If the economy ever goes belly-up, head for Martha Ward's pantry.
"When you've got something in a jar," says Martha, "you know you can eat."
That's her first law of survival, a genetic legacy from her Scotch-Irish and German forebears who followed the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road from Pennsylvania down the Piedmont curve to North Carolina. They arrived with other settlers in the 1700s and wrung a living--just barely--from its red-clay hills.
Like a banker displaying a vault, Martha opens the door to her pantry in Needmore, a hamlet of farmhouses and trailer homes set in the rolling Piedmont Plateau. Inside are 16 shelves of shoulder-to-shoulder Mason jars. Pears (two kinds), apples (three), pickles (bread-and-butter, sour, dill). And infinitely more, not to mention a Cadillac-long freezer stuffed with meat.
Her blue eyes light up a round, friendly face as she hands me a jar of blackberry jam. "I grew up on a tenant farm. We were poor but never on welfare. My father would tie on a sack before he'd accept clothes from anyone."
Outside, beyond fields planted in corn and beans, grazes a living testament to Martha's second law of survival: a black Angus, her "emergency cow," insurance against any form of calamity. Its predecessor was sold not long ago to pay unexpected medical bills.
Arthritis has slowed Martha, now 60, a step or two. Fingers that picked cotton and cleaned looms for decades are swollen into sausages. She's retired from her last job as restaurant cook. But she'll can fruits and vegetables as long as her fingers will flex.
"Honey, I've got my emergency cow, and my pantry is full." She leans forward, lowering her voice. "You can't trust them jobs."
Martha's tiny homestead sits atop the 900-mile-long Piedmont Plateau, which extends from New York to Alabama. In North Carolina the Piedmont balances between mountains and sea, a 150-mile-wide stretch of rolling country that takes in the state's major cities, more than half its people, and the lion's share of its industry. Its spine is Interstate 85, anchored by Charlotte to the south and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle, 140 miles to the north.
To find its soul, leave the interstate and drive 10, 20, 30 miles out to textile towns like Belmont, Gastonia, Lowell or farm towns like Vale, East Bend, Yadkinville.
Here is the bedrock Piedmont--land of fish camps, flattop haircuts, and kids cruising on Saturday nights with the bass cranked so loud it rattles the plate-glass windows on Main Street. Where the soft drink of choice is Sundrop or fizzy-sweet Cheerwine, and the worst thing a man can do is "get above his raisin'."
Here the small-town weeklies proclaim "HE IS RISEN" on Easter, and the defining question is not, "What do you do?" but "Where do you come from?" and "What church do you go to?"
Spiritual tastes run to Southern Baptist and fundamentalist, with a bit of glen-plaid Presbyterian thrown in for the upper crust. "Be an Episcopalian if you must," says Paul Escott, a professor of history at Wake Forest University, "but you don't want to be an atheist."
Millennia weathered the Piedmont's underlying rock into red clay. Never forget that clay. It defines the region like a colored map. Sweet-potato orange. Slick when wet. Rock hard, cracked when dry. Easily exhausted, it mandated the small subsistence farms of early settlers. Plantations of the rich Atlantic Coastal Plain were impossible here. But that red dirt yielded a crop more precious than anything turned with a hoe.
Enterprise.
To see what enterprise fashioned, I start in the region's Oz-like Emerald City, Charlotte. Until the 1849 California gold rush, Charlotte reigned as gold-mining center of the young nation. The mines led to the founding of a branch of the U.S. Mint and launched the city's career in finance.
Then they played out. Today's gold sits above ground. Charlotte has surpassed Atlanta as Wall Street of the South. Its two homegrown banks, First Union and NationsBank, have combined assets of 230 billion dollars--more than the annual gross national product of Sweden.
Growth has compounded. The city's population has doubled to 450,000 in the past 20 years; median family income, in ten. The number of firms has tripled in the past four.
"This is the southern frontier," said David Goldfield, history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "Entrepreneurs coming in and putting down money. The city is a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up the best and the brightest."
Welcome to the newest South. Unlike such ancestor-obsessed cities of the Old Confederacy as Savannah and Charleston, Charlotte doesn't care who your grandparents are or how you dress. Charlotte says: Let's make a deal.
When the city needed 16 million dollars for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, it raised 30 million. When it wanted big-league sports, it built a 23,500-seat coliseum and landed a National Basketball Association team, the Charlotte Hornets. Now the impossible dream has come true: A National Football League franchise, the Panthers, has come to Charlotte. (With the cost of inaugural season tickets topping at $6,000, the banks wasted no time in offering loans.)
