Greetings from Wilson, North Carolina, where the Lawson Trek is four hiking-days from its arrival in little Washington and the completion of this journey. 

I want to tell you all about Wilson, a small city struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of the loss of tobacco farming and other traditional rural vocations that made it a coastal plain capital. Wilson is working hard on its downtown, encouraging the arts, and looking forward. 

I want to tell you about Clayton, a smaller city (Wilson has close to 50,000 people; Clayton is closing in on 20,000), which is trying to combine a downtown focus on small business with the advantages it has by being part of the metropolitan Raleigh tech hub. I want to tell you about how it's felt to walk away from even the last hills and into the coastal plain, where the clouds put on a show every day and the land spreads itself out before you like a beach blanket. I want to tell you about the fried bologna sandwich I had in Papa Jack's, in Buckhorn Crossroads and the barbecue I ate at Parker's in Wilson, about what seems to be Lawson's crossing of the Neuse River and what may or may not have been Wee Quo Whom, a waterfall whose location has always presented a significant problem for route tracers.  

And yet instead I need to address an issue I thought we had resolved already. I'm talking, once again, about the possible hanging tree in Salisbury, which sparked a discussion -- a highly respectful discussion on all parts, I might add -- about the confederate flag and the history of racism in the Carolinas. (I updated things a bit here.)

Once again: by far the most delightful aspect of this discussion -- at least in these pages -- is the decency with which it's been carried on. I have spoken with people who vigorously support the flying of the confederate flag and people who think (as I do) that the flag represents a legacy of hatred and white supremacy. And we shook hands and we kept our voices modulated and we listened and smiled. We didn't change our minds much, but we engaged in civil discourse.

So then yesterday I got this comment on the blog.

I hate to allow Mr. Mathews, whoever he is and wherever he comes from (the return address on his comment came up as "server unknown" or some such), to kidnap this discussion, but I found it so heartbreaking that I wanted to put it out there rather than bury it: I've always believed that you expunge corruption by exposing it, not by hiding it.

It's scarcely worth pointing out the tide of irrationality in his comments -- he seems to think that his ancestors stole the land of the United States from the Indians fair and square (and tried to seize it again through treason) so that means those of us who don't share that background are somehow, I don't know -- well, gutter degenerate filth, so the United States is his country and not ours. We see so much of this now and I find it heartbreaking. I will point out that the word "gutter" is commonly attributed to Louis Farrakhan about Judaism (whether he ever said it or not is another entire question. And meanwhile, the Nazis famously despised "degenerate" art, so once you're using code words like degenerate and gutter, you're aligning yourself with some pretty troubling things.

I need to tell you this: I have sat across from Peggy Scott of the Santee Indians, who was kind and decent and delightful, across from John Jeffries of the Occaneechi, who was kind and decent and delightful. (I haven't been able to tell you about him yet, but take a look at this until I can.) If anyone -- anyone -- could complain about people showing up and ruining a country -- well, you know. The point is, Mr. Mathews is spewing a kind of vicious, ignorant, cowardly hatred that pollutes everything it touches, and it hurt my spirit to leave it rotting in the comments thread of this blog, and it hurt even worse to delete it, as though I were afraid of it. 

So I'm sharing it here. And in that spirit I also say, once more: the vast majority of people with whom the Lawson Trek has interacted -- in fact, simply everybody else -- has shown such kindness and generosity that this ugly attack so near to the end of the project serves only to underscore that. I am grateful for that more than I can express.

To cleanse the stain of Mr. Mathews' vileness from our spirits, I will do something I should have done much more of throughout this project but only just thought of literally this very second: I'm going to share a bunch of photos and captions to show what it's looked like from the Lawson Trek the least couple hikes. Thanks for reading. And as for Mr. Mathews and his ilk, I suggest we just do what his favorite song asks us to do anyhow: look away.

One of the great things about this online storytelling is I get to go backwards and fix things I've got wrong, clarify things, and revisit things. I'll do all of the above here as I revisit my consideration of Salisbury and its past, which I discussed on this blog a month ago when I trekked through there.

I went on at some length about the confederate flag and such, and I learned a good deal from a good many people, including that Salisbury still had a standing tree from which three men were lynched in 1906.

Not so fast! 

