7.06 Indy Week

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill

July 6, 2022

BY JORDAN E, LAWRENC P.14

With new album Chicamacomico , is back in the driver’s seat.

American Aquarium’s BJ Barham He’s taking it slow.

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 39 NO. 27

“A lot of the love I’ve experienced and observed with African cultures is demonstrated through food. The carriers of that, the holders of those rituals and traditions, are auntie’s," says Auntie's Ice Cream owner Samantha Kotey , p. 12 PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

CONTENTS NEWS 4 6

A Q&A with pro-choice minister the Rev. Katey Zeh. BY JASMINE GALLUP Residents applaud two new develops coming to Durham's Bragtown community. BY THOMASI MCDONALD 8 Durham's new Community Safety Department pilot programs launched last week. BY LENA GELLER 10 Archie Smith, Durham's longtime clerk of court, says goodbye to the office he's held for two decades. BY MADDIE WRAY

ARTS & CULTURE 11

A new UNC Press biography paints a colorful picture of the memories, mysteries, and myths that drove Charlotte artist Romare Bearden.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

12

Small-batch ice cream businesses bring new flavors to the Triangle.

BY GABI MENDICK

14

American Aquarium's latest album spotlights the maturity that BJ Barham has grown into as a writer. BY JORDAN LAWRENCE

THE REGULARS 3

Drawn Out

16 Culture Calendar

COVER Photo by Joey Wharton

WE M A DE THIS PUBLI S HE R John Hurld

Staff Writers

EDIT ORI A L

Jasmine Gallup Thomasi McDonald Lena Geller

Editor in Chief

Copy Editor

Jane Porter

Iza Wojciechowska

Managing Editor

Intern Hannah Kaufman

Geoff West Arts & Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

2

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

Contributors Madeline Crone, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Harris Wheless

C RE ATI V E

A D V E RTI S I N G

Creative Director

Publisher John Hurld

Annie Maynard Graphic Designer

Jon Fuller Staff Photographer

Brett Villena

Sales Digital Director & Classifieds Mathias Marchington

C I RC U L ATI O N Berry Media Group

INDY Week | indyweek.com

A D V E R T I S I N G SA L E S

P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 919-695-4848

advertising@indyweek.com Durham 919-286-1972 Classifieds 919-286-6642

E M A I L A D D R E SS E S

Contents © 2021 ZM INDY, LLC All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission.

first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com

BACK TA L K

Last week, Sarah Edwards wrote a follow-up story on Pioneers Durham, the LGBTQ-nonaffirming church-business hybrid organization that has a home in a prominent space on Geer Street downtown. Reader CHIP DAVIS had this to say in response to the story:

DR AWN OUT

BY STEVE DAUGHERTY

As one who had a front-row seat to the rise of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in Charlotte in the 70’s, I pray (IU) that you continue to hold the Catholic and whatever-the-hell-itis Pioneers churches feet to the fire (and brimstone).

These are social diseases and, if left unchecked will metastasize into a cancer on the community. Or at best, a pox. I had many friends and colleagues join the PTL cult.

Early on, they simply seemed like a hip, cool, church, selling the same salves as traditional churches with a more hip vibe.

It didn’t hurt (in my colleagues cases) that they paid their technical people (computer, A/V, etc.) slightly above scale.

As long as they didn’t mind some rather draconian “turpitude” clauses in their contracts. As for my friends, sadly, they were simply gullible idiots.

For the web, Caryl Espinoza Jaen wrote about the Durham Public Schools’ dual-language program remaining at Lakewood and Bethesda Elementary Schools.

Reader DAVE MILLER had some clarifications to add about the following part of the story: “Durham Public Schools is in the middle of systemwide redistricting and the school board’s plan was to remove the program from Lakewood and Bethesda and relocate it to the larger Southwest Elementary following the redistricting process.”

This is not fully accurate. The original plan was to sunset both the Lakewood and Bethesda DLI programs and to allow students at Lakewood and Bethesda to have access to their respective regional DLI programs associated with the new model. The Southwest Elementary program already exists in a fully mature state and so the idea of relocating the Lakewood program to Southwest may be a bit misleading, but the idea of Bethesda being given access to the Southwest DLI appears to simply be inaccurate—the regional DLI for the east region where Bethesda is located is planned to be Merrick-Moore Elementary, so Bethesda would have been given access to the Merrick-Moore DLI and not to the Southwest Elementary DLI. Keeping students from traveling out of their region and thereby reducing travel (and busing) is a goal of the plan. Also note that Bethesda is actually a larger school than Southwest.

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD?

indyweek.com @INDYWeekNC

backtalk@indyweek.com @indyweek

Help save local journalism.

JOIN NOW

INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

3

N E WS

Wake County

Faith Choice A Q&A with the Reverend Katey Zeh

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

W

ith abortion in North Carolina under imminent threat, Rev. Katey Zeh is encouraging Christians to speak up about their pro-choice beliefs and reminding patients that having an abortion isn’t the sin an extreme minority says it is.

Zeh is an ordained Baptist minister in Apex and serves as the CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). She published her second book in February, A Complicated Choice: Making Space for Grief and Healing in the Pro-Choice Movement.

INDY: How did you become a minister?

REV. KATEY ZEH: I grew up a very

conservative evangelical in a small town in southeast Georgia … [and] my faith was very important to me. Then I went to Davidson College and I started to study theology for the first time. I realized there was a lot about my faith tradition I didn’t know much about. It was a humbling experience, having come from a tradition where there’s a lot of black and white. I was examining my faith and making some different decisions about how to live into [it]. I got to the end of college and I was hungry to do more, so I went to seminary [school].

How did your attitude toward your faith change as you studied theology?

There was an expansiveness to it. Having all of the answers was really important to the faith community I was raised in.

Knowing “This is the truth, this isn’t. These are people who are Christian, these are not people who are Christian.” [It was] a lot of division.

Then all of a sudden it was like, “No, this is a lot bigger.” It allowed me to fully embrace my authentic self, because I had never really felt comfortable within the confines of what I had been taught it meant to be a faithful white woman.

4

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

I thought that those parts of me that didn’t fit were wrong, something I needed to repent from and become something different. I lost community in that search, and it was lonely in that way … but to find myself was priceless.

How did you get involved in abortion rights?

While I was a student, I did pastoral care training with RCRC about how to accompany someone making a decision about a pregnancy or experiencing a loss. I was really taken by that … so I contacted the abortion clinic across the street from the campus and asked if I could come in and tour. The day I arrived at the clinic, I had to drive through the line of protesters, and they assumed I was a patient there to have an abortion. To be on the receiving end of the harassment was very emotionally impactful.

It felt like a moment of call. I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, the people who are ‘like me,’ we share a faith tradition, are outside harassing patients ... yelling, trying to keep them from their appointments. That is how they are living into their faith in this moment.” It wasn’t right, the narrative that inside the abortion clinic is a godless place. I just felt, “There’s so much here that I can do.”

There’s so many parts of it that pull at my heart … I think especially because of the ways that white Christian nationalists have made this the center of their political agenda and have weaponized Christianity against people seeking abortion care.

What kind of work did you do at the abortion clinic?

Being inside the clinic and getting to witness … how much care and compassion there was, was really beautiful to me, so I decided to volunteer weekly. One day they

The Rev. Katey Zeh, ordained Baptist minister needed someone to actually come into the procedure room. I think they were down a staff person and simply needed someone to hold the hands of the patients. I had this really sacred, beautiful experience of being able to accompany people through a very vulnerable moment. It wasn’t that I had any specific skills or beautiful words, it was more just my presence helped break what can be a very isolating moment.

