Carolina Blue Quotes

I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.

The past doesn't define who you are, it just gives you the starting point of who you're going to be

Let's put it like this; men like Berkley, like me, we don't get a no for an answer, a girl who says no is like a... like a unicorn, and we all want to **** the unicorn!

Ben & Jerry's Lifestyle: Lots of options, exciting flavors and never repeating a scoop.

Some clothes provoke more feelings in me than people.

Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip's, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness of reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers' tartans passing in review, blue herons on the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry's, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again.

If I could cook I wouldn’t have to study my ass off at school and I would have tried to find a man to support me as his lovely wife.

I walked with a sexy, confident walk, just like Bambi on his first walk.

There was no water at my grandfather’s when I was a kid and would go for it with two zinc buckets. Down the path, past the cow by the foundation where the fine people’s house was before they arranged to have it burned down. To the neighbor’s cool well. Would come back with pails too heavy, so my mouth pulled out of shape. I see myself, but from the outside. I keep trying to feel who I was, and cannot. Hear clearly the sound the bucket made hitting the sides of the stone well going down, but never the sound of me.

A summer world where skies were Carolina blue, And friendship was everlasting. A place where courage finally came through, And sorrow left our side. It all started with a smile That I tried to put on every day, But when a true friend smiled back, It never went away. And as time goes on, something lingers, A lesson learned by heart, A memory that will always be near, Even though we are apart. Love is such a miraculous thing, When two can help each other, Bringing joy to both friendship, and family, Until life's as sweet as Honey Butter.

The stories I made up for myself changed. In the half-sleep that preceded full sleep I began to imagine the highway that went north. No real road, this highway was shadowed by tall grass and ancient trees. Moss hung low and tiny birds with gray-blue wings darted from the road’s edge to the trees.

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

Perhaps we say things with tattoos that we can't say other ways

She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

Red for the blood of Christ, green for his everlasting love, blue for heaven above, and old for the King of Kings.

I keep trying to feel who I was, and cannot. — Jack Gilbert, from “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Do you dance? Or are you strictly a prop-up-the-wall-with-a-beer kind of guy?" "I dance. But I don't shag." She laughed. "I think we've just established that you do". "Not Austin Powers shagging. It's A Carolina thing. A dance.

Most families have secrets. Locked deep within their family tree, these secrets are hidden from the rest of the world. Now, it was said most families, because there is one family with one extraordinary secret. A secret so wonderful and terrific that its impact changed many lives forever.

There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.

The slightest sea breeze clung to the air as Peter and Harper walked the pathway along Charleston Harbor. A few dolphins played in the not-so-distant waves, and sunlight fell like glitter in shades of orange and pink against the water. And this---this---was Charleston. All they needed was a front porch painted haint blue and a proverbial glass of sweet tea.

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’ s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want— hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, "There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood." I would say, "Breathe deeply," and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.

O HOSPITAL FICAVA EM UMA COLINA na periferia da cidade, igual aos hospitais que vemos em filmes sobre loucos. Nosso hospital era famoso e havia abrigado grandes poetas e cantores. O hospital se especializou em poetas e cantores, ou será que os poetas e cantores se especializaram na loucura? O mais famoso de todos os ex-pacientes era Ray Charles. Vivíamos esperando que ele voltasse e fizesse serenatas da janela do pavilhão de recuperação de drogados. Ele nunca voltou. Contudo, tínhamos a família Taylor: Kate e Livingston estavam lá, embora James tivesse sido promovido para outro hospital antes da minha chegada. Na falta de Ray Charles, seus blues com sotaque da Carolina do Norte eram o bastante para nos entristecer. Os tristes precisam ouvir o som de sua tristeza. Robert Lowell também não passou por ali durante a minha estada. Sylvia Plath chegara e partira. Por que será que a métrica, a cadência e o ritmo provocam loucura em quem os produz?

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Sirien gives, for the first time, an honest account of the extent of her sexual experience. All the cocks she has sucked as a humble massage parlor employee, she has sucked in the anticipation, in the hope of sucking Bob's cock, into which all the others were subsumed - well, I'd have to work on the dialogue. Cross fade between the two rivers (the Chao Phraya, the Delaware). Closing credits. For the European market, I already had line in mind, along the lines of "If you liked The Music Room, you'll love The Massage Room.