I've since heard from my friend and guide Susan Sides, who was very helpful to me while I was there, that the tree no longer stands. She suggested I contact Susan Barringer Wells, whose book A Game Called Salisbury details the lynching and the murder that led to it. Sides's email said that Wells's book claimed the tree still stands, and after publication (in 2010) she heard from many people that that was not the case. So I reached out to Wells to check. Wells told me that though she did hear from people who said the tree had come down, she's just not sure. There was another lynching in 1902, and some think the same tree was used both times; others are not so sure. 

A member of the black community took her to a tree in 2006, she says, which would have fit the descriptions in the newspapers of the day (it had to be close to the railroad because Vaughan says passengers described passing the hanging bodies the next day). Others say the tree (or trees) came down, perhaps when the property turned to industrial use.

In any case, it's important that I back off from my claim. It's likely the tree I identified is not the lynching tree, and it's also likely that tree no longer stands. As Susan Sides said in her email, "I just want you to know our town does not have a hanging tree." Though I'm not at all sure there's certainty here (and I did acknowledge even in the original piece that I was far from certain about the tree), it's very certain that I don't have it.

Now, that said, I'm not sure whether that's a good or a bad thing. Lynching is an unquestioned evil. But the many monuments to the confederacy help us remember what stories we were telling ourselves about the confederacy and when. According to a brilliant recent piece by Timothy Tyson, those monuments built in North Carolina were overwhelmingly built after 1898, in a time of increasingly virulent, vicious, and violent white supremacy movements and increasing danger for African Americans. In 1898 white North Carolinians violently prevented black citizens from voting and took over the government. That is, the  confederate monuments, as Tyson put it, "reflected that moment of white supremacist ascendency as much as they did the Confederate legacy." Salisbury's own confederate monument went up in 1909 as part of this movement.

I heard from more people in response to that piece too.  One of my interviewees, Tony, said at one point, "Rowan county is built on hatred." That seemed rather incendiary to me, so I didn't use his comment in my piece. Then people started sending me links. On the good side, the 1906 lynching was a moment of change for North Carolina. The governor at the time, Robert Glenn, actually sent the military to try to stop the lynching, though those actually there trying to prevent it were overwhelmed and the soldiers arrived too late.

overt white supremacist, and his name, inscribed above the doors of buildings on campuses in Chapel Hill, Durham, Greenville,  and elsewhere has been part of the discussion in North Carolina about the celebration of a legacy with such negative aspects. So far nobody has taken a chisel to a pediment (and I'll be surprised and not especially pleased if anybody does), but people are talking.

But back to Rowan County and whether it was founded on hatred -- it does have a rather off-putting legacy of klansmanship. A recent American Experience documentary about the North Carolina Klan in the 1960s focuses on Rowan County and its resident Bob Jones, who led the Klan through its last insurgence, during which the North Carolina chapter became the largest in the nation. 

Lest you think even this, fifty long years ago, is long forgiven and forgotten, consider this horrific current event: within the last month, Rowan County swore in as the chair of its Board of Elections one Malcolm Butner, who has a history of overtly racist remarks. Read about them here; I don't want to repeat them. Again, the point: We don't know whether a lynching tree still stands or if one does which one it is. But that the spirit of lynching remains very much alive for North Carolinians? There's no question. I'm glad Susan Sides brought this up. One can never go back to this topic too often. Lawson 

On another topic, the Lost Colony, I discussed a current somewhat crazy theory that the famous Lost Colony vanished in pursuit of a global conspiracy to produce sassafras. I suggested that Lawson would have found the entire question perverse: he took as simple fact that the remainder of the colony had filtered in among the natives and been absorbed. "The English were forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation; and that in process of Time, they conform'd themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations," Lawson said.  

It turns out that Lawson was exactly right, says Mark Horton, an archaeologist whose work is described by the National Geographic. "The evidence is that they assimilated with the Native Americans but kept their goods," he says, describing broken bowls, a sword hilt, and other evidence found on Hatteras Island. It's a conclusion for which archaeologists have found evidence barely three centuries after Lawson took it as perfectly obvious.

Like I said at the beginning of this piece -- it's always good to go back and check in on what you've already said.

So I'm taking a picture of a house along the Old Concord Road, which is pretty much what I do. I walk along the road, and I see a house or a field or a sign or a person that seems interesting or to have a story to tell and I take a picture of it or talk to the person or stop and jot a note down. Anyhow, I look like something between a private eye in a supermarket thriller and the way you thought a poet would look in high school -- floating down the street, pen in hand, scrawling deathless lines as I stroll.