Why is it important to make space for a conversation about faith with abortion patients?

With the decision to have an abortion, some people have a mix of feelings, because it is a big decision. And sometimes when we have those uncomfortable feelings, people start wondering, “Am I feeling this way because I did something wrong?” Even if they know they made the right decision and feel relieved about it, there might be a part that’s asking, “Was it wrong?”

A lot of times it’s external messaging that told them what they were doing is wrong. Maybe they were never part of a faith community that told them that, they just absorbed it from the culture, or heard it from the protesters as they were walking in, or they’ve got a relative or a friend who’s anti-abortion.

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Creating a space for people to feel like it’s safe to bring up those concerns and questions [is important]. And rather than giving them a black-and-white answer, I ask them to sit with their feelings, and explain, “Just because you have a feeling that’s uncomfortable doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. It means you did something really human.” It’s so important to give people the space to ask questions; then I try to turn them back to what is true within them. We all know within ourselves what we need.

How has the faith community changed over the years in its attitude toward abortion?

We see an overrepresentation of a very fringe belief. The white Christian nationalist platform around [abortion] is the thing we hear about the most, and it’s not representative of most people. Until recently, I think people have been very quiet about their support for abortion access.

In particular, there’s a lot of internalized abortion stigma we all have that functions to keep us quiet. Many religious leaders, many faith communities, even a lot of faithbased organizations that do justice work … have been really reticent to pick up and to talk about [this issue].

Now that we’re in this moment and we’ve been seeing the things like [the anti-abortion law] in Texas, people no longer feel

like they can be quiet about their support.

I see a huge uptick in the number of people reaching out to my organization who want to be involved in this work, who recognize this is a matter of faith to make sure that people get the care they need. The work of reproductive justice advocates and the extreme legislation we’re seeing has been a wake-up call for a lot of people of faith to say, “Wait a second, this is not OK.” The U.S. Supreme Court just overturned Roe v. Wade. In light of that decision, what pro-choice work are you doing now and what are you planning for the future?

We’ve been preparing for this moment for a long time. Those of us who have been in this space have seen this coming, so it’s not a surprise for us in that way. There is an immediate need to figure out how to make sure people get care. A lot of folks are going to have to travel a lot farther, it’s going to be much more difficult. Lots of folks have not been able to access abortion care easily for a long time, so that’s not new. It’s just the magnitude and the numbers.

I’ve [also] been doing a lot of speaking with churches, in particular, on how we got here and how can we move forward. I really emphasize the importance of addressing the internalized abortion stigma. People support legal abortion as a majority, but a lot of people think abortion is morally wrong, and so there’s this gap in what people think the law should be and their feelings about abortion.

Internalized abortion stigma is very similar to how internalized racism and sexism functions, and it’s our responsibility to identify it and start to challenge it so we can actually show up and help the people who are most impacted. It’s really important to show up for people in a compassionate way and not from a place of judgment, and that requires a lot of internal work. W The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice also offers online resources, including: — The Religion & Repro Learning Center, a website to help equip activists, scholars, religious leaders, and others in support of reproductive freedom. It includes webinars, online classes, and discussion groups. The website helps “unpack the narrative around faith and abortion,” Zeh says.

— Pastoral care training, virtual and in person, to help people learn how to accompany and provide spiritual support to someone having an abortion.

— A pro-choice website with spiritual resources, like meditations and journal prompts, as well as accurate medical and legal information about abortions.

PAINT & BODY • PERFORMANCE OIL CHANGES (AMSOIL) HIGH-END DETAILING • VEHICLE RESTORATION PERFORMANCE MODIFICATIONS & UPGRADES aplusclassicrestorations.com | (919)-662-4163

WE RECYCLE ELECTRONICS, PLASTICS, CARDBOARD, GLASS, METALS, ETC... www.anythingwithaplugrecycling.com | 919-610-3465

Hazy IPAs | Fruited Sours Pastry Stouts | Classic Lagers 8471 Garvey Drive, Raleigh, NC 27616 INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

5

NEWS

Durham

Housing Needed Yesterday Residents hope a pair of affordable housing developments in Bragtown will help slow the exodus of Black families.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

I

n the Bull City, gone are the days when members of its working class could purchase modest bungalows for $50,000 to $100,000 and use equity from the home to put a kid through college or start a small business.

The housing crisis that took root well before the pandemic is happening while the city is in the midst of a near-unprecedented economic boom. The dynamic has created an ironic existential question: who gets to live in Durham?

Black people, whose ancestors helped make Durham one of the most unique and culturally acclaimed cities in the country, are leaving. Over the past decade, the U.S. Census shows that the city’s Black population has decreased, owing in part to gentrification and the displacement of low-income residents by more affluent newcomers.

In an effort to address African Americans’ displacement and growing exodus from Durham, the city council last month approved two housing development proposals that will build more than 325 affordable housing units in the historic Bragtown community over the next two years. (The spelling of ‘Bragtown’ changed after the Bragtown Community Association voted to drop one ‘g’ as the community was formerly named after a Confederate general, Braxton Bragg).

“Bragtown faces an existential housing crisis that threatens many of its legacy residents’ ability to continue to afford living in the neighborhood,” according to an analysis from two affordable housing developers of the community’s housing crisis.

Longtime Bragtown residents last month told council members that the affordable housing plans are “monumental” and “historic” and should serve as a “blueprint’’ in neighborhoods throughout an increasingly unaffordable city.

6

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

The first development, known as Fairhaven Walk, calls for the Wisconsin-based Commonwealth Development Corporation of America to construct 192 multifamily, affordable housing units along the 300 block of Old Oxford Road.

The second project, a joint venture between Triangle-based companies Kelley Development and Bradley Housing Developers, will build Sandy Ridge Station, a housing complex that will provide 132 affordable units along the 800 and 900 blocks of Old Oxford Road.

The affordable housing developments were desperately needed yesterday. Kelley Development and Bradley Housing Developers, which did the affordable housing analysis of the Bragtown community, found that higher housing costs and low, stagnant household incomes, especially for African American seniors on fixed incomes, have had a predictable end result.

“Bragtown has begun to experience meaningful levels of economic dislocation,” according to the analysis. “Many are simply incapable of funding next month’s rent check, while others have fallen victim to predatory home buying and investment activity increasingly prevalent in the neighborhood.”

Vanessa Mason-Evans, president of the Bragtown Community Association, told the INDY this week that many of the community’s residents earn about $19,000 to $20,000 a year and are being pushed into rural communities after their new, white, wealthier neighbors build $300,000 and $400,000 homes next to modest bungalows where the residents have lived for generations.

Mason-Evans, whose roots in Bragtown date back to the emancipation of formerly enslaved people with the end of the Civil War, says that over the past two

Rendering of Sandy Ridge Station

COURTESY OF DEVELOPERS

years, nearly 30 homes in the community that were formerly occupied by friends and neighbors with whom she grew up have become inhabited by someone else or are empty.

“So, our fight for Bragtown is to let the city and county know that people need help to stay in their places,” Mason-Evans says. “People are moving to Hillsborough, Burlington, Holly Springs, and even Reidsville. They’re moving to certain places where it’s cheaper. But even in those places the prices are going up. They’re moving in with family in order to not get put out on the street. And I’m seeing too many elders being pushed out because they can’t pay their taxes.”