It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula. I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael’s calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones, I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians. It comes to me as a surprising form of knowledge that my time in the city is more vocation than gift; it is my destiny, not my choice. I consider it a high privilege to be a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious. Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it approves of restraint far more than vainglory. As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metalwork as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in a hellish contortion of agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water and praying for God to end their suffering. They screamed and groaned in an unending litany, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters. The predominant color was blue, though nauseations of red intruded throughout. Men lay half naked, piled on top of one another in scenes to pitiful to imagine. Bloodied heads rested on shoulders and laps, broken feet upon arms. Tired hands held in torn guts and torsos twisted every which way. Dirty shirts dressed the bleeding bodies and not enough material existed in all the world to sop up the spilled blood. A boy clad in gray, perhaps the only rebel among them, lay quietly in one corner, raised arm rigid with a finger extended, as if pointing to the heavens. His face was a singular portrait of contentment among the misery. Broken bones, dirty white and soiled with the passing of hours since injury, were everywhere abundant. All manner of devices splinted the damaged and battered limbs: muskets, branches, bayonets, lengths of wood or iron from barns and carts. One individual had bone splinted with bone: the dried femur of a horse was lashed to his busted shin. A blind man, his eyes subtracted by the minié ball that had enfiladed him, moaned over and over “I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” Others lay limp, in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard. The stink of blood mixed with human waste produced a potent and offensive odor not unlike that of a hog farm in the high heat of a South Carolina summer. Swarms of fat, green blowflies everywhere harassed the soldiers to the point of insanity, biting at their wounds. Their steady buzz was a noise straight out of hell itself, a distress to the ears.

She liked Tucker; he was handsome in a very unassuming manner. He was tall and a bit lanky, but not in that now popular junkie look kind of way. He had a head full of not-too-closely-cropped black curls and lovely blue eyes. He was originally from North Carolina and had that Southern gentleman charm going for him. Every time Ellie asked Tucker a question, he answered with a "Yes, ma'am!" that always unhinged her spine momentarily. But it wasn't like she thought about him seriously.

Just before Aimee was moved from the county jail to begin her prison sentence in Georgia, she was baptized. She described what it was like to emerge from the water to see her hands bound in chains and cuffs, the Carolina blue sky a backdrop of hope beyond the chains. I suspect that she understood something about Jesus in the backdrop of chains and cuffs that I am still too dumb to appreciate.

Having powers and mastering your powers are two very different things. One is given. The other must be earned.

I don’t know how many years had passed that I hadn’t thought about her. It was a few months after the death of my mother that her name came to me again. I was cleaning out her closet and dresser to donate some of her clothes to the Church. They always had clothes drives to give to some of the poorer people in the area. Better for someone else to have them than just hanging in a closet or in a drawer. At the bottom of one of her drawers, my eyes saw an envelope with my name on. Immediately, I recognized the handwriting on the envelope and for the first time in a long time, I could feel the tears flowing out of my eyes. This wasn’t no single tear drop cry. This was the big, fat, messy tears that come from memories flashing through your mind. Tiffany did write something to me and it was kept from me. I almost unintentionally crumpled the letter in my hand as the combination of hurt and rage took over me for a few moments. I went back to my bedroom and sat down on the edge of my bed. The letter had her North Carolina address on it. That letter would have been a way for us to stay in touch. For almost eight years, I had believed that she didn’t want to stay in contact with me. In that moment, I realized that the hurt I felt for being disregarded was unfounded and she was the one who had the right to feel forgotten. She must have believed that she meant little to me, like I thought she did of me. It’s weird how quickly your perspective can change when given new information. I held that letter in my shaking hands for a few minutes. I didn’t know what to do. Opening it seemed pointless to me. All it would do was rekindle feelings that I once had and couldn’t do anything about. After all those years, I couldn’t try and reconnect to her life. We both moved past each other and it wouldn’t be fair to her to come back. It wouldn’t make her feel good about herself to know that my parents hid that letter from me, like she was some horrible person that I needed to avoid. She may not even live at that address anymore. She undoubtedly moved away for college. I wasn’t in love with her anymore and I don’t know if she ever loved me, but if she did, I’m sure she didn’t anymore. I did the only thing that I felt was right. I went outside and lit a cigarette in the backyard. I took a deep inhale from my Camel full flavored filtered cigarette. I hadn’t converted to menthols, yet. I re-lit my lighter and put a corner of the letter into the flame until I was certain that it had caught fire. I held it in my hand watching the white of the envelope turn black under the blue and yellow flame. Once the envelope was about three quarters burned, I let it fall out of my hand and watched it float for a few moments before it hit the bottom concrete step where it continued to burn. It had all turned black and the carbonized paper started to break away from each other as I stamped out the embers with my sneaker. The wind carried away the pieces of carbon and the memory of her floated away from me. Watching those small burned pieces of paper scatter across my backyard made me realize that my childhood was over. I had nothing to show for it. All I had was myself. I didn’t even know why I was still living in my parent’s house after my mother died. There was nothing there for me. Life would only begin for me once I found something that mattered to me. Unfortunately for me, the only thing that mattered to me was words.

