Queen City Nerve - September 9, 2020

VOLUME 2, ISSUE 21; SEPTEMBER 9 - SEPTEMBER 22, 2020; WWW.QCNERVE.COM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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NEWS& OPINION

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4 EDITOR’S NOTE BY RYAN PITKIN 6 A BLACK HISTORY OF CHARLOTTE: PART 4 BY

PAMELA GRUNDY How redlining, blockbusting and ‘urban renewal’ victimized the Black community

8 THE SUFFRAGIST BY RHIANNON FIONN 9 KICKING THE CAN BY RYAN PITKIN

Why local advocates say the federal eviction moratorium is not enough

ARTS&CULTURE 10

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THAT SACRED SOUND BY PAT MORAN ‘Hanging Tree’ book and exhibit celebrate the genius of Freeman Vines

12 A WARM WELCOME BY HANNAH HASAN Stories of humanity from our immigrant neighbors

MUSIC

14 PICKIN’ FOR PROGRESS BY PAT MORAN Che Apalache frontman returns to North Carolina to make a difference 15 LIFEWAVE A dose of reality

16 SEIZE THE GROCERY BY LEA BEKELE As Carpe Diem’s doors close, a window opens at Earl’s Grocery

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LIFESTYLE

FOOD& DRINK

18 PUZZLES 20 THE SEEKER BY KATIE GRANT 21 HOROSCOPE 22 SAVAGE LOVE THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS:

PAT MORAN,

PAMELA GRUNDY, HANNAH HASAN, TIMOTHY DUFFY, RHIANNON FIONN, LEA BEKELE, AARON GREENHOOD, GRANT BALDWIN, KATIE GRANT AND DAN SAVAGE.

Enjoy a moment of peace on us. www.xcoobee.com

COVER DESIGN BY: JAYME JOHNSON PHOTO BY: TIMOTHY DUFFY

Don’t Just Recycle,

RECYCLE RIGHT! PUBLISHER JUSTIN LAFRANCOIS jl afra n co i s @ q cn er ve.com

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RYAN PITKIN

PLASTIC BOTTLES & JUGS with Necks

CARDBOARD

CANS

CARTONS

PAPER

GLASS BOTTLES

rpi tk i n @ q cn e r ve. c om

ART DIRECTOR JAYME JOHNSON

Please DO NOT place the following items in your curbside recycling bin.

jjo h n s o n @ q cn e r ve.com

STAFF WRITER PAT MORAN pm o ra n @ q cn er ve . com

DIGITAL EDITOR LEA BEKELE l be ke l e @ q cn er ve . com

AD SALES EXECUTIVE RENN WILSON r wi l s o n @ q cn e r ve . com

No plastic bags (return to retail)

No food or liquid No food containers

No batteries

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Tips to Reycle Right: NO PLASTIC BAGS Empty and rinse bottles and containers Place lids and caps back on empty containers Keep all items loose, clean and dry Resist the urge to recycle improper items No tissues, paper towels, napkins or plastic utencils

No propane tanks

No tanglers (no hoses, wires, chains, hangers or electronics)

EDITOR’S NOTE

To be clear, outrage from residents who watched Maj. Rob Dance, the supervising officer, and carried disciplined for their roles in the incident, at least in the video did lead to a few reforms, including out by his platoon and another platoon supervised any public way.

That leaves me with one question: How does it changes in CMPD policy around the use of tear gas. by Lt. Chris Rorie.

It has been discussed to death, each time CMPD In one body-cam video, a supervising sergeant end with Sherwood? This man did not have anything leaders claiming that the whole thing was just a of a CMPD bike squad describes the plan beforehand to do with the incident. He didn’t plan it, he didn’t “tactical mistake.” to a fellow officer, stating, “Rorie’s got a platoon on carry it out; he was suspended simply for talking Days after the incident, then-Chief Kerr Putney Tryon out of sight, Dance’s platoon is staged now about it excitedly, as I’m sure countless officers did held a virtual press conference in which he stated on College out of sight. We’re gonna push their ass that night.

I’ve listened and watched as city council that he didn’t like the “optics” around the incident straight up 4th. As soon as they get up on 4th, we CMPD’s refusal to take and that he “couldn’t wait” until he could share the got ’em bottlenecked now, Rorie’s squad is gonna members have discussed this incident many times, action against the men who footage that CMPD had, which he implied would step out and hammer their ass. When they start before and after the body-camera footage was ordered the June 2 ambush justify all of the department’s actions and show that running down, Dance’s squad is gonna step out and released, and despite the fact that the videos and signals their approval our one-sided coverage was misleading. hammer their ass with gas… We’re gonna fuckin’ our reporting have confirmed this was a planned ambush beyond any reasonable doubt, these people Then he retired. pop it up.”

BY RYAN PITKIN Since then, new Chief Johnny Jennings has The sergeant then stands behind a wall of bike are still wishy-washy on whether the attack was taken the reins. Jennings has said all the right things police as the protesters walk by and says, “Wave even purposeful or not.

Every day it becomes a little more clear that regarding transparency at the department, and on goodbye, they’re all about to get gassed.”

If you watch that footage with anything close nobody is willing to hold the police accountable in Aug. 26, his department released all the footage Though CMPD would not release the man’s to a critical eye, it could not be more clear what this city.

On Aug. 28, we published a detailed account of the now-infamous kettling incident that took place during protests in Uptown on June 2.

For those who aren’t aware, the incident involved riot police using tear gas to trap protesters on East 4th Street between South College and South Tryon streets then shooting down on them from above with pepper balls, which are similar to paintballs but filled with a chemical agent.

Though there were unconfirmed reports of a protester throwing things at police officers and others spraying some unknown substance at them about 30 minutes prior to this attack, by the time officers carried out the ambush, they did so on hundreds of peacefully marching protesters.

Queen City Nerve publisher Justin LaFrancois recorded the entire incident on a live-stream video. He was in the midst of the group, documenting the protest, and ended up trapped alongside them. He and a group of others had to pull up a closed garage door and escape underneath it as he nearly asphyxiated from the barrage of tear gas and pepper balls.

PROTESTERS TAKE COVER AFTER BEING CORRALLED ON 4TH STREET ON JUNE 2.

When you watch Justin’s footage, you can feel his panic viscerally. He has told me multiple times that he has never felt so close to death as he they say they have from the night of June 2. That name, Queen City Nerve confirmed through happened that night. The problem here is not a lack did in that moment, and this man has been through includes 57 videos taken from body cameras that two sources that he is Sgt. Scott Sherwood. The of transparency, it’s a lack of accountability. Majors some shit. His raw, unfiltered reaction to what was officers were wearing that night, and a handful of department announced on the day of the release answer to Deputy Chiefs, and Deputy Chiefs answer happening is part of why the footage went viral. surveillance videos taken from nearby cameras. that Sherwood has been suspended for two to the Chief. If there were any accountability in this Millions of people have viewed the live-stream Despite claims to the contrary by department weeks for making “unprofessional, insensitive and department whatsoever, Dance would be answering video that he took that night. Almost immediately, officials, the footage confirms that the trapping of unacceptable” comments in the video. for his actions that night.

Justin’s coverage led to calls for reform from local, peaceful protesters with gas on East 4th Street that Without that, transparency means nothing.

His suspension ended on the day that this paper state and national leaders. And then the discussion night was a planned ambush that was devised by hit the streets. Neither Dance nor Rorie have been RPITKIN@QCNERVE.COM just sort of … stopped.

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TRANSPARENCY IS NOT ACCOUNTABILITY

THE OUTBREAK OF CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019 (COVID-19) MAY BE STRESSFUL FOR PEOPLE. FEAR AND ANXIETY ABOUT A DISEASE CAN BE OVERWHELMING AND CAUSE STRONG EMOTIONS IN ADULTS AND CHILDREN. COPING WITH STRESS WILL MAKE YOU, THE PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT, AND YOUR COMMUNITY STRONGER. EVERYONE REACTS DIFFERENTLY TO STRESSFUL SITUATIONS. HOW YOU RESPOND TO THE OUTBREAK CAN DEPEND ON YOUR BACKGROUND, THE THINGS THAT MAKE YOU DIFFERENT FROM OTHER PEOPLE, AND THE COMMUNITY YOU LIVE IN.

 -Fear and worry about your own health and the health of your loved ones -Changes in sleep or eating patterns -Difficulty sleeping or concentrating -Worsening of chronic health problems -Increased use of alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs

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Hearing about the pandemic repeatedly can be upsetting.

-Take care of your body. Take deep breaths, stretch, or meditate. Try to eat healthy, well-balanced meals, exercise regularly, get plenty of sleep, and avoid alcohol and drugs.

-Make time to unwind. Try to do some other activities you enjoy.

-Connect with others. Talk with people you trust about your concerns and how you are feeling. Â? Â?

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ONLINE THERAPY OPTIONS

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OPEN PATH COLLECTIVE

A nonprofit that connects people with private practice therapists that choose to participate.

Digital therapy is available for a $59 membership tinyurl.com/opcollective

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PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

An interactive website where users can enter their zip code to find a counseling professional near them online with phone and video options available. tinyurl.com/psychtodayonline €€

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NEWS & OPINION FEATURE

A BLACK HISTORY OF CHARLOTTE: PART 4

How redlining, blockbusting and ‘urban renewal’ victimized the Black community

BY PAMELA GRUNDY

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The following is the fourth in a five-part history of Black culture in Charlotte. Visit qcnerve.com for the first three parts and stay tuned for the final installment in our next issue.

On February 9, 1960, two hundred welldressed Johnson C. Smith students walked out of the campus gates and began the two-mile trek down Beatties Ford Road to the center of town.

Their journey took them through a city shaped by six decades of Jim Crow segregation.

Behind them, a network of Black neighborhoods fanned out to the north and west, including Biddleville, University Park, Lincoln Heights, Druid Hills, and Greenville.

Just down the road, they passed through the western edge of a circle of white neighborhoods that ringed the center city, among them Seversville, Wilmore, Dilworth, Belmont, and Midwood. Closer in, they walked by two of the smaller Black communities scattered around the city: Fairview, which centered on Fairview Elementary School, and the Black section of Third Ward, grouped around Isabella Wyche Elementary and the historically Black Good Samaritan Hospital.

Once downtown, they headed for stores where they were allowed to shop but not to eat. They took seats at the lunch counters and asked politely to be served. The Charlotte sit-ins had begun.

Across the South, student-led sit-ins galvanized national attention and brought new energy to the civil rights movement. But they were far from the only forces affecting Black communities. In many cities, including Charlotte, civil rights gains took place against a backdrop of community destruction.

On January 19, 1960, Charlotte’s city council approved a “slum razing” project funded by a massive federal program called “urban renewal.” It

targeted the Brooklyn neighborhood — the historic heart of Charlotte’s Black community.

On April 8, the city unveiled plans for a massive new highway system that routed two major expressways — I-77 and the Northwest Expressway (now the Brookshire Freeway) — through Black neighborhoods on the west side of town.

Over the next decade, even as the civil rights movement won African Americans new opportunities, urban renewal and highway construction tore at the social fabric that Black Charlotteans had woven during the long era of Jim Crow.

“The church I attended: leveled,” recalled Ed Anderson, whose childhood home fell victim to the bulldozers.“The elementary school I attended: leveled.

My home: erased. All of our little community was just wiped out and we were scattered everywhere.”

valuable property” was “covered with houses that are among the worst in the entire city.”

This theme of substandard housing saturated the urban renewal endeavor. In December 1961, at the ceremony that marked the project’s start, Mayor Stan Brookshire picked up a sledgehammer, sent it crashing into the porch of the dilapidated house at 310 South Davidson. He then turned to Redevelopment Commission Chairman Elmer Rozier, who stood waiting with a second hammer at the other end.

“In the years to come,” Rozier proclaimed before taking his swing, “no one in Charlotte will have to live in a house like this.”

That simple statement obscured far more than it revealed.

Most important, it ignored the many lovingly

as bad investments. This designation — which became known as “redlining” — made it almost impossible for African Americans to get bank loans to buy or improve property in historically Black neighborhoods.

White leaders’ proclamations about the need for better housing also conveniently overlooked a key reason substandard housing existed to begin with: Renting rundown dwellings to low-income African Americans was highly profitable.

“The investment is low, return high and taxes negligible,” Charlotte Observer writer Joe Doster explained in a 1960 article. According to Doster’s assessment, the average Brooklyn rental had a tax value of about $1,000, cost just over $15 in annual property taxes, and if rented at the typical $10 a week could bring in $520 a year.