And, as sometimes happens, someone comes over. I'm snooping or I have out a notebook or I'm pointing a camera, so somebody strides or drives over -- in this case drove, pulling smoothly but quickly into the drive directly in front of me. I don't remember what he said first -- tall slim white guy, probably late 60s, if I recall correctly smoking. Driving -- I can't believe how little I observed! -- some kind of long two-door, I THINK, probably domestic. I must have been asleep. Or at the very least paying attention to the house I was shooting.

Anyhow. "You okay?" he asks me, very polite and it's worth noting without a hint of threat or defensiveness. But it was his neighborhood -- he'd been shooting the crap with the guy across the street, at the car lot/produce market/cattle farm. I'd seen them talking as I walked past and felt like they'd noticed me. I usually would cross the street to speak with people like that, but they were deep in an asphalt parking lot by a big aluminum barn, and I just couldn't bear to walk a quarter mile with them wondering who the hell I was the whole time.

So I explained who I was and gave him my elevator pitch about Lawson and his book and my project and so forth and then we were friends. He said he had been an investigative reporter at the Independent Tribune, so we enjoyed talking about work. He told me most of the people on these roads -- in these communities -- are retired now, and the farms that are run are either keep-busy farms or rented out, with only few of the latter. We talked about the stories we have to tell, and then history came up, and then he mentioned that of course nowadays we're rewriting history, and then of course here we went on the Confederate flag.

I don't have to share the specifics. Some facts, as far as I can tell wrong (the owner of the most slaves was himself African American?); some commonly heard themes about historical revisionism and states' rights. Even a claim, new to me, that the war was fought over taxes. (I have to admit: if people have really begun to convince each other that the Civil War was fought over taxes, it may be game over. I thought of Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now" saying, "My god, the genius of that.") But anyway, a simple interaction. I stopped along the road, a fellow told me how the locals lived, shared what they thought. It was a perfect interaction for a reporter like me, on Lawson's trail to see what's out there.

We parted cheerfully, wished each other well without reservation. And for about 30 seconds I congratulated myself on simply reporting, letting the story come to me, instead of challenging. And then I thought, you know, with the murders and the flag and the cops and all this, though it's fine to listen to everybody I come across, I had better take care to hear other voices than the ones from the people whose houses were on the main streets I was walking down. I had better make sure I hear everybody's voices.

I mean not that this was new. Lawson mentioned the Huguenots by the river, and Huguenot descendants I found. Lawson talked extensively about Indians (everyone I've met in the Santee and Catawba tribes referred to themselves as Indians, and so I do as well), and I've made an effort to make sure I have talked to and about them as well.  I was stunned when I learned that for its first half-century, the slave port of Charleston made more money sending Indians to Barbados than it did bringing African and island peoples to the mainland, so this is good for me. I'm doing like Lawson did -- trying to get how things are here, how they've been.

So I decided that since the murders of African Americans, in churches or at the hands of police or private citizens, are so much in our discussions, I'd better make a special effort I got some African American voices in my chorus, and along I went.

The very next day I had a great opportunity. 

I walked my first day from the little not-even-crossroads of Mt. Gilead, just north of Concord, into Salisbury. There I was well entertained, as Lawson was by the Sapona Indians. The next day I started in Salisbury and walked through town to the northeast, walking down Long Street, quickly leaving the prosperous downtown and entering the town of  East Spencer, which I will describe with these images and this, directly from my notebook: "Long st a parade of the burned, the collapsed, and abandoned." I have a half-dozen similar images of burned-out buildings and houses. 

A town of 1500 or so souls that has been losing population for 40 years, East Spencer is a place with problems: half its children in poverty, and a quarter of its elderly. Fewer than 700 families, 85 percent of which are African American, with a commonly cited number of more than 100 empty houses. A town of broken houses. And across Long Street, on a back porch, two guys having a chat. I walked over and met Mike and Tony, though Tony later told me his name was actually Curtis, and when I called the business card Mike gave me and asked for Mike, it was a wrong number, so he may have started out with a pseudonym too.