The high-flying symbol of Charlotte's rise is Hugh McColl, head of NationsBank. Twenty years ago his bank lagged second in the state behind Winston-Salem's Wachovia. Now it's third in the country--closing in on second.
McColl holds court in the tallest building in town, the 60-story NationsBank corporate headquarters, a spare-no-expense tower of glass and pink granite locally dubbed the "Taj McColl."
One morning I was ushered into McColl's walnut-paneled office on the 58th floor. Fog hid the view. A hard-charging former marine from South Carolina, McColl gets to the point quickly.
"I came here to work," he said. "Charlotte was the one place you could make money."
He has. Last year NationsBank made more than a billion dollars. Aided by southern banking laws that allowed regional expansion while keeping northern banks at bay, it covers the South like kudzu--1,900 branches from Florida to Maryland.
He could play on any stage from New York to San Francisco. Why here?
"This is home. We are not distracted by pseudosophisticated things. We don't go to power lunches or drink martinis. It's an environment in which you can know your people and friends."
McColl impatiently twists a plastic straw around his finger. Money waits to be made.
Time to descend. The fog lifts; sunlight glints off rival banks.
"Let me know if I can help you," McColl said, showing me out.
A small loan? I joked.
Hugh McColl didn't laugh. "I love loaning money," he said.
But bustling Charlotte cannot dominate North Carolina the way, say, Atlanta tends to dominate Georgia.
"A region of city-states," David Winslow, a professional fund-raiser from Winston-Salem, calls the Piedmont.
Ask the resident of one city-state his opinion of another, and the fur flies.
What about Winston-Salem? I challenged Charlotte Observer publisher Rolfe Neill.
"Tired blood," said Mr. Neill of Winston's Old Money.
Charlotte? I prompted long-time Winston-Salem Journal publisher Joe Doster, now retired.
"Hustlers," said Mr. Doster of Charlotte's New Money.
Nearly everyone in North Carolina knows Senator Jesse Helms's response to the state zoo near Asheboro. "Who needs a zoo? Fence in Chapel Hill," referring to the liberal, intellectually elite hometown of the University of North Carolina.
"Regionalism is not a concept people have embraced," sighed Dee Walston, former columnist for the Durham Herald-Sun.
Raleigh, Dee?
"Mayonnaise. A bland city wrapped around a capitol."
The leap from red clay to cities like Charlotte began with the South's struggle to rebuild after the Civil War. Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady preached the gospel of industry. The South shouldn't raise cotton; it should make cloth. The Piedmont, ripe for conversion, had the magic mix: water power, cheap land, cheap labor.
The workforce came right off the farm. "He's in public work," they'd say with a hint of sadness, meaning, in a local phrase still heard today, he'd taken a factory job.
No matter how menial the job, people gave it their best shot. A woman who worked in cotton mills for 35 years told me: "Daddy taught that when you accept that job, those nine hours belong to the man you work for." Factories that moved South cashed in on the inbred work ethic. As a bonus they got laborers whose independence prejudiced them against unions. Needless to say, factory owners never put out a welcome mat either.
The payoff: Last year the Piedmont turned out 350 million towels, 475 billion cigarettes, 1.7 billion pairs of hosiery, and 350,000 kitchen cabinets. But the traditional pillars of its economy--textiles, tobacco, furniture--no longer support the weight they once did. In the seventies, companies began investing in faster, smarter machines. Those machines spelled fewer people.
Simultaneously, southern labor no longer was cheap. There were Taiwan, Malaysia, Mexico--places where eager hands work for a few dollars a day.
As in much of America, factory employment shrank as productivity increased. In 1974 the North Carolina textile industry employed 300,000; by 1993, only 206,000.
To see that workforce shrinkage in human terms, I take the road to Cooleemee, a plain-as-soap-and-water town of 971, stuck somewhere between Charlotte and Winston-Salem but on the way to neither.
Boxlike houses cling to a slope. A small shopping center passes for downtown. There is the U-Stop-In Grill, the F & F Barbecue, and not much else. Except fierce pride.
For years the town nestled warm and snug in the embrace of a cotton mill. The mill owned houses and rented them cheaply to workers, ran a company store, the school, the water system. It fixed leaky roofs. Painted fences. In hundreds of towns across the Piedmont, whatever the problem, the mill took care of it.
In 1962 Burlington Industries bought the Cooleemee mill. Seven years later its whistle blew for the last time.