A Melungeon. She ain’t white, she ain’t colored, she ain’t Injun. Ain’t any one a them three kinds would claim her. Ain’t just any fool’d take a chance on her, neither. Them Melungeons been hidin’ up in these mountains long’s anyone can remember. Got a certain look to ’em, like her—dark skin, but not red like a Injun. Black hair, and them cold blue eyes.

Walked on the battery with Louis Young† in the moon-light. It was lovely! The tide was full. The waters of the bay rippled up against the stones with a pleasing gurgle. The shores of the opposite island of St John’s were seen dimly in the distance; the clump of tall pines standing out a darker shade in the haze. The whole bay was light, silver-like, with ships spotting it, their watch-lights trembling like stars, and reflected below in the water. The sky was perfectly cloudless, intensely blue. The moon full and sharply defined—no haze tip there. The air full of fragrance. The houses along the bay with their piazzas, so strange, so tropical-looking. All still and calm. Is it reality? or I am dreaming, and in fancy conjuring up the shadow of some half-forgotten story? It is real. I have seen it. And I love to remember it as the farewell scene of Charleston. Taken

In another well-written and authoritative study of roots music, Mark Kemp quotes a Crystal Lunsford as saying this: How come you think music’s so good in the South? It’s because black people and white people worked together to make it so damn good, that’s how come. There’s always been black people in white southern music and white people in black southern music. That’s the way it works down here. We wouldn’t have a southern rock & roll without the black influence, but then, I don’t think the blues and rock & roll would have been as accepted if it weren’t for white people down here who backed them and pushed them and recorded them. It took both races. Music has always been a universal thing down here. It goes beyond color. And that goes all the way back to slavery. By the way, Crystal Lunsford isn’t a professor or a music critic. As Kemp explains, she’s a third-generation employee of the Eveready plant in Asheboro, North Carolina who lives by herself in a trailer in rural Guilford County. If you’re the kind of expert who doesn’t look beyond the obvious, you might think the musical world is as segregated as the school systems were back in the day. But if you live out in the woods and you keep your eyes and ears open the way Crystal Lunsford does, then you know there’s more to the

A hundred years later the gold is still there. The miners have all left and no one would know that beneath the red clay of these Carolina hills the best and the worst in man struggled with each other in the search for gold. If you should walk across these hills, you may still hear the wind whispering the names of these mines—the Dixie Queen, the Yellow Dog, the Blue Hill, the Dutch Bend and the Reed Mine, but even the wind does not mention the name of the MacIntosh Mine. —The Haunted Gold Mine

I believe North Carolina is going to be a very important place in holding positive energy for this part of the world as we go through our next evolution on a body, mind, spirit, and planetary level. I believe that North Carolina is evolving into a light center for the United States. I see the symbolism with the lighthouses all along the North Carolina coast, shining brightly. They remind me of the great lighthouse in Alexandria, Egypt, where the world’s greatest library once existed. On the other end of the state lie the mystical Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and with vortices in the area spinning with so much energy in cities like Asheville that the area has been nicknamed the Sedona of the South, in reference to the vortices and spiritual energy

