release as a true headliner, The Hour of Khrysis, as an album 12 years in the making—a project delayed by, but also indebted to, his years of nurturing those individual relationships. The album has been well-received by fans, including Pete Rock, one of the legendary producers who inspired it. “He loves it,” Khrysis says, laughing. “He was hitting me up, talking about the interludes on my album.” What sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime, dream conversation with an idol is, in Khrysis World, just another well-maintained community relationship: the two keep up a regular correspondence, and have for years, about music, superhero movies, and more. And the frequencies continue to align. Khrysis recently produced for the hit Netflix film, The 40-Year-Old Version, and his eclectic mix of collaborators, from old school (Del The Funky Homosapien) to new school (BJ the Chicago Kid), and from down home (Durham’s Young Bull) to far out (LA-based Evidence), continues to grow. After a career spent living in the liner notes, he seems to be enjoying—at least momentarily—seeing his name in the marquee. As he enters his third decade in the music industry, he isn’t taking the moment for granted. “I feel,” he says, “like I’ve finally arrived.” W
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Her Take: On Carolina Hip Hop ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER
Creative Control Joseph “Headgraphix” Headen pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a graphic designer BY KYESHA JENNINGS
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music@indyweek.com | @kyeshajennings
oseph “Headgraphix” Headen—a graphic designer, vegan chef, and social media and branding creative—is a prolific visual architect. Everything that Headen, who is based in Raleigh, touches seems to turn into gold. Like many millennials, he’s traded in a singular side hustle, instead embracing his many skill sets. By doing so, Headen has contributed to the Triangle’s creative scene in many ways, from helping brands and local hip-hop artists flourish to curating unique social experiences that are often directly influenced by hip-hop. His multi-hyphenate talents further prove the importance and fluidity of the graphic designer role. “I would say I’m an all-around creative who pushes the bounds of what being a creative means,” says Headen. “I don’t just do one thing.” What’s especially special about Headen’s work is that it is apparent that his love for graphic design remains at the center of his many creative endeavors. Over the phone with
the INDY, Headen shared that an entertainment and marketing class in high school first sparked his interest in graphic design. After a few years of teaching himself how to navigate Photoshop and other design software programs, he went on to pursue a degree in Digital Media in 2011 at Living Arts College. There, his relationship with local Triangle hip-hop artists began to flourish. After doing a few album cover art pieces for free, he started to slowly build a clientele. Once Headen realized he could monetize his talent, he maximized his connections with artists like M8alla, Ace Henderson, King Mez, Shame Gang, and Well$ and began shooting their music videos. Ever the forward thinker, Headen realized there was a lack of hip-hop events for artists to showcase their talent, so he became an event planner, sometimes even shooting recap footage of the events. “I went into designing artwork for hip-hop artists because hip-hop is what I know,” Headen says. “I grew up on it so I know it very well. Creating visuals to coincide with the culture has been perfect for me. It’s the lane I organically stepped in, and I’ve been in this lane for over 10 years now.” Since he began assisting artists with building their brands and hosting hip-hop showcases, Headen has since gone on to curate a wide range of local events including Trap Karaoke, Bad Boy and Brushes, Wings and Mimosas Day Party, Monsters Ball Halloween Party, The Skate Party, and the infamous DuRag Festival. While reflecting on his approach to curating events that cater to young Black millennials, Headen said, “I am more interested in creating experiences [as] opposed to just a regular event that people come to.” Unlike larger metropolitan areas like D.C., NYC, or Atlanta, the Triangle has yet to maintain and/or build a stable brunch or day party scene that is influenced directly by hip-hop culture. As a result, Headen and his innovative ideas remain in a lane of their own, thus making his events well attended. In addition to designing graphics for his events, Headen is the mastermind behind innovative Triangle community branding, working with organizations and businesses like the Black Farmers Market and The Bull City Apparel store. Right around the time that Headen was finding his footing in the event and