Rental houses were often owned by absentee white landlords who had acquired Brooklyn property in the 1920s and ’30s.

“As many of the older [Black] citizens died out, their property was turned over to new landlords,” recalled Rose Leary Love, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1910s. “Large lots were dissected. New alleys were created and lined with undesirable houses that were packed one on the other with hardly any space between them . . . In other places, creeks and ditches were used as homesites, and homes were placed as near the water as possible in the owners’ efforts to eke out a spot on which to erect four walls for a house.”

A house at 301 South Davidson Street, built in the early 1910s, was a prime example. It sat on a parcel of land that had been purchased by AME Zion Bishop Thomas Lomax in 1900. After Lomax died in 1908, the land ended up in the hands MAYOR STAN BROOKSHIRE AND ELMER ROZIER START THE DEMOLITION OF BROOKLYN. CHARLOTTE REDEVELOPMENT COMMISSION RECORDS, J. MURREY ATKINS LIBRARY, UNC CHARLOTTE. of retired white physician Alexander Redfern.

Although the Redfern family left Charlotte “Urban Renewal” maintained dwellings that contradicted claims that for Virginia in the 1930s, they continued to own Charlotte’s white leaders had set their sights Brooklyn was simply a “slum” that needed to be the property and rent the houses on it until the on Brooklyn as early as 1912, reasoning that “this “razed.”

Redevelopment Commission purchased it in 1961. section, because of its proximity to the center “My momma had renovated that house,” city, must sooner or later be utilized by the white Barbara Crawford Steele recalled of her Brooklyn Development at any cost population.” home. “We had electric lights — they put electric Finding better homes for families was also In general, Charlotte’s white business and lights in the house and they put a furnace in. We not the Redevelopment Commission’s top priority. political elite championed small government and had three bedrooms, we had a living room, a dining As Observer columnist Kays Gary noted, the resisted federal involvement in local affairs. But room, a kitchen, and a great big front yard and a Commission chose to start Phase One of the project when the Housing Act of 1949 allocated federal great big back yard. It meant everything to us. We in one of Brooklyn’s most prosperous areas, a place funds to purchase and demolish “slum housing,” loved that house.” that held plenty of houses “in good condition,” as they leaped at the chance to wipe Brooklyn off the It was far from easy to improve buildings well as “smoke shops, grills, drug stores, one of the map. in Brooklyn. The federal Home Owners’ Loan city’s two Negro theaters, a few food stores, barber The rhetoric that accompanied the city’s efforts Corporation, which underwrote a massive and beauty shops . . . some churches and the Phyllis no longer focused on race. Rather, white leaders expansion of home ownership in the postwar Wheatley YWCA.” lamented that some of Charlotte’s “potentially most era, uniformly designated Black neighborhoods Urban renewal, Gary made clear, had far more to

NEWS & OPINION FEATURE

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do with white leaders’ desire to remake downtown than with the welfare of Brooklyn residents.

“Thoroughfare planners have cited an immediate need for rights-of-way here,” he continued, referencing the highway plan. “One block of the area is required for the new government center.” The area was also “closest to the central business section and consists of land most readily marketable for mostneeded building sites in expansion of the midtown business district.”

The sweeping changes underscored African Americans’ limited political and economic power.

“Everybody in Brooklyn was very upset about it,” Barbara Steele explained. “Somebody was always speaking out, you’d see people standing on the streets speaking out about it, how they were taking homes from people. But whatever they wanted to do that’s what they did.”

The Redevelopment Commission began buying Brooklyn land early in 1961 and started tearing down houses at the end of the year. But the process moved slowly, leaving devastation in its wake. By August of 1963, Brooklyn held several hundred “vacant, rotting buildings.” Fires became common.

Highway construction extended the disruption into neighborhoods on the Black west side.

Expressways consumed huge amounts of land — the roads themselves could be 200 to 300 feet wide, and interchanges covered as much as 50 acres each.

Charlotte’s plan sent I-77 plunging through Lincoln Heights, joined it to the Northwest Expressway (now the Brookshire Freeway) in the heart of Greenville, and then to the Independence Expressway (now I-277) at the edge of Third Ward.

The Northwest Expressway continued on through Biddleville, just above the Johnson C. Smith campus, on its way out to I-85.

What had once been a landscape of closely linked communities became a group of islands divided by wide swaths of concrete.

Leaving Brooklyn As Brooklyn’s residents scrambled to find new homes, Black leaders such as Reginald Hawkins and Kelly Alexander called on the city to build more public housing. But city officials were more responsive to Charlotte’s powerful real estate sector, which staunchly opposed the idea. While federal regulations finally forced the city to build some new public housing — most prominently First Ward’s Earle Village — most Black families ended up fending for themselves on the open market.

Then as now, Charlotte suffered from a shortage of affordable housing. Urban renewal added to the problem. The housing shortage, along with persisting discrimination, sharply limited options for low-income Black renters, who often ended up paying higher rents than whites for comparable dwellings.

The relatively low prices paid for Brooklyn homes also limited homeowners’ choices. “From what they gave us for our house, we couldn’t buy another house, we had to pay down on a house in order to move in,” Barbara Steele explained. “We had to move in a house that wasn’t as nice as the one we were in, but we had no choice, we didn’t have enough money to get something else.”

As growing numbers of Black renters looked for new places to live, entrepreneurial investors turned their eyes to the white working-class neighborhoods just outside downtown. By 1965, homeowners in Belmont, Seversville and similar communities were inundated by a “flood of real estate men” eager to make money by purchasing homes that they could rent to Black tenants.

Blockbusting — using the threat of an influx of Black neighbors to frighten white owners into leaving — became a common tactic.

“He asked me if I were interested in selling,” one Belmont resident told a reporter about the man who stopped by her home in the fall of 1965. “I said ‘No.’ He said he just thought with so many colored people moving in I might want to sell it.”

Neighborhoods tried to rally together, and city officials denounced blockbusting on several occasions. But by the mid-1970s the ring of close-in neighborhoods had become predominantly Black.

Market economics also influenced which businesses and institutions populated the new downtown. Cleared Brooklyn land was sold to the highest bidders — at prices few Black institutions could afford.

In 1965, for example, white First Baptist Church made plans to move to Brooklyn, spending $439,000 on 8.5 acres of land between Caldwell and Davidson streets. Barely a block away sat Friendship Baptist, an African-American church that had occupied the corner of First and Brevard since 1893. As the bulldozers neared, Friendship’s members decided to spend $35,000 on land for a new, larger building in suburban Northwood Estates.

“There were questions as to why First Baptist can move [to Brooklyn] and we can’t,” Friendship pastor Coleman Kerry, Jr. said of his parishioners.

“They have to accept the answer. They know we didn’t have $400,000.”

School closings In addition to the disruptions caused by urban renewal and highway construction, African Americans had to contend with the closing of many of their beloved schools. Faced with growing federal pressure to desegregate, the Charlotte Mecklenburg school board adopted a strategy common across the South: Instead of working to integrate Black schools, it simply closed them. In the summer of 1969, board members voted to shutter all of the center city’s historically Black schools: Fairview, Alexander Street, Bethune, Isabella Wyche, and — the greatest shock of all — Second Ward High School.

The announcement sparked widespread outrage. A protest petition gathered 19,000 signatures. African-American residents packed the next school board meeting.

“You force our back against the wall and you ask us once again to have good faith,” A.M.E. Zion minister George Leake thundered at board members. “Every time we have faith, you treat us like a bunch of dogs.”

Coleman Kerry Jr., the board’s only Black member, called on his colleagues to rethink the plan. But the majority stood fast. None of the targeted schools opened that fall.

“There was a lot of ‘Uh-oh. I see what they’re going to do to us,’” recalled Angela Wood Fritz, whose father worked at Second Ward. “‘They’re going to close down all of our schools and make us move.’ . . . It was just all of a sudden. Bam: ‘This is how it’s going to be.

Deal with it.’ There was a lot of anger.”

At the end of the last service conducted at Brooklyn United Presbyterian Church, parishioners held hands and formed a friendship chain around the sanctuary, just as the church’s founders had done more than 50 years before. Singing and praying, they pledged to carry on. They eventually joined with First Ward’s Seventh Street Presbyterian to form First United Presbyterian.

Displaced businesses sought out new locations, primarily on the west side. But with their customers dispersed across the city, they faced an uphill climb.

Some prospered. Many did not.

In 1972, residents of Greenville filed a lawsuit that eventually forced the city to create more low-income housing for displaced residents. The supply, however, would continue to fall far short of the need.

Most Black homeowners in the west side’s newer suburban neighborhoods remained in the neat, modern homes they had worked so hard to acquire.

Families able to buy new homes could for the first time look beyond the old Jim Crow boundaries.

Those were forced to rent had fewer choices.

Some found homes in the city’s few public housing complexes. Others moved from one rental to another, dependent once again on absentee landlords who profited from renting to low-income Black tenants.

Contending with the “root shock” of displacement, many families struggled to reweave the supportive social fabric that had served them so well during segregation. “We lost contact with a lot of people,” Ed Anderson recalled. The results of that trauma remain with us today.

Aftermath In 1960, Brooklyn held more than a thousand structures and nearly 9,000 residents. The other affected communities —Third Ward, First Ward, Greenville, a corner of Dilworth — contained still more. By the early 1970s, the people had been scattered and most of the buildings were gone. The endeavor had cost nearly $60 million in public funds.

Only four of Brooklyn’s buildings remain today: Second Ward High’s gymnasium, on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard; Grace AME Zion Church and the offices of the Mecklenburg Investment Company, both at Third and Brevard streets; and the former McCrorey YMCA, at Third and Caldwell. Three historically Black buildings remain in First Ward: First United Presbyterian at Seventh and College, Little Rock AME Zion at Seventh and McDowell, and the United House of Prayer for All People on South Davidson.

Black Charlotteans tried to make the best of a situation over which they had almost no control.

Resources Thomas Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998, new edition 2020).

Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liverright Publishing Corporation, 2017).

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (One World Books, 2005).

Brooklyn Oral History Project: brooklyn-oralhistory.uncc.edu/ (Barbara Crawford Steele interview) Willie Griffin (curator) “Brooklyn: Once a City Within a City,” Levine Museum of the New South: qcnerve.com/ levine-brings-brooklyn-back-to-life-with-new-exhibit/ INFO@QCNERVE.COM

NEWS & OPINION COLUMN

THE SUFFRAGIST NO NEED TO WAIT

In North Carolina, voting begins in September

BY RHIANNON FIONN

If you’re running behind on all things voting, now is the time to get caught up. Make sure you’re registered, or update your registration, on the N.C. State Board of Elections (NCSBE) recently revamped website (https://www.ncsbe.gov/).

Then, if you haven’t yet, request your absentee ballot here (https://votebymail.ncsbe.gov/app/ home).

If you have already requested your absentee ballot from the Board of Elections, know that ballots began hitting the mail on Sept. 4, making our state the first to begin voting in the 2020 general election. The deadline for requesting an absentee ballot is Oct. 27.

“It has to be in my office by the 27th,” says Michael Dickerson, the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections (BOE) Director.

However, as we warned in July, it’s a bad idea to wait until the last minute. For one thing, the mail may be running slowly. But another important consideration is that if there are issues with your request you want to allow enough time to correct any errors.

To request an absentee ballot, you must share personally identifying information to help the BOE verify that you are a registered voter in this county.

“If [the application] is incomplete I do not send out the ballot,” says Dickerson, who recommends that you call his office if you need assistance with the application.

Not only do you want to allow for enough time to correct any errors with your ballot request, you want to allow enough time to correct any errors on your actual ballot. Once you receive your ballot back from the BOE, complete it and return it ASAP. Take your time and make sure you follow the directions carefully; sign it – a witness must sign it, too – and don’t forget your first-class stamp.

Fortunately, in August, a North Carolina judge ruled that county BOEs can’t just throw out ballots with errors, they must give voters a chance to correct their ballots.

The Mecklenburg County BOE’s mailing address is P.O. Box 31788, Charlotte, N.C., 28231. But what if you don’t trust the post office?

You can hand-deliver your absentee ballot request, and your completed ballot for that matter, to the BOE office.

You can also submit your completed ballot in person to an election official at a one-stop early voting site during hours when that site is open for voting. Be sure to wear a mask and know you can’t just toss it into the door; you’ll need to spend a minute with an official while they process your ballot.