Anxious to defend his adopted city—especially his side of town, the less fashionable west end—Eli considered giving Veronica a condensed lecture on the history of Asheville, North Carolina. 1880: the Western North Carolina Railroad completed a line from Salisbury to Asheville, which later enabled George Washington Vanderbilt to construct the Biltmore Estate, the largest private residence in America. Over time, that 179,000 square foot house transitioned into a multi- million dollar company. Which lured in tourists. Who created thousands of jobs. Which caused the sprawl flashing by Eli’s window at fifty-five miles per hour. But Eli refrained from being the Local Know-It-All, remembering all the times he’d traveled to new cities and some cabbie wanted to play docent, wanted to tell him about the real Cleveland or the hidden Miami. Instead, he let the air conditioner chase away the remnants of his jet lag and thought about Almario “Go Go” Gato. He waited for Veronica to say something about the Blue Ridge Mountains, which stood alongside the highway, hovering over the valley below like stoic parents waiting for their kids to clean up their messy bedrooms. Eli gave her points for her silence. And for ditching the phone, even if she kept glancing anxiously toward the glove compartment every time it buzzed. The car rode smooth, hardly a bump. For a resident of Los Angeles, she drove cautiously, obeying all traffic laws. Eli had a perfect driving record. Well, almost perfect. There was that time he drove the Durham Bulls’ chartered Greyhound into the right field fence during the seventh inning stretch. But that was history. Almost ancient.

Automobile preference, it seems, follows a pattern similar to baby names. Just as Michael and David are popular names with all types of people, so, too, are Honda Accords, Ford Focuses, and Toyota Camrys. Indeed, the top five cars that YourMechanic services are exactly the same in both blue and red states and districts. But interesting differences appear beyond consensus top sellers. YourMechanic identified cars in each state and congressional district that were “unusually popular”—that is, which were overrepresented compared with the national average. So, for example, a Volkswagen Jetta is not a particularly popular car nationally, but in certain states and districts there are a lot of them. The red/blue divide manifests itself clearly when it comes to unusually popular vehicles. In the twenty-four states won by Mitt Romney in 2012, the most unusually popular car was American-made in three-quarters of them. Of the twenty-six states that Barack Obama won that year, the most unusually popular car was foreign-made more than two-thirds of the time. The Jetta is big in New Hampshire, for example. Two different Subarus, the Japanese automaker with the especially gay-friendly reputation, are unusually popular in Maine, Oregon, and Colorado. In contrast, the Chevrolet Silverado is the most unusually popular vehicle in Louisiana and Arkansas, with the Chevrolet Impala being particularly prevalent in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

You recall, I am sure, Old Juba’s stories of the fearsome blue-eyed mountain Indians with their six fingers and brown skin and wicked ways? No doubt you can still hear Juba threatening that, were we to vex her enough, those Melungeons would come and steal us away in the night. Ziltha, there are such people! The girl, Able, is a Melungeon. According to Mrs. Walker, her kind live high in the hills, but they are a reclusive, suspicious sort and do not warm to outsiders. Nor do outsiders warm to them.

In America, the South Carolina Negro Code of 1735 went so far as to specify the fabrics enslaved black people were permitted to wear, forbidding any that might be seen as above their station. They were banned from wearing “any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes,” the cheapest, roughest fabrics available to the colony. Two hundred years later, the spirit of that law was still in force as African-American soldiers were set upon and killed for wearing their army uniforms.

Carolina Flores took a sip of her sandía agua fresca on her porch and looked out across the scenic landscape of her lush farm, mesmerized by the clear blue sky overhead, the rows of colorful Swiss chard lined up like little soldiers, and the fields of red onions, ripe for picking. It wasn't strawberry season yet, her favorite, but she loved the calm of the winter months. A cool coastal breeze wafted the fragrant scent of garlic through the air, and Carolina marveled at the contrast between the snowcapped Santa Ynez Mountains in the distance and the food growing on the land. Mi tierra.

Whenever Daddy would take me to the ocean, I'd see it in its beauty--the blues and turquoises of the water, the ripples and movements that drenched my ears in soothing sounds. But Daddy never took me there during the storms. We didn't go to shore when a hurricane came or the waves crashed high and hard onto the sand. What Daddy had come to know was the dichotomy, the mixing of the beauty and destruction, the awe and devastation that the force of nature could unleash.

What does it say?" "What do you want it to say?" she asked. "You haven't bothered to tell me what you're after." "I want to buy a battleship, of course. Who has one for sale?" Barbara shot him a dour expression and studied the blue papers. "I'm afraid you're out of luck. The Soviet Union has one left, which is used to train naval cadets. France has long since scrapped hers. Same with Great Britain, even though she still keeps one on the rolls for the sake of tradition." "The United States?" "Five of them have been preserved as memorials." "What are their present locations?" "They're enshrined in the states they were named after: North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and Massachusetts." "You said five." "The Missouri is maintained by the Navy in Bremerton, Washington. Oh, I almost forgot: the Arizona is still sentimentally kept on naval rolls as a commissioned ship." Jarvis put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. "I seem to recall the battlewagons Wisconsin and Iowa were tied up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard a few years back." "Good memory," said Barbara. "According to the report, the Wisconsin went to the ship-breakers in 1984." "And the Iowa?" "Sold for scrap.

