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Daphne Athas 
CARRBORO lore is harder to come by than Chapel Hill because it doesnīt have an artistic tradition. Its fate as Chapel Hillīs servile underdog has always forced it to pick and lick at an image. In November 1986 Mrs. Frances Shetley stood up at a Carrboro Preservation Society meeting and told how it felt to go from Carrboro Elementary School to Chapel Hill High in the Fifties. "For the first time you were in with kids who had been to Europe, whose fathers taught at the University. The teachers warned you, Sink or Swim.ī These were almost the first words I heard when I entered Chapel Hill High as a sophomore in 1938. My family had moved from Massachusetts and settled into a broken- down house at Chapel Hill at the end of the railroad tracks. Wayne Williams, a freshman, quoted them verbatim from his elementary teachers. He was my first friend. Together we formed a cabalistic liaison in which we consciously defined the high school in its hierarchy of descendance: 1) professorsī kids 2) town (merchantsī) kids 3) country kids and 4) Carrboro kids. The orange buses in which Carrboro kids came to school were called in those days "trucks" which by extrapolation tainted them as "truck kids." Before World War II Carrboro oriented to Calvander, White Cross and Hillsboro as a more or less honest Southern Mill Town, unsullied by proximity to the intellectual oasis in the cultural desert. By the time Wayne paraded me through Carrboro like an insect on a leash, to inspect it (the same route which now, 48 years later, the Preservation Society uses for its historical house tour), its independence was reversed, and the tracks represented its horrible umbilical cord to Chapel Hill. Wayne at fourteen had already separated himself from the stigma by moving out to a nine-by-twelve shack his father had built in the backyard. It was called his "little house" and had walls patchworked with Sears and Roebuck wallpaper samples. He had dozens of books, jars of chemicals, paints, paper, drawings, and objets dīart. He slept out there before the hippie sleeping-bag era, and came into the house for meals. His real house had tongue and groove walls, which we considered the epitome of Lower Depths. My house was tongue and groove too. Pictures of his grim-faced ancestors with beards, sawing wood in the mountains of Tennessee before the Civil War, looked down. There was a round, galvanized washtub in which the family took a bath once a week, filling it with kettles of water heated on the stove. I was shocked. Even my place had a bathtub with claws and faucets. "You mean you donīt have a bathtub?" "Nope." Mr. Williams had worked for the mill as a fixer until the mill closed, and when the war machine revved up, he got a job at Fort Bragg and much later put in a bathtub. In the Forties Carrboro was dead from the Depression, and people with freckled Scotch-Irish faces of Walker Evans photographs sat on porches with glazed stares. Summer vibrated. Tin rooves cracked. Streets were dirt, and the sidewalks, eroded, slid into them during rains. Fitchīs lumber pile dominated the town, so we climbed it in bare feet to feel the pulse of hell. Even suffused in pine resin at the top, we inhaled the Carrboro of dust and dogs. The dogs, replicas of their masters, skulked in the dark spaces beneath the foundationless houses, only venturing out to attack when you passed. They yelped when you picked up an imaginary stone to aim, retreating before you could throw it. Technically, my house was within the Chapel Hill limits, on a knoll off Meritt Mill Road, now called Knolls Development, above the black tin town where guitars, laughter and screams wafted up on hot Saturday nights. We called it "Sociological Conditions" except sometimes when we belted out the word "Niggertown" like any white trash, defying the straitjacket of liberal hypocrisy and claiming the virtue of self-mockery while beating the class one step lower. Blacks were equal, of course, but we didnīt know any blacks. The only way you could was to go out, find one, and start a conversation. There werenīt any in school, so youīd have to do it in the street, and they would suspect your motives, besides which, whites would suspect you. Only daring misfits did that. One day Walter Carroll came running to tell Wayne and me how he had made friends with a black named Lincoln, an intellectual 15-year-old. Heīs brilliant. We spent the whole day walking in the woods talking! He writes plays!" Walter, the nephew of D.D. Carroll, for whom Carroll Hall is named, was a street urchin. His mother and father were dead, and his sister Loretto, married to J.O. Bailey of the English Department, was writing plays in Prof. Kochīs Playmakers, staying up late for rehearsals of her Jobīs Kinfolk, a now forgotten folkplay about three generations of millwomen in Gastonia. Walter was unsupervised, did exactly what he pleased, sat on curbstones, failed arithmetic, played hookey, and stayed back in the third grade, but already he spoke in the rhythms of Paul Greenīs Hymn to the Rising Sun. I was envious. My