The groundbreaking next year for the hundreds of affordable rental units doesn’t offer much by way of homeownership and building generational wealth in Bragtown, but it does provide a means of keeping longtime residents in the historically Black community.

According to executive summaries from Reginald Johnson, director of the city’s community development department, the developments will span eight separate parcels of land that cover about 14 acres.

Both developments along Old Oxford Road “will be deemed affordable to residents whose household income is 70 percent or less of Durham County’s Area Medi-

an Income (AMI),” Johnson explained in a summary to city manager Wanda Page.

“Twenty-one percent of the units will be affordable to households with incomes at 30 percent AMI,” Johnson added.

The city council’s approval of the projects on June 21 required both developers to submit a 4 percent tax credit/bond application to North Carolina Housing Finance Agency during its rolling acceptance period between May 2 and September 30.

To fill the remaining funding gaps for the projects, the city made loan commitments totalling more than $8 million to the developers. The funds will come from Forever Home, Durham, the city’s $160 million program that is at the heart of a $95 million affordable housing bond voters overwhelmingly passed in 2019.

The city’s gap funding for the projects is vital.

Community development officials point to a finding by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that reports there “are over 12,000 renter households in Durham—most of them very low-income—paying more than 50 percent of their income for housing.” The issue is most acute in communities like Bragtown, where developers determined that while Durham’s “population growth continues to explode,” a significant number of new residents are attracted to places like Bragtown

instead of “more suburban, homogenous, subdivision communities like Brier Creek.”

Indeed the community’s diversity, proximity to downtown, and relatively inexpensive housing has attracted a “broader home buyer market for effectively the first time in neighborhood history,” according to the developers.

“As house prices increased, most Bragtown residents received a higher rent payment instead of benefitting from an increase in the home’s equity,” the developers concluded.

Bragtown residents trace the community’s origins to the end of the Civil War, when newly emancipated men and women left the Stagville plantation—the largest forced labor camp in the state— some 10 miles away and settled in North Durham. Bragtown residents say it is the oldest African American community in the state.

Constance Wright is a former cochair of the Bragtown Community Association and retired lifelong Durham resident who has owned a home in Bragtown for nearly 35 years. She told the city council that her community has been “historically overlooked” when it comes to investments that will improve the overall quality of life for its residents.

“With today’s boom [economy] and financial increases in the cost of living, many residents of Bragtown will not be able to afford to continue living in a community they have considered home for years without gap funding assistance for Fairhaven Walk and Sandy Ridge Station.”

Lorisa Seibel, director of the Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Program with the nonprofit Reinvestment Partners, told council members about the nearly 80 evictions that were set to take place over a two-day period at the downtown courthouse.

“But we really, really need affordable housing,” Seibel said. “That’s what’s going to make [a] big difference in Durham. We just can’t keep putting people out. We’ve got to have more affordable housing so that families, especially families with children—but everyone—[has] stable affordable housing.”

Bragtown resident Donna Frederick retired last year after owning and operating the now-closed Playhouse Toy Store on Ninth Street for more than a dozen years.

She has lived in her dark brick home in the Colonial Village subdivision for nearly 20 years. She told the council that the two projects could be game changers for Bragtown and the entire city.

“These two projects that came before you are very, very important and we have

had multiple, multiple meetings with these developers, one-on-one and in groups. So we’re all on the same page,” Frederick said.

“This could be a monumental decision with presenting affordable housing to Durham, especially Bragtown.”

Mason-Evans said that she hopes the plan will become a blueprint for Black communities across the city as an example of “how communities should be working with developers who are not just making it more expensive, where people have to move out of Durham, and move into county areas where there’s no hospitals, clinics, or grocery stores.”

“We really, really need affordable housing. That’s what’s going to make a big difference in Durham. We can’t just keep putting people out.”

Now, with the trend of refurbishing and flipping of old homes for $300,000 or more, longtime residents worry about losing their homes because of exponential increases in property taxes.

Two years ago, John Killeen, director of the nonprofit DataWorks, found that in 2010, residents could afford nearly 70 percent of homes for sale in Bragtown. In 2018, only 47 percent of residents were able to afford a home in the community. Killeen noted that the costlier homes have led to higher taxes and the threat of displacement.

“As of April 2020, Bragtown was the location of 270 of the 3,207 tax-delinquent properties in [Durham] County,” he said. He also pointed out that Bragtown residences make up more than 8 percent of the county’s total tax-delinquent properties.

The public first learned about the community’s affordable housing crisis in 2020, when the Bragtown Community Association petitioned the city’s planning commission to preserve its neighborhoods. Community leaders were up in arms with a developer who wanted to build 900 new

homes along Danube Lane, with 20 affordable housing units.

“At first they said they would build 10 affordable homes. Then they said 20,” Mason-Evans says. “Ten was a slap in the face.”

Members of the city’s planning commission twice voted unanimously to knock down developers’ rezoning requests to build homes in their neighborhoods. Several months later, Kelley Development in Durham purchased more than 100 acres of land in Bragtown to begin the Sandy Ridge Station project and Sandy Villa, a 66-unit senior housing complex.

Ted Heilbron, lead developer for the project, told the INDY that after spending just a couple of minutes in the community and speaking with the residents, he realized there was a huge need for affordable housing in Bragtown.

“What we learned is that it’s impossible to spend any time there and not get a sense of the community,” Heilbron says. “The legacy residents who have lived there for 50 and 60 years are most at-risk.”

Heilbron says the project is a joint venture with Kelley Development and Bradley Housing that has ongoing affordable housing projects in Wilmington, Rocky Mount, and Garner.

“The goal from the outset of the project was to build market-rate, quality housing at prices affordable for Bragtown residents,” Heilbron explains. “The previous developer wanted to build 10 to 20 affordable units that the [Bragtown Community Association] pushed back on. Frankly, that’s worse than offering none at all.”

Heilbron says the current project started with the premise of building 200 affordable units on two separate locations for the family complex and seniors. Sandy Ridge, whose construction will begin early next year, will feature elevators, a swimming pool, and “no 900 square feet two-bedroom apartments” and will accept housing choice vouchers.

Twenty-eight of the 132 units have been earmarked for residents who earn 30 percent of Durham’s AMI, meaning a one-bedroom apartment will rent for $450 a month, a two-bedroom for $550, and a three-bedroom for $650.

For residents who earn 40 percent of the AMI, a one-bedroom will rent for $640, a two-bedroom for $770, and a three-bedroom for $880.

“The balance of the units will be 60 percent AMI with some at 70 percent,” Heilbron says.

Mason-Evans told the city council that the construction of over 325 affordable housing units would be “historic.”

“Not just for Bragtown,” Mason-Evans said, “but for Durham.” W INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

7

N E WS

Durham Professionals from Durham’s Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams (HEART) will respond to some 911 calls.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CITY OF DURHAM

Crisis Diversion Three of Durham’s new community safety pilot programs are up and running as of last week. BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

A

woman is afraid that she’s about to be abducted by aliens. A man sees a drunk college student stumbling down the middle of Main Street, disrupting traffic.

A restaurant owner is concerned that a panhandler may be scaring away customers. A mother fears her son may attempt suicide in the coming hours.

They all call 911. When the cops arrive, officers handle the situations however they do: maybe they write a citation or make an arrest; maybe they perform a welfare check; in worst-case scenarios, they might use unnecessary physical force while confronting the panhandler or cart the son off to the psych ward without confirming that he’s really suicidal.

