Category: Charlotte

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Charlotte

A long night in Charlotte

This shouldn’t need to be said but let’s say it. There were honorable protestors in the Charlotte streets last night, and there were people who came to break and burn. It’s possible, even likely, that some changed sides during the night. They showed up to stand for peace but anger overwhelmed them. Or they showed up to riot and their hearts pushed them a different way. Our lives are complicated.

 

This shouldn’t need to be said but let’s say it. There are honorable and skilled police all over this country, and there are police not worthy of the badge. It’s possible, even likely, that some change sides under pressure. They practice calm reason but pull the trigger too soon. Or they itch to take down a suspect and decide, in the moment, to leave the gun in the holster. Our lives are complicated.

 

It’s 1 o’clock Thursday morning and the cable networks are still showing live updates of the chaos in uptown Charlotte, two and a half miles from our house. I can hear the helicopters. I’ve lived in Charlotte 27 years. My wife and I met here. Our roots are sunk to the waterline. One of the things we love most about Charlotte is that it has always been a warm and friendly city. But it is also an American city, and every American city lives with the threat of a street fight over the tensions that have always defined us: freedom vs. control, justice vs. peace. They are values this country has battled over since the beginning. This week, it’s our turn.

 

It is our turn because a police officer here shot a black man Tuesday afternoon. Maybe you have already decided who was right and who was wrong. The truth is, only a few people know. Police say the victim was holding a gun. The victim’s family says he was holding a book. We haven’t seen all the pictures or any of the video. We don’t know the facts. We just know how it makes us feel.

 

The officer’s name, by the way, is Brentley Vinson. The victim was Keith Scott. They are actual people with names and families, not just cardboard stand-ins for what you already believe. Put those same two human beings in that same spot on a different afternoon and maybe it ends another way. The possibilities are as countless as the stars. But here on the ground we have to live with what happened – one man dead from an officer’s bullet, and two nights of blood and broken glass.

 

The anger is always just under the surface, even in a friendly town. Like most other places, Charlotte has wealthy white suburbs and a poor black urban core. Like many other places, we have basically re-segregated our schools and limited the chances of our children to grow up around anyone different. Like a lot of other places, we have a troubled history of police shootings. Just last year a jury could not reach a verdict in the case of Randall Kerrick, a Charlotte officer who shot an unarmed black man named Jonathan Ferrell 10 times. Prosecutors chose not to try Kerrick again. It was a victory of sorts that they decided to try him at all.

 

The violence in Charlotte comes from the same place as Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the sidelines during the national anthem. It comes from the same place as the rise of Donald Trump. It comes from a mutual mistrust of those who are not like us, and the furious belief that America is rigged to favor the other side. Mostly it comes from a shared history that we can’t escape. From the beginning, when our country was built on the backs of slaves, we have been clothed in sins that will never wash all the way clean. With every generation we will turn more tolerant, more welcoming, more alike than we are different. But our resentment and shame over race is built into our genetic code. It has been there since the birth of the nation. Our past bleeds into our present, and that’s why things are never black and white, just always a frustrating gray.

 

Wednesday afternoon, in between the first night of protest and the second, I had a cup of coffee with a smart young sportswriter. We were talking about how Cam Newton spoke out in a blunt and bold way about race late last season, but has taken a softer tone this year. The young writer didn’t know what to think. Is last year’s Cam closer to the truth, or is this year’s Cam the real one? Or are they both authentic parts of the same person?

 

I told him to get used to the confusion. People never get more simple. Life never gets more simple.

 

Last night, watching on TV, there were heroes on the street. A public defender named Toussaint Romain got in between the front line of protestors and the front line of cops, brokering peace. A few protestors tried to chase off the others just looking for something to destroy. A few cops walked over to the protestors and lifted up their faceguards and started a conversation.

 

Those are small things, but they matter. On some nights, like these last two in Charlotte, it seems like we live in different worlds, separated by bullets and tear gas and rocks thrown through windows. Sometimes that’s the only way the voiceless can speak. Sometimes it’s the only path to justice. But there’s also a space in between, somewhere in the gray smoke, where we can try to reach one another as human beings. We have to step into the smoke, knowing that we do not always know, understanding that we do not always understand. Otherwise we’re destined to meet here again and again, late at night, on the streets.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Charlotte Sports

Losing the Lottery

Gerald Henderson and the lowly Bobcats lost again — in Wednesday’s draft lottery. (US Presswire)

So you build a backward team — a team born to lose. They go 7-59, the worst record in NBA history. You end up with the best chance to get the first pick in what many people think is a one-player draft. Lottery night comes, and you survive all the way to the final two. The other team used to be in your town. They have the name that people still wish your team had, back when your city cared about pro basketball. Maybe, if you get the first pick, the city will care again.

They open the next-to-last envelope. It has your name on it.

The New Orleans Hornets get Anthony Davis. You are the Charlotte Bobcats. You lose. Again.

Categories
Charlotte Music

Richard Thompson / Loudon Wainwright III, Knight Theater in Charlotte, 4/19/10

The house lights were still up when Loudon Wainwright III walked onto the stage. So he could see that the 1,200-seat Knight Theater, beautiful as it is, was maybe two-thirds full. I wonder how many times he and Richard Thompson, separately and together, have played to theaters of quiet but devoted fans with empty seats in the back, all their talent not enough to fill the house. Talent doesn’t always sell tickets.

But God almighty, the talent.