design world, social media was starting to become embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, Vine—the now-defunct six-second video platform—was beginning to make its mark on the internet. Not surprisingly, Headen was an active participant from the beginning, taking full advantage of the unlimited creative possibilities that Vine provided. His presence on the app (he had more than 100,000 followers) allowed him to expand his brand, and get his video editing skills exposure on a national level. His most infamous viral Vine video “Bruh” is still making an impact even with Vine no longer operating. His overall popularity on social media has led him to be featured on major hip-hop media outlets like Complex, XXL, Thisis50, and Revolt, to name a few. Today, Headen carries that legacy on Instagram (@Headgraphix). Once COVID-19 hit, Headen, like many others, sought a way to remain creative. With previous experience in the service industry, he opted to take a shot at putting a spin on vegan creative dishes. Before he knew it, his social media followers began requesting recipes and plates and soon, he began selling them. His visual and branding aesthetic gives a fresh spin to his marketing materials for his new business, called Plant Based Pressure. Some of his most creative meals include Chik’N Empanadas, Southwest Eggrolls (Slutty Edition), BlackEyed Pea Stew w/ Fried Oyster Mushrooms, and Vegan Gumbo. Headen is definitely a ‘cool’ vegan chef, and when asked about his new identity, he responded with an on-par level of coolness. “I’m not a regular chef,” he says. “I’ve been intentional about including elements to my cooking visuals and marketing material so people can tell that I am a graphic designer when they see my menus. I change my menu up every week, so offer a different visual aesthetic each week.” As he thinks about the future, including additional ways he can flex his graphic designer muscles and build out the thriving digital creative community he’s a part of, Headen envisions a studio or co-working space where “people can come to flush out their ideas.” “I’m working on developing either of the two,” Headen says. “That’s my goal for the top of next year—building a creative hub.” W INDYweek.com
May 19, 2021
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TO BE YOUNG: COMING OF AGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY
Through Feb. 22, 2022 | NC Museum of Art, Raleigh | ncartmuseum.org
The Art of Adolescence A new exhibition at the NC Museum of Art is an intimate, inclusive look at the way we grow up BY SARA PEQUEÑO spequeno@indyweek.com
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here’s a certain coming-of-age experience that’s well-documented, especially in music and the movies. It’s the story of the spunky white girl, or the loner white boy, or the reckless, vaguely diverse teens whose experiences feel years ahead of what high school is actually like. Usually, these stories are made by people who’ve seen a lot of daylight since their youth, and you’d be hard-pressed to find art that focuses, not just on what it means to grow up, but on who gets to be shown doing it. Maya Brooks, the curator of a new exhibition at the NC Museum of Art, knows this well. Brooks, who got her B.A. in 2018 from UNC-Chapel Hill and her M.A. in 2020 from UNC-Greensboro, came up with the idea for To Be Young as she made the transition into her first post-grad job. “I just graduated from grad school and I was like, ‘I am going through so many emotions,” Brooks says. “I put a lot of that emotion—that idea of transition, of growing up, of changing— into this exhibition. It was partly for the public, and partly for myself.” To Be Young: Coming of Age in the Contemporary, on view through next February in NCMA’s West Building, uses 23 pieces of photography, painting, and sculpture from the museum’s permanent collection to tell a story about adolescence. The thoughtful exhibit reminds viewers that “coming of age” isn’t a uniform experience—it’s shaped by race, place, and gender. It’s sometimes playful and can be painful. It’s also beautiful. Brooks, who is Black, also made an effort to showcase diverse artists from the museum collection. Each museum wall has some art focused on Black or Latinx childhood experiences, and not the ones we tend to see in television and movies, which often favor depictions of children of color experiencing interpersonal violence or generational trauma. “There are so many other aspects to [growing up Black] that include just being happy, playing, being kids,” Brooks says. “I wanted to definitely throw that in there: We also have these narratives. It’s not only about white suburban kids.” The photograph “Blanca” is emblematic of that joy. The Luis Rey Velasco piece shows a young Latina beaming while she holds up a bug for the photographer. Instead of relying on storylines about immigration or living in poverty, Blanca is allowed to be as happy as the three white children in “Children Singing in the Rain,” a photograph across the room, who are shouting exuberantly into a storm.