Though police officers are dispatched, their skills aren’t particularly useful here—what the callers really need is a mental health professional, a peer support specialist, a list of resources, and a promised follow-up in a few days—and when someone gets shot across town, the handful of on-the-clock officers are tied up with situations where their guns and handcuffs aren’t needed.

8

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

This is the type of scenario that the City of Durham hopes to prevent with its new community safety pilot programs, three of which launched last week. The programs, which operate under the name HEART—Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams—aim to better connect those experiencing mental or behavioral health crises with the proper care, starting from the moment a person calls 911.

The pilots were implemented by the Durham Community Safety Department, which works to provide community-based approaches to public safety as alternatives to traditional policing. Though the department celebrated its first birthday only last week, HEART is years in the making. Two years ago, around the time of the national George Floyd protests, a cohort of city and state employees led by then Durham city manager Tom Bonfield teamed up with the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to lay a foundation of research for the pilots. When the department was formed in 2021, its fledgling staff hit the ground running, creating a

multi-agency planning team, compiling data from cities piloting similar programs, and conducting resident interviews and focus groups.

As a result, Durham is now the first city in North Carolina to dispatch mental health professionals in response to 911 calls.

The first pilot, Crisis Call Diversion, makes several changes to the system that Durham’s Emergency Communications Center uses. Emergency dispatchers will ask callers the same script of questions they usually do, but now, the software may recommend a new type of first responder—a mental health professional—instead of police, firefighters, or emergency medical services. The program embeds a mental health clinician in the 911 center, allowing callers who are at risk of self-harm or undergoing mental health crises to be transferred to an expert.

To assess which calls warrant a mental health response, the Community Safety Department utilized data from an RTI-led analysis of 911 calls. After examining three years’ worth of Durham 911 data, the analysis concluded that 15 percent of Durham’s 911 calls could be addressed by mental health professionals instead of police officers.

“There’s a misconception about 911 calls,” says Anise Vance, assistant director at the Community Safety Department. “Folks think 911 calls are either there’s a cardiac arrest or there is some violent incident occurring.

The truth is, most 911 calls have nothing to do with any kind of violent or threatening incident. Many calls are just people who are scared or worried or confused and are calling to ask for a little help, because they don’t know where else to turn.”

Calls currently eligible for a community safety response include suicide threats, trespassing, welfare checks, panhandling, and intoxication, among others.

In some cases, callers may trigger the second pilot program, a three-person team of skilled first responders—a mental health clinician, a peer support specialist, and an emergency medical technician—who can now be dispatched in response to nonviolent mental health crises or quality-of-life concerns.

HEART responders, who have already successfully cleared several trespass and welfare checks, are uniformed in friendly teal T-shirts branded with the team logo: a heart sandwiched by two chat bubbles, signifying care and communication. They’re also unarmed.

“We don’t arm firefighters,” says Community Safety Department director Ryan Smith. “We don’t arm paramedics. As a rule of thumb, we only want to send weapons into scenes where we feel it’s absolutely necessary.”

As a precaution, the team’s location will be tracked by emergency dispatch services, and responders can quickly radio a request for police backup.

The HEART team is operating primarily within a limited region for now—covering about 15 square miles selected due to the high volume of crisis calls. The service area is shaped like a heeled boot, with the toe touching Old West Durham, the heel hovering over NC Central University, and the leg reaching up to Hebron Road.

Forty-eight hours after a HEART team’s initial encounter, the third pilot, Care Navigation, comes into play, sending a two-person team of a licensed clinician and a peer support specialist to follow up with the person in need and ensure that they’ve been connected with the proper resources or care.

According to Vance, the emerging literature on alternative crisis response work strongly indicates that the “follow-up moment” is crucial for long-term progress.

“We want to be in a position where we’re not always just ‘responding,’ but we’re proactively out in communities, changing the trajectories of some of our neighbors,” Vance says.

The fourth and final program, slated to launch later this year, will dispatch pairs of mental health clinicians and police officers in response to behavioral health-related 911 calls that may pose greater safety risks.

The three functioning pilots currently operate from eight a.m. to five p.m. on weekdays, with plans to expand hours into the evenings and weekends sometime in the next few months. One year from now, the efficacy of all four programs will be measured using surveys, call outcome data, formal third-party evaluations, and in-depth interviews with both first responders and crisis response recipients.

Durham Beyond Policing, an activist group working to defund prisons and police departments and reinvest resources into Black and brown communities, is pleased about the launch of the HEART programs and commended local advocates for the years they’ve spent protesting, writing letters, and signing petitions in support of the cause.

In a Facebook post, though, the group shared concerns that the pilots are so underfunded they may be set up for failure. The Durham City Council last month signed off on a budget that adds only seven new employees to the Community Safety Department, requiring the four HEART programs to be operated by a staff of 20: five administrative personnel and 15 field-workers.

Manju Rajendran, a community organizer for Durham Beyond Policing who also serves on Durham’s Community Safe-

“We want to be in a position where we’re not always just ‘responding,’ but we’re proactively out in communities, changing the trajectories of our neighbors.” ty Task Force, says the city should have approved twice as much funding for the pilot rollout: there’s plenty of demand for HEART services, but spread too thin, the two teams of responders may burn out.

Minimal staffing may also prevent the programs from being adequately evaluated next year, she says.

“When will [the Community Safety Department] have time to be able to respond to the current demand for calls, much less conduct the kind of rigorous data collection and qualitative research they need to be doing along the way for us to really understand the value of these pilots?” Rajendran says. “I don’t understand why they didn’t provide the staffing that would set up these programs for success.”

She points to Albuquerque, NM, a city comparable in size to Durham whose similar crisis intervention pilot, launched last year, has proven successful with 36 first responders and 12 administrators— though even the Albuquerque team has found itself shorthanded at times.

In its Facebook post, Durham Beyond Policing condemned the city council for its January vote against reallocating 15 vacancies in the Durham Police Department to the Community Safety Department. At the time, those vacancies were frozen in the police department’s budget.

“Their pro-cop ideological stance disallowed them from allocating staffing that would have cost them nothing additional—those vacancies continue to sit

vacant in the DPD department budget,” the post reads.

The advocacy group has similarly criticized the council’s decision to fund the forthcoming ShotSpotter pilot program, which will see gunshot detection sensors installed in some areas of Durham later this year. ShotSpotter, which aims to help first responders save shooting victims and make arrests by detecting the precise location a shot was fired, has been a divisive issue among both the council and the community at large, with many dubbing the technology overpriced, ineffective, and conducive to overpolicing.

While the ShotSpotter and HEART pilots each seek to enhance public safety, there are some stark contrasts between the two. ShotSpotter was approved without an in-depth community engagement process, its critics say, and threatens to advance mass incarceration in Black and brown neighborhoods and squander first responders’ time with false positive alerts.

It also shows little favorable data from its implementation in other cities and has no concrete evaluation plan.

The HEART pilots, on the other hand, were born out of local organizing; stand to prevent communities of color from overpolicing and free up the availability of first responders; mirror programs that have seen widespread success in other cities; and pose clear and thorough evaluation metrics.

On its website, ShotSpotter maintains that it has a 0.5 percent false positive rate, though numerous third-party investigations in cities including Chicago and San Diego have found that percentage to be much higher. A MacArthur Justice Center investigation found that ShotSpotter false alarms dispatch Chicago police on as many as 60 trips a day.