"The men spent all day building up steam in the boiler on that last day," remembered Linda Jordan, whose husband worked there. "Around five they let it rip. I ran out on the porch. I knew I'd never hear that sound again. Time was moving on."
Throughout the Piedmont the paternalism of family-owned mills yielded to big corporations. Efficiency ruled. Layoffs and plant closings followed. As disbelief faded to sorrow, folks in Cooleemee drifted to other factory jobs in nearby towns. And there was always the pantry to tide you over.
"I liked to spin. I do believe I could still," said 87-year-old Mabel Head, holding out long, tapered fingers that had flown along the frames twisting together ends of cotton fiber that would be drawn through rollers and into thread.
As I sat in her mobile home, she spoke quietly of picnics by the river and the laughter of the girls in the spinning room.
How had the town held together through the bad times? I asked.
She thought awhile.
"Well now, Cooleemee was always like one big family," Mabel said finally. She reached for my hand and gripped it tightly.
The Piedmont had lured industry with cheap labor and cheap land. North Carolina still ranks near bottom in average manufacturing wage. But with automation, low-skill jobs have begun to disappear. Now managers try to hire workers who can read the computers that monitor production. Because of a lack of available technical training, the managers have trouble finding them.
Fortunately, as early as the 1950s, the state realized it should put some of its eggs in other baskets.
The golden egg turned out to be Research Triangle Park, the dream child of the late Governor Luther Hodges and a group of North Carolina businessmen and academics. The park--a 6,800-acre tract carved from worn-out tobacco land and centered among the brain trusts of North Carolina State University at Raleigh, Durham's Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--operates as an economic-research zone and has turned the surrounding three-county Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle into one of the hottest growth areas in the nation.
Some 34,000 people work in its 70 or so companies tucked among neat lawns and shrubs. Sociological spillover from RTP, as Research Triangle Park is known locally, ranges from politics (an influx of country-club Republicans) to revamped laws allowing sale of liquor by the drink. Biggest dividend: a regional image newly minted from redneck to high-tech.
Surely I imagined it, but in RTP the very air seems rarefied. Here AstroTurf was developed; also bar codes, the cancer drug Taxol, and the AIDS drug AZT. In sleek buildings, "beakerheads" (scientists) discuss MOS (metal-oxide semiconductors). They ponder NSRI (norepinephrine serotonin re-uptake inhibitors). Recently, thoughts have turned to SRI (socially responsible investing).
Each dawn offers the hope of discovery. At Glaxo, a British pharmaceutical firm, I found Julie Tomlinson, manager of the robotics lab, working with an experimental AIDS drug.
"I've lived in Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, and Boston," Julie told me as she demonstrated how her robots could, at the touch of a button, whirl around, pluck a test tube from a rack, and run tests.
"Boston has wonderful cultural resources, but traffic is horrible. You can't drive, and if you do, you can't park, and if you do, they tow your car. I like the relaxed way of life here. I've got mountains three hours to the west, beaches two hours to the east."
Such livability has a habit of self-immolating. Population in the three-county Triangle already is 690,000 and may top one million by the year 2000. Yankee afflictions like land speculation and traffic jams have become as much a part of the landscape as dogwood and magnolia.
"We need growth," former Governor Terry Sanford says, "but not at the expense of looking like New Jersey."
The most spectacular example of growth fertilized by RTP is Cary, a squeaky-clean community near Raleigh, where people live in PUDs (planned unit developments) and the town hires professionals to paint "CLASS OF 1994" on the water tower. Cary's population has jumped from 8,000 to 62,000 in 25 years. In some months it issues more building permits than Charlotte.
But if the folks who move to this blow-dried community are content, 66-year-old, native-born Lynn Banks is not. "I don't know my neighbors any longer. I'm going to move," said Banks, as we sat in his home only five blocks from downtown Cary.
Because of the refurbished economy, higher paying foreign firms have added their luster: Sumitomo from Japan, Canada's Northern Telecom, and a German invasion, including Siemens electronics. (So many German corporations flank I-85 near Charlotte that locals call that stretch of highway the autobahn.)
Fields where bird dogs once flushed coveys sprout subdivisions. And now there are as many places to eat sushi as barbecue in a five-mile radius of Research Triangle Park.
Only 20 minutes from RTP's gleaming towers, rural poverty carries on. Margaret Hardcastle lives in Cheeks Crossroads, a community of six houses. She has no running water or plumbing. Waste is thrown out in a bucket.
