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Monthly Archives: July 2020

The Love of Baseball Stories

July 27, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

When I first moved to Charlotte in 1984, I lived just a few blocks from Crockett Park where the Charlotte O’s (the city’s minor league baseball team at the time) played their home games.  The park featured an aging wooden stadium that looked like it belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting, and I fell in love with it.  I purchased season tickets and attended almost every home game.  I didn’t care that much about the outcome of the games; I just liked the ambiance.  This immersive experience introduced me to the world of baseball stories.  I loved listening to the old-time fans tell stories about famous baseball players who once played for the Charlotte O’s.  I enjoyed hearing tales about the colorful Crockett family that owned the team.   I took an interest in the stories about the history of baseball in Charlotte, and I became intrigued with the connections between baseball and Charlotte’s textile mills.  Every time I went to a game, I felt like I was dipping into a book of stories that all had something to do with baseball.

This summer the city’s current minor league baseball team—the Charlotte Knights—is on hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that baseball stories have come to an end.  Charlotte writer Chris Arvidson and her collaborator Diana Nelson have provided area baseball fans with a collection of essays about the joys of being a baseball fan.  Titled The Love of Baseball:  Essays by Lifelong Fans, this recently published book includes contributions by numerous writers from the Charlotte area.  Chris currently lives in Charlotte, where she teaches in UNC Charlotte’s English Department.  I contacted Chris Arvidson and asked her about the book’s connections to Charlotte.  Here is what she sent to me:

The book has so many connections to Charlotte.  Of course, my husband, Henry Doss, is in the book, and he’s the ultimate Charlotte connection. He’s how I ended up in Charlotte. Henry was running D.G. Martin’s congressional campaign for the open NC-9 seat. I was working at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in D.C.  The race was in everybody’s top 10 in the country in 1984.  My job was to keep track of what DG and Henry were up to. I have no idea why I even liked these guys because they were the bane of my existence that election cycle, always making decisions and doing stuff without telling me until after the fact. I swear, the only time I ever got in trouble with the boss was when these two were involved. That’s how Henry and I got together, after hundreds of hours on the phone. But I digress…

I have a way of sniffing out fellow baseball fans. I’m not sure what gives us away. It may be that I illicit baseball interest with my attire, which out of the classroom, consists almost entirely of Detroit Tigers’ themed stuff, with a bit of Pittsburgh, Nationals, and Orioles thrown in. I think that’s how UNC Charlotte Dean Nancy Gutierrez and I sussed each other out. She’s a diehard Cleveland Indians fan. She told a wonderfully poignant story of listening to games on the radio, and scoring tickets to games with a good report card. 

I met Rebecca Bratcher Laxton, one of the contributors to the collection, when I was a guest speaker at a graduate class at UNC Charlotte.  During my presentation, I mentioned the project.  Rebecca contacted me the next day, and she ended up writing a wonderful piece about being a girl who wants to play baseball.

Julie Townsend doesn’t live in Charlotte anymore, but she taught in the English Department at UNC Charlotte for years and that’s where I first knew her. We met up again at the dump in Ashe County, where we both lived for a time. We always laughed about seeing one another at the dump, looking twice and saying at the same time, “Don’t I know you?” We went on to start a writing salon in West Jefferson and editing two anthologies together. Julie knows nada about baseball, but her great friend and real estate colleague Martin Little had a shot at the show, so with a little coaching on baseball terminology, Julie was able to tell a wonderful story about Martin and his brief sojourn in professional baseball.

Caroline Kane Kenna is the President of Charlotte Writers Club. Caroline’s got deep roots in the New River country of Virginia, and she wrote a lovely piece for an anthology I co-edited called Reflections on the New River: New Essays, Poems and Personal Stories. Once again, baseball fans can smell each other and a t-shirt was the giveaway. Caroline’s family team is the Cardinals and she was delighted to set aside her poetry for an essay about her St. Louis team. 

When I told longtime UNC Charlotte Professor Emeritus Sam Watson what I was up to with a baseball book, he said right away, “Oh, you’ve got to get up with Ellyn Ritterskamp—she’d be perfect.” Ellyn, who teaches in the Philosophy Department at the university, and was one of Sam’s former students, has worked for the Charlotte Observer for years, too. She’s a fellow baseball freak, and we hit it off right away. She writes a wonderful story about her travels, many with her mom Julie, to baseball parks around the country. She’s been to all of the Major League Baseball stadiums, the South Atlantic League and the Carolina League. Now, that’s a serious fan. Of course, Sam ended up in the book as well. He’s one of my baseball fan “recruits” and has come over to baseball fandom in recent years via college baseball and Charleston’s minor league team.