The Mecklenburg BOE office address is 741 Kenilworth Ave., Suite 202, Charlotte. The BOE has not yet announced the sites for early voting, which will take place Oct. 15 through Oct. 31.

If you decide to drop off your absentee ballot in person, know this: Per state law, you may only drop off ballots for “near relatives”(mother, father, children, grandparents, stepfamily). You’re going to have to spend time with the clerk explaining your relationships with each and every person whose ballot you submit, says Dickerson. And make sure you’re in the right county; you can only vote in your county of residence.

Your VALID Vote Will Be Counted Claims that some absentee ballots won’t be counted are false.

According to Dickerson, “That’s the furthest thing from the truth. Even if the race is over and done with and someone wins by 10,000 votes, we still count all of those ballots that are properly sent to us.”

Get your absentee ballot in on time and it will be counted. “In order to have it counted for Election Day, absentee ballots must be in my office by 5 p.m. on Election Day,” says Dickerson. “I will count all ballots that come in that are postmarked Election Day – not mailed, postmarked – if received by the Friday after the election by 5 p.m.”

Another critical reminder: It is a felony to vote twice. As Dickerson told us in July, if you request an absentee ballot that does not mean you absolutely must vote via mail. However, you don’t have to use your absentee ballot.

“You may vote that ballot. You may not vote that ballot. You may decide to throw it away and vote in person,” he says, adding, “Don’t do both; I’ll send an investigator out to you because that’s

a violation of law.”

There are protocols in place to prevent double voting, and you don’t get take backs if you vote then change your mind. If you vote by mail then try to vote in person you will be stopped.

If you try to game the system by doing both on the same day, the in-person vote will prevail. And, yes, says Dickerson regarding absentee ballots, “Each one is inspected by the Board.”

Your absentee ballot is unique to you. It will have a barcode on it that helps the BOE track it through their system. The state board will soon launch a new BallotTrax portal so you, too, can track your ballot online. Check for the portal’s launch via the NCSBE Twitter page.

Review Your Sample Ballot Now When you look up your registration, you’ll also be able to access your sample ballot for this year’s election.

Remember: It’s not all about the presidential race. There are also congressional races, the governor’s race, judges – quite a lot of them – and other important state races. There are races for the N.C. General Assembly and we’re voting for Mecklenburg County Commissioners, too.

And, here in Charlotte, there are three bonds on this year’s ballots.

If you review your sample ballot now, you can take your time in deciding who you will vote for and whether or not you want to support the bond referendums. Not every race is a choice between a Republican or a Democrat, there are non-partisan races this election cycle and, in some races, you’ll see choices for “third” parties, too.

Your vote is important. Decide with care, and prepare to decide soon.

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

Pg. 8 SEP 9 - SEP 22, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM

Join Queen City Nerve in discussions about local news topics over cocktails with featured guests on the Queen City Podcast Network.

www.queencitypodcastnetwork.com/noozehounds

NEWS & OPINION FEATURE

provides no relief for housing or utility payments property owner to be considered protected under evictions that is this broad and this all-encompassing. as we enter the fall and winter months and as the the moratorium. Tenants must sign off that they It does seem like an extraordinary move by the pandemic and economic downturn continue to meet all of the following requirements: income is federal government,” Sturgill said. “There’s a lot of bring unprecedented hardship to North Carolina less than $99,000, did not have to pay income tax hope for tenants who are facing eviction but also families.” in 2019, and/or received a stimulus check; unable a lot of logistically trying to scramble to figure out, HB 1105, known also as Coronavirus Relief Act to pay rent due to income loss or extraordinary out- how is this going to work? How are these protections 3.0, passed through the N.C. House and, at the time of-pocket medical expenses; and would become going to work for everybody?”

Why advocates say the of publication, is expected to be signed by Gov. Roy homeless or need to double-up (stay with friends or Some parts of the moratorium leave room for federal eviction moratorium Cooper. It does not include any new funding for family) if evicted. legal subjectivity, such as the question around isn’t enough rental or utility assistance, instead placing funds Tenants must also promise under oath in the people who live in hotels. In August, Queen City previously dedicated to such in a larger pool with a affidavit that they will continue to make partial Nerve spoke with Ethiopia Williams, who has lived

BY RYAN PITKIN range of possible uses, according to NC Policy Watch. payments using their “best efforts” to do so “as the in a hotel with her 9-year-old daughter for two years House Bill 1200, which was filed in May and has individual’s circumstances may permit, taking into after an eviction on her record made it hard for her A new moratorium on evictions went into effect been languishing in committee since, would provide account other non-discretionary expenses.” to find housing despite working multiple jobs. nationwide on Friday, Sept. 4, and will last through $400 million to residents who have been impacted A tenant needs only to print out the affidavit, Sturgill pointed out that the order applies to December, but some local activists say without most by the COVID-19 crisis. which can be found in the moratorium order itself, renters on any residential property, house, building, financial relief to help renters apartment, mobile home, or land climb out of the hole caused by the that’s been rented. However, COVID-19 pandemic, a moratorium what’s in the cards for people who is not enough. live permanently in hotels?

Housing rights activists with “The order does state that the Tenant Organizing Resource if you’re a ‘seasonal tenant’ or a Center (TORC) delivered their own guest at a hotel, this does not eviction notices to members of the protect you,” Sturgill said, “but North Carolina General Assembly families that live in hotels as their (NCGA) on Sept. 3, as community permanent residence may have members spoke about their own an argument that this does still experiences with eviction and apply.” protested the NCGA’s ongoing Sturgill said his team is failure to provide adequate relief working to clear up legal questions during the biggest eviction crisis like that and provide more in U.S. history. The previous day, information, including the order the group rallied in front of the itself and the affidavit needed Mecklenburg County Courthouse for tenants who want to claim its for the same cause. protections, on the Legal Aid of NC A statewide moratorium on website. evictions began in March and In the meantime, local ended on June 20. In Mecklenburg activists will continue to push for County, eviction proceedings, more relief on the ground for those known as summary ejectment affected most directly by the rent PHOTO BY JESSICA MORENO/ TORC hearings, resumed in July 20. HOUSING ADVOCATES OUTSIDE OF THE N.C. STATE LEGISLATIVE BUILDING ON SEPT. 3. shortfall.

The new order does not offer Apryl Lewis, a Charlotteretroactive protections to people who have been However temporarily, the moratorium on then sign and deliver it to their landlord or property based housing advocate who spent much of 2019 evicted between the end of the first moratorium evictions will surely help many people who were owner. Landlords do not need to formally accept helping families being displaced from the Lake and the beginning of the next one, which is being at urgent risk of becoming homeless in September the affidavit, tenants only need to be able to show Arbor apartment complex in west Charlotte, helped enacted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It’s and the coming months. Isaac Sturgill, managing that they have attempted to deliver it. Sturgill organize Thursday’s protest in Raleigh and explained estimated that 542,000 renter households in North attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Housing recommended that any tenant who files an affidavit why in a release leading up to the action.

Carolina are experiencing a rent shortfall.

Practice Group, held a virtual press conference on make two copies, so as to have one for their own “We have been fighting eviction and the “The recently announced nationwide eviction Sept. 2 laying out the steps for tenants to apply for records. cycle of displacement our community faces daily moratorium by the CDC still leaves many people protections under the new moratorium.

Sturgill said he was “floored” by the moratorium, before the pandemic and will continue to fight for vulnerable and does nothing to address the financial The moratorium does not automatically apply which was handed down by the CDC on Sept. 1, and our community during and after,” Lewis stated. cliff that renters and landlords will find themselves to all evictions, only those caused directly by the has not seen anything like it in his eight-year legal “Displacement is state violence.” facing at the end of the year when the moratorium COVID-19 pandemic. Tenants who meet certain career representing tenants.

INFO@QCNERVE.COM expires,” read a press release from TORC. “[House requirements must file an affidavit with their “In my lifetime I have not seen a moratorium on Bill] 1105, which just passed in the N.C. Senate,

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KICKING THE CAN

ARTS FEATURE

THAT SACRED SOUND New book and exhibit celebrate the genius of Freeman Vines

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BY PAT MORAN

For nearly 50 years, Freeman Vines has carved guitars out of all sorts of wood, including the steps of an old tobacco barn and the soundboard of a dissembled Steinway piano. But in 2015, the unsuspecting African-American luthier, sculptor and mystic bought some wood that would go on to change the rest of his life.

Vines remembers that he went to purchase the wood from an old man demolishing a building down the road from Vines’ shop in his hometown of Fountain, North Carolina.

“He said, ‘You might not want to take that wood. A man were hung on that tree,’” Freeman recalls to Queen City Nerve.

Days later, Timothy Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation (MMRF) and a worldrenowned photographer with work in the National Gallery of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and Northwestern University, among other galleries and museums, visited Vines for the first time. “[Vines] pointed out some planks of wood to me and said, ‘That comes from the hanging tree, and I am making a hanging-tree guitar,’” Duffy says. “Being in the music business and trying to promote things, that title went straight to my brain.”

Before crafting that guitar, Vines couldn’t have guessed how it would catapult his life in a whole new direction. Last June, he opened his first solo exhibit at the Greenville Museum of Art, less than 25 miles from his birthplace in eastern North Carolina.

Vines, his spiritual philosophy and his art are also the subject of a sumptuous book, published by The Bitter Southerner in association with MMRF.

The sculptor, who plied his trade as a blues guitarist before turning to guitar-making, has steadfastly refused to sell any of his guitars, chasing prospective collectors away. But he showed them to Duffy that day because Duffy had come to photograph Vines’ handiwork with a process as traditional and hand-crafted as Vines’ approach to Hidden in plain sight But all that was five years in the future when building guitars: the collodion wet plate process, Duffy stepped into Vines’ yard for the first time in used to create tintypes.

“You have to mix the chemicals yourself,” Duffy 2015. He knew at once that he was in an artist’s says of tintype making. “You have to cut the tin and space.

The Southern yard, especially in an African- fiddle with the camera. In any part of the process American community, is a sacred spot, Duffy offers, you can totally screw up.”

The result of juxtaposing Duffy’s familiar yet a space where a person can express themselves and reflect their personality. At the same time an otherworldly images with Vines’ words is magical, Duffy says, and can be seen in Hanging Tree Guitars. Duffy feels the book’s layout and design allowed him to chase Vines’ ideas.

On that very first visit, which would be the starting point for a close friendship and partnership, Vines showed Duffy the two planks of black walnut wood, all that was left of the lynching tree where a Black man named Oliver Moore was purportedly murdered 90 years ago.

Duffy remembers going into Vines’ shop. On a manila envelope Duffy found a drawing Vines had FREEMAN VINES WORKS IN HIS WORKSHOP, 2017 made. It pictured a PHOTO BY TIMOTHY DUFFY tree with a rope and a guitar hanging from African-American artist also has to keep his work it. It was the earliest vision for what would become invisible to the white community. Otherwise whites Hanging Tree Guitars. will steal it or destroy it, Duffy says.

The unseen world “Freeman started pulling guitars out of piles in Vines remembers that the sound shot through his yard under linoleum,” Duffy remembers. “He was him like an electric shock. He was leaving his shop hiding all his prized possessions in plain sight.”

Dozens of rough-hewn yet elegant guitars, late one evening when it struck like lightning in myriad and fantastic shapes, unpainted and and nearly drove him crazy. Vines says he’s been showing their wood grain, were on the property. searching for that sound ever since, trying to capture The guitars’ pickups had also been fashioned by it in many of the guitars he made. So far, it’s eluded him.

Vines out of old radio parts.

Featuring text by Vines and folklorist Zoe Van Buren, and illustrated with Duffy’s evocative and mysterious tintype images, the volume dropped on Sept. 1. The exhibit and the book share a title: Hanging Tree Guitars.

But he has found the spirit within wood.

“The thing about wood is, wood has a soul,” Vines says. “The hanging tree wood, that gave me a feeling I never experienced.”

In a conversation with Dr. Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Vines went into more detail. “[The wood] had all that stuff in there,” Vines said. “It sounded kind of strange when I hooked it up with pickups, so I left it alone.”

Not every piece of wood that comes into Vines’ hands becomes a guitar, the sculptor told Dr. Ezeluomba. He told of another piece of wood, much vaunted by its seller for its superior vibrations. Vines had hoped to find his elusive sound with it, but in disappointment he turned the wood into a guitar where the body resembles a mask.