Anyhow, I introduced myself, shared business cards and pins and my little Lawson story -- and the story of the conversation of the day before. And off we went, cheerfully. In a town with the problems of East Spencer, Mike and Curtis did not think the Confederate flag was a big issue -- they were a lot more worried about employment, violence, and poverty and its attendant miseries. "As long as you keep a bunch of winos and run-down property in town," Tony said, you're not going to improve. They discussed water bills and troubled youth, irresponsible code enforcement and the failure to invest in the community. We never quite got to institutionalized racism and that sort of thing, but they said the makeup of the town was simple. Over in Spencer and Salisbury is where the white people and slave-owners had lived, and East Spencer was where the black people went -- literally on the other side of the tracks; enormous freights trundled through as we spoke. And they said it was within living memory that you were back across the tracks by nightfall if you knew what was good for you. As far as the flag went, Mike did say he actually approved of it: "I'd rather someone hung up the flag, then I know not to go there; I'll go somewhere else. Go there and I might get hung."

Mike had to leave -- he had started a nail salon, whose card he gave me -- but he expanded on that whole getting hung thing. He and Curtis had mentioned a boundary between East Spencer and Salisbury they called "the unemployment tree," and I was looking for a clarification on that, but I never got there because he brought up another tree. "Don't forget to see the hanging tree," he said, before he left. 

The what, now?

Yep: the hanging tree. I was to Google "lynching" and "Salisbury," and I would find an image of five men hanging from a tree, and the tree still stood on Seventeenth Street where it crossed the railroad tracks. Well, it's not five but three men hanging from a tree -- in 1906 -- and Seventeenth doesn't cross the tracks. Eleventh Street does, though. And according to this account (and map!) of the events, Eleventh Street was where I wanted to be. So I went there.

I have no reason to be certain the tree I took a picture of is the one from which these three men -- one only 15 years old -- were lynched by a mob in August 1906, but if this tree is the wrong one, the right one is within a hundred yards or so. [Correction, 8-26-15: I'm told that there's considerable doubt about not only which tree but whether the tree stands at all; link through for a thorough discussion.] And here you can get a lot of background on the crime that led to the lynching, but that's not the point. The point -- the terrible point -- is that of all the historians and writers and people throughout the Salisbury area who showed me such enormous kindness, pointing me in the direction of old buildings and monuments, cemeteries and trails, the Trading Path and the Trading Ford, nobody outside the black community thought to say to me, "Don't miss the hanging tree." The black community? I spoke to two guys for twenty minutes and it came up and came up but good.

I spoke with Curtis for a while after Mike left, and then I went to see the tree. Around Eleventh Street there are warehouses and traintracks and such, but standing by itself was this tree, plainly old enough to have been large in 1906, and I watched it for a few minutes. No wreath, no flowers, no nothing -- just a tree, surrounded by a fence. It's not a symbol for Salisbury -- but it's a symbol for its black residents.

Anyhow off I went, along the path Lawson and I share.

Naturally, that turned out to be the day I saw a million Confederate flags, too. I took pictures.

So anyhow, I walked along, thinking my thoughts, until I passed the Pandemonium Performance motorcycle shop on Flat Swamp Road into Denton. There a large Confederate flag flew, and a small one, and a large American flag, and a sign saying, "You want to start something?" 

I most certainly did not. I got a curt nod from the guy out front and I didn't even take a picture. Except then I walked into Denton and thought, "I want to talk to the guy flying those flags." So I drove back, pulled over across the street, and shot a couple snaps. As I sat there the same guy walked out and asked: "You okay?" With overtones only of helpfulness. "I'm fine," I said, and asked if it was okay if I took some pictures. It was, and he urged me to park in his lot. "When I saw you stop, I worried you had broken down," he said. He was genuinely checking to see if I needed help.

So I told him my story. And we talked. "The reason is, to me that flag does not represent color," Kary, the shop owner told me. His some-number-of-greats-grandfather fought in the war, which was fought because "the North was trying to take what the South had, tell us we couldn't do what we wanted." Like, I pointed out, own slaves, a point he yielded.  But "to me, that flag represents me rebelling versus the government telling me what to do." He pointed to the American flag and said, "that's another thing about that flag -- you have the right to have an opinion."

To be sure; and to fly any flag you like, regardless of how others perceive it. The conversation continued and never, I need to be sure I am making clear, approached disrespect, threat, or even anger. We were discussing one of the matters of the day, and Kary laughed when I told him the "You want to start something?" sign had cowed me. Turned out it came from a rack of motorcycle batteries in the shop. Kary and I spoke respectfully, decently, and cheerfully. When Kary tells me he's not racist I believe him. I suspect that when I told him the flag is perceived as racist by just about everybody else, I think he believed me. He didn't change his actions, but he believed me.