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US Craft Brewery Sales to Anheuser-Busch InBev March 28, 2011: Goose Island Beer Co. (Chicago) February 5, 2014: Blue Point Brewing (Patchogue, New York) November 5, 2014: 10 Barrel Brewing (Bend, Oregon) January 23, 2015: Elysian Brewing (Seattle) September 23, 2015: Golden Road Brewing (Los Angeles) December 18, 2015: Four Peaks Brewing (Tempe, Arizona) December 22, 2015: Breckenridge Brewery (Littleton, Colorado) April 12, 2016: Devils Backbone Brewing (Roseland, Virginia) November 3, 2016: Karbach Brewing (Houston) May 3, 2017: Wicked Weed Brewing (Asheville, North Carolina)

Jazz musician Miles Davis once said, “If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.” bell hooks, a black professor of English at City College of New York who spells her name in lower case, once wrote, “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.” Demond Washington, a star athlete at Tallassee High School in Tallassee, Alabama, got in trouble for saying over the school intercom, “I hate white people and I’m going to kill them all!” Later he said he did not mean it. Someone who probably did mean it was Maurice Heath, who heads the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther party. He once told a crowd, “I hate white people—all of them! . . . You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies!” Another one who probably meant it is Dr. Kamau Kambon, black activist and former visiting professor of Africana Studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In 2005, Prof. Kambon told a panel at Howard University Law School that “white people want to kill us,” and that “we have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.” In 2005, James “Jimi” Izrael, a black editorial assistant for the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald- Leader, was on a radio program to talk about Prof. Kambon. Another guest mentioned other blacks who have written about the fantasy of killing whites, and Mr. Izrael began to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “I’m laughing because if I had a dollar for every time I heard a black person [talking about] killing somebody white I’d be a millionaire.” For some, killing whites is not fantasy. Although the press was quiet about this aspect of the story, the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, DC, area in 2002 had a racial motive. Lee Malvo testified that his confederate, John Muhammad, was driven by hatred of America because of its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy.” His plan was to kill six whites every day for 30 days. For a 179-day period in 1973 and 1974, a group of Black Muslim “Death Angels” kept the city of San Francisco in a panic as they killed scores of randomly-chosen “blue-eyed devils.” Some 71 deaths were eventually attributed to them. Four of an estimated 14 Death Angels were convicted of first-degree murder. Most Americans have never heard of what became known as the Zebra Killings. A 2005 analysis of crime victim surveys found that 45 percent of the violent crimes blacks committed were against whites, 43 percent against blacks, and 10 percent against Hispanics. There was therefore slightly more black-on-white than black-on-black crime. When whites committed violence they chose black victims only 3 percent of the time. Violence by whites against blacks, such as the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, is well reported, but racial murder by blacks is little publicized. For example, in Wilkinsburg, near Philadelphia, 39-year-old Ronald Taylor killed three men and wounded two others in a 2000 rampage, in which he targeted whites. At one point, he pushed a black woman out of his way, saying “Not you, sister. I’m not going to hurt any black people. I’m just out to kill all white people.

So, a little desperate and surprisingly inspired, I bought a cap. Not just any cap. I picked one with a bright-gold visor, a gold button at the top, a crown of navy blue, an American flag on the left temple, and—on the forehead emblem—a spread-winged eagle over a rising sun and a red-and-green tractor-trailer and the white letters “America— Spirit of Freedom.” On the back, over my cerebellum, was a starred banner in blue, white, red, green, and gold that said “Carnesville, GA Petro.” I put on that hat and disappeared. The glances died like flies. I could sit anywhere, from Carnesville to Tacoma. In Candler, North Carolina, while Ainsworth was outside fuelling the truck, I sat inside in my freedom hat saying “Biscuits and gravy” to a waitress. She went “Oooooo wheeeee” and I thought my cover wasn’t working, but a trucker passing her had slipped his hand between the cheeks of her buttocks, and she did not stop writing.

Consistently, in most places in the New World—as varied as Haiti, Liberia, South Carolina, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Louisiana—and among most people, the creation of Blackness meant that proximity to Whiteness, while favored, was not Whiteness.