This week’s performances of Harriet Jacobs will be preceded by a video sneak preview of Little Green Pig’s spring production of a new work by Durham’s Howard Craft. When two Duke professors were looking for material for a black theater festival, they found two pieces from equally fraught periods in African-American history, separated by a […]
Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell
Posted inFood & Drink
A new generation of beekeepers
A bee superhighway whizzes around Liz Lindsey’s Chapel Hill yard. Between their frequent pollen runs, about 100,000 Italian honeybees take shelter inside six cedar pagodas, where they cool by flapping their tiny wings. Lindsey, a 38-year-old folklorist who lives in the Glen Lennox neighborhood, is part of a new generation of beekeepers: younger, female and […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Native persimmons are overabundant and underappreciated
One woman’s wasp magnets can be the urban food forager’s delight. So I learned, one fall day, as I complained to my husband about the orange orbs leaking fragrantly and sparking a backyard bacchanalia for our insect friends. Muttering something about the ignorance of the city-bred, my husband pronounced them persimmon fruits and began to […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Local cheesemaker Alessandra Trompeo injects Italian culture into her work
It takes an artisanal cheesemaker to fully appreciate the honor of having a Jersey cow named after you. Durham’s Alessandra Trompeo understands that Jersey cows provide a milk rich in butterfatthe perfect base for the cheeses she crafts as the founder of La Casa dei Formaggi (“house of cheeses” in her native Italian). So when […]
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Clara Sue Kidwell
When Clara Sue Kidwell entered the University of Oklahoma in the late 1950s, the school’s unofficial mascot, “Native American brave” Little Red, did his “war dance” along the sidelines at home football matches. Kidwell, of Chippewa and Choctaw descent, didn’t go to the games. It was only in the 1970s and after pressure from American […]
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Sweet summer
Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell. My trigger: the tinny tunes cranked out by an ice cream truck. Several weeks ago, the sounds of that should-be-irritating carnival music wafted through our open window. Bare feet, hair flying, I sprinted out the front door in search of the truck. I caught a glimpse […]
Posted inArt
Zelda Lockhart explores the shared histories of Native and African Americans
In the peculiar racial order of these United States, almost everyone claims a Native American ancestorusually Cherokee, the most popular, if not most probable, optionperched on some distant branch of the family tree. Declaring Indianness is just as much a part of black American culture as it is for the majority’s, partly due to real […]
Posted inArt
Duke’s Karla F.C. Holloway studies black authors’ favorite writers
Karla F.C. Holloway BookMarks: Reading in Black and White Thursday, Nov. 30, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh For Karla F.C. Holloway, the William Rand Kenan Jr. professor of English, law and women’s studies at Duke University, the term “book report” is a verband describes a literary convention among 20th-century black authors who “book reported” […]
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Gospels gone wild
Forty-something Theresa Hopson owns a Christian-oriented boutique on Fayetteville Street, selling panties that say “Only the Lord can see” and hats as big as showboats to the Triangle’s church ladies. She’s dating the Rev. Purvell Sykes, a roughneck in a pastor’s robes and a schemer who’s trying to redevelop the abandoned black neighborhood where Theresa […]
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UNC-Chapel Hill examines race and history
In life, Eli Merritt would have never shared a table with William Richardson Davie and Cornelia Phillips Spencer. Yet on the opening page of the University of North Carolina’s new virtual museum, a photograph of Merritt, a college servant in the 1880s and likely a slave before that, sits beside portraits of UNC founder Davie […]