The mask-guitar led Dr. Ezeluomba to compare Vines’ sculpture, including his guitars, to traditional African masks, and not just because the aesthetics are similar.

“I see you as a vessel,” Dr. Ezeluomba said to Vines. “You are the process through which spirit manifests itself,” likening Vines to the African maskmakers who are also conduits for forces from an unseen world.

Vines is no stranger to that unseen world, with interests ranging from the pagan religion Wicca to 19th-century occultist Madam Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, an amalgam of Western esoteric beliefs and Eastern religions. In the Theosophical view, space is not only boundless, it also contains of a number of unperceived dimensions. It’s a concept not unlike the multiverse posited by physicists.

“There are dimensions that are as real as this one,” Vines tells Queen City Nerve. He offers that it’s easy to get out to those dimensions, but not so easy getting back to ours.

“I know the proper incantations, the [magic] circles and going to the trees,” he elaborates.

Vines also speaks of meditation. “[You can] keep on going deeper and deeper until you realize that having an OOB, an out-of-body experience. And that’s when it gets dangerous.”

Duffy says the guitar maker is a voracious reader, recently racing through the epic medieval AngloSaxon poem Beowulf for fun.

“Who reads Beowulf for fun?” Duffy asks. “He’s got me reading The Egyptian Book of the Dead, so I can understand what he’s talking about.”

Duffy says Vines has taught him the spiritual nature of things, which may be why he takes it seriously when Vines feels power in the hanging tree wood.

ARTS FEATURE

Pg. 11 SEP 9 - SEP 22, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM

“[Vines] talked to me about how the blood of the fellow that was lynched was coming into him in his dreams and thoughts,” Duffy says. “It was obvious to him that the wood spoke to him.”

Confronting racial terror The lynching took place in 1930 on Aspen Church Grove Road, close to where Wilson and Edgecombe counties meet, but the hanging tree is long gone.

It was a particularly brutal lynching, Duffy says.

The white men put a mule harness under Moore’s armpits and suspended him from the tree. Then they shot him 200 times.

According to folklore around Fountain, the bullet casings were so heavy on the street, the postman couldn’t deliver the mail.

Afterwards, the vigilantes left guns on a card table under the tree so anyone else could drive up and shoot the carcass.

Folklore or not, Duffy says the story taught him the realities of racial terror.

“I learned how a society can terrorize a people. They do [acts of terror] every once in a while, so everyone knows their place,” he says.

Vines has encountered that terror for most of his life.

Born in 1942 in rural Greene County, he grew up on a white man’s farm in Snow Hill. Both Vines and his mother worked for the owner.

“My mother was a house woman. I know you know what that is,” he says flatly. “She was a house nigger.”

Vines went to jail for the first time at age 14.

For what, he will not say. In 1964, at 22, he and some white men got caught with two 500-gallon moonshine stills, Duffy says. The white guys walked, but Vines did time in the federal penitentiary system.

He spent a total of five years, first in Atlanta and then in Tallahassee, Florida, with a ball and chain attached to his leg. He still bears the scars.

Though Vines learned to read and write in the penitentiary, in Hanging Tree Guitars he’s emphatic about the nature of his incarceration.

“The college I went to is spelled C-H-A-I-N G-AN-G.”

“Freeman has suffered deeply and painfully,” Duffy says.

At the same time, Duffy believes Vines’ body of work, which includes all his guitars, is a statement on how to address racial terror.

“It’s art of resistance,” Duffy says. Although a code of silence remains in small towns throughout the Carolinas, it will only change when voices like Vines’ are heard, Duffy believes.

And lately Vines’ voice has grown louder. Some of his work was part of We Will Walk — Art and Resistance in the American South, a group show at the Turner Contemporary art gallery in the United Kingdom last February.

In June, Vines’ debut solo exhibition went up in his home community at the Greenville Museum

up a sustainability program for traditional artists.

“They’re the cultural wellspring of America’s greatest export, our music,” Duffy offers.

He also feels that eastern North Carolina has been overlooked in the narrative about American music.

Those who point to Mississippi as the birthplace of the blues and New Orleans as the cradle of jazz are forgetting our history, Duffy maintains.

In the colonial South, more than half of all the enslaved people that were brought to this country came through the eastern Carolinas and the Piedmont, Duffy asserts.

“This is where the first people were enslaved and this is where African-American music was first created.”

In 1994, Duffy launched Music Maker Relief

FIELD OF GUITARS, 2017 PHOTO BY TIMOTHY DUFFY

of Art. The exhibit, which engages memory, racial identity, and spirituality — themes that thread through all of Vines’ work — is open to groups of 10 or less by reservation, and boasts a steady stream of visitors, Duffy says.

Let the music lead you For Duffy, his visit to Vines’ home in 2015 was an unexpected result of a passion that took hold when he was 16 years old. At that early age, an interest in ethnomusicology spurred him to start recording and photographing traditional folk, gospel and blues artists throughout the South.

After studying music in Mombasa, Kenya, Duffy was introduced to Piedmont blues while earning a master’s degree in Folklore at UNC Chapel Hill.

“All the people I worked with had the greatest talent but were really poor,” Duffy says. Realizing that there was little space for traditional artists in a fame-obsessed music industry, he determined to set

Foundation along with his wife Denise. The nonprofit takes a people-first approach, Duffy explains, preserving the traditional music of the South by supporting the musicians who make it. The foundation focuses on sustenance, education and performance.

“This work is real social equity,” Duffy says.

Tour support is one of three tent poles for MMRF’s sustenance approach. Many traditional musicians are too poor to tour, Duffy offers. So, the organization acts like a small bank, paying for airplane tickets, meals and hotel rooms for artists who’ve never owned a credit card, then collecting on its micro-loan after the tour has made a profit.

The foundation also focuses on education, releasing books like Hanging Tree Guitars, and mounting exhibits like the one at Greenville Museum of Art to let people know about artists like Vines, Lightnin’ Wells, Pinetop Perkins, Johnny Ray Daniels and others.

Several of these artists perform on a full-length album, released in tandem with the Hanging Trees Guitars book, with which it shares its title. On the collection, Daniels plays a guitar carved and crafted

by Vines on the song “Somewhere to Lay My Head.”

MMRF also provides musicians with sustenance, Duffy says, offering basic aid for artists living in chronic poverty. When people are living on just a few hundred dollars a month, receiving aid for food and home repair is a big deal, Duffy offers.

“We’ve bought homes for people that were homeless,” he says.

The nonprofit helped Vines pay for doctors’ bills and medications to get his diabetes under control.

The foundation also bought an old drugstore in Fountain, converting it into an art studio for the sculptor and guitar maker.

Shot through with sound For all the work MMRF has done, Hanging Tree Guitars and giving Vines’ art and philosophy its broadest forum yet is perhaps the most important, Duffy says.

“I think the book is a jewel,” he says. “It’s the greatest thing Music Maker has been a part of.”

In the book, Vines talks about racial terror and how it effects an artist and a community, and although Vines has been terrorized, he comes through it to a place of beauty and love.

Hanging Tree Guitars also examines the mystery of a parallel universe, Duffy says. Vines’ story offers an examination of the other side and the unseen world, told by someone who has studied it extensively.

As Dr. Ezeluomba suggests, that other side could be, in part, the source of Vines’ genius.

But with that gift, the ability to be a vessel, comes the responsibility to share that transmission from spirit.

Vines suggests that he’s often unable to control or shut off the transmission, and that consequently he’ll never stop trying to replicate it in the material world.

When asked about what message he’d like his life’s work to convey, Vines returns to the night he received an unexpected blessing that also almost drove him mad.

“It’s the sound,” Vines says. “Like the howling of a dog in the middle of the night, it’s the sound.”

PMORAN@QCNERVE.COM

ARTS FEATURE

A Language Of Our Own Beautiful Like Chai Hector Vaca Cruz is an organizer and photographer Amarra Ghani is the thoughtful leader of “Welcome Home Charlotte,” a group that was formed and is currently featured in the Levine Museum of to help resettlement and relief efforts for local refugees. The New South’s Counting Up Exhibit. Check out Hector’s work by following him on Instagram @ Follow them on Instagram @welcomehomeclt. hectorvacacruz.

Growing up in a household with Pakistani Stories of humanity from My mom is Puerto Rican. My dad was parents while living in the United States, I navigated our immigrant neighbors two worlds. It’s a delicate dance that most children Ecuadorian. After we moved from New York, they raised our family here in the South. Much of who of immigrants learn early.

BY HANNAH HASAN In our home, my parents only spoke our I am is deeply rooted in the lessons and traditions language. So when I went to elementary school, that I embraced from my mom and my dad and their The following is part of a new project in which I was required to take ESL classes for the first few background.

Hannah Hasan adapts her ongoing Muddy Turtle Talks years. While at school, I wore the American spoken-word storytelling event series for the pages of clothes; jeans and t-shirts. As soon as I got Queen City Nerve. Visit facebook.com/epochtribe to home, I would change into my Pakistani learn more and check for upcoming events. clothes.

It wasn’t about erasing my Pakistani Here’s the thing. I know — or know of — so identity while in the outside world, it was many amazing people in our community who make about learning to navigate both worlds while important and beautiful contributions to this place holding on to the language and traditions that that we call home. shaped the woman I was to become.

While I’ve had the chance to get to know some I can acknowledge the imperfect parts of them on a more intimate level, it’s not lost on of my Pakistani me that I only know culture that also most of them through exist within the their work: their art, greater American the programs and culture. Colorism.

HECTOR VACA CRUZ events they create, PHOTO COURTESY OF EPOCH TRIBE It’s a very real the organizations they problem. I was manage.

The biggest similarity in their respective cultures in my early 20s when Yes, these people’s I was inside of a was that they both speak Spanish. But Ecuadorian work is a snapshot of coffee shop and had culture is mostly Spanish and Native Indigenous who they are, but it’s a moment that I have people with some African influences. not all that they are.

Puerto Rican culture is really a blend of Spanish, never forgotten.

These people who I ordered chai. As African, and Tajino natives. As for me, I grew up make extraordinary I went to pour the tea identifying with both Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian contributions to our into the cup, I marveled with roots in New York. By college, I started to AMARRA GHANI city and our world are at the beauty of the explain it as Equo-NewYorican.

PHOTO COURTESY OF EPOCH TRIBE full human beings with A huge portion of my identity is connected to color of the chai. “Wow! stories and experiences, and those stories and What an amazing hue. That is such a vibrant and rich my language. I grew up more Puerto Rican. I spent experiences directly correlate with the way that they color that this tea has created.” I was immediately summers there when I was younger. The Puerto show up in the world. overwhelmed. It was the same as the very unique Rican side was more familiar with the ways that Welcoming Week 2020, held between Sept. color of my skin. they spoke Spanish. These family members were 12-20, is a national celebration of immigrants and It was an overwhelming moment for me. I went louder and more gregarious. It was more lighttheir contributions to the fabric of American society. into the bathroom and wept in the mirror. My skin hearted on that side.

To ring that celebration in, I decided to interview is special and beautiful and it carries the traditions The Ecuadorian side of my family is more formal some amazingly diverse Charlotteans who work to and sacrifices and the love and history of my parents in the way they speak their Spanish. I was taught lift others in our community and write stories from and their parents. It tells the stories of my family and on that side to enunciate all of my words and to use the experiences that they shared with me. my people. It deserves to be honored and cared for. better grammar. Even dinner was more formal on Through storytelling, we can get to know the I deserve to be honored and cared for. Who knew that side. You sit. You eat. “You have one mouth, you stories of Charlotteans with immigrant roots who something as small as a cup of chai could teach me a can’t do both.” are using their experiences to create the kind of lesson as big as self-love and acceptance?.

At some point, my parents developed a neutral community that we can all be proud to call home. accent between the two of them. My mom came

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A WARM WELCOME

a little over to the Ecuadorian side and my dad shifted a bit to the Puerto Rican side. So within my household, we spoke our own language that was a combination of both.

Our mixed accent has been difficult for others to understand, and that’s OK because through developing our own family language we have built a connection that is unique to us and our story.

Writing Home Kurma Murrain is a published poet and educator.

Find her bilingual book In the Prism of Your Soul for sale on Amazon.

I have my beautiful mother to thank for my love of poetry. She was an amazing woman who wasn’t afraid to be different. She was a mantissa (mixed-race) woman married to a Black man living and raising children in the mountainous city of Bogotá, Colombia, in South America.

