INDY Week 5.5.21

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill May 5, 2021

Why did it take two years for Kyron Hinton’s family to learn who was behind the Raleigh man’s death?

BY THOMASI MCDONALD, P. 12

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

Blue Cactus releases sophomore LP, Stranger Again, on May 7, p. 15

VOL. 38 NO. 16

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

CONTENTS NEWS 4

Apple is coming to town. Is it a good deal for the Triangle?

6

A looming new Starbucks is making Durham coffee lovers nervous.

8

Property taxes suddenly spike in historically Black neighborhoods in Orange County. BY SARA PEQUEÑO

BY LEIGH TAUSS

BY JAKE SHERIDAN

FEATURE 12

How did Kyron Hinton die? His family finally learned the truth.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

ARTS & CULTURE 14 At Raleigh's Sam Jones BBQ, no corners are cut. BY LEIGH TAUSS 15 Growing new together with Blue Cactus's Stranger Again.

BY MADELINE CRONE

16 The Edges of Time honors the life of the pioneering journalist and activist Marvel Cooke. BY BYRON WOODS 17 Together Together is a new kind of love story. BY GLENN MCDONALD

THE REGULARS 3 15 Minutes

10

PHOTOVOICE

COVER Illustration by Jon Fuller

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER Susan Harper

Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

EDITOR I AL

Digital Content Manager Sara Pequeño

Editor in Chief Jane Porter Managing Editor Geoff West Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards

Copy Editor Abigail O'Neill Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods

May 5, 2021

Interns Emma Lee Kenfield

C RE ATI V E Creative Director

Annie Maynard Graphic Designer

Jon Fuller Staff Photographer

Jade Wilson ADVERTISING Director of Sales John Hurld Raleigh Sales Manager MaryAnn Kearns

C I RC U L ATI O N Berry Media Group

Senior Writer Leigh Tauss

2

Contributors Madeline Crone, Jameela F. Dallis, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Layla Khoury-Hanold, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Anna Mudd, Dan Ruccia, Jake Sheridan

INDYweek.com

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 Durham: 320 East Chapel Hill Street, #200 Durham, N.C. 27701 | 919-286-1972

advertising@indyweek.com Raleigh 919-832-8774 Durham 919-286-1972 Classifieds 919-286-6642

Raleigh: 16 W Martin St,Raleigh, N.C. 27601

E M A I L A D D R E SS E S first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com

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

BACK TA L K

We wrote about Apple’s big announcement, last week, that it’s bringing a $1 billion investment, including 3,000 jobs paying wages of $187,000, to the Triangle. Our readers

are worried about what this will do to the local real estate market, which is already tough for first time buyers and the non-wealthy.

“I’m all for high paying jobs but I think we need a plan in place to ensure affordable quality housing for those NOT making $187k,” wrote Facebook commenter DANA VAUGHN. “I don’t want to read about the great Wake County exodus in a decade or two due to unaffordability like California today.”

“We are already heading that way - prices in the Triangle keep going up with no end in sight,” replied commenter SARA FELSEN. “While it is likely not a big deal for the tech folks for everyone else it is really difficult to find housing. Not to mention we have no public transport in place so 40 will just get worse. I am all for high paying jobs but I don’t want this area to become a Seattle where the only people who can afford to live there are the tech people.”

We spoke to some experts this week about how the state enticed Apple to RTP and what we’ll get back in return. Check out Leigh Tauss’s story (page 4).

And, if you have kids, you may consider getting some Nuggets, according to the feedback we got from our readers—and we’re not talking about the ones from McDonald’s.

“We have two and our kids LOVE them!” wrote Facebook commenter NATASHA COLLINS of the modular children’s couches, whose creators we profiled in our cover story last week. “They have especially come in handy on those bad weather days.”

“I have a 4 yo 2 yo they love the nugget,” wrote Twitter commenter LT. J.T. MARSH. “They intuitively understand it and it really meets their desires to jump/play/fall/place to read. It really is more than the sum of its parts.”

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD?

indyweek.com @INDYWeekNC

backtalk@indyweek.com @indyweek

Durham

e

15 MINUTES Erin Linn and her third-grade class at Durham’s Central Park School for Children

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

BY SARA PEQUEÑO spequeno@indyweek.com

Erin Linn’s class of 20 third-graders at Durham’s Central Park School for Children held a dog treat bake sale that raised more than $2,000 for the Animal Protection Society of Durham. The students selected their cause as a group, made the treats, and tallied up the earnings.

How did you all decide to raise money for stray animals specifically?

Nora: We started out on Mondays, with a class called current events, and we split into four different groups, I think, because we wanted to help with different things. And I think the four topics we chose were climate change, people with COVID-19 in the hospital, endangered animals, or stray animals.

Judah: We did a vote from all of all the ideas we had. So then this one won, and then we also decided what to do. First we [picked] dog toys and cat toys, dog treats, and stuff like that, and we were gonna do all of them but then we realized it was really hard so we just did dog treats.

Erin (teacher): Originally, we wanted to have a real bake sale.

We have a really fun club that meets every Wednesday called Cooking and Baking Club. We really like food in this class, and we were thinking it would be fun to have a real bake sale, but after talking to the parents, and realizing that during COVID, it might not be the safest option for us to make food that human people would eat, that we would maybe stick to just treats that dogs can eat.

How did you all feel when Erin told you how much money you raised?

Adriana: We felt excited, because we really wanted to help. We really wanted to donate money.

Erin (teacher): Our original goal was $1,000, and we’ve now exceeded $2,000. So we doubled our goal which is really, really, really cool. We even did all the math calculations.

What would you tell other kids who want to make a difference in their communities?

Rowan: I would say just work hard, and I think it’s a little easier if you do it in a group, and you take your time. But it’s really worth it at the end.

What did you all learn from this experience?

Eli: A few things. First of all, that dog treats are really easy to make. Second of all, it’s not super hard to do a Zoom, working together, if you’re all on the same page, which we were.

So it was really fun and I think that I learned that it’s better to do it with a group than just try and do it by yourself.W INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

3

N E WS

Triangle PHOTO BY LAURENZ HEYMANN VIA UNSPLASH

Apple Pie-Eyed Is the deal to bring Apple to the Triangle as good as it sounds, or will it cost taxpayers more than bargained for?

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

I

t’s a pretty sweet deal.

Apple announced last week it would spend $1 billion to construct a new eastern headquarters in Research Triangle Park in exchange for $846 million in state grants and $20 million in county property tax breaks over the next three decades.

In other words: we’re giving them nine apples to get 10.

It’s the largest incentive package of this kind that North Carolina has ever awarded, but officials maintain it’s well worth the price tag due to the economic growth the tech giant could bring to the region, which Apple claims will be worth $1.5 billion.

