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they were. They were the prettiest mixing bowls in the world, a grown-up present bankrolled on Daddy’s weary shoulders” (42). The language communicates the essence of the characters but is seldom played for humor as Hampton sometimes does. Hampton’s stories often have a speakerly voice with a Southern twang. One of the most notable is Beth’s in “Sparkle”: “Since I was thirteen, I have wanted to meet Dolly Parton, to exist for a minute in that cloud of glittery badassness. I don’t even like country music. Just Dolly. All that light; she brings light into the world, or did into mine when I was a kid” (169). Part of the pleasure in Hampton’s stories is the sometimes jarring way the characters tell about their worlds. Hampton can be deft and sensitive, but her general tone ranges from outrageous to thoughtful. White’s tone remains more quiet and lyrical. Both White’s and Hampton’s short story sequences provide thoughtful explorations into their characters’ worlds. White’s is the more technically impressive and haunting of the volumes; Hampton’s speakerly texts recall the raucous humor of Grit Lit – and perhaps even Flannery O’Connor, if she had a hard R rating. The texts add to the increasingly complex body of Appalachian fiction and, since these are debut collections, we can look forward to the unfolding of the authors’ careers in future years. n
A MAP TO EVERLASTING AND LIBERATING TRUTH a review by Philip Gerard Wayne Moore. Triumphant Warrior: A Soul Survivor of the Wilmington Ten. Warrior Press, 2014.
PHILIP GERARD, recipient of the 2019 North Carolina Award for Literature, teaches in the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington. He is the author of, among numerous other books, the novel Cape Fear Rising (Blair, 1994; rpt. 2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2020), inspired by the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat. WAYNE MOORE is founder of the Wilmington Ten Foundation for Social Justice, dedicated to serving youth and families in Wilmington, NC.
OPPOSITE L to R, George Kirby, boycott
activist; Reverend Ben Chavis, one of the Wilmington Ten;, and Angela Davis, supporter of the protest to integrate New Hanover County schools and the campaign to free the Wilmington Ten, 1971 (other man not identified)
This eloquent memoir by Wayne Moore is a coming-of-age story of a very special and troubling kind: a Black high school kid, caught up in the ugly politics of desegregation, has his future stolen from him in a travesty of justice that makes international headlines and, over the course of four decades, requires the intervention of Amnesty International, a Congressional delegation, President Jimmy Carter, two governors, and a federal appeals court. “In many ways, I was an allAmerican Black boy fixed on being a man my mama could be proud of,” Moore writes (xvii). As a teenager, he has his heart set on attending Williston Senior High, the engine of upward mobility in Black Wilmington, a school that traces its origins to 1865, when the American Missionary Association established the first classes for liberated Blacks. Moore explains, “If this book had a million pages, it still wouldn’t be enough to convey the bone-deep, heart-deep, pride-deep – love-deep – place Williston Senior High School occupied for generations of us in Wilmington’s AfricanAmerican community” (17). But facing a court order to desegregate its three high schools, in 1968 the school board votes to shut down Williston High and bus its 1,100 Black students to the two white high schools, where they face ongoing harassment from white students and belligerent non-students who attack them on campus – and even from some faculty. In his words, they feel like Williston “refugees” (51). In January 1971, Moore is an eleventh grader at John T. Hoggard, a suburban high school