When I think about my love for words when they come together to tell a story in a melodious way, I think about my mother reading the works of Chilean poet, diplomat and educator Gabriela Mistral to me. Her work sounded very musical, and it reminded me of the freedom that poetry has.

I was a young girl, but I started writing then. I would write to my friends. My friends would ask me to write letters for their boyfriends and girlfriends. I was famous for that.

I fell “in love” when I was 12. I wrote a very emotionally vulnerable poem. My mother asked, “What happened with this boy?” I explained that I didn’t know. It was just in my head. He didn’t know.

KURMA MURRAIN PHOTO COURTESY OF EPOCH TRIBE

ARTS FEATURE The relationship wasn’t that deep, but I understood how to capture feelings in this unique and poetic way. I learned that at a young age.

When I moved to the United States for a teaching opportunity in the ’90s, I was afraid that Charlotte would feel like a small town, and that there wouldn’t be much to do here, and that I would be so far away from my home. But I was pleasantly surprised when I got here, and I’ve been able to continue to do things that I love, like write poetry.

I think in English now. I haven’t written much poetry in Spanish but the memories — the flowers, the fields, the mountains, the food — will always be in my writing.

Colombia will always be in my writing. A greater extension of that is that somehow my mother always comes to my poems. I mention the word mother often in my poetry. It just comes. I can’t avoid it.

Since my mother is synonymous with home, I always carry her with me. Wherever I am in the world, as long as I have my poetry, I will always have my home.

Creating Meaning Liliya Zalevskaya is an artist whose work has been featured in galleries locally and in other cities.

Find out more about her work at liliyazalevskaya.com.

Philadelphia, they have a large Russian/ Ukrainian community. So when I went to school I just hung out with other Russian kids, which meant there was not a lot of pressure to learn English. My sister was a couple of years older than me and she picked up the language quicker than I did.

When we came to Charlotte, we went to International House and they did placement tests and it was determined that I would need to take ESL classes. I learned English, but there was still some insecurity there. It’s something that a lot of immigrant children experience.

When I was a kid, I was quiet and observant. I wanted to go into theatre, but when we moved here I was so shy about having an accent that I never took any theatre classes. I was fascinated by The Little Prince story books. They are by a French writer who had the idea that certain people, when they grow up, they can still have imagination but some don’t. It has all of these metaphors about looking beneath the surface and finding truth and meaning.

This really inspired me and helped to shape my career as an artist.

I like the idea of duality in things and perception is interesting to me. One of the things about growing up in Soviet culture, everyone reads between the lines. People know that whatever you say there is always a hidden meaning and a metaphor. Nothing is always just as it seems. And as a person who has learned to navigate the waters of cultural difference, I understand that if we search deeply enough we can find meaning in things and experiences that connect all of us to each other. That is a part of what I try to create in my art.

MEKI SHEWANGIZAW

PHOTO COURTESY OF EPOCH TRIBE

communities. I even worked at a refugee agency after college and it was ideal.

I always knew that at some point I would want to go back home, I signed up for a fellowship to go to Ethiopia for six months. It was magical. I stepped off the plane, and the first thing I thought was, “Wow, everyone looks like me.” And I know that might be strange for some people to understand, but the

United States is very diverse and this is the first time I go to another country and everyone looks like me.

Also, everyone was able to say my name so casually. I didn’t have to shorten it or enunciate to make it fit into their mouths. They were able to say my name — as it is — as it was given to me at birth.

There was also an instance of community, that was like a familial understanding, a feeling that you have with people that you have never met before. I’ve never felt anything like that. It was a great time for me and my family. It was an experience of a lifetime. It really helped me to understand my parents better, and what home means for me and so many like me.

America is home, a familiar place. I grew up here. When I came home from Ethiopia, my dad was cooking food and playing traditional Ethiopian jazz music. I was like, “Ahh, Home.” My physical home is like a little Ethiopia in America. And I love both of them. America is my familiar home, Ethiopia is my spiritual home.

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

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HomeGoing Meki Shewangizaw is the vice chair of Tesfa Ethiopia, an organization that helps support the children of Ethiopia. Learn more at tesfaethiopia.org.

My family moved when I was four. We came over on what was called a Diversity Immigrant Visa.

It’s kind of a lottery type of process. Every year, my dad would sign up, and every year he didn’t get chosen. People would ask him why he kept trying.

He said it doesn’t hurt to try.

LILIYA ZALEVSKAYA On his 10th year, he signed up and he got it. He PHOTO COURTESY OF EPOCH TRIBE moved to America and brought me and my siblings I was 13 when my family immigrated from and my mom a little later. We grew up in America Ukraine to the United States with refugee status. but we had a very Ethiopian household, and because Before we moved to Charlotte, we lived in of that, I’ve always felt at home in immigrant Philadelphia. I didn’t speak English but luckily in

Enjoy a moment of peace on us. www.xcoobee.com

MUSIC FEATURE

PICKIN’ FOR PROGRESS

Che Apalache frontman returns to North Carolina to make a difference

Pg. 14 SEP 9 - SEP 22, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM

BY PAT MORAN

As a Grammy-nominated bluegrass musician, Joe Troop is no stranger to making some noise himself. But with his new video series Pickin’ for Progress, he’s using his platform to inspire people to tell their stories, providing a megaphone for voices that too often go unheard.

He’s also encouraging people in rural North Carolina to reclaim their power by exercising their right to vote Stranded in Winston-Salem, a city he left soon after he came out as gay at age 19, Troop launched the Pickin’ series of mini-documentaries mixed with musical performances because he was looking for something to do. Now he may have found a new calling.

“Being able to do this project is a tremendous blessing,” Troop says. “I feel more passionate about this than … anything else I’ve done.”

That’s saying a lot. The 37-year-old banjo player and his band Che Apalache have been praised for revitalizing roots music, by taking the instruments and techniques of Southern stringband music and applying them to the rhythms and textures of Latin, African and Asian music.

Troop puts that glowing portrait in perspective.

Che Apalache is a result of the sounds and rhythms of Buenos Aires, the band’s hometown, not any predetermined plan to shake up the bluegrass establishment, he says.

“Everyone wants a mystical origin story,” Troop offers. “It’s just four people living in a city of 15 million people, messing around with different forms of music.”

Troop has lived in the Argentinian capital city for the past 10 years, and his Latin-American bandmates — Mexican banjo player Pau Barjau, and two Argentinians, guitarist Franco Martino and mandolinist Martin Bobrick— are his former music students.

“I had knowledge of the traditions and how we play the instruments. I taught them that,” Troop offers. “They’re cosmopolitan guys who listen to all

kinds of music.”

That eclecticism is apparent on the band’s acclaimed 2019 album Rearrange My Heart, which opens with “Saludo Murguero,” a greeting framed as a murga, a Uruguayan street theater tune.

The hypnotic “Maria” follows, entwining tango, percussive candombe and the rasgueado rhythms of flamenco.

Che Apalache also draws on folk music’s tradition of protest songs, saving its strongest messages for its most traditional tunes.

“The Dreamer” recounts the story of gay North

JOE TROOP OF CHE APALACHE PHOTO BY AARON GREENHOOD

Carolina resident and DACA recipient Moises Serrano, says Troop. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, or “Dreamers,” are undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children who receive eligibility for a U.S work permit plus a renewable two-year period free from the threat of deportation.

“It’s important to shine light on stories [like Serrano’s] because … the Trump administration has totally upended legal immigration and protections like DACA,” Troop says. “’The Dreamer’ is a song that hopes to humanize these dreamers and give them a voice.”

In January, when he attended the Grammy ceremony where Che Apalache was nominated for Best Folk Album, Troop walked the red carpet with Serrano

“The Wall” is another traditional tune that subverts bluegrass expectations with a progressive message, criticizing Trump’s wall, and the racist pandering it represents. “[Bluegrass] has become a stomping ground for white nationalists.” Troop says. “They think this is their music. It’s not.”

Troop points to Southern string-band music, some of it historically played by African Americans, to refute the narrative that bluegrass is based entirely on the music of white Appalachian communities. He also calls attention to the instrument he plays.

“It’s an African instrument,” Troop says.

The bluegrass establishment’s focus on straight white male players is one the biggest things that alienated Troop when he was growing up queer in Winston-Salem.

“White people in the United States over-compensate for the fragility of our own identities, which are rooted in inflicting hardship upon others and appropriating and fetishizing their cultures,” Troop maintains.

“I’m a part of that and I recognize it.”

Troop dealt with his alienation by leaving, heading off to college at UNC Chapel Hill, and then to Spain at the University of Seville. Travel seemed to set off a globetrotting chain reaction for Troop. In addition to America and Spain, he also lived in Japan before landing in Buenos Aires, where he’s settled for the last decade.

Then last March, Che Apalache was touring the U.S., when the country swiftly shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Overnight, the four members of Che Apalache had to rearrange their lives.

The two Argentinians, Martino and Bobrick, booked one of the last flights out of their country to Buenos Aires. Barjau decamped for Mexico, which hadn’t locked down yet. Troop decided to stay in the states to deal with the economic repercussions of an abruptly canceled tour.

As Troop was tying up loose ends, he was contacted by Matt Hildreth of RuralOrganizing.org, a progressive advocacy group that states on its website that its mission is “to rebuild a rural America that is empowered, thriving, and equitable.”

“Matt was challenging the narrative about rural America,” Troop remembers. He says that RuralOrganizing.org, which has been working since last summer on a campaign to strengthen the US Postal Service, challenged Troop to write a song about the service.

The song, “A Plea to the US Government to Fully

Fund the Postal Service,” went viral in April, when Troop debuted it online.

It went viral again in August when Troop performed it in front of hundreds of protesters at the Greensboro home of embattled US Postmaster Louis DeJoy. The following Monday, Troop played the song and a few others at Marshall Park in Charlotte on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

In July, RuralOrganizing.org launched VoteNC.org, a coalition of North Carolina grassroots organizations devoted to a varied slate of projects across the state.

VoteNC.org’s goal is to encourage people to volunteer with grassroots organizations to help with a number of causes including getting out the vote, Troop says.

The purpose of the Pickin’ for Progress videos, which can be seen on YouTube and Facebook, is to get people to volunteer for VoteNC.org and pick which organizations they want to work with, Troop offers.

Each episode of the series, hosted by Troop, blends social justice music and interviews with rural progressives in a mini-documentary format. Several of the songs were written by Troop, and he arranges all of the material Troop kicked off the series with a friend, Oklahoma-born Cherokee Nokosee Fields. In the interview, Troop and Field examine the very notion of immigration in North Carolina, where whites have displaced original indigenous inhabitants.

They also play the tune “Hermano Migrante” (“Brother Migrant”).

Other editions feature interviews with Juana Luz Tobar Ortega an undocumented immigrant who has sought sanctuary in a Greensboro church, and Lumbee activist and environmental scientist Alexis Raeana Jones.

The interviews are followed with performances

by Troop. Often, the interview subjects, like Jones, join Troop in song.

At the time of this writing, the latest video, episode 8, covers the exploitation of undocumented central American immigrants, largely indigenous Mayan people from Guatemala, in Morganton.

Pickin’ for Progress is a showcase of progressive thought in North Carolina, Troop says. He counts himself lucky that he gets to sit down with interesting people and help them to tell their stories.

“This is the best education I’ve ever gotten,” he says. “I won’t lie, it’s a challenge, [but] it’s a noble challenge. To me, it’s the greatest job, [and] the best work I’ve ever done.”

INFO@QCNERVE.COM

We’re kind of opening, kind of not, so not all of these are virtual events as we were highlighting at the beginning of the lockdown, but plenty are. COVID is still going strong, so party at your own risk.

‘ALL IN: THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY’

What: Voter suppression is an insidious tactic that has plagued The United States since the country was founded, contends the documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy, screening at Hounds DriveIn and Badin Drive-In on Sept. 9 and available on Amazon Prime Video September 18. Stacey Abrams, former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives — and the 2018 Democratic opponent to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who used his position as secretary of state to suppress the Back vote — hosts an insider’s look into laws and barriers to voting that most people don’t even know exist.

Screenings are free, but registration is required.