But others worry it will only exaggerate the Triangle’s burgeoning affordability crisis and ultimately could cost taxpayers more in the long run on education and infrastructure updates to accommodate the growth.

“I think it’s great news. Does it bring challenges with it? Yes,” Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin told the 4

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

INDY. “We already have a housing shortage and we are really going to have to focus on how we build supply to keep up with demand.”

But it’s not that simple, says Samuel Gunter, executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition.

“Even when that supply and demand is in some sort of balance, it never works for folks at the lowest end of the income spectrum, those folks at 30 percent area median income and below,” Gunter says. “As housing prices are going up, incomes at the bottom aren’t. So while there may be some jobs that are added that are better-paying jobs, or are going to raise the area median income, the folks that work for minimum wage are still making minimum wage.”

Apple’s RTP hub is part of a $430 billion expansion the company is planning nationwide that will create 20,000 new jobs. In the Triangle, that includes the construction of a new million-square-foot research campus

next to Highway 540 near the border of Cary and Morrisville. The $552 million headquarters will bring with it the creation of 3,000 new jobs, which Apple says will pay an average salary of $187,000.

That’s about three times the current average wage in Wake County—$63,966 in 2019—but according to Duke Sanford School of Public Policy professor John Quinterno, it’s probably too good to be true.

“The reason the average is so high has to be that they’re planning to move some high-level executives out here, and those outliers are going to pull up the average for everyone else,” Quinterno told the INDY. “These are good jobs, but they are not necessarily that superstar salary level.”

That’s not the only reason Quinterno is skeptical. For him, the biggest sticking point is the sticker price—why should North Carolina dish out massive subsidies to a company that, in all likelihood, was probably going to come here anyway?

“It’s all wasted money at that point, whether it’s a billion dollars or a hundred dollars in subsidy, if you are providing an incentive for a company to do what it was going to do in the first place, that’s not an incentive,” Quinterno says. “That’s essentially then directing money that otherwise would be public money available for public purposes to invest in roads, schools, and parks.”

It’s no secret the state’s power brokers had been courting Apple for years and Apple already owned the land in RTP. Nor is it secret that several high-level executives at Apple have extensive ties to the Triangle. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, earned his MBA from Duke University. Jeff Williams, who has served as Apple’s chief operating officer since 2015, graduated from Sanderson High School and has degrees from NC State University and Duke.

“As a North Carolina native, I’m thrilled Apple is expanding and creating new long-term job opportunities in the community I grew up in,” Williams said in a press statement. “Apple has been a part of North Carolina for nearly two decades, and we’re looking forward to continuing to grow and a bright future ahead.”

If that future looks anything like Austin—where Apple announced it would also open up a new billion-dollar campus—it may be not so bright, Gunter says. Austin recently passed a policy to essentially criminalize homelessness in the rapidly growing city.

“Austin is a couple of years ahead of us and I don’t think Austin did a good job at all of preparing for that growth that was coming,” Gunter says. “You get to the point where your communities are so overpriced and then you start locking folks out of them.”

Housing prices in the Triangle were already on the rise, pre-pandemic, and with lending rates at historic

AT A GL A NC E

Apple’s Impacts How Much is Apple Spending?

How Much are the State and Wake County Spending?

$846 million

WAKE COUNTY PROPERTY TAX INCENTIVE:

Job Development Investment Grant over 39 years

50% off

property taxes for improvements to the site over 30 years for up to an additional $20 million

$1 billion Apple’s total Investment by 2032

=

$558 million in Wake County for construction of the campus at Research Triangle Park

+ $448 million for improvements to the existing Catawba County data center

What Are We Getting From Apple? (According To Apple)

$100 million

$110 million

to support schools in Raleigh and Durham

in infrastructure spending across 80 counties

$1.5 billion

3,000 jobs

in economic benefits for North Carolina once the new HQ is fully built out

over 10 years paying an average wage of $187,000 (The average Wake County salary was $63,966 in 2019)

Source: Apple Press Statement and the N.C. Economic Investment ; Committee's Job Development Investment Grant project executive summary

lows, prices are continuing to skyrocket, with some markets seeing 10 percent spikes in value, year over year. According to the online real estate market company Zillow, the median home price in Raleigh has ballooned by nearly 28 percent since 2015.

While Raleigh did pass an $80 million affordable housing bond last year, Baldwin says more needs to be done on the policy and land use fronts to ensure growth keeps up with demand. That will likely mean greenlighting more density in neighborhoods that may balk at change.

But the growth could also catalyze essential projects for the region, such as commuter rail, which Baldwin sees as a positive.

“I see it as a catalyst for all these things we need to do,” Baldwin says. “Now there’s a sense of urgency.”

The deal also includes a 50 percent county tax break on property taxes for improvements to the site for the next 30 years, more than twice the duration usually awarded.

When the INDY asked why the Board of County Commissioners agreed to extend the subsidy beyond its usual policy, board member Sig Hutchinson replied glibly, “to get the deal.”

“I see it as a catalyst for all the things we need to do.

Now there’s a sense of urgency.”

“These things are anything but cut and dried and these are very, very sensitive negotiations with the most significant and successful tech company in the world,” Hutchinson says. “I’d say this is the biggest thing that’s happened in the Triangle. This is comparable to IBM deciding to move here in the ‘60s.”

Likewise, the state’s incentive package, known as a Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG), is also historically huge, and Quinterno says that leaders’ willingness to cave to Apple’s demands constitutes a form of corporate welfare. These sorts of deals—negotiated in secret and not by elected officials in many cases—aren’t even considered

politically controversial anymore. They are just accepted as the status quo and set a dangerous precedent.

“No other public spending request would occur on say-so,” Quinterno says.

“Nobody at the legislature says, ‘Why do we need more money for school teachers?

Because school teachers say so.’”

David Rhoades, spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Commerce, says the historic deal was deemed necessary because it qualified as a “transformative” project, a relatively new category of the grant. However, Rhoades emphasized Apple gets the money only if the company makes good on its promises to add jobs and invest in the community.

“It is indeed transformative in nature and it’s going to bring not just the benefits of the company itself but other companies and other jobs will be created because they are here and will attract others,” Rhoades told the INDY. Still, Quinterno says, the waived taxes will come out of taxpayers’ coffers to ultimately accommodate the growth that the deal will bring to the school system which must accommodate new students, and to new infrastructure to support more cars on the road commuting to the new tech hub.

“Apple will be insulated from those costs, but more of them will be borne by everybody else,” Quinterno says.

If the county and state can shell out a combined $866 million to bring Apple here, Gunter says taxpayers should be demanding more to ensure the security of existing residents.