commerce with blacks was eloquent and operatic, but peripheral. It came mostly from railroad track encounters. One eerie-moonlight night Wayne walked me home from Carrboro. We vibrated with the moonlit tracks and began improvising sounds. Wayne cackled. I made soft, maniacal laughter and then switched to moans. "Oooh, ah," I moaned. He concocted a strangled scream. There was the bang of a door and a burly black man rushed out of his house with a shotgun. So we switched to talking in low voices, without missing a beat, about our Latin assignment. He stared, then catapulted down into the woods where he thought the sounds had originated. The lights went out in the cabins. A fat old woman shouted into the hollow: "What forīs all that noise?" Wayne had to pass back that way to go home. The next day he reported that he had asked a clump of black people standing by the track: "What were those screams I heard?" They told him: "Some crazy manīs down there in those woods, and he got a woman down there, and sheīs moaning." Another night when I left Wayneīs to walk home, Mrs. Williams said worriedly: "What if some old black man accosts you?" "Iīll pull religion," I said arrogantly, fantasizing. "Iīll say: Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?ī and heīll be too scared to try rape." It makes sense that a black belt did then and does now separate Chapel Hill from Carrboro. Carrboro was on the eve of a turbulent change, but in 1940 it was the lull before the storm. We had inherited from the Thirties the vocabulary of strikes, Communism and Roosevelt, with words, now extinct along with their context, like "pellagra, proletarian, New Masses, New Deal, Colored People, and Reds." Frank Graham was president of the University; Howard Odum, the center of Southern Sociology; Prof. Koch, the pusher of folk plays; and Paul Green, before the historical pageant phase, at the apex of Pulitzer fame for plays of passionate social justice, sharecroppers and blacks. With that outmoded vocabulary we dedicated ourselves not to the common good, but to subversion, our goal being to overthrow and destroy not merely the boundaries of Carrboro, but its religion and morality. And the possibilities were palpable because of Chapel Hill, which offered for the taking its library, its lawns, its social idealists, its philosophers, and its artists. The guns were roaring in Europe, and in the summer of 1940 Winona Riggsbee, who lived one street from Wayne, became our conduit to the Inner Sanctum. She was three years older than Wayne and had taken care of him when he was a baby, and his mother had to do errands. She was pure Carrboro, with long reddish hair draped like Veronica Lake before Veronica Lake existed, had dropped out of her freshman year at college because of money, dated New York Jews, was a crack typist with 149 words a minute, and was writing a novel called Hope Is A Woman. She was Paul Greenīs secretary. "Paul said this; Paul did that," she used to say, taking a drag of her cigarette as the three of us conspired those stifling summer nights on the porch. In the streetlamp her too-generous mouth moved all over her face, forming at lungful the Greek mask of tragedy, and when she let out the cloud of smoke, her husky voice was intense, transforming her into our advance scout into the world of artists where we would someday follow. She sang Beal St. Blues and My Mamma Done Told Me. Her mother was a bony post-mistress named Hattie, her grandmother dipped snuff and showed us how you spit into the Campbellīs Soup can with the right plop, and her father, a handsome, roistering drinker, had walked out on the family on her graduation day, leaving her to wait in vain on the platform in her white graduation dress. She had a twin brother, Jack, who was a roisterer too, and he dreamed of the Navy while she dreamed of the Vieux Carré and New York City. But these self-dramatizations had substance. She was not ashamed of, had digested Carrboro, talked about it gallantly like Ann Sheridan, the wrong side of the tracks in Kingīs Row. In addition, she limped because sheīd had polio as a child, and her bad leg was as shapeless and red as a ham on a hook, to her glamor what salt is to hot chocolate. Youīd see her limping, always alone, to work or to meet some date at night. She had a bad reputation, was known as "the mattress" in times when reputations mattered. Perhaps it was because her lovers were always Jewish graduate students, or because she talked freely, romanticizing them in the vocabulary of bohemian Provincetown, like Carlotta did OīNeill, not physical details, but ceremonial nuance. Carrboro minded the mystique more than the deed. The summer of 1940 Richard Wright came to Chapel Hill. He lived in a rented room in Sunset, near where the Mason Hotel is today, an attic room where he slept in shorts and sweated. He was working with Paul Green on the play version of Native Son in Bynum Hall during the day. Winona typed. Despite his fame, only the artist fringe of the University and the graduate students knew of or cared about his presence. But Winona was tight in the secret