In fact, when I tried to explain that whatever his personal beliefs, there was no doubt that millions of people took the flag as a symbol that he was a racist, he said he hated that. So I made a gesture, raising my middle finger, though pointing it at the wall, not at him. "What if I put that on a flag and waved it in your face?" I asked. He admitted that might offend him, and when I said, "What if I told you that though that middle finger is universally understood to mean disrespect and meanness, when I use it I just mean you should remember to have a digital exam to make sure you don't have prostate cancer? Because I'm worried about you?" He smiled and even laughed, nodding. He got the point.

He didn't take down his flag, mind you, but he got the point.

Anyhow. That was last week, and I look at the conversations of that day is among the most important I've had on the trek. Like Lawson I'm out trying to see what's out there, who's out there, what's going on, and at the moment, we are talking about this flag, and I'm walking through its home territory. Lawson walked through North and South Carolina. And it was South Carolina still flying the Confederate flag on its state capitol grounds until the Charleston church murders convinced their legislature to take it down. And it was North Carolina KKK members, don't forget, who came down to make sure nobody thought all Carolinians were civilizing. 

I was so glad for these conversations. Because I want it to be easy -- I want the house with the dirty yard and the flag to be symbolic of a Bad Person with Racist Views, and I want anybody who still flies that flag to be Bad and Wrong and Mean. I want it to be easy. But there were Mike and Curtis telling me that they were a lot more concerned about jobs and education and civic investment than in some flag, and they pointed me at the hanging tree. And there was Kary -- and so many like him whom I've met so often -- who genuinely believes that the flag is not a symbol of racism, and who genuinely believes, despite all the enormous, vast evidence that ths Southern states seceded to protect slavery and white supremacy, that the Civil War was fought over something other than slavery. (Here's the flag's designer, in his own words. Shudder.)

In fact, as a small aside, let me remind you that unlike Lawson, I am not having on my trek my first experience in this territory. I have lived here more than two decades, and I can remind you: people in the South? If nothing else, they are stubborn. Stubborn. With all the positive and negative things that word can carry. If you're wondering why people refuse to accept the unequivocal evidence that the war was about slavery and the flag was adopted as a symbol of white resistance to Civil Rights, try to remember that you may be dealing less with racism than with a streak of pure, gut stubbornness. That stubbornness is not unadmirable. Though I will say -- in this case it's horribly misguided.

We talk about the flag and the flag and the flag and the churches and blah blah blah but the reality is now, this very day, black people are being murdered in the streets. By criminals, by citizens, by amateur crimestoppers, by the police, over and over and over. There cannot be any doubt that this is a direct result of slavery and the war. And yet another black citizen is killed and we say, "Gracious me that's just terrible," and then we get into a long pointy-headed discussion about the damned flag.

Mind you: the flag should come down. Anybody who flies it? At the very least -- at the very least -- is saying, "I know that tens of millions of people will find this offensive, but I still think the fact that I can claim to my own satisfaction that I personally don't mean it that way outweighs the absolute certainty that those tens of millions of people will perceive this flag as racist and mean and vicious." This is at best selfish and at worst ... something much worse. We should take down the flag, and everybody flying one should know: people who look at you see Dylann Roof, not your great-whatever-great-grandfather, whether he personally owned slaves or not. By flying it you're choosing to side with the Dylann Roofs of this world. 

One more aside -- monuments. The monuments should stand, every single one of them. Salisbury itself has had some discussion over its downtown Confedereate monument, which some would like to have removed. I completely oppose such Stalinist whitewashing. Salisbury's monument to Confederate soldiers is actually quite lovely, but it's also physical fact. And though I agree with all who find offensive and even absurd its inscription that it commemorates men who died for "constitutional liberty and state sovereignty," I would never take it down. Instead I'd add a new plaque giving more responsible information. [Update, 2020: Not sure I still agree with this sentiment; please see a piece I wrote for Duke Magazine about building and monument renaming and removal.]

More important, I'd build an enormous monument around the Hanging Tree -- a monument to every African American person lynched, to every African American person terrorized during Jim Crow, to every African American person ruined by centuries of state-sponsored racism. In the first place, why would you not? In the second place, what visitor to the Southeast would miss the Salisbury Lynching Monument, if it existed? 

So that's it on flags, trees, symbols, and suggestions from the Lawson Trek. No answers, and certainly no easy shorthand. Flying the flag doesn't make you one of the racists -- but it certainly means that's who you're choosing to align yourself with. Anyhow that's what people are talking about right now, here in the Carolinas, where Lawson walked and where I walk along in his path.