“Don’t let anyone deceive you that the resources aren’t there. It’s a matter of political will,” Gunter says. “If you can scrape together those public resources to recruit a company, you can also ensure the folks at the bottom end of the economic spectrum who are working are able to live and thrive in your community.” W INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

5

N E WS

Durham Triangle Coffee House PHOTO BY JAKE SHERIDAN

Bantum had plans to open a second Triangle location this summer, before the pandemic hit. That’s still the plan, but now he doesn’t know if he’ll have to close his original spot.

“It’s definitely a possibility,” he says. A broader local ecosystem would be hurt if the café were to close, he added.

Starbucks won’t get its pastries from Ninth Street Bakery like Triangle does.

Art of the café

Caffeine Conflict The looming arrival of a new Starbucks makes some Durham coffee lovers feel jittery BY JAKE SHERIDAN backtalk@indyweek.com

A

s reliably as Triangle Coffee House’s drip brew flows, Victor Loperfido inhabits a cushy chair by the shop’s door. In the four months since he moved to Durham after his father’s death, he’s visited daily.

The people filling the bohemian joint draw in the soonto-be 70-year-old: “golden” baristas, book-beguiled students, regulars with whom he swaps music. “All my friends that I know in Durham frequent this place,” Loperfido says.

But the Ninth Street coffee shop, essential to Loperfido, beloved by many, and a community unto itself, may soon cease to exist. A Starbucks is moving in two doors down.

The new competitor could force Triangle out of business, threatening to wipe out much more than coffee.

“It would break my heart if this place closed,” the regular says.

Thin iced coffee When COVID-19 first hit, Triangle closed for nearly three months. Now, pandemic capacity restrictions continue to hurt business.

6

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

“We’re barely [staying] afloat,” Triangle owner Jermaine Bantum says.

Triangle isn’t alone. The number of independently owned coffee shops in the U.S. shrunk in 2020 for the first time in a decade as the coronavirus made sipping and lounging dangerous.

Starbucks is pouring struggling cafés a double shot of disadvantage.

The company announced in June that it’s hastening the roll-out of “convenience-led” drive-throughs and new takeout-only locations. Bantum expects the unopened Ninth Street Starbucks to be a “pickup” shop, a prediction consistent with visible renovations. A green “Coming Soon” sign hangs on the storefront’s window. The iconic siren logo on it might as well be a pirate skull-and-bones.

The 32,600-store chain has long been accused of pushing out small coffee shops.

“The track record speaks for itself,” Bantum says. “It’s usually predatory. They end up pushing out the local businesses when they open up. It’s hard to compete.”

Triangle opened in 2016, but the space it occupies has been home to a coffee shop for at least 20 years, he says.

Triangle looks like a mill-and-funk-themed fishbowl.

On one side, the windows stretch from checkerboard floor to ceiling and look out onto Ninth Street. On the other, they peer into interior office space. Relentlessly colorful paintings from a local artist cover the back red brick wall.

There’s a black couch upstairs, and two more in the basement. It wouldn’t be weird to take a nap. In fact, it’d be easy to doze off if Evan Morgan, the shop’s regular barista, were playing his standard mix of melodic low-fi hip-hop.

Morgan has made coffee at Triangle for three years. He says his boss’s flexibility and the dependable community make it feel unlike work. He knows 30 customers’ orders by heart.

“You get to know their names, their faces, what they got going on in life,” Morgan says.

When he heard Starbucks would be moving into the empty storefront, he was surprised. Ninth Street was supposed to be local. “But the money talks at the end of the day,” he says.

The barista thinks his local shop has some edges on the mega-corporate caffeinator. For starters, “real coffee.”

He believes Starbucks’s brew is often burnt and too sugary. “The art of coffee is just not there,” he says. His roast comes from fresh, organic, shade-grown, fair-trade beans, of course.

Morgan doesn’t think the feelings match, either. Starbucks has a “more sterile, corporate vibe that isn’t very comfortable,” he says.

Across the street and beyond a large parking lot, another Starbucks operates within a grocery store. Morgan says he doesn’t know how the new one will make money with another location so close. He says he’s personally not worried about losing business, and never has been—he’s hopeful that the incoming behemoth will bring new coffee drinkers by or shed overflow crowds. Plus, regulars might rally behind his little shop.

If the pot is empty Hope aside, Morgan sees much to lose.

“If this place were to turn into a Starbucks or to a very corporate place, you wouldn’t have that same atmosphere and that same community,” Morgan says.

The song of Daniel McCray, who regularly busks outside Triangle, would likely also disappear. “If this place goes, I don’t know where I’ll be able to play,” McCray says, sitting at a grated patio table with Morgan and a guitar. “I don’t think Starbucks is going to be too friendly.”

“I’m hoping it’s not gonna be like all the mom-and-pop stores when Walmart came out,” McCray, who does a nice cover of Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” continues.

The gray-haired Loperfido says he’s seen this one before. When he lived in California, Starbucks smoked out a Kensington café when it moved in kitty-corner. He says he knew the owners.

“There’s nothing you can say to Starbucks,” Loperfido says. “You can’t stop their methodology.”

The Starbucks opening on Ninth Street will be a company-operated store, not a licensed or franchised location owned by local people. The owners won’t know the other restaurants on Ninth, won’t chat with their regulars, and won’t have heard buskers playing outside.

When the INDY inquired why the company chose a location so close to a pre-existing Starbucks and another café, and whether any considerations were made for the impact that opening on Ninth Street might have on local businesses, a company spokesperson gave little clarification.

“Starbucks is always looking for great locations to better meet the needs of our customers, and we are happy to confirm that we will be opening a new location in Durham, N.C. this summer,” the full statement said.

Bantum recalls big businesses kicking local ones from his native Brooklyn. “Once it gets commercialized, it kind of takes away the soul of the town,” he says.

A new Chase Bank just opened across the street from Triangle. Starbucks’s future storefront was formerly a dessert café called Francesca’s, which operated for three decades until soaring rent costs caused the owner to fold in 2017.

Bantum wishes he could get a word in now.

“I would love to speak to somebody, some decision makers at Starbucks,” he says.“Did they consider, ‘This local coffee shop’s over here, why are we opening up next door?’

What was their thought process?” W INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

7

N E WS

Orange County

Family Values Advocates are trying to correct an unforeseen spike in property taxes in Orange County’s historically Black neighborhoods

BY SARA PEQUEÑO spequeno@indyweek.com

H

udson Vaughan was surprised when he got his tax revaluation earlier this spring.

His home, located in Chapel Hill’s Northside neighborhood, was valued higher than it had been for the previous four years. In turn, his property taxes went up about 35 percent. He didn’t think much of it until he spoke to a former coworker, Kathy Atwater, a community advocacy specialist at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center.

“I was talking to Miss Kathy, who works with a lot of older, longer-term homeowners, and she was saying that there had been tons of calls about how much some had [risen],” Vaughan says.