Meanwhile, according to the Community Safety Department–cited RTI analysis of 911 calls, skilled, unarmed HEART teams could address an average of 1,585 calls a month—and save law enforcement around 971 monthly hours—if the program had the funding, Rajendran notes.

Though Rajendran is disappointed that the HEART pilots didn’t receive more funding, she says she’s thrilled to witness the rollout nonetheless.

“I have been in a number of different situations where I’ve needed to reach out for help for myself or for loved ones over the years, in moments of crisis, and needed for better options to be available in terms of accessing appropriate care,” Rajendran says. “I’ve just been feeling goose bumps of joy all week.” W

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

INDYWEEK.COM INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

9

N E WS

Durham

New Evolution Problem-solving, “The Starship Archie,” and making all families count: a longtime court clerk bids adieu.

BY MADDIE WRAY backtalk@indyweek.com

I

n the 20 years since Archie Smith III took over as Durham County clerk of the superior court, he has seen much change.

The Durham metro area population skyrocketed, growing by around 129,000.

Three different mayors have sat on city council. High-rise apartments have overtaken the Brightleaf and Warehouse Districts. The court system even migrated down the block to a new building.

“Durham, the town that you see, is not the town that I grew up in,” Smith said. He added: “Every evolution of Durham is exciting to me.”

Except that the newest evolution of Durham’s court system does not include him.

In May of 2022, Smith lost reelection to newcomer Aminah Thompson, and in December, he will return to civilian life.

Change has finally caught up with the man who was the center of the courts for 20 years. And he says he is OK with that.

“Time flies,” he said quietly. Later he added, “Shake your fist at the storm, and you’re gonna get wet!”

Smith, a Durham native and NC Central University School of Law graduate, described the clerk’s office as “the hub of the court system.” Smith rattled off all the different duties taken on by him and his staff of 72; in addition to keeping records for courthouse proceedings (which the internet appears to think is the clerk’s only job), the role includes judging probate, appointing guardians for minors, overseeing incompetency cases, and settling general disputes. Phew.

Smith, whose chatty, jovial presence puts strangers at ease, thrives under the pressure. He describes his job as a professional problem solver—when a case comes across his desk, it leaves resolved. “Probably one of the best things about being the clerk,” Smith said, “is that I’m challenged every day.”

Durham County district attorney Satana Deberry emphasized Smith’s dedication to conquering daunting tasks. The two col10

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

laborated on the Durham Expunction and Restoration Program, a reform effort that expunges records that prevent Durham residents from regaining their driver’s licenses.

Together they worked to waive older traffic violations for over 35,000 Durham residents and 1,200 petitions for expungement.

“That required tremendous lift from the clerk, and he certainly could’ve said no to that,” Deberry said of Smith. “But he was enthusiastic about being involved in making that happen.”

Smith’s legacy does not stop there.

LGBTQ+ groups have long endorsed him due to his support for the development of landmark second-parent adoption procedures in Durham starting around 2004. This historic process allowed same-sex couples to have both parents recognized on birth certificates and other legal documents before same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015.

Smith had the choice to turn away documents requesting a second name, but he fought for them, said attorney Cheri Patrick. It was not a popular choice, but “he did it because he believes that all families are important,” she said. “That all families count.”

Smith has brought all types of families together across Durham County, and created one right in the courthouse, too. “It’s not your usual workplace atmosphere,” he said.

“We’re conscious of that.”

The office is shockingly close-knit for its size. Smith points to photos of hundreds of his employees over the years, recounting fond memories, such as when employee Pam Apple bought his granddaughter her first Easter basket.

Smith encourages all of his clerks and assistants to bring their children into the office if necessary (for instance, if childcare falls through or there is a teacher workday), and as he says, they all become aunts and uncles for the day. “The Starship Archie,” as Smith has nicknamed his office, is stocked with chocolates and toys for the children

Outgoing Clerk of Court Archie Smith

PHOTO BY MADDIE WRAY

to play with, as his granddaughters, now 16 and 10, once did.

Smith’s granddaughters were well known around the office when they were children.

As he showed me around the courtroom, Smith picked up the gavel sound block riddled with dents and scratches.

“I have never used one of these in court in 20 years,” he laughed. “My eldest granddaughter, she would put on my old robe, and she would sit in this chair with myself and a couple of lawyers, and she would hold court and bang on this.”

In just under six months, Smith will leave the bench when Thompson steps into the role. Thompson, the first African American clerk elected in Durham history, is a fresh face on the scene. Smith had not seen an opponent for the county clerk position since 2002, but Thompson barreled into office with 65 percent of the vote in May. Her agenda of reform and modernization won the endorsement of the People’s Alliance, a key political organization that had long supported Smith. To Smith, this shift of support was a major reason for his loss.

“It was simply politics,” Smith said, throwing up his hands.

Deberry, despite being fond of Smith, says Thompson may be the better choice to bring Durham’s courts into the future as North Carolina moves toward eCourts (a system for keeping court records in the cloud rather than in physical copies) and becomes more technologically sophisticated.

“I think that it just takes a different mindset,” said Deberry. “I don’t know that [Smith] would have led the charge.”

So what’s next for Smith? He gushed about spending more time with his wife of 24 years and granddaughters, which he has put off over his years as clerk. He also hopes to do more with organizations like the Durham Sports Club and his Masonic lodge and get started on long-neglected repair projects.

“I’ll clear the decks,” Smith said with a laugh. “I have got a whole laundry list of projects and things I haven’t been able to have the time for.”

As Smith has watched Durham transform, he relies on things he calls “anchors,” little pieces of the city that never seem to change. The Lucky Strike smokestack, the Sower statue on Duke’s East Campus, the historic Durham Athletic Park: “They’re where you get your anchor to the community and to yourself.”

And after two decades as the hub of Durham’s criminal justice system, for many, Smith has become an anchor himself.

“He is from a different time in Durham, when it was much more of a small town,” Deberry said. “A guy like him who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, could grow up to go to law school and have a real impact on his community.”

She added: “Those kinds of guys don’t come along anymore.” W This story was published through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is produced by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.

Email backtalk@indyweek.com to comment on this story.

PAGE

GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE: ROMARE BEARDEN IN THE HOMELAND OF HIS IMAGINATION: AN ARTIST’S RECKONING WITH THE SOUTH [University of North Carolina Press; March 2022]

Colorful Visions

e Support th businesses that ... support us

A new UNC Press biography paints a compelling portrait of the memories, mysteries, and myths that drove Charlotte artist Romare Bearden.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

W

hen harassment from a white mob forced the family of renowned artist Romare Bearden to flee their Charlotte home for Harlem in 1915, he was only four years old.

In a new biography, Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South, Yale University scholar Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore chronicles four generations of Bearden’s remarkable family and points to how one of the most “prolific, original and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century” offered “episodic glimpses” of his Charlotte childhood.

The beautifully illustrated new volume, published by the University of North Carolina Press, offers a rich and compelling portrait of Bearden’s family and how it informed his journey of becoming a nationally recognized artist.

His depictions of Black culture in turn inspired the playwriting of Pittsburgh resident August Wilson, who often referred to the “Four B’s” as his inspiration: Bearden, the blues, poet Amiri Baraka, and the Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges. Bearden’s work as a cubist painter also relies on the blues, Black poetry, and mysticism while chronicling the grand sweep of the American South and the Black tradition.