"We are pushing for a sewage line, but it would cost about $500,000 and the county won't do it," said Stephen Dear, executive director of the Rural Communities Assistance Project.
Mrs. Hardcastle can't afford a bathroom, so volunteers were building an outhouse for her, using an old Peace Corps manual as a guide. "Looks good to me," she said. Even so, several neighbors weren't happy about the outhouse next door.
"Do you feel shame at having an outhouse in your yard?" I asked. She pulled herself up tall and looked me in the eye.
"There's dignity in everything you do," she said. "It's just in how you do it."
Mrs. Hardcastle is far from unique. In North Carolina, 125,000 people live without indoor plumbing; one-sixth of the population is below the official poverty line.
In the Piedmont, Old South and New South are like two tectonic plates rubbing uneasily against each other.
Take politics. How, I wondered, could a state elect such polar opposites to the U.S. Senate as Terry Sanford, progressive, and Jesse Helms, hard-right conservative? (The two served concurrently from 1986 to 1993.)
"Four percent," Mr. Sanford told me at breakfast in Durham. Sanford, who also served as governor and president of Duke University, meant that victory margins here are slight. "Our progressive instincts turned out to be built on a very thin margin," he sighed. "In truth, we were never very far from the demagoguery of the rest of the South."
Some contrasts were less grim. One night I opened my menu in a Chapel Hill restaurant to find: "Collard greens, topped with shavings of imported Parmesan cheese."
Because the economic rules keep changing, folks around here have learned to make do. Drive through any Piedmont mill town, and you see front-lawn signs of the ingenuity that supplements a factory check: upholstery, taxes, even tattoos.
A farmer too knows better than to bet on a single crop.
For Hassell Brown, keeping up meant taking a job in town coaching high school sports while farming tobacco on weekends. "Some years you have a disaster--hail, drought, bugs," he said, standing beside his newly plowed field in East Bend, a small town in Yadkin County, on the Piedmont's western fringe. His off-the-farm job guaranteed the electric bill, heat, food, a pension.
But "the problem," as farmers who grow the region's major cash crop call it, is the increasing unpopularity of tobacco.
In 1964 the surgeon general issued a report linking smoking with lung cancer, laryngeal cancer, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema. Subsequent reports increased the list of hazards and decreased the use of tobacco. Since 1975 tobacco acreage in the Piedmont has dropped from 140,000 to 76,000.
If there are any qualms about growing a crop deemed a health hazard by the surgeon general, you won't hear them in Yadkin County, which harvested eight million pounds of the leaf last year.
"Everybody here's raised up on it--it puts shoes on kids and sends them to college," said Mark Smitherman, who farms 30 acres of tobacco. "Tobacco bought my car. Bet you couldn't buy a car on corn." A farmer can clear a thousand dollars an acre on "backer." Nothing else comes close.
In a region that grows 200 million pounds of tobacco a year and where five cigarette manufacturers employ 21,000 people, worry about the unpopularity of nicotine floats like a plume of smoke.
The smoke has cleared in Durham and Winston-Salem, two Piedmont cities once dependent on tobacco. Durham officially kicked the single-industry habit 14 years ago, when health care replaced cigarette manufacturing as the primary industry. Bull City, so called for a brand of plug tobacco, was re-nicknamed the City of Medicine.
Ironically, the basis of Durham's new claim to fame--Duke University and its Medical Center--was underwritten by tobacco money. Until the Sherman Antitrust Act busted his monopoly in 1911, Durham tycoon James B. Duke controlled 90 percent of the world's tobacco production. In 1924 he set up a 40-million-dollar foundation creating the university bearing his name. "Mr. Duke always said education is, next to the church, the most civilizing influence we have," his grandniece, philanthropist Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, told me over a porcelain cup of tea.
Even a hypochondriac like me feels secure in Durham. The city has five hospitals and 1,700 doctors; its physician-to-population ratio is five times the national average.
The Duke Medical Center sprawls over 175 acres, a maze of 25 buildings. It offers state-of-the-art therapies for serious diseases--among them bone-marrow transplants for childhood cancers.
There are seven rooms in the pediatric bone-marrow transplant unit at Duke, seven poignant chambers of human frailty.
I asked Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, co-director of the program, how she could work in a place where half the patients never make it.
She indicated a photograph on her wall--a girl with dancing eyes and a dark helmet of hair. "We do it because of Jana."
At the age of nine, Jana Haislip was diagnosed with leukemia. "My heart was ripped away," her father, Jackie, said. "You see, she was our only child."