world of theater, sitting on a keg of dynamite before it exploded, for Orson Welles and John Houeman were going to produce and direct it. At first she told us a little, but then it became hush hush. Clifford Odets came down from New York for a visit. He went for Winona. Wayne and I had just graduated from high school and needed money for college. Winona got me a job for a Lillington friend of Paul Greenīs researching some old graveyard epitaphs in the library. She had to be careful now. She couldnīt talk about the play. She went to New York and spent a weekend with Odets. They had a fling. She didnīt tell us. She implied. And we still spent our conspiratorial evenings talking in the Carrboro summer night, but the final act in the collaboration of Green and Richard Wright was coming to pass, and with it, the course of her imminent departure from Carrboro. Her dreams were to begin their realization. She decided to celebrate by giving Richard Wright a party at her house the night the final act was finished. Wayne and I didnīt expect to go, for this was Winonaīs life, and we were her stage-left confidants. She threw her hair back talking about it, her enthusiasm spilling over. It thrilled Hattie and her grandmother too. And Jack. At last her family would meet Paul Green and Richard Wright for the first time. Jack went down to the poolroom that night and as he chalked his cue--he too was on the brink of graduating from Carrboro, for he had just enlisted--he talked of the party openly. It was scheduled for Saturday. On Friday morning the rednecks sent word through the grapevine. Somebody leaked it to Jack. There was a warning. "If you bring that nigger to Carrboro, weīre going to kill him." Winona had to tell Paul Green, Paul to tell Richard Wright. It scotched the deal, and the party never came off. A few months later Winona left for New York, did some modeling, studied singing with Josh White, fell in love, and wrote us back about his black hand on her white skin. Wayne and I went to college. Walter Carroll won the first Kay Kyser Scholarship to the University. Native Son opened with Canada Lee and was a smash hit. Jack went into the Navy. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, war began, and the years passed. Richard Wright left America for France, Winona married, had five children, and disappeared in America. Walter went to Yale Drama School. Wayne and I went on to our careers. Eighteen years later, in 1958, after I had published my second novel, I met Richard Wright in London. His wife, who had become an agent, and my English agent had somehow arranged our meeting which took place on a summer afternoon in Hyde Park. We sat on some kind of lawn chairs, facing each other, and, never having met him before, I was awed but recognized him at once. He spoke in those rhythms of Hymn to the Rising Sun which Walter Carroll had breathed, which were the syllables of the Carrboro of my childhood and the expression of myth behind life. He looked from the cool grass of England back to the lawns of Chapel Hill from the windows of Bynum Hall, marvelling over the anachronism of red clay, dreaming of a South past black and white, of an America past bigotry, and knowing his revolution, from which he had been absent so many years, was lost in evolution. He seemed a man marooned in French intellect as he cradled gently the emotion of past persecutions, wishing, almost, that he could hate as he used to hate. He read me a section of one of the last things he wrote, a translation of a French work called Papa le Bon, which he called Daddy Goodness, and it sounded of those old repetitions. In his handsome brown face I saw the benign, sad contours of the title in English. And when I asked him about Winona and about Carrboro, he said: "Oh Carrboro, how could I foget it?" "Do you hate it?" I asked. "Well, it was very embarrassing," he said. "And I was scared. They threatened my life. I was sorry for Winona. And for everybody. But no, I donīt hate it. You must understand that that was just my experience there, thatīs all. When I think of Carrboro, thatīs what I think of." Time makes hermit crabs of us, and we carry the world around on our back as our shell of reality. The tune we first hear is the tune we hear forever. Richard Wright died a year or so later. The University confiscated the Old Well as its commercial shrine. And twenty years after, Paul Green died and the Paul Green Theater was built and opened its doors with, by his stipulation, Native Son. Carrboro, a long way from its days as the Joan Crawford of chips instead of pads for the shoulders, clops on the fence between commercial strip development and bohemian gentrification. Hundreds of old Carrboroites live and work in Chapel Hill, secretaries, businessmen, professors, some cooperating with the juggernaut, others amazed at the extinction of their personal reality. "What should the image of Carrboro be?" the Preservation Society asks, as if Carrboro had neither sunk, nor swum during this half century. It seems an impossible question to answer.
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