More: Free; Sept. 9, 8:15 p.m.; Hounds Drive-In, 114 Raven Circle, Kings Mountain; September 9, 8:15 p.m.; Baden Road Drive-In, 2411 Badin Road, Albemarle; Register here: tinyurl.com/AllInFightForDemocracy

NEIGHBORHOOD THEATRE ART AUCTION

What: Neighborhood Theatre used the time afforded by their pandemic-induced shutdown to replace their stage. But it seemed a shame to simply throw away the old one after it provided a platform for so many memorable performances by exceptional artists. So, Neighborhood gave the wood from the retired stage to local artists and invited them to craft works of art. The works go on sale in a virtual auction held on Neighborhood Theatre’s Instagram page starting Sept. 17. Proceeds go to the theater, which hopes to be able to open their doors again so they can continue to bring live music to Charlotte.

More: Free; Sept. 17; instagram.com/neighborhoodtheatre/

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MINI ART LABS

What: The McColl Center hosts mini art labs designed to jump start your creativity. These quick tutorials taught by professional artists are for anyone who wants to learn basic art skills and begin their own art projects. Spray Paint Posters is a quick, stepby-step tutorial to create airbrushed designs using stencils. This 20-minute art lesson is a jump-start for anyone who wants to learn the versatility of spray painting from Charlotte-based street artists Arko

+ Owl. Marcus Kiser, perhaps best known for his Afrofuturist exhibit Intergalactic Soul, hosts Inspired Icons, a quick, step-by-step tutorial to turn your ideas into digital and analog icons. This 15-minute art lesson is a primer for anyone who wants to learn how to think creatively, simplify complex ideas, and create your their logo or symbol.

More: Free; mccollcenter.org

MINT MUSICA & POESIA CAFE

What: This virtual event features talented poets, dancers, and musicians from the Charlotte area, including harpist Beste Toparlak and poet Irania Patterson. Listen to the voices of the classics through Toparlak’s deft glissandos or be inspired by Patterson’s lyrical voice and verses. The Mint Musica & Posia Café celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month, and it is also tied with the current Latin American exhibitions at the Mint. The event will be live-streamed on the Mint’s YouTube and Facebook pages.

More: Free, Sept. 16, 7 p.m.; mintmuseum.org

LUNCH AND LEARN: MODERNISM 101

What: Midcentury modern architecture and design continues to inspire and delight well into the 21st century, but what exactly is it? For this installment of the Charlotte Museum of History’s Lunch & Learn series, Susan Mayer of SVM Historical Consulting begins with the basics to help novices and experts alike understand and appreciate this important part of our architectural landscape here in the Queen City. The Lunch & Learn programs use Zoom to invite audiences to be a part of the conversation.

More: Free, Registration required; Sept. 10, 12 p.m.; tinyurl.com/MadAboutModern

LISA DE NOVO

What: This brings us back to the pre-pandemic days when Lisa De Novo popped up frequently on our Soundwave listing of live shows around town. Remember those? A De Novo show includes a selection of her originals, including her hits “California” and “Paralyzed,” and a range of covers.

Visit lisadenovo.com to place requests.

More: Free; Sept. 19, 6:30 p.m.; Artisan’s Palate, 1218-A East 36th St.; lisadenovo.com

CHARLOTTE FILM SOCIETY’S VIRTUAL THE EYEBROWS What: Jay Garrigan’s spiky yet melodic rock trio SCREENING ROOM

What: Once again the Charlotte Film Society culls and rejuvenates their collection of foreign and indie art films that you can’t see anywhere else. “This is big. This is going to be big,” said cinema luminary Werner Herzog about the riveting documentary Coup 53. The story about America and Britain overthrowing democracy in Iran in 1953 is told in extraordinary detail using never-before-seen footage and documents bolstered by a mesmerizing Ralph Fiennes performance. The screening includes a Q&A with Fiennes and the filmmakers. The documentary Feels Good Man is a tale of an artist reclaiming his work. When indie comic character Pepe the Frog became an unwitting icon of white supremacist hate and QAnon craziness, underground cartoonist Matt Furie fought to bring Pepe back from the darkness. It’s a Frankenstein-meets-Alice in Wonderland journey of an artist battling to regain control of his creation.

More: $8-12 for 72 hours; charlottefilmsociety.com

The Eyebrows are going to release their second fulllength album First Flight, recorded and mixed by the legendary Mitch Easter, in February. That’s reason to celebrate because their previous collection Volume, served up 10 punchy and emotional tunes that recall the snarky smarts and wiry grooves of new wave performers like Nick Lowe and Athens, Georgia’s Pylon. The band will live-stream this gig from their rehearsal space.

More: Free; Sept. 19, 7 p.m.; the-eyebrows.com/

NO CONTACT CONCERT SERIES

What: Midwood Entertainment’s collaboration with Codex Sound comes to a close Sept. 12, with a grand finale to its series of live-streamed full band performances. Shot at Codex Sounds 14,000-squarefoot warehouse in Hickory, the NCC series trades iPhones and living rooms for a professional stage and lighting rig, concert hall quality audio inputs and 12 video cameras. At the time of publication, the bill for the final show has not been announced yet, but based on Midwood Entertainment president COOL GLOBES: HOT IDEAS FOR A Micah Davidson’s impressive roster for past shows, COOLER PLANET it should be a blowout. Catch the final concert on What: Discovery Place’s Stay at Home Science takes YouTube or Facebook live. you out of the home for a self-guided walking tour.

More: Donations starting at $10; Sept. 12, 8 p.m.; It’s your chance to explore strange new worlds, tinyurl.com/NoContactConcert or at least strange cool globes. The Cool Globes public art exhibition on display in Uptown Charlotte showcases 35 globe structures that provide lessons ZACH WILLIAMS & BIG DADDY WEAVE on ways to incorporate sustainability into our lives. What: Until 2012, Zach Williams had a respectable, The globes, primarily located within an eight-block if unspectacular, career as an indie Southern rocker radius, include the “Wave Power” globe outside fronting Zach Williams and the Reformation. But his Discovery Place, which focuses on the power of career exploded when he went solo as a Christian the oceans’ waves as a source of renewable energy. artist. Truth be told, there’s not much difference The “Bee Mindful” globe’s honeycomb pattern is a in Williams’ sound before and after his spiritual visual representation of the critical role honeybees awakening. Except for lyrics focused on praise, he play in agriculture. Charlotte artist Jackie London’s delivers the same warm roots rock. Williams scored “Sustainable Textiles” globe pays homage to the a faith-based hit with “Chain Breaker” in 2016, and Carolinas’ long history of textile manufacturing. delivered a full-length album of the same name later that year. Rescue Story, the 2019 follow-up Walk down Tryon to find even more globes.

More: Free; discoveryplace.org/stay-at-home- album to Chain Breaker, features a guest vocal by science/take-a-field-trip-to-uptown-for-colorful- Dolly Parton.

More: $100 per car; September 11, 6:30 p.m.; lessons-in-sustainability Hounds Drive-In, 114 Raven Circle, Kings Mountain; houndsdrivein.com/

FOOD & DRINK FEATURE

SEIZE THE GROCERY

As Carpe Diem’s doors close, a window opens at Earl’s Grocery

Pg. 16 SEP 9 - SEP 22, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM

BY LEA BEKELE

When sisters Bonnie Warford and Tricia Maddrey closed their iconic Carpe Diem Restaurant and Caterers in the spring, they didn’t know it would be for the last time. The sisters opened the restaurant in 1989, and they shut down in March with hopes that the COVID-19 stay-at-home order would only last a month or two. By June, however, the sisters had to make the heartbreaking announcement that after 30 years, Carpe Diem was shutting its doors, making the Elizabeth staple one of the first restaurants in Charlotte to close permanently because of the pandemic.

The decision to close came at a point when it made more sense for them financially to shut down, finish out the last seven months of their lease and regroup than to try to stay open. During the initial close, they lost over $30,000 worth of fresh produce and meat, not to mention their head chef, who took another job offer with the support of Warford and Maddrey, who couldn’t promise anything in regards to Carpe Diem’s future. With three immunocompromised staff members who couldn’t return to work anytime soon, they saw no other option but to close completely.

“We have put quite a bit of thought into this difficult decision. The financial loss that we incurred as a result of the shut down combined with the uncertainty of reopening at this time was simply too much,” the sisters lamented in a statement to patrons and neighbors on their website. “We have shown great tenacity in the face of many challenges over the years, but the upheaval created by the pandemic is going to take time for the restaurant industry to sort out, and we simply felt it best to refocus and move on.”

The unshakable sisters weren’t giving up completely, however. In the same statement, they announced the planned reimagining of Earl’s Grocery, another local joint they own just a few doors down from the former Carpe Diem on Elizabeth Avenue. With less than a month left on Earl’s lease, rather than riding out the remaining

Sisters and partners When Warford and Maddrey opened Carpe Diem Restaurant in 1989, the duo weathered moves, economic downturns, and a slew of time-consuming construction projects. You’d think that after growing up and eventually co-owning two businesses together, the stress would take a toll on their relationship as siblings, but Warford and Maddrey truly act as a support system for one another.

“We’re honestly lucky that we work so well together,” Warford said. “Sure, we get frustrated occasionally but she does more of the back of the house stuff and I do more of the front of the house stuff, so because we have our own areas, we don’t really step on each other’s toes as much.”

The tradition of entrepreneurship runs in the family, with both sets of PHOTO BY GRANT BALDWIN TRICIA MADDREY (LEFT) AND BONNIE WARFORD IN EARL’S GROCERY. great-grandparents being involved in time and closing for good, Warford and Maddrey same seafood supplier that provided regional catches the food industry at one point in time. One owned chose to take a leap of faith and extend it for another for Carpe Diem when it was open. For the time being, a grocery store in Pennsylvania and the other a six, then revamp and reopen the popular shop.

Earl’s menu will shift exclusively to takeout and offer bakery in Miami. Both sisters moved to Charlotte favorites from both restaurants, including Carpe’s after growing up in Miami. Bonnie moved to pursue Leap of faith iconic buttermilk fried chicken and Korean carrots and a degree in Business at Queens College with Tricia Before committing to resigning the lease, they Earl’s harvest salad, among others. mulled over finding a smaller place or implementing some other way to thrive within the current set-up.

The sisters realized they weren’t utilizing Earl’s space in the most strategic way and it no longer made sense to just offer specialty items. Their six-month plan gave the sisters enough time to reimagine the layout and purpose of the part-counter-service restaurant, part-specialty-food store and give it a fighting chance at survival.

Since Earl’s opened back in 2014, it came to be known mainly for being a restaurant that offered over-the-counter lunch service and a couple of specialty grab-and-go items. The result was not really what they had envisioned or expected in the beginning, as they had envisioned it being a grocery store first and foremost.

“When COVID happened, we were like, this is kind of our opportunity to do what we originally wanted to do, which was be more of a grocery store,” Warford told Queen City Nerve.

Earl’s now offers a well-curated mix of everyday cleaning products, cereal, canned goods and specialty items, including a handful of local favorites such as Homeland Creamery milk, Duke’s Bread, Chef Alyssa’s Spreads, Cannizzaro sauces, and Pure Intentions Coffee.

Shoppers can find restaurant-grade meat from Find virtual experiences at ArtsAndScience.org/Virtual purveyors such as Springer Mountain Chicken, Koch Turkey, Beeler Pork and Brasstown beef. They use the

Connect with free arts, science and history experiences for all ages, virtually.

CULTURE

BLOCKS

FOOD & DRINK FEATURE following shortly after.

Business degree in hand and dreaming of being an entrepreneur, Bonnie started out in the restaurant industry and worked her way up. She always enjoyed making people happy and working in the service industry gave the chance to make a career of it. They never expected to open such an impactful place.

“We were so naive,” Warford recalled.

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Bumps in the road Fast forward to 2020, and naivete is far from a description for the two sisters, who have faced each oncoming hurdle with pragmatism. The COVIDinspired pivot hasn’t been without challenges.

“There have been unbelievable obstacles at every stage,” Warford said. “The food business is in chaos right now with outages, expired products on vendor shelves, and many people being laid off, causing slow implementation.”

The sisters added online ordering through the ChowNow app to help Earl’s replace the foot traffic that it once had pre-COVID. “It’s still slow to catch on,” Warford said about

the transition. “First of all, we don’t have as many people walking around this area because they’re not in the offices as much or the school.”

People that may not know about the space tucked away in the heart of Elizabeth now have another avenue to come across it and explore their offerings. What they find is never what they expect.

Smaller independently owned grocery stores tend to only carry niche options and cater to patrons with more disposable income. Warford aims to bridge the gap between the average grocery store experience and specialty stores by offering the best product at the highest quality and for the most affordable cost.