Stephen Ward had the whole fan package to my mind. He’s from Michigan and he is a serious Detroit fan. We spied each other’s Tiger hats at UNC Charlotte’s archeological dig in Jerusalem. Stephen wrote a piece about growing up with the Tigers. Before he moved to Hawaii to take on a new job in higher ed, he was Associate Vice Chancellor of University Communications at UNC Charlotte. 

In fact, nine of the contributors to the book have Charlotte connections, and as every baseball fan knows, it takes nine to make a team.

My thanks go to Chris and her collaborators for sharing their passion for baseball.  For all of the Charlotte baseball fans who are missing the experience of watching the Charlotte Knights play in their beautiful new stadium, The Love of Baseball provides a chance to connect with fellow baseball fans.  These essays tap into the pleasure that comes with sharing baseball stories.  Although these essays are not about the history of Charlotte’s various baseball teams, they have their place in the great compendium of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: baseballbaseball fans

And the Winner Is…Alicia D. Williams

July 20, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Charlotte is home to many successful children’s authors, but only a few have won the big awards in children’s literature, such as the Caldecott Medal, the Newbery Medal, and the Coretta Scott King Award.  Fifty years ago, Gail Haley became the first children’s author from Charlotte to win one of these awards when her picture book A Story, A Story won the Caldecott Medal.  The latest Charlotte children’s author to enter this winners’ circle is Alicia D. Williams.  Her 2019 debut novel, Genesis Begins Again, is making a big splash in the world of children’s literature.  She recently received both a Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Author Award for New Talent for this novel.  For more information about Williams, please click on the following link:  https://www.aliciadwilliams.com/

Genesis Begins Again, which is intended for middle school readers, focuses on a thirteen-year-old girl named Genesis Anderson.  Genesis lacks confidence and has a low sense of self-esteem.  She keeps a list of 96 reasons she hates herself, and one of these reasons is that she thinks her skin is too dark.  Her grandmother often makes hurtful comments about Genesis’s dark skin complexion, and these comments have a negative impact on Genesis.

Genesis has internalized a form of racism known as “colorism.”  In a recent interview, Williams discussed this aspect of her novel.  The story, she said, “evolved to be about colorism–discrimination within the same ethnic group based on skin tone and facial features. … I continued to see children of color–every colonized country has a colorism issue–struggle with self-acceptance and self-love based on skin color and hair texture. The need to speak to them was the driving force of completing this story.”

Fortunately, for Genesis, her life gradually changes when she moves to a new school and has a chance to begin again.  She makes new friends, and she comes to the attention of a music teacher who recognizes her musical talent.  Her teacher introduces her to Billie Holiday and other great jazz singers, and Genesis begins to look to these jazz greats as positive role models.  In many ways, the second half of this book celebrates the life-affirming power of music.

When I read that Alicia Williams received the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award for 2020, I flashed back to the day I spent with John Steptoe toward the end of his life.  I was interviewing him for my book Trust Your Children:  Voices Against Censorship in Children’s Literature, but we ended up talking about much more than censorship.  One of the points he made during our conversation was that the children’s book world needs more books by African American authors.  To this end, this award was established after his death to promote “new talent and to offer visibility to excellence in writing and/or illustration” by African American children’s authors/illustrators.  Given my personal association with John Steptoe, I am especially pleased that Williams received this “new talent” award.  Our community is a richer place because of the talent that Alicia Williams brings to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: colorismCoretta Scott King-John Steptoe Author Awardmiddle school readersNewbery Honor

Novels Set in the Charlotte Area

July 06, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

A reader of my Storied Charlotte blog recently sent me an email in which she asked, “Are there any novels set in Charlotte?”  I responded by sending her a list of five novels that take place in Charlotte, but her question sparked my curiosity.  I started researching this topic, and I soon realized that my initial list of five novels was way too short.  I then decided to compile a list of ten novels set in Charlotte, and then I upped it to a dozen, and I finally settled on a list of twenty novels set in the Charlotte area. However, I knew that I should not write about twenty novels in one blog post, so I ended up dividing my list into two lists. In last week’s Storied Charlotte blog post, I wrote about ten works of genre fiction set in Charlotte.  For this week’s post, my focus is on more mainstream or literary novels that take place in the Charlotte area.  In each of these novels, the setting plays an integral role in the novel.