Memory, however, can be as firmly rooted as a tree, and as elusive as shadows around midnight.

“He could not tell precisely what he remembered or what generalized African American culture, particularly Black Southern culture, evoked for him,” Gilmore writes.

“As he created paintings and collages, he often did not know what was real, what was partially real, and what was a dream.

This creative conundrum drove his artistic expression and sparked his imagination.”

Gilmore further notes that the “contrasts of history and memory also testify to the violence that slavery and Jim Crow wrought on African American memory and self-representation.”

“A century and a half of historical neglect, family secrets, silences and a racist archive that hides the Black past stole a factual family story from Bearden, even as he often tried to capture it visually,” the author adds.

Born in Charlotte, Bearden moved to Harlem with his family when he was a toddler and, later, Pittsburgh. He died in New York City on March 12, 1988. He was a formally trained artist and full-time social worker, whose “artistic trajectory reflects the history of twentieth-century art”: social realism during the 1930s, abstract expressionism in the 1940s, and the iconic collage paintings that began in the late 1950s, Gilmore writes.

Bearden’s work is rooted in memories of an impressive family. His dignified great-grandparents Rosa Catherine Gosprey Kennedy and Henry Kennedy had been enslaved by President Woodrow Wilson’s father, “but when they spoke of it, they said they had been ‘servants,’” Gilmore writes.

Gilmore also discovered that his grandmother Cattie Bearden was president of the North Carolina Women’s Christian Temperance Union #2.

“Bearden’s great-grandparents entered Reconstruction with considerable advantages: literacy, a federal job, and small business,” Gilmore writes. “They owned outright a large Victorian home with a wraparound front porch, two rental houses and a store.”

The Kennedy and Bearden family story “is a compelling saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy.”

“He began life bathed in love and certain of his place in it,” the author adds, who

Love ? y d n i e h t

later notes that as a child at his grandfather’s knee, Bearden “heard—and forgot— stories before he had the words to process them as memories.”

Bearden, Gilmore notes, “realized that he could not see these memories in full.

Instead they were fragments of a past that he found he partially recovered through the process of collage. He began with rectangular colors, added paper, put in cutout material such as illustrations or fabrics, and painted and drew his impressions across the disjunctures. He did it again and again in the same work.”

Gilmore writes that memory, mystery, and myth drove Bearden’s work—that he “understood that the sum of his artistic life had slipped the bonds of reality and embraced the realm of the mythical.”

Though he spent most of his childhood up north, Bearden’s legacy began to flourish in Charlotte in the early 2000s when the Charlotte Mint Museum exhibited six of his collages. Landmarks and community spots from the city showed up often in his work. In 2011, a five-acre park was built in his name near where his great-grandparents’ home once stood.

Near the end of his life, Gilmore notes, Bearden said, “I never left Charlotte, except physically.”

Bearden’s work is evidence that one can go home, if only in memory.

As the distinguished historian notes, the great artist also said this: “You leave and then return to the homeland of your imagination.”

It’s a powerful volume. W

S hop local!

Get your culture fix.

Follow @INDYWeek on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for breaking news.

INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

11

FO O D & D R I N K Photo Auntie’s Ice Cream owner Samantha Kotey PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Dream Creams New Triangle churners explore their heritage and bring inspired small-batch ice creams to town. BY GABI MENDICK food@indyweek.com

als and traditions, are auntie’s. If you go to an auntie’s house you’re always going to be welcomed with some sort of dish.”

The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, Kotey was raised in Houston, Texas. She credits her upbringing in Fort Bend County, ranked among the most diverse counties in the United States, and her summers spent in Ghana with instilling her passion for sharing culture and connecting through food. Kotey moved to North Carolina in 2008 to attend Duke University School of Law, and after graduating and working in Washington, D.C., for a couple of years, she chose to return to Durham in 2014.

She launched Auntie’s Ice Cream in September 2020 when she realized that there was a space in the market for African-inspired ice creams. Auntie’s does not produce ice creams that would be found for sale in Africa but rather pairs African ingredients and spices with classic flavors. Flavors like Ghanaian hot chocolate use dried chilies from Ghana giving a kick to the familiarity of chocolate ice cream.

She started out selling scoops at the Black Farmers’ Market, which has pop-ups bimonthly in Raleigh and Durham, with a menu of flavors that represent each cardinal region of Africa; a number of those flavors include ingredients sourced directly from Africa.

“The chocolate, the coffee, the ginger—that all comes from Africa,” Kotey says. “People bring it for me when they’re traveling, suitcases full.”

She now does pop-ups about once a month at places like the Durham Hotel and Rofhiwa Book Café in Durham. To hear more about upcoming pop-ups, you want to join the Auntie’s listserv.

Bold Batch

boldbatchcreamery.com

I

ce cream can (and should) be enjoyed year-round, but the official start of summer signals an excuse to make ice cream a part of your daily dairy routine. Who would want to meet a friend for a pint of beer on a hot day when there are so many enticing spots to grab a pint of the best frozen treat?

The Triangle’s ice cream landscape has continued to evolve over the past few years, with options ranging from tucked-away country wonders like Broken Spoke—a Hillsborough farm stand with weekend soft-serve hours—to the more established FRESH, which first opened in 2011 and serves the Triangle in its three locations in Raleigh, Apex, and Cary, and chains with a cultish following like Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, which opened recently in Brightleaf Square in Durham.

12

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

Still, there are plenty of hidden gems and new churners in town, many of which use ice cream as a vehicle to share their heritage and tell their stories. The coming summer months offer ample opportunities to taste them all and find your favorites.

Auntie’s

auntiesafricanicecream.com Auntie’s Ice Cream owner Samantha Kotey is on a mission: she sees ice cream as a way to share African culture.

“A lot of the love I’ve experienced and observed with African cultures is demonstrated through food,” Kotey says. “The carriers of that, the holders of those ritu-

Until now, customers of Bold Batch Creamery (formerly 12 Paws Ice Cream) have had to preorder ice cream to be picked up at a specified time from a specified location.

But this summer, Bold Batch’s Maura McCarthy will be opening a scoop shop at Little Blue Bakehouse, a soon-to-be coffee shop, bakery, and incubator kitchen in Raleigh. Bold Batch is known for flavors that pack a punch with high-quality, often homemade mix-ins that McCarthy—who started her business in Raleigh in 2020—does not skimp on.

She goes above and beyond, sourcing from and collaborating with local businesses (such as croissants from Layered Croissanterie and ube jam from Bad Oven).

Becoming more immersed in the local food and restaurant community has complicated McCarthy’s outlook on the recent Jeni’s opening.

Elaka Treats elakatreats.com

Shafna Shamsuddin was born and raised in the United Arab Emirates. The daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, she moved to North Carolina to attend UNC Charlotte in 2006.

After several false starts pursuing work and further education in the fields of earth science and clinical psychology, Shamsuddin turned to ice cream.

She set up shop in a production facility in Hillsborough and founded Elaka Treats in 2020 to cope with homesickness and missing her family—and of course, the food.

“It was pretty lonely being here by myself,” she says.

Shamsuddin uses fresh produce in her frozen treats: ingredients like plantains, zucchinis, and apples serve as the base for her ice creams, while dairy is used sparingly. Every flavor is infused with cardamom; the namesake of the company, elaka, is “cardamom” in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala.