Balance and flexibility have been the key ingredients in curating the selection, she said. It helps that products change according to patron requests and comments.

“I think our biggest challenge is getting people to say, ‘No, they’ve got like regular groceries.’”

Warford noted. “When people come in they’re, like, ‘Oh you have a lot of stuff … We didn’t realize you have this much stuff.”

Once things settle down a bit, they hope to offer an online grocery shopping option for curbside pickup. Online ordering for to-go food is already up and running and available through the website,

With the reputation the sisters have built and a Earlsgrocery.com. Earl’s hours are 10:30 a.m.-7 p.m.

Monday-Saturday, with takeout starting at 1 p.m. prime location in Elizabeth, the concept of a local, neighborhood grocer is much needed. Their shared love for customer service and crafting the perfect Still having fun Warford and Maddrey may have gone through guest experience led them to offer a service that you a hellish few months, putting out fire after fire, but can’t find at any grocery chain in Charlotte.

“I think shoppers will grow to trust our choices their goal remains the same: Provide great service to whoever walks through the door. During our recent of products and quality,” Warford shares.

The recently closed Carpe Diem and reimagined visit to Earl’s, Warford gave us an in-depth tour of the space, pointing out ingredients that you couldn’t Earl’s Grocery are testaments to the sisters’ drive, find in the average grocery store and explaining why showing that, no matter what, they have given their all throughout the entirety of their careers. each one was purchased.

Each explanation had a similar theme — a The hospitality community is suffering now guest was looking for something, couldn’t find it, more than ever. Restaurants and bars are struggling and Bonnie ordered the specific item and texted the to stay open and many are staying afloat by the skin of their teeth. With over six decades of service customer once it came in.

Despite the pandemic, everything the sisters do industry experience under their belts between is inspired by their desire to create a community of them, Warford and Maddrey managed to stay food lovers. At Earl’s, folks get the choice of quality flexible and true to their values even in the midst of groceries — each item picked out by Warford a pandemic.

“If we’re not having fun, then why would we do herself. She encourages guests to tell her what they it?” Warford asked. want Earl’s to carry on the shelf.

At a time when not many folks are having fun, “Whether it’s a soda from Michigan, a potato chip from Ohio, or a hot sauce from Brooklyn, tell us it’s an important question to keep in mind. what you crave. We want to try it, too,” Earl’s website LBEKELE@QCNERVE.COM states.

Charlotte’s Favorite Gift Shop for Over 30 Years!

330 East Boulevard, Charlotte NC 704-333-7130

@paperskyscrapergifts

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LIFESTYLE PUZZLES

LIFESTYLE PUZZLES SUDOKU

BY LINDA THISTLE

PLACE A NUMBER IN THE EMPTY BOXES IN SUCH A WAY THAT EACH ROW ACROSS, EACH COLUMN DOWN AND EACH SMALL 9-BOX SQUARE CONTAINS ALL OF THE NUMBERS ONE TO NINE. ©2020 King Feautres Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

TRIVIA TEST

BY FIFI RODRIGUEZ

1. GEOGRAPHY: Where are the Azores Islands located?

2. GAMES: In poker, what is a “dead man’s hand”?

3. AD SLOGANS: Which company has a series of advertisements asking the question, “What’s in your wallet?”

4. U.S. PRESIDENTS: Who was the only president who never married?

5. LITERARY: The pet rat Scabbers belonged to which character in the Harry Potter book series?

6. MUSIC: Which American singer/songwriter was nicknamed “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business”?

7. U.S. STATES: Which state is home to the only active diamond mine in the United States?

8. MATH: What is the date of the annual Pi Day? 9. ASTRONOMY: After the sun and moon, what is the third brightest object in Earth’s sky?

10. MOVIES: What was the name of Quint’s boat in “Jaws”?

CROSSWORD ACROSS

1 Neighbor of Niger 5 Comical bits 9 Work group 14 PLO chairman Mahmoud 19 Europe’s “Eternal City” 20 Blind as -21 Common typeface 22 -- Polo 23 App-based ride option 24 -- fide (real) 25 Grilled steak with thin, diagonal cuts 27 Neighbor of Niger 28 Alternative to toffee 30 County in New Mexico or Colorado 31 Aeneas’ lover, in myth 32 Link two disparate things 35 Once -- while 37 Gp. backing firearms 38 Has the helm 39 Revered one 40 Terminated 42 “Wild Thing” rapper Tone -43 $20 dispenser 45 “Really?”

48 Natty scarf 52 Palmtops, e.g., for short 56 Internet ID 57 Goggles 58 Not breaking the rules 61 Fast glance 63 Lizard that may be a pet 64 Terrible fate 65 Refuses, as a chance 69 “Norma --” (Field film) 70 Initial amount required by a creditor

74 Suffix of sugars 75 Hold sacred 78 Verse writer 79 One dodging 82 Slovak coin 83 1969 Stevie Wonder hit 86 “Geez!”

89 -- Paulo 90 Crooner Redding 91 Exaggerated and theatrical 92 Reasonable advance notice 96 Facial locale 98 Prefix with gender 99 Ringlike isle 100 Soda shop drink 104 Sells virtually 109 Surg. locales 110 Vote in favor 111 England’s “Nine Days’ Queen” 113 Tel. or elec.

115 Statesman Stevenson 118 High points 119 Advance 120 Watercourse associated with the starts of eight long answers in this puzzle 123 Rabbit’s kin 124 Part of A.D. 125 Attend 126 Greek vowel 127 Clear out of 128 Marsh plant 129 Elia piece 130 “The Balcony” playwright Jean 131 Old flames 132 Slips up

DOWN 1 Cookie bits 2 Tasmania’s capital 3 2001 Audrey Tautou film 4 Sneer at 5 Rap session 6 See 76-Down 7 India’s Rajiv 8 Like plays 9 Mineo of movies 10 Outpost unit 11 “That -- happenin’!”

12 Get dimmer 13 Ocala’s state 14 Envoy: Abbr.

15 Verse writer 16 Sib acquired via marriage 17 Late-’60s music genre 18 One-person bands, e.g.

26 Nine-person band, e.g.

29 Self-image 33 Potatoes au -34 Frazier foe 36 Folk sayings 40 To be, to Fifi 41 Flames’ org.

44 Car ad abbr.

46 SPF part 47 Ersatz 48 Blazing 49 Astronomer Carl 50 Hints 51 Schnozz or boff ender 53 “Where -- go wrong?”

54 Auth. unknown 55 Feed in a sty 59 Low point 60 Windows ad statement 61 Frying vessel

Pg. 19 SEP 9 - SEP 22, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM

PG.18 PUZZLE ANSWERS

SONG SPAN ©2020 King Feautres Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

62 Perfumer Lauder 65 -- dish (lab item) 66 City that Lot fled from 67 Deplete 68 Matthew of “Friends” 71 Tokyo-born Yoko 72 Pirate chant opener 73 Run across 76 With 6-Down, catch wind of 77 Airport strip 80 Clear out of 81 Dr.’s gp.

83 Postal stack 84 Over there 85 Mag. printing 86 “Naturally!”

87 Scrunchies 88 Long letters 89 TV inits. since 1975 93 Vexed a lot 94 Selfish driver of a sort 95 TV inits. since 1975 97 Multipiece gifts for calligraphers 101 Cavity-fighting org.

102 Fruit of a Chinese tree 103 Discount department store chain 105 Blazing 106 Clothes smoother 107 Less fatty 108 Church councils 111 Feudal lord 112 Eagle’s nest 114 “-- hundred flowers bloom” 116 Half-baked 117 Prayer ender 121 “Hee Haw” co-host Clark 122 Used a chair

LIFESTYLE COLUMN

THE SEEKER A LOCAL YOGA INSTITUION IN PERIL

NoDa Yoga launches crowdfunding campaign as funds dry up

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BY KATIE GRANT

You may have heard by now that multiple yoga studios have permanently shuttered in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; a conspicuous void that will be no doubt felt by the community once we return to “normal’.

Amidst the unknown future we collectively share, NoDa Yoga has launched a crowdfunding campaign seeking the city’s support to prevent becoming yet another statistic among local, smallbusiness closures.

Co-owners Jillian Longsworth and Craig Rasmussen launched a GoFundMe campaign on August 7, about a month before yoga studios were allowed to reopen at 30% capacity as part of Phase 2.5 of the state’s plan to reopen. The two were kind enough to describe their current state of affairs over a mid-morning Zoom call.

NoDa Yoga is a boutique yoga studio located above Cabo Fish Taco in the crux of the NoDa neighborhood. Part of what makes the space so exceptional is the various styles of yoga offered, and the trauma-informed approach the majority of teachers take during class.

“What NoDa Yoga is known for is, number one, most people that take our classes, we know their name … You feel at home when you enter into this space,” Longsworth said.

As a practitioner at NoDa Yoga, I fully understand when she describes the staff ’s enjoyment of meeting us where we are when we walk in, allowing us to find our home within our own bodies — a sense of homeostasis, if you will.

Secondly, the NoDa Yoga team is known for their work with veterans. They offer discounted and free classes to folks who have served, as teaching people who have experienced chronic pain, chronic illness,

and PTSD is a passion of Longsworth’s.

“We’re known throughout the mental health community for being a trauma-informed studio,” Jillian explained.

It’s not only veterans’ organizations that refer clients, but mental health therapists and organizations like Love Your Brain — a nonprofit that improves the quality of life of people affected by traumatic brain injury. During our video chat, I couldn’t help but notice the Love Your Brain t-shirt Jillian rocks, punctuating her fondness for the organization and the work they do together.

About 90% of NoDa Yoga instructors have trauma-informed certification backgrounds.

This means these yoga teachers have a solid understanding of what trauma is, how it affects us, and how to approach trauma within a yoga setting.

Additionally, each class, despite varying by style, caters to every body type, age, and ability.

Jillian and her team have a passion for “accessible yoga” — a business practice based on the concept of everyone, deserving the opportunity to access a yoga class regardless of income.

Under the Noda Yoga umbrella is Bella Vita Yoga Teacher Training, co-founded by Longsworth and Carrie Wren, a close friend and fellow yogi.

Through Bella Vita and NoDa Yoga they have created a more accessible practice so that anyone can take a class knowing it doesn’t have to look a certain way, and that it may look different simply because of each individual’s structure. As someone who often feels pressured by the yoga trend on social media, I find this to be a refreshing perspective.

NoDa Yoga has been shut down for in-person classes since March 17. That’s a long road to Sept. 5, when Phase 2.5 took effect. In the meantime, the team evolved to offer online classes only.

Longsworth took out a small loan from the Small Business Association, but didn’t want to overdo it.

“We did take out an SBA loan and what I need for people to understand … is when you’re taking out multiple loans, when you have no revenue coming in, that’s a lot of money you’re expected to pay back,” she said. “You’re going to play catch up for two or three years”.

She then explained why the grant process is interesting during these times, as well. Gyms and yoga studios may have a larger independent

contractor-to-employee ratio than, say, restaurants, which have mostly employees working in-house.

“These grants that are being offered don’t allow for the language in the grant for contractors,” she explained. This means grant applications are requesting small businesses to provide payroll tax information and W-2 tax form shows — information that may not be accessible or applicable in the case of yoga studios or gyms.

Before COVID-19, there were plans to open a second studio location in the Oakhurst neighborhood. Thankfully, the landlords have been gracious and willing to work with NoDa Yoga through their plight. Despite the threat of closing and a revenue drop of around 80%, Jillian appeared brilliantly optimistic during our Zoom interview.

While it’s promising to see the fundraiser has surpassed its halfway mark of the $20k goal, NoDa Yoga still needs our help as a community. If donating funds is unthinkable during this difficult time, a free alternative is simply sharing the GoFundMe on social media (gofundme.com/support-noda-yoga).

If you have a favorite teacher, why not give them a shout out? If you have a favorite class, why not use your voice to share what you’ve experienced?

NoDa Yoga has committed to serving us for so long. Now is our opportunity to give back.

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By Lucie Winborne • An armadillo’s shell is so hard that it can deflect a bullet, as a Texas man discovered to his chagrin when he took aim at one. The bullet ricocheted into his jaw and he had to be airlifted to a hospital. The armadillo, on the other hand, strolled away unscathed.

• One million U.S. dogs hold first place in their owner’s last will and testament.

• The original time machine in “Back to the Future” was not a DeLorean, but an old refrigerator. According to HuffPost, “Ultimately, it was determined that it probably was not a good idea to use a refrigerator in such a manner as kids might want to reenact the scene.”