Property owners in Northside and Pine Knolls in Chapel Hill, Tin Top in Carrboro, and the rural parts of northern Orange County also saw tax hikes. The Jackson Center, which advocates on behalf of historically Black neighborhoods, says that the property owners they spoke with will pay 53 percent more on average in property taxes due to the revaluations.

The Jackson Center is appealing the revaluations of 144 properties in the Northside neighborhood alone through an informal process, according to executive director George Barrett. Eighty-four of the properties they claim are overvalued are owned by long-term residents, while 32 are undervalued. Most of the undervalued properties are duplexes or homes with more than three bedrooms that are rented out to students.

North Carolina’s tax laws dictate that 8

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

homes being revalued must be compared to homes that sold recently in the same neighborhood. Northside neighbors say the majority of those homes were newer, bigger houses that were being rented to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students, while their homes are smaller and older. They also mentioned that these newer homes, which are mostly duplexes, are no longer allowed to be built in the neighborhood.

Delores Bailey, executive director of EmPOWERment Inc., which focuses on affordable living options in the area, says she will owe $3,000 in property taxes; her 1,300-square-foot home on 0.13 acres of land in the Northside neighborhood of Chapel Hill was assessed at around $300,000. Meanwhile, a nearby duplex that sold in 2019 for $750,000—a newer home with over twice the livable square footage—is paying taxes as if it’s worth only $535,700. These two were considered comparable homes in the tax assessment.

“What you have are older residents living in these homes that haven’t changed in the last 10 years, whose land value is going up based on these mega-mansions that are being built, and the fact that we were so close to Franklin and Rosemary Streets,” Bailey says.

When leaders from the Jackson Center, EmPOWERment, and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP contacted the county’s tax office, they were told that the assessors followed the same laws they’re bound to by the state. If the own-

A map of the Northside Neighborhood Conservation District in Chapel Hill MAP COURTESY OF TOWN OF CHAPEL HILL

ers believe they’re being overtaxed, it’s on them to point it out.

Informal appeals are handled by the staff and were due to the county tax administration on April 30. Formal appeals, which have to be done in a presentation in front of the Orange County Board of Equalization and Review, can be filed until June 30. Advocates point out that either way, an appeals process still requires individual homeowners to correct a systemic issue, and they have to act fast to get the easiest possible process.

“We have around 40 volunteers who are trying to mobilize and connect with neighbors to do these appeals,” Barrett says. “That is a massive amount of energy and labor in a tight amount of time [to try] to get something in, and that is clearly inequitable.”

Christopher McLaughlin, a professor at UNC School of Government, says one solution would be to hire more assessors so that the neighborhoods could be divided into smaller home groupings. The issue, then, is county resources.

“I’m not blaming the tax office because part of it is they’re given the budget to conduct every appraisal,” McLaughlin says. “It may be that the county itself

has to say, ‘We’re willing to spend more money on this. We’re going to need more staff to make sure we increase the accuracy because we’re worried about making sure we get this right and making sure there’s not inequity across the board.’”

Orange County has some of the highest property taxes in the state due to its lopsided ratio of residential to commercial properties. The county’s tax rate is 86.79 cents per $100 in assessed property value compared to a statewide average of 68 cents. This rate doesn’t include Chapel Hill or Carrboro property taxes, or the additional property tax for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. The high property taxes are something that could be mitigated by development that would bring in commercial taxes, but that solution would take years, says Todd McGee, an Orange County spokesman.

For folks living in these neighborhoods, waiting years for more development and better jobs is a gamble.

“This is like a textbook example of how process is biased,” Barrett says. “Process does have bias in how it affects individuals, and if we just rely on process and go with that process, we’re actually not doing anything to take away inequities.” W

INDY A NIMALS

TRiP – We work to create effective pain-relief options for pets

HIP OR ELBOW DYSPLASIA?

NC State Veterinary College Translational Research in Pain (TRiP) Group is running several clinical trials (therapeutics and diets) to help dogs that can’t walk as well as they used to.

Please go to bit.ly/3mpS4ae for more information or contact cvmclinicalstudies@ncsu.edu or 919-515-3634

apel Hill

HAPEL HILL

nd more eed more he accut making king sure oard.’” the highue to its commerx rate is ed propide avert include ty taxes, or ChapThe high hat could at would hat solud McGee,

orhoods, ment and

e of how “Process s individcess and ually not quities.” W

New downtown Raleigh location opening this July!

“West Street Dog” will have pet boarding, daycare, grooming PLUS a dog friendly bar and off leash dog park!

INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

9

PHOTOVOICE 10

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

Dear Baby Jade WORDS + PHOTOGRAPHY BY JADE WILSON

Congratulations, kid! Who knew a media outlet’s Facebook post wanting a photographer for Dreamville would jump-start your career in photojournalism?

You didn’t just accept the job; you exceeded expectations. You never saw it as just a job, though. Thank you for constantly putting yourself out there because you knew we weren’t represented well in the press. The way you translate what you see with your eyes and feel in your heart is your biggest flex. Almost every week for nearly two years you sprinkled some of your magic around town and online. For the majority of that time, you did it with a busted camera and a 50 mm lens. The only thing you were missing was confidence and we have a lot more of it now. You’ve been doing this kind of storytelling for several years, but it wasn’t until the George Floyd uprising that you finally realized that this is what you’re supposed to be doing. You were deprived of a lot of things as a child, but all of those things, plus more, are here with us now. You’ve always wanted a home and Durham is it. Our life is what it is because the people of Durham embraced us with so much love and support. What we’re able to do is because of the stability they provided. Thank them and love them back. You’re the real MVP. We’ve already achieved what we set out to do. Now, it’s time to relax before our big adventure. Then, on the train to UNC-Chapel Hill we go. W

INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

11

ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER

Kyron Hinton’s family members want to know why it took two years for the Wake County District Attorney’s Office to reveal who was behind his death

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

tmcdonald@indyweek.com

12

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

P

olice never did say who was responsible for the homicide of Kyron Hinton in 2019.

Now we know.

“It was a young man, a juvenile who admitted to trying to restrain him,” Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman told the INDY last week.

Before Hinton’s death, the juvenile had been charged during the same timeframe with an unrelated misdemeanor and “was found incompetent due to developmental disabilities,” she said.

“Both the [police] chief and I understood he was unfit to stand trial. Unfortunately, people left with the perception that the case was not thoroughly investigated because someone should have been charged, and that’s not true. It was a really tragic situation.”

Freeman’s disclosure was news to Hinton’s family.

“She never told my aunt that,” says Dominique Sanders, Hinton’s cousin.

Her aunt is the slain man’s mother, Vicki Hinton. “So, he’s getting off instead of being committed to an asylum? She told you this?”

Vicki Hinton answered with two words when asked if Freeman had told her a child in the home had admitted to being involved in her son’s death.

“No. Never,” Hinton said.

Shannon Utley, the mother of Kyron’s daughter, Kyra, described the news as “strange.”