While Shamsuddin still misses her home and her family, Elaka Treats honors her roots and has helped her find a welcoming community in North Carolina and a way to express herself. “Elaka Treats is all me; you are getting me packaged in pints and cups,” Shamsuddin says. “What I’m doing is sharing a little bit of me with the whole world.”

“I knew that this was something that nobody was doing—executing experiences as a frozen product, as an ice cream flavor,” Shamsuddin continues. But it’s not only the flavors but the experiences that make the small-batch, handmade ice creams from Auntie’s, Bold Batch, and Elaka stand out in a crowded market to find a place in customers’ palates and hearts.

Find Elaka Treats at the South Durham Farmers’ Market, the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, and the Tuesday Chapel Hill Farmers’ Market. W

th

us

ke up w a W i

“It’s difficult because when I first started I was inspired by Jeni, but I don’t love that her shops are usually placed really close to mom-and-pop shops,” she says. “My heart hurts for the other small ice cream shops in the area because that’s hard competition.

Her ice cream is legitimately excellent, and she’s put together a very well-oiled machine …. It’s complicated. Before I made my own ice cream I’d be like, ‘Why does Charlotte get all the Jeni’s?’ But it feels very different now being on the other side of it.”

Visit the Bold Batch website to order a pint (or a few).

SIGN UP FOR THE

INDY DAILY Local news, events and more— in your inbox every weekday morning

Sign up:

INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

13

M U SIC

AMERICAN AQUARIUM: CHICAMACOMICO

[Losing Side Records/Thirty Tigers; June 10]

Roads Less Traveled With new album Chicamacomico, American Aquarium’s BJ Barham is back in the driver’s seat.

He’s taking it slow. BY JORDAN LAWRENCE music@indyweek.com

W

hen BJ Barham picks up the phone, he’s happy to be connected.

It’s late June, and he’s about to play a show in Asheville, the sixth date on a tour that will stretch across the country and continue until October with little interruption.

The run finds the Raleigh-based Barham and his American Aquarium, perhaps the Triangle’s most quintessential road-dogging rock band, touring in earnest for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic stymied dates around the release of the group’s 2020 album, Lamentations.

He likens playing for an audience—hearing them respond, talking to them afterward—to therapy, a necessary connection he could never quite replace.

“You can’t get that through a livestream,” he says. “It’s the feeling that only comes with standing on a stage in front of 1,000 people and connecting.”

The disconnection of the past two years was hard for Barham. He was cut off from a key emotional outlet at a time when he had an overwhelming amount to process: the songwriter lost his mother in December 2019, a little more than two months after he lost his grandmother.

Chicamacomico, the album American Aquarium just released in June, is marked by these losses and others, and by the isolation of the pandemic. Left largely—and intentionally—bereft of his band’s trademark barroom bombast, Barham slows things down on a set of mostly patient ruminations that process traumas, including the miscarriage he and his wife experienced six years ago and the suicide of a friend.

The album’s tempered Americana is less dynamic and distinct than on the lauded Lamentations, but it spotlights the maturity Barham has grown into as a writer.

14

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

He stripped things back successfully on the 2016 solo effort Rockingham, dissecting his fraught feelings for his hometown.

Brad Cook, who produced that record and Chicamacomico (as well as the 2015 American Aquarium album Wolves), urged a similar approach for the band’s latest, subtly enhancing songs defined by the loneliness of their creation with the confident chemistry of a road-strengthened band.

To write the songs for the new album, Barham decamped to Rodanthe, a small beach town on one of the thinner stretches of the Outer Banks, between late February and early March 2021. While the area bustles in the summer, he says it was a ghost town in late winter.

“I was there for a week and a half and saw three people,” Barham recalls. “There’s nobody in those towns, there’s no cars. It’s the weirdest thing. I’d go for three- and fourmile runs every day and never see another car pass me on the highway. It felt apocalyptic. It felt like the end.”

The setting provided space and inspiration to finish a song he’d been working on since his wife’s miscarriage. On his runs, he says, he kept seeing a water tower emblazoned with the word “Chicamacomico,” which he discovered was the name of a station built in 1874 by the U.S. Life-Saving Service (which eventually merged into the U.S. Coast Guard).

It became the central symbol for the album and its opening title track, in which a couple comes to the island seeking salvation and to move past their miscarriage by “swim[ming] out past the breakers to curse the maker’s name” and “head[ing] down to the shoreline [to] wash off all this blame.”

Behind these words, the band lopes softly, with pedal steel casting far-off shimmers, like hope coming slowly into focus.

American Aquarium (plus a cat)

PHOTO BY JOEY WHARTON

Barham says he couldn’t—and didn’t try— to know or express the physical loss felt by his wife, but the idea of a couple coming to this end of the earth to get through their grief allowed him to fill out around the verse he’d been holding onto for six years, keyed by the lines “And I swear I’m gonna lose my mind / If I have to hear about God’s plan one more goddamn time.”

“It was something that, in anger, I scribbled down after someone explained to me, you know, that God’s plan is the reason we lost a child,” he recalls.

The rest of the album is similarly poignant and plainspoken as it copes with bereavements.

The suicide of a friend stirs bittersweet memories of Barham’s hometown on “Waking Up the Echoes”—“Weddings and funerals used to always get me down / These days they seem to be the only thing

that ever bring me back to town”—as he wishes that he might have helped: “I wish you’d have called me / Maybe I could have talked you down.”

Barham charts the difficulty of “The First Year” without his mother, marking the time with visits to her grave on Mother’s Day, Independence Day, and New Year’s Day and observing the void she left. “Like a castle made of sand, watched that mountain of a man / Fall apart when they laid to rest his queen,” he sings, digging into the gravel of his baritone to describe his father’s anguish.

Both songs are spare and contemplative, guided by finger-picked acoustic guitar and girded by skeletal piano and ethereal pedal steel.

The closing “All I Needed” is the only tune where the band erupts into its typical fervor, offering a redemptive swell of confident country-rock as Barham recounts the

“It was a reminder that no matter what life throws our way—and as cheesy as it sounds, I truly believe it—there’s always going to be a song that gets us through it.” surprising comfort he found in a song that came on the radio when he got in his car after his mother’s funeral.

“It was a hook, it was a line,” he hollers in the chorus. “It was a savior in 3/4 time.”

He declines to disclose what the song was, which is probably for the best; its power is more universal when the listener can imagine one that’s made a similar impact on them.

“It was a reminder that no matter what life throws our way—and as cheesy as it sounds, I truly believe it—there’s always going to be a song that gets us through it,” Barham says.

It’s fitting, too, that the album ends on this hopeful note.

Despite the difficulties, Barham’s life changed for the better these past few years, a shift he describes on the jauntily rollicking “Little Things,” the album’s only truly happy song.

“I used to be a singer with a family back home,” Barham sings. “And now I’m just a father and a husband / Who knows his way around a microphone.”

Pulled off the road during the pandemic, he fell into being a full-time dad to his now four-year-old daughter, Josephine Pearl, and he didn’t want to give that up. With American Aquarium having already cranked down from playing at least 200–250 dates each year to 92 in 2019, Barham says the band is now at a place where it can comfortably subsist on about 75.

