UNC at Pittsboro? Historians reveal what might've been and more

 

Imagine that our great University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, would, but for the tight-fistedness of an 18th century landowner, have been our great University of North Carolina at Pittsboro.

On Pokeberry Creek, no less.

It's true, and the details of this near-miss of the 700-acre Chatham County Jones Grove plantation as a site for the University in 1792 -- as well as the secrets literally dug from unmarked slave graves -- are revealed in a tantalizing new book, "Miss Mary's Money: Fortune and Misfortune in a North Carolina Plantation Family, 1760-1924" (McFarland Publishers, Jefferson, N.C., $29.95 softcover.) by H.G. Jones with David Southern.

Trust Jones, who's taught history in several universities, served as state archivist and director of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History and as curator of the North Carolina Collection at UNC, to nail the most elusive facts and make history come jigging to life.


David Southern is a managing editor at Duke University Press of "The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle" and a genius of a sleuth.

Let's put aside the complicated Smith genealogy that begins with a 1760 land grant to one Richard Parker, and just say that Mary Ruffin Smith became the sole heir of several sizable parcels, including Jones Grove, which over the years expanded to more than 1,000 acres, and which, at her death in 1885, she willed to the University. Proceeds from the sale of the property were parlayed into scholarships.

Mary Smith never married. But her unsavory bachelor brothers, Francis Smith and Sidney Smith, one a quasi-doctor and one a binge-drinking lawyer, sired four daughters with a slave woman named Harriet, often as the result of rape.

And that's only the beginning of this fascinating story, which anyone interested in dysfunctional families, horrific treatment of slave women by their white owners, great wealth, family devotion and heart-swelling generosity, will definitely want to read.








 

Thomas Wolfe Winner: 'a short story is when people shut up and listen'

Sandra Cisneros

Novelist and short story writer Sandra Cisneros is this year's winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award, sponsored by the Department of English at UNC Chapel Hill. She will deliver the free public Wolfe lecture at 7:30 p.m., on Tuesday, Oct. 21, in the Genome Sciences Building on the campus. 

Winner of a MacArthur "genius grant," Cisneros is the author of two award-winning novels, "The House on Mango Street" and "Carmelo," as well as three collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, "Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories" and, most recently, "Have You Seen Marie," a picture book for adults.

In 2002, the Missouri Review asked Chicago native Cisneros about her definition of a short story. Her answer:

I don’t know what the definition of a short story is, and I don’t even care to answer that question. That’s something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it’s a story. For me, a story’s a story if people want to hear it; it’s very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I’m speaking it out loud, whether I’m reading it in a banquet hall for a convention and it’s the waitresses and busboys who are looking up from their jobs, or whether it’s across an ice house table (ice house is an outdoor bar here in San Antonio), or whether it’s a group of my girlfriends when we’re having soup. Its power is that it makes people shut up and listen, and not many things make people shut up and listen these days. They remember it, and it stays with them without their having to take notes. They wind up retelling it, and it affects their lives, and they’ll never look at something the same way again. It changes the way they think, in other words.

The Wolfe Prize and Lecture honors the memory of Thomas Clayton Wolfe, UNC class of 1920. Previous winners include Ron Rash, Josephine Humphreys, Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell and Ellen Gilchrist.

Bathanti Reads at Annual Thomas Wolfe Society Meeting in Chapel Hill

Thomas Wolfe

You never know where N.C. Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti will show up. On Friday, 7:30-9:30 p.m., he'll be reading from his poetry in the Wilson Library on the UNC Chapel Hill campus, as part of the annual meeting of the Thomas Wolfe Society.
On Saturday, Paula Eckard of UNC Charlotte will moderate a panel on Wolfe and his novella, "The Party at Jack's." Other topics during the weekend include "Thomas Wolfe's Cinematic Storytelling," "Look Homeward, Always," "Aspects of Wolfe's Time in the Paris House of Illusion," "Thomas Wolfe's Asheville," and "Decoding Wolfe's Universe: A Modern Understanding of Space, Time and Dimension in Look Homeward, Angel."
Registration is at 10:30 Friday morning in Chancellor's East at the Carolina Inn. Cost: $125 for all sessions and the Saturday evening banquet (students: $60). For Saturday sessions only and banquet: $65.
Wolfe was 15 when he enrolled at the university in Chapel Hill, where he served as editor of the Tar Heel newspaper and became an award-winning playwright. At the end of his senior yearbook entry, the following quote appeared: “He can do more between 8:25 and 8:30 than the rest of us can do all day, and it is no wonder that he is classed as a ‘genius.’” Wolfe died of tuberculosis at age 37 in 1938.