“Blanca” by Luis Ray Velasco
PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA
To the left of “Children” is the largest photo in the exhibit. “Devonte,” by the Durham photographer Titus Brooks Heagins, captures a moment of rare childhood stillness. In the photo, a Black toddler is surrounded by lush English Ivy. He looks as if someone photographed him in the midst of playing pretend in the woods behind his house, stopping him long enough that he could look, for just a second, before disappearing back into childhood. Brooks says that while she had a fairly easy time curating Black and Latinx art, the permanent collection at the museum is still predominantly made up of art by white men. Even her presence here, Brooks notes, is still novel in the museum world. “When I was growing up, there was only one Black woman curator that I could look to—Ms. Johnnetta B. Cole at the Smithsonian,” she says. “Now there are so many of us and it’s so nice to see us in these spaces and say ‘Hey, I can do this work.’” Some of the featured artists are young, too. Photographers Jaylan Rhea and Faith Couch, for instance, were born in 1994 and 1997, respectively. Through their eyes, the often-elusive experience of growing up feels honest and intimate. “We don’t often get that chance to experience our stories on the wall,” Brooks says. “We might get it at a lecture or a presentation or some other thing but we’re not represented fully in the physical space. I wanted to do that as my first step into this work.” W
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HAVE A NICE LIFE
Live screening May 23, 4 p.m. | $15 | hanlmovie.com
Maiden Voyage For his debut feature, filmmaker Prashanth Kamalakanthan returned to the places— and person—he knew best BY ZACK SMITH arts@indyweek.com
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hough it’s been a while since he lived in the Triangle, writer/director Prashanth Kamalakanthan didn’t have to look too far for material for his first feature film, Have a Nice Life. Not only did the 28-year-old shoot it in locations in Raleigh and Durham, where he grew up, he also cast one of the lead roles with a Triangle resident he knew only too well—his mother, Jagathi Kamalakanthan. Have a Nice Life, which premieres May 23 at the Maryland Film Festival in a live online screening that also features Q&A, is an offbeat road comedy about two very different Durham women. Jyothi (Jagathi Kamalakanthan), a middle-aged Pacific Asian Indian woman awaiting her citizenship test, is experiencing marital problems. Meanwhile, Sophie (Lucy Kaminsky), is a 20-something musician with a fondness for pot and making bad situations worse. Most recently, this has resulted in her music equipment being taken to a pawn shop; here, her path collides with Jyothi’s. The situation quickly escalates in a (possibly unnecessary) flight from the law toward Canada that has trouble just getting out of town. Along the way, in this Thelma and Louise-esque flick, there are confrontations, recriminations, and an actual Bollywood-style musical number. For the younger Kamalakanthan, the film—described in the press kit as “the road movie America needs in 2021”— started as his graduate thesis in film school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I realized that I needed to write something that I could actually make,” says Kamalakanthan, an alumnus of Duke University. “So, I was immediately thinking of stories from back home, stories from around where I grew up—characters from my world.” That world was Raleigh-Durham, to which the Kamalakanthan family moved in the late 1990s. “It was kind of a strange place to grow up, as a young Indian boy,” Kamalakanthan recalls. “I remember seeing some Bollywood films at the Madstone (later the Galaxy) over in Cary. We’d get samosas at the concession stand, and there’d be dancing in the aisles during the song and dance breaks. That was a little taste and a little reminder
Still from Have a Nice Life
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FILMMAKERS
of a very different world that I had access to and would see and catch glimpses of in those films.” Later, as a student at Duke, Kamalakanthan found himself living a “very separate life” from the other students. “I would go to school and most of my friends were white [and] didn’t look like me,” he says. “I had this really kind of traumatic experience around 9/11. I wrote about it in the Duke student newspaper [in 2013]—this paradoxical duality that kind of defines my Indian-dash-American hyphenated existence.” “I think that this film is kind of about that tension,” he continues. “It follows two characters coming from both poles of that experience. But also, we put it together in a way that would flex a sense of duality and paradox.” When trying to figure out where the film could be shot, Kamalakanthan decided to not only shoot in the Triangle, but to also use real locations from his own life. “The house where Jyothi lives, that’s my parents’ house,” he says. “The other major house where Sophie lives, we [found when we] went around the old neighborhood that I lived in, off of Duke’s East Campus.” Other locals helped out, including the North Carolina-born filmmaker Onur Tukel, who appears in a supporting role as Sophie’s bandmate. And while he’d based the character of Jyothi on his mother, Kamalakanthan hadn’t intended to cast her until he featured her in a fundraising video, in which he explained the concept of the film to her over a phone call. “People just loved and responded really well to her,” he says. Though she hadn’t acted a day in her life, the elder Kamalakanthan took to the role well, delivering a deadpan
performance, at once vulnerable and resilient, as a woman who finds herself bewildered at the bizarre circumstances she finds herself in. For Jagathi Kamalakanthan, helping out her son was no problem, even though her acting experience was, as she matter-of-factly puts it, “none whatsoever.” For her son, though, she was willing to take the plunge. “He is a hard worker and so success comes to him,” she says. “I believe in him.” In her off time—she works as an agronomist in the Soils Lab at the NC Department of Agriculture—Kamalakanthan filmed scenes she was given, a few pages at a time, for a movie she still hasn’t seen in its entirety. “I’ll be seeing it on May 23 with everyone else,” she says cheerfully, stating that she’s especially excited that several of her coworkers have bought tickets; when it’s suggested that the film could play a local theater like the Crossroads in Cary, which occasionally screens Bollywood films, she pauses: “Wouldn’t that be something!” As for her son (and director), he’s planning the rollout for Have a Nice Life while working on his next projects and teaching film at Virginia Commonwealth University. But the Triangle remains a powerful part of his life and his filmmaking. “The beauty of working in a place like North Carolina is that it’s the kind of place that is not captured on film that often anymore,” he says. “I had to have the places back home in the movie because they’re such a part of me, of my experience. I couldn’t have that anywhere else.” W INDYweek.com
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