According to his autopsy report, Hinton died from an irregular heartbeat caused by cocaine poisoning and a fractured larynx due to strangulation. Hinton was found unconscious by paramedics on the floor of a Southeast Raleigh home.

One day before, he had received $83,000 from Wake County as part of a settlement for being beaten by law enforcement officers in 2018, which led to criminal charges filed against a sheriff’s deputy and two state troopers.

A day later, after receiving $3,000 of the settlement money, Hinton, a 30-yearold Black man with a history of severe mental illness and drug abuse, was found mortally injured.

Two months after Hinton’s autopsy was made public, Freeman announced no charges would be filed in the case due to insufficient evidence of foul play.

Before Freeman’s disclosure on Friday, the circumstances surrounding Hinton’s death were unknown and troubling for his family, especially for his mother.

“I’m not myself anymore,” Vicki Hinton says. “I just can’t seem to get it together.

Kyron being taken away from me like that took me for a loop. I’m just not the same.”

KYRON’S DEATH It was a Saturday night in Raleigh when someone living in the 700 block of Cooper Road called 911 to report that Hinton, a family friend, was unconscious on the floor.

“He had been drinking, and he passed out on my floor,” the female caller said, according to a copy of the 911 recording obtained by the INDY from the Hinton family. “I guess he [was] drunk. They said he was drunk when he got here.”

The woman told the emergency dispatcher that Hinton was breathing, “but he ain’t awake.”

“Kyron? Kyron! Ky-Ron!” the woman repeated throughout the six-minute, 26-second call.

“Oh, my God. Kyron? Oh, my God. Oh my God,” she said toward the end of the call while directing someone else in the home to follow the dispatcher’s instructions to determine if he’s breathing.

“My daughter is here and my…” she said with her voice trailing off before identifying other people in the home.

The woman was breathing heavily when she told the dispatcher, with growing alarm, that Hinton had a heartbeat, but she wasn’t sure if he was breathing.

Paramedics who arrived at the home rushed him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The 911 caller said people at the home told her Hinton was drunk before he arrived. But a toxicology report by the state medical examiner indicates the presence of cocaine, but ethanol, the intoxicating ingredient in alcoholic beverages, was not detected in his blood.

According to a summary of events leading to Kyron’s death from the state medical examiner, “he was reportedly let into a friend’s home after asking to use the bathroom.”

When the police arrived, the residents inside the home on Cooper Road told the police that while Kyron was outside the home he was “observed talking nonsense, yelling, and acting strange.”

“Once inside the residence, he began damaging items with continued yelling and was restrained by another individual,” according to the medical examiner’s report. “At some point, he was observed to be unresponsive on the floor.”

Freeman said last week the juvenile responsible for Hinton’s death either

acted in self-defense or attempted to restrain him, with devastating results.

In addition to neck fractures, Hinton also had blunt force injuries to his head, chest, and extremities, according to the autopsy, which classified his death as a homicide.

Hinton says Freeman previously told her the juvenile restrained her son but “did not intend to kill him”—or that there was any evidence he had.

“But the autopsy says ‘homicide,’” Hinton told the INDY.

PUBLIC BEATING Before hearing news about the child’s involvement in Kyron’s death, Hinton’s fa m i ly members thought the police were responsible.

Their belief held some credence. Court records show that one of the state troopers involved in assaulting Hinton, Michael G. Blake, had a history of beating the hell out of Black motorists. In 2016, Blake was involved in the vicious beating of a motorist that left the man with head injuries, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung.

Blake was not criminally charged or disciplined for the 2016 incident near Cary.

Moreover, days before Blake was charged with felony assault against Kyron Hinton, a disabled Navy veteran filed a complaint with the N.C. Industrial Commission, accusing the former state trooper of assaulting her during a traffic stop in Brier Creek.

The motorist accused Blake of pulling her out of her car, throwing her on the ground face-first, and jumping on her back.

“I don’t know,” Hinton told the INDY last week. “I just think the police did it.”

Dominique Sanders, Hinton’s niece, said she thought “someone gave him a ‘hot shot’ of bad drugs.” The toxicology report shows that the cocaine found in

Hinton’s body had been contaminated with levamisole which is used by veterinarians to treat animals with parasitic worms.

Utley, the mother of Hinton’s child, told the INDY that months before his death, Hinton was worried and that he felt threatened by police.

The beating Kyron Hinton endured by law enforcement first came to the public’s attention in April 2018, when this writer reported that he was brutally assaulted by officers while he was unarmed and standing in a busy street in East Raleigh.

The State Bureau of Investigation launched a probe of the beating after Hinton suffered a fractured eye socket and was bitten repeatedly by a K9 animal after being confronted by Raleigh police officers, Wake County sheriff’s deputies, and state troopers.

The release of video and audio footage showed Hinton unarmed, yelling out, and standing in the middle of the busy road.

The situation, according to the video, remained calm until former Wake County Deputy Cameron Broadwell arrived on the scene with his police dog, Loki.

The former deputy yelled, “Get on the ground now or you’re gonna get bit!” and sicced the animal on Hinton.

Broadwell was charged with three felonies— assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury, assault inflicting serious bodily injury, and willfully failing to discharge duties.

In 2019, Broadwell pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor and received a 45-day suspended sentence and unsupervised probation. Blake and fellow former state trooper Tabithia Davis were both charged with assault inflicting bodily injury and willfully failing to discharge duties. Their cases are still pending today, Freeman said.

“We don’t intend to dismiss them, but the ultimate outcome is shaped by the fact that we don’t have our victim living,” Freeman added.

“I’m not myself anymore.

I just can’t seem to get it together.

Kyron being taken away from me like that took me for a loop.”

TROUBLED LIFE In a 2018 interview with this writer, Vicki Hinton said her son’s life was one of poverty, drugs, mental illness, and incarceration.

He and his two brothers were raised by their mother in a mobile home park in southern Wake County, about eight miles from downtown Raleigh. He stopped going to school in the sixth grade then started dealing drugs, his mother said.

In May 2003, four months after his 14th birthday, Kyron Hinton was tried as an adult and convicted on four counts of armed robbery. He was released from prison four years later and continued to struggle with alcohol, drugs, and untreated mental health issues.

“For most of his life, Kyron had been disrespectful,” Vicki Hinton said. “It started when he was nine, running around with his older cousins. He began to rob places with no bullets in the gun.”

Vicki Hinton has had her own violent encounter with law enforcement. Not long before Kyron Hinton’s death, she said she was assaulted by police during a confrontation with an employee at a Family Dollar Store in Garner.

Hinton was living in Cary on the day her son was killed. She was sick and still recovering from her encounter with the Garner police.

It was dark outside. Hinton did not have a bed and was sleeping on the floor.

