Zuma, Marshall, NC, March 5, 2020.
The next to last day we were among people.
Charlie was so excited to play with Bobby Hicks in the Zuma Jam.
We were excited to hear him. And we did hear him.
Along with a young man with a voice like Hank Williams.
Little did we know what was coming.
Now, Zuma is closed and voices are stilled until further notice.
Our Pasture, Paw Paw, Madison County, NC, March, 2020
The news is so depressing, exhausting really, and will likely get worse, much worse. Still, up here in our mountains, we have it so much better than most people that I know I shouldn’t complain. But time itself seems to be pausing, not yet stopping, like in a photograph, but taking a break, saying, “let's just stay right here for a bit, mark time, and catch our breath before we move on again.”
Paw Paw, 2020
I remember a conversation with my friend, Dellie Norton, that would have taken place about 1978. She told me about a time, sixty years earlier in 1918, when the Great Flu swept through her community of Sodom and the entire world., killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people. Now, 102 years after the time Dellie described, we’re faced with a similar pandemic and I wonder who will tell this story one hundred years from now.
It’s been a long time ago. It was long before I was married. They had that bad flu through here. I don’t remember what year, but I sure remember the time. I must have been about thirteen years old. I can remember it good. We lived right over there in that old big house. We all had the flu. Every time I raised up, I’d faint. My nose bled so. Daddy, he got out and gathered this red willow. That’s the best medicine for flu and fever ever was. He got out and would break it up. Get the tender limbs and boil them and that would just cool you off if you had the highest fever ever was. He’d have you drink the water from it.
There were so many that died. All the pregnant women died. Every one of them. I knowed them all. Matthew Ramsey’s wife died. James Davis’s wife died. There’d be seven and eight dead at a time. Couldn’t get people to strip them. They didn’t take them to the funeral home back then like they do now. They had people in the community dig their graves, put their clothes on them, and bury them. Jack Ramsey used to make coffins. There was the awfulest bunch of pregnant women that died ever was. I think it was the fall of the year. Nowadays, people will say they’ve got the flu, but they know nothing about the flu unless they had that kind.
Dellie Norton
—from Sodom Laurel Album
Inside Toby’s Deerstand, Paw Paw, Madison County, NC 2020.
I’ve never needed much of an excuse to stay at home. Rather, over the years, I’ve taken every opportunity to not leave our place. To wit, the question I’m asked most when I do venture into town is “I haven’t seen you in awhile, where you been hiding?” I’ve long recognized our land as my shelter, my quiet place, my spot to hunker down and avoid the outside world. I’ve always loved how these mountains embrace you in that quiet way, but only if we allow them into our lives to work their magic.
Benny, aka Banjo Amberg, with Chall Gray and Catfish, McDowell County, NC 1986.
When I picked up Ben at the airport last week, he asked if we could visit Chall Gray at his bar in Asheville, Little Jumbo. We did. Nice place. We had a drink, a snack, more than a pleasant visit with Chall who I hadn’t seen in a few years. Chall and Ben are both thriving in the cocktail business.
Seeing the two of them together reminded me of this photograph of their first meeting - Ben, fish in hand caught in Chall’s father’s pond, and Chall, a toddler in swaddling clothes, mesmerized by the flopping catfish.
One of the beauties of photographs is their ability to help us remember. They inform us of long ago - a gesture, a look, the way we were back then. For me, looking at this image, I see two young boys, each expressing his feelings about a long-dead fish, and I recognize my own amazement that after 34 years the two boys still have things in common.
My long-time friend and collaborator, Charlie Thompson, will be reading from his new book, Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land, at the Madison Container Company in downtown Marshall on Friday evening, March 6, at 6:30p.m.
We will also share the stage together for a few minutes looking at photographs from our trips and talking about them.
Jim Smyre and Family planting tobacco, Harmony, North /Carolina 1987.
When I think about Charlie Thompson, a number of things come to mind. There is his overwhelming commitment to the common man - the underserved, the small farmers, the downtrodden, those among us who haven’t been able to achieve their dreams. I think about his intensity of belief, his integrity, and the value he places on dialogue and story. I think about his love of tradition, of old ways, and the importance of holding our history close to our hearts. But mostly when I think about Charlie, I think about the soil, the land, the dirt under fingernails, and understand that that is where his true happiness lies.
My long-time friend and collaborator, Charlie Thompson, will be reading from his new book, Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land, at the Madison Container Company in downtown Marshall on Friday evening, March 6, at 6:30p.m.
We will also share the stage together for a few minutes looking at photographs from our trips and talking about them.
Man with fire ant bites, the Hurricane Floyd Flood, eastern North Carolina 1999.
In 1999, Charlie Thompson and I travelled through eastern North Carolina documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd and the ensuing flood, which left the eastern third of the state under water. We were working with the Southern Oral History Program at Chapel Hill and our goal was to try to understand the effects of this unprecidented natural disaster on the numerous small, rural communites in its path.
We met an elderly man in front of his home and he described the night the waters rose around him, flooding first his fields and then his home. As he waded four feet of water, trying to get to higher ground, believing he would die, he noticed massive balls floating in the water around him. Fire ants.
That day, two months after the storm, he lifted his pants leg for us to reveal his limb, still covered with ant bites.