• Napoleon introduced brass buttons on soldier uniforms’ sleeves to discourage them from wiping their noses.

• The first webcam was created to check a coffeepot! In 1993, researchers in the University of Cambridge’s computer science department really didn’t like getting up from their chairs to check the coffeepot just to find it empty, so they wired a system that would stream three images per minute from the Trojan Room, where the pot was kept, to the internal computer network.

By the end of that year, the stream made it onto the new World Wide Web, endowing the Trojan Room coffeepot with international, if brief, fame.

• The asteroids in “Star Wars” were actually painted potatoes.

• When English Romantic poet, painter and engraver William Blake was just 4, he claimed to see God through a window. Throughout the rest of his life, Blake said he often communed with angels, incorporating these visions into his art.

• According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the stickers on fruit are edible. We haven’t tried them ourselves, though. *** Thought for the Day: “The best teachers remain students all their lives.” — John Stott © 2020 King Features Synd., Inc.

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LIFESTYLE

HOROSCOPE SEPTEMBER 9 - SEPTEMBER 15

SEPTEMBER 16 - SEPTEMBER 22

ARIES

ARIES (March 21 to April 19) Careful, Lamb. Taking LIBRA (September 23 to October 22) All work and

(March 21 to April 19) Cupid is strong in the Aries aspect this week, with the cherub opening romantic possibilities for single Lambs, and strengthening ties ‘twixt loving pairs already in a caring relationship.

LIBRA

(September 23 to October 22) The week favors combining dollops of creativity and practicality to work out both professional and personal problems. A longtime friend could have something of note to suggest.

on too many tasks at one time can cause you to create more snarls each time you try to work your way through the tangled mass. Best to handle one job at a time.

little play could wear the Libra’s usually positive attitude down. Take some much-needed time off.

Perhaps a short jaunt with someone special is the way to go.

TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Your dramatic flair SCORPIO (October 23 to November 21) Some TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Making bold moves SCORPIO (October 23 to November 21) This is a

might make things more interesting as you recount an event to your colleagues. But be careful not to exaggerate reality to the point that facts and fancy combine to form fiction.

surprising facts could come to light if you decide to probe deeper into an “opportunity” than you might usually do. What you’ll learn could determine what you’ll earn.

is what Bovines do. But the best moves are made with lots of data to provide backup just in case you charge into an unexpected complication. A new relationship shows promise.

good time to expand your view from the known to the unfamiliar. Confronting new situations could be challenging, but ultimately also could be extremely satisfying.

GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) Sharing credit SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21) for a job well done is easy for you to do, but not Giving advice to those who just want validation for this week you should get lots of chances to share Someone close to you might seek your counsel. Hear necessarily for your partner. But fair is fair. Don’t what they’re doing can be unsettling. So back off and your thoughts with people who will not only pay them out, but hold the line at giving actual advice let yourself be denied the right to have your save your counsel for those who really appreciate it. attention to what you have to say, but will want to until you get credible answers to all your questions. contributions recognized. hear more.

CAPRICORN (December 22 to January 19) CAPRICORN (December 22 to January 19) What CANCER (June 21 to July 22) Communication Cultivating a more positive attitude not only makes CANCER (June 21 to July 22) The pattern of recent seems to be an overwhelming workplace project can is important to help bridge a gap that can lead to you feel better about yourself, but also has an changes could begin to shift from mostly workplace- be dealt with quite well if you handle one category problems at home and/or at the workplace. Find upbeat effect on those around you, especially that related events to more personal matters. Continue at a time. Things will soon begin to fall into place. a way to get your points across before the breach certain someone. to keep an open mind as you prepare to deal with becomes a chasm. them.

AQUARIUS (January 20 to February 18) Keeping AQUARIUS (January 20 to February 18) A personal matter might need more of your time than LEO (July 23 to August 22) Relationships, whether the lines of communication open and accessible LEO (July 23 to August 22) Reward yourself for you had expected. Try to prioritize between your business or personal, need to be watched carefully is the key to establishing the right foundation what’s sure to be a dynamic week with a getaway to many outside commitments and your domestic for signs of trouble. Any negative indications should on which to build an important and meaningful be dealt with before they become too burdensome. relationship. Stay with it. someplace wonderful, hopefully with a wonderful responsibilities. someone. You’ll return refreshed and ready for what’s ahead.

PISCES (February 19 to March 20) A developing VIRGO (August 23 to September 22) PISCES (February 19 to March 20) Before agreeing situation still needs more time to grow, and more Congratulations. A more positive aspect highlights to act on a request, consider using your perceptive VIRGO (August 23 to September 22) You might time to study before you can plunge in and make much of the Virgo’s week. You should find others Piscean talents to see what might lie hidden beneath want to suggest resolving an old disagreement some attention-getting waves. Patience is best for more receptive to your suggestions, and also more its surface and could possibly cause problems later likely to act on them. on. before it can affect a matter expected to come up for wise Pisceans.

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GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) You love to talk, and SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21)

discussion. It’s always best to start with a clean slate.

BORN THIS WEEK:

BORN THIS WEEK: You’re a friend who, if you err at all, does so on the side of concern for those you care about.

You have a gift for organization that would make you a fine archivist.

(Are you listening out there, Library of Congress?)

2020 KING FEATURES SYND., INC.

LIFESTYLE COLUMN

PG.19 PUZZLE ANSWERS

SAVAGE LOVE THE CHOKE RULE

The hot new move is not so hot without consent

BY DAN SAVAGE

I’m a 29-year-old straight woman in Pennsylvania. My question has to do with choking and consent. I’ve had two experiences in the past six months or so where someone has tried to choke me without my consent. The first time this happened, I coughed immediately but he tried multiple times during sex. I was caught so offguard that I didn’t say anything until the next morning. I told him I wasn’t okay with that and that it was too much. The second time, I shook my head as soon as he put his hand on my throat and he stopped immediately. I told him, “That scared the shit out of me.” He apologized for startling me and said he wouldn’t do it again. My question is, why is this a thing? The fact that this has happened to me more than once in a short period of time kind of shocked me. And what is the appropriate thing to do when this happens? What should I do with the person who does this?

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CONCERNED HETERO DUMBASSES

OVER

KINKY

ENTITLED

“I would also love to know why choking has become a thing,” said Dr. Debby Herbenick. “And it is a thing, especially among young adults.”

Dr. Herbenick is a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and the author of numerous books on sexuality and sexual pleasure. She’s also the lead author of a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, CHOKED, which looked at the sort of behavior you’ve been encountering recently: people engaging in spanking, choking, face fucking, etc.. Though some of this is no doubt consensual, much of it is not.

“We found that 21% of women had been choked during sex as had 11% of men,” said Dr. Herbenick. “We also found that 20% of men and 12% of women had choked a partner. But choking during sex was much more common among 18-29-year-olds — almost 40% of whom had choked or been choked — leading us to believe that choking has really changed in the US, over probably the last 10-20 years.”

Men who choked women were the biggest single group of chokers, CHOKED, followed by men choking men,

women choking women, and trans and gender non-binary individuals choking and being choked. Straight cisgender men, perhaps unsurprisingly, were the least likely to report that partners choked them during sex. Trans and gender non-binary participants in Dr. Herbenick’s research more often reported that their partners established consent prior to choking, but across the board there was still a great deal of nonconsensual choking going on.

How did we get here?

“Probably porn,” said Dr. Herbenick. “We found that many people into choking remember growing up and watching porn with choking in it — and in a country where porn stands in for sex education and family conversations about sex, some young people do what they see in porn.”

And some people — mostly male people — do it because they think the other person wants or expects it.

This was dramatized in an episode of Euphoria, the terrific HBO show about a group of high school students, when a boy suddenly starts choking a girl during their first hookup at a party. The girl is scared and confused — she thought the boy liked her — and the boy tells her he does like her; he grabbed her throat because he thought she would like it, not to harm or scare her. Although shaken, she makes it clear she expects him to ask first.

It is scary to be suddenly choked by a sex partner. When asked if something scary had ever happened to them during sex, numerous women Herbenick surveyed for a different study cited someone choking them without asking. Even if you were into being choked, CHOKED, which you’re not, suddenly being choked by a new sex partner would still be scary. Because if someone chokes you without asking first, they’re essentially saying — they’re clearly saying — that they have extremely shitty judgement (and didn’t think to obtain your consent) or that they’re an extremely shitty person (and didn’t care to obtain your consent).

“Now I’m not one of those people who says explicit verbal consent is needed for every hug or kiss or breast/ chest touch,” said Dr. Herbenick. “I’m well aware that sex often involves verbal, non-verbal, and other shades of asking for something. But no one should choke another person without their explicit verbal consent.”

That goes double/triple/infinity for aggressive and/ or high-risk kinks, not just choking.

“And choking is really risky,” added Dr. Herbenick.

“Even though people call it choking, external pressure on the neck — like from hands or a cord or necktie — is technically strangulation. In rare cases, choking/ strangulation causes people to pass out, leading to probable mild traumatic brain injury. And choking/ strangulation sometimes kills people. Even if the person who was choked consented to it, even if they asked to be choked, the person who did the choking is often legally

TRIVIA ANSWERS: 1. Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Portugal 2. Two pair of black aces and black eights, named after the hand Wild Bill Hickok reportedly held when he was shot to death. responsible in the event of injury or death.”

I’ve interviewed professional Dominants who will literally stick needles through men’s testicles — sterilized needles, consenting testicles — but who refuse to choke clients or engage in other forms of breath play. These professionals aren’t refusing to choke clients because it’s too extreme (remember the needles?), but because it’s too dangerous.

“There is truly no safe way to choke someone,” said Dr. Herbenick. “As part of my research, I’ve sought advice from several kink-positive physician colleagues, none of whom feels confident in a ‘safe’ way of choking as there is too much that can go wrong — from seizures to neck injury to death.”

So what do you do the next time some dude grabs your throat? (And there will, sadly, most likely be a next time.) You immediately tell them to stop. Don’t cough, don’t deflect, don’t prioritize their feelings in the moment or worry about ruining the mood and derailing the sex.

Use your words: “Don’t choke me, I don’t like that, it’s not sexy to me and it’s not safe, and you should’ve asked.” If they apologize and don’t try it again, great. Maybe you can keep fucking. But if they pout or act annoyed or insist you might like it after you’ve just finished telling them you definitely don’t like it, get up and leave.

And if someone tried to choke you during sex and you shut it down and they pivoted to mutually enjoyable sex acts, CHOKED, be sure to raise the subject up after sex. Make sure they understand you don’t want that to happen again and that you expect them to be more conscientious about consent the next time — if there is a next time.

And considering that this has happened to you twice recently, CHOKED, and considering how popular busting this particular move seems to have become, you might wanna consider saying something about choking to a new sex partner before you have sex for the first time.

“I would be very up front about it from the getgo,” said Dr. Herbenick. “And for everyone reading this,

3. Capital One 8. March 14 (3.14) 4. James Buchanan 9. Venus 5. Ron Weasley 10. The Orca 6. James Brown 7. Arkansas seriously: Stop choking people without first talking or asking about it. Just stop.”

Follow Dr. Debby Herbenick on Twitter: @DebbyHerbenick.

I hope you’re getting a lot of mail from people uncomfortable with your response to DISCORD, the woman whose cheating husband blew up when a man she was merely chatting with forwarded their correspondence to her husband. My first question was whether the sadistic creep who baited her into telling him she had an affair wasn’t actually her POS husband playing some sick game.

I mean, 30 minutes is awfully quick turnaround from her messages being forwarded to his blowup. And seeing as DISCORD’s husband has already established that she will put up with his tantrums, withholding of sexual intimacy, strangulation, lying, and affairs, it’s also possible that he’s engineered her financial dependence. I would advise her to at least talk to a professional who could paint an objective picture of her financial options. She might also benefit from the advice of an advocate for domestic violence survivors.

Strangulation is usually not an isolated violent act.

RARELY DISAPPOINTED READER

Thank you for writing, RDR — thanks to everyone who wrote. I’ve reached out to DISCORD privately and will forward your emails on to her. I should’ve pushed back when DISCORD ruled out divorce as an option.

Here’s hoping DISCORD takes your advice over mine. mail@savagelove.net; Follow Dan on Twitter @ FakeDanSavage; Meet the author of The Vagina Bible on this week’s Savage Lovecast. www.savagelovecast.com

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