“I was laying there thinking God’s gonna put me and Kyron back together to go to work in the church,” she said. “I happened to look down at my phone at 8:30 [p.m.] and it was my son Kendal.

He told me Kyron was dead and came to pick me up. By the time we got to the hospital, they said ‘don’t touch him because he’s dead.’”

Kyron Hinton’s attorney, James Hairston of Raleigh, said that the day before he was killed, Kyron requested $3,000 of his settlement money, but family members said Kyron didn’t have a dime or any identification on him when he died.

The remainder of the settlement money he received went to an estranged wife— not a dime went to 10-year-old Kyra, whom he had with Utley before Hinton married, the family said.

“Not one black penny,” Utley says.

For Kyra, the pain of her father’s death still lingers. “[She] still has her moments of working through the grief of losing her father,” Utley says. “It was traumatic for her and it changed her.” W INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

13

2021

FO O D & D R I N K

SAM JONES BBQ | 502 W Lenoir Street, Raleigh, NC 984-206-2555 | samjonesbbq.com

Down Home Concerts

The three-meat combo at Sam Jones BBQ: ribs, smoked turkey, and the classic pork with a side of sweet slaw and collard greens. PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

Live music is back—

tickets on sale now!

Friday, May 7

The Gibson Brothers

with TRAY WELLINGTON BAND

Friday, May 14

Balsam Range

Whole Hog Raleigh’s Sam Jones BBQ isn’t cutting any corners

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

Thursday, May 20

The Bluegrass Experience 50TH ANNIVERSARY featuring TOMMY EDWARDS, SNUFFY SMITH AND FIDDLIN’ AL MCCANLESS

All concerts begin at 7:30 p.m. in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Downtown Raleigh Limited capacity, socially distanced seating; masks required | Livestream tickets available

pinecone.org • Box Office: 919-664-8333 14

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

A

confession: before moving to Raleigh, I rarely ate pork.

It’s not because I grew up in a Jewish household (my family didn’t keep kosher) in Connecticut but more so because my parents, and seemingly everyone else in the Northeast, has no clue how to cook a hog. Every chop I’d try was bone dry and tasteless—the kind you over-chew because you dread swallowing. So, with the exception of bacon, that’s what I thought pork was—a flavorless gray hunk of blah.

Thankfully, the swine at Sam Jones BBQ is anything but blah. It’s both sweet and savory, and the naturally smoky flavors need minimal accoutrements. That’s because this place isn’t taking any shortcuts—on a busy day, they barbecue three whole hogs, head and all, on a massive grill.

The hotly anticipated barbecue joint opened in February of this year at 502 W. Lenoir Street, tucked away just west of the city center. It’s the second Sam Jones BBQ outpost; the first opened in Winterville (near Greenville), in 2015. The Raleigh location formerly housed Dusty’s Garage and pays homage to the auto shop with a photo of Dusty’s family on the wall and by retaining the original flooring, scratches and all, giving the space a unique feel.

Sam Jones has its own celebrated history. Sam learned the ropes from his grandfather, Pete Jones, who perfected the family’s classic eastern Carolina barbecue recipe at the Skylight Inn, which opened in Ayden, North Carolina, in 1947. Skylight rose to national prominence for its classic whole-hog approach.

“We don’t cut any corners,” says Adam Bauer, kitchen manager at the Raleigh location. “Nothing here is frozen. Everything comes in fresh. We don’t have a freezer on site. We really take pride in passing on that southern hospitality that would you find in your home here to the guests.”

Seasoning is minimal—just salt, pepper, hot sauce, and vinegar—and the magic all happens on the grill.

At about 1 p.m. three whole hogs sliced down the center are placed on the grill at 250 degrees until about 10 p.m. Then, they’ll cut the heat, but keep the hogs in overnight, so they continue to cook. In the morning, they fire up the heat again and crisp the skin. The hogs then get chopped up and the skin is removed but mixed back in to add a hint of that charred and smoky texture.

“It all comes together and equals this perfect bite in your mouth,” Bauer says.

When I stopped by on a recent Thursday evening, the restaurant was mostly empty—a rarity, I hear, as there’s often a line out the door at lunch and dinner. But soon after we took our seats outside on the picnic benches, families and couples started filing in.

I ordered the three-meat combo with ribs, smoked turkey, and the classic pork with a side of sweet slaw and collard greens. It comes with a dense hunk of cornbread that feels almost like a brick.

That’s because it’s not meant to be gnawed alone—its ultimate utility is found in soaking up the extra sauce and meat.

The sides were on point, with a slaw so finely chopped it’s hard to tell what’s in it (not that it matters; it’s delicious).

The ribs are another popular Sam’s staple—juicy and flavorful yet with an appropriate amount of char. I quickly stripped them to the bone. The turkey wasn’t particularly memorable, but the pork more than delivered with its perfect balance of salty savory goodness.

If you can save room for dessert, I’d recommend the banana pudding, a sweet and spongy delight. But if you’d rather drink to help you digest, the Jay the Butcher cocktail is an old-fashioned with pig-fat infused bourbon to give it a unique, smoky flavor.

You can find hot new takes on southern-style cooking all over the downtown Raleigh food scene, but sometimes you just want to go back to the basics. Sam Jones delivers barbecue in the most classic sense. It definitely hits the spot. W

M U SIC

BLUE CACTUS: STRANGER AGAIN

[Sleepy Cat Records; May 7]

Growing New Together Blue Cactus’s new album, Stranger Again, is a cosmic country ballad of new beginnings for weary lovers

BY MADELINE CRONE music@indyweek.com

“W

e’ll pretend we’re lovers / Something more than friends / Right beside you, but I wanna be closer than this,” Steph Stewart sings with mournful levity. She’s climbing into “Stranger Again,” the title track of her upcoming album with Mario Arnez as Blue Cactus.

The Chapel Hill-based duo’s sophomore LP, Stranger Again, out May 7 on Sleepy Cat Records, is anchored with a titular sentiment that resonates with cohabiters everywhere, especially after weathering the past year at home. Though penned pre-pandemic, the yearning lamentations speak directly to weary lovers, repeating, “Let me keep you wondering / I wanna be strangers again.”

Before there was Blue Cactus, there was Steph Stewart & the Boyfriends. Arnez, a South Florida native who picked up the guitar in his mid-teens, was one of the backing string players and co-writers before he became Stewart’s suitor. In the new band, Stewart drew on the early influences of her grandfather’s Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline records, back home in Catawba County, and expanded upon his knowledge of the country sound.

After a second record (Nobody’s Darlin’) with the Boyfriends in 2015, Stewart and Arnez made their eponymous debut in 2017 as Blue Cactus, expanding upon regional bluegrass traditions into a mid-century, classic country sound.

Following their debut release, the duo spent a week at the Wildacres residency in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. Up in the mountains, they found ample space for creativity and headed home with a few songs that, they humbly offer, “wrote themselves.”