When told, Jana looked directly at her doctors and asked, "Am I going to die?"
No, said a young doctor getting down on his knees to meet her gaze. "You're going to live and have 18 grandchildren."
School opened the other day in her hometown of Robersonville, North Carolina. Jana, now 13, attended cheerleader tryouts.
"I didn't make it," she confided to me.
A tough break, I agreed, but, as her mother said to me, "Isn't it nice to have normal problems?"
Jana has no remaining trace of the disease.
For Winston-Salem the wake-up call came on January 15, 1987, when Ross Johnson, head of the biggest game in town, RJR Nabisco, announced he was moving the headquarters of the food-and-tobacco giant to Atlanta.
When the company moved, Winston-Salem squared its shoulders and diversified its portfolio. Today the Reynolds Tobacco division (left behind in the move) shares the corporate limelight with Bowman Gray School of Medicine/Baptist Hospital, Sara Lee, PepsiCo, Lee Jeans, and Wachovia Bank.
In Winston-Salem I caught a whiff of noblesse oblige. In 1946 city leaders decreed the need for a major college; five years later they broke ground on a new 19-million-dollar campus and reeled in Wake Forest, a thriving Baptist school located 110 miles to the east.
"It may sound crass," admitted publisher Joe Doster. "You go buy yourself a university...but it shows vision."
When legislation established the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1963 as the country's first state-supported residential school of the performing arts, civic leaders here met a site-selection committee with a million dollars in seed money and the promise of a campus. They got the school.
Culture has always been part of the social climate in Winston-Salem, Doster assured me, when I asked if Giselle mixed well with grits. "Going to the Stevens Center here is like going to the theater in New York," he said. "Except instead of `Hello, Dahling,' it's `How Y'all?'"
By grace of geography, the Piedmont had few slaveholders; the red clay militated against plantations. Racism existed, but at a lower key than in Mississippi or Alabama.
Chuck Stone once wrote a widely quoted newspaper column in Philadelphia; now he is a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His move reflects the recent reversal of the black out-migration of the fifties. "Integration here wasn't as painful as in other southern states," he says. "There were no clubs, dogs, water hoses. There was even a decorum. You didn't get the vitriol of Little Rock or Birmingham."
Yet Greensboro, North Carolina, took its place on the civil rights roll of honor along with Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi.
Franklin McCain, a black hero of that era, went with me for coffee one morning to the exact spot at Woolworth's lunch counter where, as a college freshman, he made history in 1960.
"Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, Jibreel Khazan, and I walked from the library at North Carolina A & T," he recalled. "We looked at each other, moved to this counter, and sat down. I ordered coffee and a doughnut."
The white waitress refused. Blacks were supposed to eat downstairs, at the hot-dog stand.
The next day 30 black students joined McCain. The following day 63. By Saturday 400 sat in shifts. The sit-in spread like prairie fire to other restaurants in town, to other cities in the state, then to the rest of the South. On July 22 the white business community quietly moved to integrate Woolworth's and other restaurants.
McCain is now a Charlotte businessman. (The store has since closed; a section of the counter now has an honored spot in the Smithsonian Institution.)
"Something had to happen," he reflects. "I watched how white people treated black people as if they were one step below human."
In the Piedmont you now see the fruits of that struggle. Black Congressman Melvin Watt represents the 12th District that includes portions of the region's major cities. Dan Blue, the black former speaker of the state House of Representatives, represents Raleigh. Harvey Gantt, Charlotte's first black mayor, ran for the Senate against Jesse Helms and lost by a mere 6 percent.
But, as in the rest of the country, blacks have lower average incomes and a shorter life expectancy than whites. "When I was governor," Terry Sanford told me, "I was sure the race problem would be solved in 30 years. I was wrong."
The great Piedmont romance plays out on an oval of asphalt or red clay. It cuts across class and gender, bonding rich and poor, Yankee and Southerner. It is the love between man and car: stock-car racing.
In the small towns of the Piedmont, the Saturday night sport wasn't football. It was the wheel-to-wheel combat of hot-rodding.
Races graduated to dirt ovals where fans watched souped-up cars driven by guys like Junior Johnson, who honed their skills running moonshine down back-country roads.
Now, major races outdraw the Super Bowl. Junior Johnson no longer builds engines himself; he owns a whole team. Corporate megabucks roll in. High-octane drivers like Dale Earnhardt earn three million dollars a year from appearances and endorsements.