The Ada Decades by Paula Martinac is set in Charlotte between 1947 and 2015.  Published by Bywater Books in 2017, this novel focuses on the evolving relationship between Ada Shook, who works as a librarian in a Charlotte public school, and Cam Lively, who teaches English in the same school.  Ada and Cam become involved in the struggle to integrate the Charlotte public schools.  At the same time that they are fighting racial prejudice, they also have to deal with the prevailing prejudice that lesbians faced during the time period portrayed in the novel. The Ada Decades is steeped in Charlotte history and culture, and it even includes a reference to the house where Carson McCullers started writing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.  For more information about Martinac, please see the Storied Charlotte blog post for June 22, or click on the following link:  http://paulamartinac.com/

The City on the Hill is Marian Sims’s 1940 novel in which an idealistic lawyer named Steve Chandler takes on bigotry and corruption in Charlotte, which is called Medbury within the context of the novel.   Sims grew up in Georgia, but she and her lawyer husband moved to Charlotte in 1930 and became residents of the Myers Park neighborhood.  Her husband went on to become a local judge, and Sims drew on her husband’s experiences as a lawyer and judge when writing The City on the Hill.  The publication of Sims’s novel sparked controversy in Charlotte, and several church leaders and police officials made it known that they were not pleased with the book.  However, the book received excellent reviews.  One reviewer proclaimed that “Mrs. Sims knows her stuff” and added that “the double problem of conflict between generations and reform of a small southern city are really integrated with the personalities of the chief characters.”  Sims died in Charlotte in 1961.  Her papers are located in the Special Collections Department of the Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte.  For more information about Sims and her books, please click on the following link: https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/sims-marian

Clover by Dori Sanders is a children’s novel set just south of Charlotte in York County, South Carolina.  Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 1990, this novel is told from the point of view of Clover, a ten-year-old African American girl whose father dies in an automobile accident just hours after marrying a white woman named Sara Kate.  The novel deals with evolving relationship between Clover and Sara Kate as they get to know each other through the medium of food.  The family peach orchard and farm stand figure prominently in this novel.  Although Clover takes place about twenty miles south of Charlotte, there are a number of references to Charlotte in the book.  Sara Kate, for example, spends her Sundays reading The Charlotte Observer.  Following the success of Clover, Sanders rented an office in Charlotte in order to have a quiet place to write.  Clover is the winner of the Lillian Smith Award for Southern literature that enhances racial awareness.  For more information about Sanders and her books, please click on the following link:  https://scafricanamerican.com/honorees/dori-sanders/

Lookaway, Lookaway is Wilton Barnhardt’s satirical novel about the foibles of an upper-crust family living in the Myers Park neighborhood of Charlotte.  Published in 2013, Lookaway, Lookaway explores how the changes associated with the rise of the New South ripple through the lives of a family that has deep roots in the Old South.   Jerene Jarvis Johnston, the matriarch of this family, does her best to keep up some semblance of gentility and prevent her family from disintegrating, but the rest of the family members behave in ways that make it difficult for her to maintain the family’s reputation.  In writing this novel, Barnhardt drew on his childhood memories of spending his summers in Charlotte with his aunt, who lived in Dilworth.  Currently Barnhardt is a creative writing professor at North Carolina State University.  For more information about Barnhardt and his books, please click on the following link:  https://www.wiltonbarnhardt.com/

The Queen of Hearts, Kimmery Martin’s debut novel, came out in 2018.  As a former emergency room physician in Charlotte, Martin is very familiar with the inner-workings of Charlotte’s medical community, and this background is reflected in The Queen of Hearts.  Reviewers of this novel often refer to it as a medical drama, for much of the story is set in a Charlotte hospital.  At its core, this novel is about the evolving friendship between Zadie Anson (a pediatric cardiologist) and Emma Colley (a trauma surgeon).  These women first became friends in medical school, and both go on to pursue successful medical careers in Charlotte.   Their friendship, however, is threatened when secrets from their medical school days start to surface.  For more information about Martin and her books, please click on the following link:  https://www.kimmerymartin.com/

The Skin Artist by George Hovis is set in Charlotte during the boom decade of the 1990s.  Published in 2019, The Skin Artist is Hovis’s first novel, but it is not his first book.  He published a scholarly work titled Vale of Humility:  Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction in 2007.  The Skin Artist traces the fall and eventual redemption of Bill Becker.  Of the course of the summer of 1998, he goes from being a successful business manager living with his wife in a gated-community in the suburbs of Charlotte to losing nearly everything.  As his life and career disintegrate, he becomes involved with a heavily tattooed dancer named Lucy, who works in a strip club in Charlotte.  Bill sinks deeper and deeper into Charlotte’s underworld, accumulating tattoos along the way, until he hits rock bottom.  Eventually he and Lucy leave Charlotte and go to rural Gaston County, where he grew up, and there they begin to rebuild their lives.  Hovis dicusses the writing of The Skin Artist in a length interview with Paula Eckard.  To read this interview, please click on this link: https://issuu.com/eastcarolina/docs/2020_nclr_online-final/44