Wainwright is 63 now, Thompson 61, and there’s no need to feel sorry for them — they’ve been able to do what they love and make a good living it for something like 40 years apiece. But you hear Wainwright crack open his family secrets and spill them on the floor, or you hear Thompson rev up a guitar break as powerful and precise as a Ferrari running through the gears, and you wonder why they’re not playing arenas.

And then you’re glad they’re not, because it would never be this quiet and you would never get this close.

Here’s Wainwright, in a rare moment at the piano, singing about how he notices his kids like to sing in the same key. Here’s him in “White Winos” singing about his mom liked her white wine, almost (but not quite) to the point where she would let loose her anger about his dad. Here’s him in “Unfriendly Skies” trashing an airport official named Susie who cracked his precious Martin D-28, then wouldn’t let it on the plane.  (He calls her Susie because he doesn’t want to get sued. Then, in the next line, he lets slip that her name is Angela.)

He’s funny, heartbreaking, weird — he does a little Michael Jordan thing with his tongue in between verses — and worth the money all by himself.

But then Richard Thompson came on.

He played his bagful of alternate-universe hits like “Crawl Back (Under My Stone)” and “I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight.” He absolutely killed a cover of Britney Spears’ “Oops… I Did It Again.” He filled every song with riffs and rolls and leads, always in service to the song, but at the same time proving that he’s one of the five best acoustic guitarists in the world.

And he played “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”

If you know any Richard Thompson song, that’s probably the one — it’s on the setlists of a million folkies on open-mike nights, and iTunes shows me two dozen covers (I like the Mary Lou Lord version on “Live City Sounds,” recorded in a Boston subway station). It’s about a robber and the girl who loves him and the fine motorcycle they ride, and it’s tragic and epic and inspiring all tangled up in those six guitar strings and the way, at the end, that Thompson stretches out that last riiiiiiiiiiiiiide.

It was a performance strong enough for a million. About 800 of us got to see it. We went home lucky.

Categories
Charlotte

DP, RIP

If newspapers do go under one day, the thing I’ll miss most is working on a team. Of course you can do good stories alone, as a freelancer. But a newsroom means teamwork, and it means that electric crackle when everybody’s working on the big story, and most of all it means working with unforgettable characters. There could be lots of great characters at accounting firms, I don’t know, but I doubt most places have as many as newspapers. One of the greatest in the Charlotte Observer’s history died this morning. David Poole was 50.

Here is an incomplete list of the things Poole loved: UNC basketball, the Atlanta Braves, creative cursing, R.O.’s Barbecue in Gastonia, politics, old race-car drivers, the newspaper business, his grandbaby Eli, two cars side-by-side in the last turn at Daytona, and most of all, talking.

Here is a list of things Poole was not so fond of: the NBA, dumb NASCAR rules, stupid people in general, the occasional editor, being on the road six days a week, re-engineering and re-designing and all the things we tried to make the newspaper better instead of just doing better stories.

Poole loved to argue. LOVED it. All you had to do was throw out a word — “Earnhardt.” “Bush.” “Dean.” — and he’d be off. Lord help you if you ended up on the other side. He was smart and quick and forceful and pretty soon you’d end up in a tidy little pile of rhetorical dust. He would cut you a look that said, surely you didn’t think you would win an argument with ME. And then he would get tickled about the whole thing and you’d be friends again, not that you ever weren’t.

Sometimes he would get legitimately furious, and at those times it was best to give him about 10 feet of space in every direction. But from my experience it was mostly bluster and show, wrapped around a good heart.

I follow NASCAR, not enough to call myself a fan but enough to know what’s going on, and there’s no question that he was the best NASCAR reporter on the scene — he learned from the great Tom Higgins, the best there ever was. The thing about Poole is, if we had asked him to cover city hall or real estate or theater, he would’ve been the best at those, too. He was a good guy, a devoted family man, but most of all to me he was a great teammate. There’s no way to replace him.

Categories
Charlotte Media

Charlotte blues

It’s spring break at Harvard so Alix and I decided to come back home to Charlotte for the week. It turned out to be remarkable timing. We arrived in town the same day our newspaper laid off another large chunk of the staff — including many of our friends. One of our photogs took a pretty amazing photo of the announcement. I know every single person in that photo. I’ve seen that body language before. That’s a funeral.

Alix and I are safe for now. Whatever “safe” means these days.

We had lunch today with a group of co-workers, all of whom (for now) have survived. We just happened to end up next to a table of Observer people from outside the newsroom. Two of them lost their jobs yesterday. One told me she’s more worried about the people she’s leaving behind.

None of this is unique to us, of course — the same thing is going on all the way up and down the line, to white-collar workers and blue-collar workers and no-collar workers. We are catching it hard for many reasons, one of them being that the people who used to advertise in our paper can’t afford to anymore.

I think what we do is important — if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have done it for these last 25 years — but we don’t deserve a job any more than a teacher or a textile worker. Everybody who puts in an honest day’s work contributes to the world. And the market works its will on us the same as it does everybody else.

Newspaper people get by on gallows humor — it’s how we cope with having to cover murders and missing children and the mamas of sons who don’t come back from the war. So at lunch we mourned the people who lost their jobs and we worried about our own futures but mostly we laughed at it all the best we could. Is the glass half full or half empty? All I know is, somebody peed in the glass.

We’ll be back for good in June. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, and nobody else does either. We just have to enjoy the moments we get, make the most of the rest, and prepare ourselves for whatever happens next. Somebody peed in the glass.