Between the 2017 retreat and recording their second album in 2019, the two

penned an entire tracklist. Stewart, who was on the closing end of a divorce, and in the early phases of her relationship with Arnez, feels she derived the songs from emotional contusions and healing.

“It’s a lot about relationships—growing apart from people when you’re with them all the time, and having to maintain a relationship even more so when it’s long-term,” Stewart says over the phone on a Friday afternoon, in reference to the new record. “Sometimes, to be who you want to be, you’re not going to make everyone happy, and I had to come to terms with that.”

Stranger Again was recorded with their bass player and co-producer Alex Bingham (Hiss Golden Messenger) at his lake house-turned-second-site of his Hillsborough-based Bedtown Studios.

The lakeside set-up in the mountains of Virginia has become a recording retreat of sorts for Triangle artists. Over eight days, Blue Cactus tracked the album almost entirely live, backed by Bingham on bass, drummer and creative collaborator Gabe Anderson (Sleepy Cat Records), and Nashville-based pedal steel player Whit Wright (Joshua Hedley, Elizabeth Cook) and engineered with Ryan Johnson and Saman Khoujinian.

Blue Cactus first established themselves as fervent followers of early 1960s country traditions. The debut collection was embellished with experimental overdubs and characterized by a wailing vocal delivery best displayed in Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” Stranger Again bears a palpable vulnerability with an unadorned take on storytelling.

“Beyond recording almost all of these songs live, one of the bigger shifts on this

Steph Stewart and Mario Arnez

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

album is a more personal approach to our songwriting,” Arnez says.

“Worried Man” evolved immensely under Bingham’s advice. The song dates back to the Boyfriends days, ideated as a Bluegrass-leaning tribute to Stewart’s grandfather, who was “the worrier” of her family.

“It’s such a gift to have someone thinking about you all the time,” Stewart says.

“I didn’t realize that until he was gone.”

When it came time to record it for the first time, Bingham twisted the classically structured tune into a disco groove, invoking early Outlaw sounds introduced by the likes of Waylon Jennings. This was an apt approach to honor the man who introduced Stewart to that country-western sound. Much of the lyrical content is rooted in years past and yet, overlaid with the current context, the messaging is undying.

“Rodeo Queen” and “Radioman” speak to the toxicity that social media presents— especially to the creative community—and the dilemma of a digitally streaming world.

“One of my favorite things about this record is how it feels even more relevant today than when we recorded it,” Stewart says. “It holds new meaning in a lot of ways.”

She points to “I Can’t Touch You,” as an obvious example of this irony within current social-distancing measures. The theme of “constantly evolving” relationships grows increasingly evident as each of the 10 tracks rolls as vintage vignettes

of a universal phenomenon, coalescing into a retro-country collection. Pedal steel sears through the album opener (“Blue as the Day”), setting the tone through lingering gloom.

Skylar Gudasz’s vocal offerings on “Rebel” add a nostalgia-tinged jubilance to the confident mile marker for Arnez— bidding adieu to freedom-filled 20s and devoting himself to his partnership. “Come Clean” reckons with a painful conclusion as Stewart sings, “I think it’s time I got it right with me / Cause I’ve been becoming everybody / I never wanted to be.”

“Stranger Again” is told by someone who has drifted from the familiarity of a previously congenial partnership, now longing for the mysterious excitement that being a stranger once brought.

“When you start a relationship, you have so much to learn about each other, so much potential,” Stewart says. “It’s weird that when it ends, it’s often because you don’t know each other anymore.”

The duo captures the brokenness of this full-circle effect with perseverance through painful emotional processing and the stillness of the pandemic. In harmony with the late-August cicada chorale that first inspired the album nearly four years ago in their creaky cabin at Wildacres, Blue Cactus evokes a celestial soundscape of mid-century heartbreak. Rather than attempt to fix what’s broken, this prickly pair of cosmic country artists embrace it. W INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

15

STAGE

EDGES OF TIME | PlayMakers Repertory Company Monday, May 3 – Sunday, May 9 (online) | $24 | playmakersrep.org

PANEL DISCUSSION: WHERE ARE WE NOW: BLACK WOMEN IN JOURNALISM

PlayMakers Repertory Company | Free | playmakersrep.org

Kathryn Hunter-Williams in Edges of Time PHOTO COURTESY BY ALEX MANESS

Leading the Way Jacqueline Lawton’s new historical drama, Edges of Time, honors the life of the pioneering journalist and activist Marvel Cooke

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

J

acqueline Lawton was angry. The award-winning playwright and dramaturg in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Dramatic Art was deep into a semester-long fellowship for a new work that was sparked by the attacks on journalism that had become prevalent under the Trump administration.

Her research led her to the story of Marvel Cooke, a writer, journalist, and civil rights activist, who broke boundaries when she became the first Black woman to be hired as a reporter at a mainstream (read: white-owned) American newspaper, The Daily Compass, of New York, in 1950. Before that landmark job, Cooke worked as an editorial assistant to W.E.B. DuBois and critic at the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, subsequently reporting for the New York Amsterdam News and editing at a weekly New York paper, The People’s Voice.

Her labor activism, organizing New York’s first chapter of The Newspaper Guild, and political and civil rights work with activists including Paul Robeson, gained the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who subpoenaed 16

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

and grilled Cooke in 1953 before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Lawton’s fury at never having heard of her before was tinged with a different emotion: grief. “How different would my life have been if I’d known her history—known this woman advocated for us so strongly and protested by taking to the streets, leaving her job, to tell the stories of people who look like me,” she says.

Lawton wrote her latest drama, Edges of Time, to make sure Cooke’s story was remembered. PlayMakers Repertory Company gave the one-person show its world premiere in a production starring veteran actor Kathryn Hunter-Williams, whose livestreamed performance was made available as video-on-demand in March and early April.

The company revived the online production this week in honor of World Press Freedom Day on May 3. Patrons can view the work online through Sunday night, May 9.

The drama finds Cooke in the company of friends on the morning of September 16, 1963, the day after the horrific bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birming-

ham, Alabama. It’s a turning point, “a moment that sort of stopped a nation,” as director Jules Odendahl-James notes.

The moment also poses a direct challenge to Cooke herself. Blacklisted after the McCarthy hearings, the former reporter hadn’t worked as a journalist in a decade.

“I tried to imagine how bereft she must have felt,” Lawton says. “She didn’t have a newsroom to run to. She couldn’t say ‘Let’s pick up some petty cash, I’m heading to Birmingham to get on the ground on this.’ She didn’t have a byline to tell this story.”

It’s a moment of transition the show’s director thinks many can relate to, within the context of recent history and present-day events: it’s a catalyst that prompts Cooke’s character to look, react, and ask herself what she can actually do.