“Ninety-five percent of our fans, I’ve shaken their hand, I’ve sold them a record at the merch table. We’ve built this really kind of beautiful grassroots thing,” he says of the 16 years it took to get here. “I couldn’t have been the dad I am now 10 years ago. Hell, I couldn’t have been the dad I am now five years ago.” W

Raleigh's Community Bookstore

Latest on Bookin’ Available

7.04

Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart Events

TUE

7.12 7PM

IN-STORE

Anika Scott, The Soviet Sisters: A Novel of the Cold War in conversation with Amanda McCrina IN-STORE

THU

7.14 7PM

THU

7.14 7PM

Marcie Cohen Ferris, Edible North Carolina: A Journey Across a State of Flavor with contributors Sandra Guttierez, Cheetie Kumar, and Andrea Weigl ONLINE

Eric Holder, Our Unfinished March in conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill

Register for Quail Ridge Books Events Series at www.quailridgebooks.com. www.quailridgebooks.com • 919.828.1588 • North Hills 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh, NC 27609 Offering FREE Media Mail shipping and contactless pickup!

INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

15

CULTURE CALENDAR

C

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

Take 6 with special guest Najee perform at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Thursday, July 7 PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA

Vansire SOLD OUT. Sun, Jul. 10, 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Foxing $18. Mon, Jul. 11, 8 p.m.

Motorco, Durham.

Live Jazz with Danny Grewen & Griffanzo Mon, Jul. 11, 6 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

The Chicks $40+. Tues, Jul. 12, 7:30 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.

Fenton Live!

Music Series Tues, Jul. 12, 6:30 p.m. Fenton, Cary.

music Goodnight Texas $13. Wed, Jul. 6, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends $27. Wed, Jul. 6, 8 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Lost Dog Street Band Wed, Jul. 6, 7 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw.

Music Bingo Wed, Jul. 6, 7 p.m. The Oak House, Durham.

Mellow Swells Thurs, Jul. 7, 7:30 p.m.

Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Take 6 with Special Guest Najee $35+.

Thurs, Jul. 7, 7:30 p.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

Le’Andra McPhatter $15+. Fri, Jul. 8, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Tan Universe $5. Thurs, Jul. 7, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Luke Bryan: Raised Up Right Tour $56+.

Fri, Jul. 8, 7 p.m.

Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.

Chris McGinnis Fri, Jul. 8, 7:30 p.m. The Oak House, Durham.

Cultus Black & LYLVC $13. Fri, Jul. 8, 7:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Der Hammer $10. Fri, Jul. 8, 10 p.m.

The Fruit, Durham.

Don Merckle $10. Fri, Jul. 8, 8 p.m. Schoolkids Records, Raleigh.

Horse Jumper of Love $15. Fri, Jul. 8, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Mustache the Band: The World’s Most Powerful ’90s Country Party Band $12. Fri, Jul. 8, 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Summer Jam 2022: The Commodores $70+. Fri, Jul. 8, 7:30 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

Bill Easley Trio $15+. Sat, Jul. 9, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

NC Symphony Summerfest: Disco Fever $15+. Sat, Jul. 9, 8 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

Whiskey Myers $55+. Sat, Jul. 9, 7 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

The Shoaldiggers $7. Sat, Jul. 9, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Bayside $28. Sun, Jul. 10, 6:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Live Jazz with the Brian Horton Trio Tues, Jul. 12, 9 p.m.

Kingfisher, Durham.

Mysti Mayhem Tues, Jul. 12, 7 p.m. The Oak House, Durham.

Stan Comer Tues, Jul. 12, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Esme Patterson performs at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room on Saturday, July 9.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

screen CatVideoFest 2022 $10. Jul. 6-10, various times. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Amarillo Ramp Jul. 8-10, various times.

Lump, Raleigh.

Blazing Saddles and History of the World, Part 1 $10. Fri, Jul. 8, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Outdoor Film Series—SpiderMan: No Way Home $7. Fri, Jul. 8, 8:30 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Sing $8. Fri, Jul. 8, 8:45 p.m. The Lumina Theater, Chapel Hill.

Fantastic Mr. Fox $8. Sat, Jul. 9, 8:45 p.m. The Lumina Theater, Chapel Hill.

Outdoor Film Series—Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings $7.

Sat, Jul. 9, 8:30 p.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

Watch Durham: A VERY Durham Film Screening Series Tues, Jul. 12, 7 p.m.

Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.

Esme Patterson $13. Sat, Jul. 9, 9 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR: INDYWEEK.COM

16

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

sta

C U LT U R E CA L E NDA R

LOCAL ARTS, MUSIC, FOOD, ETC.

in your inbox every Friday

“Another Summer III”

by Rachel Campbell is currently on view at Craven Allen Gallery in the exhibition Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant PHOTO COURTESY OF CRAVEN ALLEN GALLERY

art A Collective Introspective Art Exhibit Jul. 6–Sept.

19, various times.

Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

stage

Gallery Talk: Charles Edward Williams Thurs, Jul. 7, 6 p.m. The Nasher, Durham.

Twilights on the Terrace: Party in the pARC Fri, Jul. 8, 5 p.m. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

Opening Reception—Rachel Campbell: Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant Sat, Jul. 9, 5 p.m. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham.

What’s That Sculpture? Sun, Jul. 10, 10:30 a.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

American Dance Festival Jun. 3–Jul. 20, various times.

Various venues, Durham.

Read the Room: Stories, Comedy, Music Wed, Jul. 6, 7:30 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing, Durham.

Celeste Barber $25+. Wed, Jul. 6, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Pauly Shore $25. Jul. 8-10, various times.

Goodnights Factory & Restaurant, Raleigh.

Future Stars of Comedy Wed, Jul. 6, 8 p.m. James Joyce Irish Pub, Durham.

Comedy Showcase Fri, Jul. 8, 8 p.m.

Sammy’s Tap & Grill, Raleigh.

the Triangle’s Arts & Culture Newsletter

The Egress $10+.

Fri, Jul. 8, 10 p.m.

The Portal, Raleigh.

Fenton Friday Comedy Night Fri, Jul. 8, 6:30 p.m.

Fenton, Cary.

TO SUBSCRIBE, VISIT indyweek.com/newsletter-signup

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

July 6, 2022

17

NEWDED AN S! EXPO R H U

PUZZLES 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.

In-Store Shopping Curbside Pick Up www.regulatorbookshop.com 720 Ninth Street, Durham, NC 27705

Hours: Monday–Saturday 10–7 | Sunday 10–6

SUDOKU

18

July 6, 2022

INDYweek.com

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

C L AS S I F I E D S M I S C.

HEALTH & WELL BEING

919-416-0675

www.harmonygate.com EMPLOYMENT Application Development Senior Advisors (Raleigh, NC) Application Development Senior Advisors (Raleigh, NC) Dsgn coding frameworks that consider items like abstraction, object-oriented dsgn principles, & microservices to reduce code bulk. Incidental domestic travel only. Virtual/work from home benefit available. Reqs a Bach’s deg in Comp Sci or another IT-related field & 5 yrs of progressively responsible IT exp or a Master’s deg in Comp Sci or another IT-related field & 3 yrs of IT exp. Resumes to Evernorth Enterprise Svcs., Inc. at: david.mccullough@cigna.com

Looking for easier advertising?

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE

TRY INDY CLASSIFIEDS! Email classy@indyweek.com or sales@indyweek.com for more information

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com

July 6, 2022

19

WITH YOUR ONGOING SUPPORT, THE INDY BRINGS YOU:

• Best of the Triangle awards • The Best Arts & Culture coverage in the Triangle • Local election voter guides & much much more!

Just $2.77 a week keeps you informed

JOIN NOW