To see for myself, I drive (slightly above the speed limit) to the Charlotte Motor Speedway to join the Richard Petty Driving Experience. Petty, the "King," winner of 200 races, has lent his name to a course for wannabe stock-car drivers. Our group of 22 includes a retiree who jokes that his blood pressure tops any speed he'll hit.
I zip up my fire-resistant suit, pull on gloves, helmet, goggles, and shoehorn myself into the car through the window (for safety reasons there are no doors).
The stock car I settle into is candy-apple red. Except for the screaming colors, a stock car looks something like what you'd run the kids to school in, hence its name. The resemblance ends there. With a top speed of 180 miles per hour, this 600-horsepower baby can really move.
"I can't breathe," I tell the guy who immobilizes me in a five-point safety harness.
"Just right," he nods.
A flip of the ignition and the car growls to life. Foot on clutch. Shift to first, second, third, fourth...and I am rolling along the track apron, tailing instructor and NASCAR driver Barry Graham.
This beats any video game. I relax, loosen my death grip on the wheel, enjoy the powerful rumble of engine, tap the accelerator, remember to keep eight lengths behind Barry's car, and, as afterthought, check the tachometer, though the numbers don't mean a thing to me. (There is no speedometer. It's a distraction.)
I look up. I can't be doing more than 40, but the distance between Barry and me is shortening. Six lengths. Five. Is it four? Better downshift and slow down. Uh oh, I'm not sure how. Panic strikes. Afraid of rear-ending him, I nudge the car toward the middle of the track. Relief settles in, then evaporates as I see Barry's arm pop out, frantically waving me back to the apron. The flagman averts his eyes.
Two seconds later a crescendo of thunder roars past on my right.
I have pulled into the path of a second set of cars and am barely out of their way as they scream by at 130 miles per hour. I turn red with embarrassment, then white with terror. I follow Barry back to the pit at a crawl.
"Mistakes happen," I say, fishing for sympathy. "Has anyone else done that?"
He reflects for only a second.
"No. Can't say that they have."
At this track two weeks earlier, on Memorial Day, I had watched the big boys chase in circles at the Coca-Cola 600 in front of 163,000 fans.
Wasn't the Indianapolis 500 being run on the same day? What about those Indy drivers?
"Prima donnas," sniffed Bill Veeder, a retired city manager of Charlotte and a racing fan.
Stock-car drivers are not prima donnas. In the pit area I watched racing immortals Junior Johnson and Richard Petty sign autographs as if they enjoyed it.
"You see 'em light up. It's like I'm giving 'em something," Petty said when I complimented his patience. He flashed that winner's circle smile.
"There's a place here for the guy who works in the mill. A place for the guy who owns the mill," Charlotte Motor Speedway manager, Humpy Wheeler, shouted above the scream of engines.
The guy who owns the mill probably hangs out in one of 64 trackside executive suites. In suite 141, I met Ronnie Brewer, a High Point furniture manufacturer, who arrived in a chauffeur-driven, champagne-stocked black limo. "Racing's no longer chicken bones and Bud," said his wife, Linda, flashing bloodred nails, a tiny rhinestone centered on each.
You could forget the limo and buy one of the 52 condominiums overlooking the track (great asphalt views). Price when built by the speedway owners in 1986: $115,000. Most recent sale: $320,000.
I helped myself to a chocolate-covered strawberry and wandered off to the infield in search of the guy who works in the mill.
Bill Scoggins cracked open a beer in front of an old school bus he'd converted into a motor home. He'd driven down with his cousin from Mount Ulla, North Carolina, a blink of a mill town.
"I've been coming to this race for 23 years," he told me in a soft drawl. "When I come here, I don't worry about business problems--or anything else." He gestured toward the tunnel connecting the speedway entrance with the infield.
"When I come through that tunnel, I leave Mount Ulla behind."
As the stands emptied and night deepened, I watched the headlights of pickups, station wagons, and campers scatter to towns and cities across the folds of the Piedmont--to a red-clay realm where people demand more of themselves than of others.
Because the soil grudged them a living, those who settled here two centuries ago learned to make do in other ways. Hardship was never too much to pay for the independence they craved. From Charlotte to Cooleemee, their spiritual heirs continue the quest--while keeping a little something in a jar, just in case.
"Out east, we have scrub oaks," novelist Doris Betts mused one afternoon in Chapel Hill. "They are spindly, useless. No good for lumber or even firewood. We have a saying--they're no good for anything except holding the world together.
"That's like our people. No good for anything except...."
She smiled, "...holding the world together."
Copyright 1995 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.