The Slow Way Back, Judy Goldman’s first novel, came out in 1999, and it went on to win the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award.  Thea McKee, the central character in this novel, has family roots in Charlotte’s Jewish community, but she knows little about her family history.  She is married to a non-Jewish man, and she does not think of herself as being religious.  However, when she acquires a series of eight letters written by her grandmother in the 1930s, she begins to delve into her Jewish heritage.  The letters are written in Yiddish, which she cannot read, so she arranges to have the letters translated.  In the process, she uncovers a series of family secrets that span three generations.  Although The Slow Way Back focuses on one family, it sheds light on the experiences of other Southern Jews who call Charlotte home.  For more information about Goldman and her books, please click on the following link:  http://judygoldman.com/about-judy/

Tomorrow’s Bread, Anna Jean Mayhew’s historical novel set in Charlotte in 1961, shows how Charlotte’s urban renewal program affected the lives of the people whose homes and neighborhoods were destroyed to make room for new real estate projects.  Published in 2019, this novel provides a vivid portrait of daily life in the African American neighborhood of Brooklyn just before it was bulldozed.  As Mayhew explained during an interview, she focuses on three characters:  “Loraylee, the narrator who opens Tomorrow’s Bread, was my initial inspiration for the novel. She’s a young black woman who works at the S&W Cafeteria. … The next voice I heard was that of the Reverend Ebenezer Polk, a mid-50’s educated black minister and community leader in Brooklyn. …  My third point-of-view character is a 51-year-old white woman from Myers Park. … She’s married to a real estate lawyer who is on the planning commission that will ultimately decide the fate of Brooklyn.”  For more information about Mayhew and her books, please click on the following link:  http://annajeanmayhew.com/

Whisper My Name, the first of many books that Burke Davis wrote over the course of his long life, came out in 1949.  Davis set this novel in Charlotte, but he changed the name of the city to Elizabeth.  Daniel Gordon, the central character in the novel, also undergoes a name change.  The child of immigrant Jewish parents living in Philadelphia, he was born with the name of Daniel Goldstein.  However, when he moves to North Carolina in 1910, he changes his name and creates a new identity for himself.  He joins a Baptist Church and attempts to hide his Jewish background as he starts a retail business.  The story of Daniel’s conflicted life touches on the difficulties that Jews faced in the South during this period. Davis loosely based this character on an executive at Ivey’s Department Store.  In writing this novel, Davis drew on his ten years of experience as a reporter and editor for the Charlotte News.  For more information about Davis and his books, please click on the following link:  https://www.nclhof.org/inductees/2000-2/burke-davis/

The Woman in Our House is by the bestselling Charlotte author Andrew Hartley, but in this case, he uses the pen name of Andrew Hart.  Published in June 2019, The Woman in Our House is set in Myers Park.  The novel deals with a young family that has just had their second child.  The mother, Anna Klein, decides that she wants to resume her career as a high-powered literary agent, so they contact a nanny agency in an effort to find a live-in nanny.  They end up hiring Oaklynn Durst, who is listed as a Mormon woman from Utah on her application, even though Anna has some initial misgivings about her.  At first, the arrangement seems to go well, but then the young children start to experience puzzling injuries and illnesses.  These problems prompt Anna to take a closer look into Oaklynn’s past, and as a result of her investigation, she gradually uncovers a series of disturbing deceptions and dark secrets.   As the plot unfolds, the family’s beautiful Myers Park home takes on a frightening and foreboding feel.  For more information about Hartley and his books, please click on the following link:  https://ajhartley.net/meet-author-aj-hartley/

While researching the aforementioned novels, I noticed a theme that applies to most of the books, and that theme can be summed up by the phrase “things are not as they seem.”  Most of the characters in these novels have secrets.  Myers Park figures in a number of these novels, but in these stories, this affluent neighborhood is not nearly as serene and genteel as it appears when one is driving down Queens Road.  These novels scratch at Charlotte’s surface and look behind the facades.  As portrayed in the pages of these novels, Storied Charlotte is a complex place, full of contradictions, but rich in narrative possibilities.    

Tags: literary novelsnovel
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