“Many of us spent most of the last administration trying to ask that question,” Odendahl-James says. “What do you do when life and the structures that you want to critique also give structure to your daily life, including your job, your education, and your community space? If you want to push back against those, you’re still relying on them to have some stability, and it seemed like everything was slipping from our grasp.”

The director concludes that finding a moment like that in Cooke’s life lets today’s audiences join her. “There were so many moments from January 2017 on where we found ourselves having to confront and ask how do we do it: how do we be activists, grapple in public with what’s happening, and try to reshape it?”

Cooke was an unrelenting critic of the journalism of her time, with an insider’s damning knowledge of the industry’s frequent shortcomings. In Lawton’s script, after reading The New York Times’ cover story on the church bombing, her character concludes, “This reporting isn’t for the Black people of Birmingham. It can’t be. That’s no way to comfort people in mourning. And it certainly won’t reassure a community that is rightfully enraged.”

Moments later, she bluntly tells her audience, “I don’t trust newspapers.”

In coming to terms with Cooke’s unsparing candid critiques, Lawton recalls having to stop and ask, “Wait—what is she actually saying?”

“I thought about James Baldwin, who said, ‘I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,’” Lawton notes. “I think about my relationship with the United States, as someone who’s had the fortune to travel to other countries. I think of my relationship with the American theater, which I love, but I’m going to critique it to the edge of its life because of its exclusionary practices.

That’s what she’s doing.”

Cooke “looks at the field she loves,” Lawton concludes, “and she’s saying, ‘Damn it, we can be better than this.

We are better than this. We have principles. Let’s follow them.’” W

SC R E E N

TOGETHER TOGETHER | HHHH

In theaters now and available digitally starting Tuesday, May 11

In the Family Way Together Together has the shape of a romantic comedy, but it scribbles outside the lines

5.03

Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar: A Novel

Virtual Events THU

5.06 7PM

Cate Doty, Mergers and Acquisitions: Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned on the Wedding Pages

967-6159

Available

bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com

Listen to the latest podcasts on Bookin’

C o l l967-6159 ections (919)

Raleigh's Community Bookstore

Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e

arrives, he says: “Thank you for doing this for me, and also I apologize for everyone that I know.”

Together Together has the shape of a traditional rom-com, but it’s scribbling outside the lines. The film is interested in empathy and kindness, and how people care for one another in our fast-moving, technologically mediated relationships.

In a genre known for cliched signifiers of phony romance, this is a movie with real heart.

None of this works without the wonderful performances of Ed Helms and, especially, Patti Harrison. Already almost-famous as a stand-up comic and prolific Instagram joker, Harrison is the real deal, and here she gives the kind of breakout performance that launches Hollywood careers. She’s blessed with one of those magical movie-star faces, so expressive that you can read complicated feelings arising, retreating, colliding, and hiding behind other feelings.

And wow, she can bring the funny. She sets the tone for the entire film in the first scene, in which Matt interviews Anna for the surrogate job. I watched it again just to admire her weird, bold choices. Helms hangs right in there, too. His role could have easily devolved into “OK, Boomer” fall-guy territory, but Helms insists that we appreciate Matt’s humanity in all of this. He just wants to be a good dad.

The film earns additional style points for its skillful use of supporting role ringers: Julio Torres as Anna’s gloomy co-worker, Sufe Bradshaw as a seen-itall ultrasound technician, and Tig Notaro as a family therapist armed with lethally deadpan reaction takes. There’s a lot to like in Together Together. See it with someone you love. W

SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c Bu s i n eDIVORCE ss Law UNCONTESTED In c o r p oBUSINESS r a t i o n / LLAW LC / MUSIC Pa r t n e r s h i p INCORPORATION/LLC Wi lls WILLS

riter/director Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together is a sharp indie film that works as a funny-poignant double character study. It’s a romantic comedy without the romance: a new kind of love story for a swiftly tilting planet.

It goes like this: 40-something Bay Area app designer Matt (Ed Helms) is coming off a failed long-term relationship. His dreams of fatherhood fading, he decides to sign on with a surrogacy agency. Matt is paired with Anna (Patti Harrison), a 26-year-old barista who agrees to be his gestational surrogate. It’s all rather transactional, until it isn’t.

Anna has her own reasons for taking the job, and she’d just as soon manage the next nine months on her own. Matt, however, is determined to get to know the person carrying his child. His intrusions into Anna’s life are genuinely well-meaning and frequently ill-considered. He brings podiatric pregnancy clogs to her place of employment. He tries to monitor her diet, her activities, even her sex life.

She’s not having it.

Don’t worry—the film does not go where it likely would have gone in years past, and we don’t have an icky May-December romance to deal with. (The film tackles this issue directly with a funny scene dissing Woody Allen films.)

Instead, Together Together depicts Matt and Anna as natural loners—independent people with their own hopes, dreams, and heartaches. Nobody here is completing anybody else.

Director Beckwith maintains this bittersweet tone, even as she stages pitch-perfect comedy set pieces. I particularly liked the baby shower, in which Matt tries to include and protect Anna at the same time. Just before his family

ATTORNEY AT LAW

W

BILL BURTON

BY GLENN MCDONALD arts@indyweek.com

with Ayn-Monique Klahre, editor Walter TUE

5.11 7PM

WED

5.12 7PM

Jeffery Deaver, The Final Twist (A Colter Shaw Novel) Sean Flynn, Why Peacocks?: An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird with Cate Doty

All events are online. Register for Quail Ridge Books Virtual 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

May 5, 2021

17

P U Z Z L ES

KEEP IT !

L LOCA

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.

Delivery in Durham & Chapel Hill Mail Order | Curbside Pick Up www.regulatorbookshop.com

Hours for pick up: Monday–Saturday 12–4PM

su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box.

The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered.

Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages.”

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com solution to last week’s puzzle

18

May 5, 2021

INDYweek.com

5.05.21 INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

CLASSIFIEDS

ur webpage.

EMPLOYMENT

HEALTH & WELL BEING

Wedding

ial Spec on!

Secti

GUIDE

L AST WEEK’S P U Z ZL E

Software Engineer III (Raleigh, NC) Software Engineer III sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to USE ADVANCED SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY TO DESIGN AND DEVELOP SOLUTIONS FOR SPECIFIC SOFTWARE FUNCTIONAL AREAS AND PRODUCT LINES. Min of Masters degree (or equiv) in Comp Sci or rltd + 2 yrs exp rqd. Interested candidates apply by mail to Toyia Hayward, Immigration Compliance Assistant, RELX; 1100 Alderman Drive, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job “Software Engineer III”

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

RECYCLE THIS PAPER 919-416-0675 RECYCLE THIS PAPER www.harmonygate.com RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER

May 26, 2021

Highlight your venue, catering, floral services and more!

To advertise or for more info, contact sales@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com

May 5, 2021

19