Bull City

It's the City of Medicine but received its nickname from the infamous Bull Durham Tobacco company. The bull still stands proudly in the newly renovated downtown area. It's home to Duke University, the Durham Performing Arts Center that houses touring Broadway shows (hopefully that can happen again soon), the Tobacco Trail that connects major parts of the city. Not to mention the Durham Bulls Athletic Park for our baseball team. None of these attractions make Durham home, for me.

It's the trees that grow so high in areas around my neighborhood, near the campus of North Carolina Central University, NCCU or Central, a thriving Historically Black College/University. Everytime I come home, there's at least 20 yard waste bags and the yard waste bin waiting. No matter what time of year it is, the leaves will fall. There are 5 huge trees surrounding the yard and two Crepe Myrtle trees flanking the front. Since I was eleven when we moved into that house, I grew to love the trees and the offerings. A city is a city and while Durham has its unique set of issues i.e. crime, poverty, disparity much like any other city, we still have the trees. Any day I wake during a visit, I make sure to open the blinds and invite the sun in, crashing through my childhood bedroom in streaks through the branches.

Before the house with the endless trees, there was Grandma (G-Ma) Grace's house. I lived there from birth until I graduated elementary school. She lived and still lives in Fisher Heights, a short drive from Fayetteville Street Elementary School where she was a teacher's aide for 20 years after work for decades at Belks Department Store. I was with her quite often growing up and if I wasn't under my mother's arm or at Treasure's of Joy Day Care, conveniently located in her neighborhood, I was with my G-ma. Ironically, her first year as a teacher's aide was my second year in elementary school in my first grade teacher's class. She gave me freedom in kindergarten which proved too long for the both of us.

There was a ditch. But it is so much more than that. It's been filled and now trees grow where a swamp of sewage water used to lay. As a country child in the late 90's, I would jump across that ditch any chance I could get. If somebody fell in, it was the funniest grossest thing you've ever seen. Somebody always fell in. Her next door neighbor for many years was the Leitzsey family. My best friend was their youngest son, Isaiah. That backyard was heaven and hell and hope in one. Home, among the trees, spelled adventure and loving arms to fall into. The arms of grace. Decades later, she's still my friend as she calls me.

There is my Dad, a city boy. He wore cowboy boots, sure, but would blast go-go music as we rolled through neighborhoods off Elmira Street, a stone's throw from Shepard Middle School which I attended. It also happens to be in the same vicinty and my elementary, the high school I would later attend and of course, Central. It was a no-brainer why I decided to venture 4 hours away for undergraduate studies at Howard University. My Dad was ecstatic in his reserved, non-chalant way. Apparently, he loved DC and found his way up every year for homecoming, legendary as it is, as well as for any time NC A&T Aggies played the Howard Bison during football season. He sports old school BMW's and gives you a glimpse every so often into the city guy he is, though Durham was always considered a strange mix of the slow pace of the country and the speed of a big city.

Now, he works a farm with my stepmom kim at their ranch home and farm in Bahama, a solid 20-minute drive away from where I live. Fortunately, from my house you can take Otis two blocks to Pekoe, make a left through the neighborhood slowly becoming gentrified with houses priced at more than $300,000 across the street from the 'Purple House' with a family that doesn't plan on leaving. Wind through Pekoe until it becomes Masondale and take your time following that hill down to S. Roxboro. Make a right. Pass CC Spaulding Elementary, more new houses who share driveways with houses built directly behind them. Drive right on past Durham Biker's Club and my old church, Mt. Vernon Baptist. Take Roxboro all the way, past the courthouse and jailjouse, the newly renovated library off Liberty Street and coast. Roxboro turns to Old Oxford which turns to more streets where the trees become more plentiful and your signal worsens.

They have had more than 5 dairy cows including Pearl eating above, miniature donkeys Jada and Annie, 3 goats, Carl is the eldest farm animal and still there, scores of chickens and pigs and an unwelcome hawk or neighbor every now and then. Still no horse though I have requested one every year since 2016. It's a quieter life, a much busier and unpredictable life and I oddly look forward to visiting every year. This past visit when the picture of Dad and Pearl was captured, we celebrated his birthday, reminisced and I was in the presence of my 3 step siblings for the first time together in more than a year and a half.

Durham is alive with art and culture. Yes, we have the Durham Performing Arts Center. We even have Durham School of the Arts. The live performance that really stands out is dance and high school theatre. Every year for the Bimbe Festival, the people of Bull City gather in the downtown corridors and clap, eat and dance to Afro rhythms, Doug E. Fresh and to the rhythms of one other. Baba Chuck Davis was rhythm, he was life itself. A graduate of my alma mater, Howard, he founded the Chuck Davis Dance Company in NYC followed by the African American Dance Ensemble in Durham in the 1980s. He was integral to the incorporation of African dance appreciation in the Bull. Every year, the Hayti Heritage Center, at Fayetteville Street and Durham expressway, a block from my barber Leroy at Thorpe's in Phoenix Square, hosts a Kwanzaa celebration that he helmed.

I was fortunate enough, blessed enough, to work with him while attending the historic Hillside High School, the true performing arts school. Every academic year in October, the community would flock to Fayetteville Street for Hillside's epic homecoming parade. How special it was when I finally got to promenade with my high school's theatre department for the festivities. We strolled through crowds beaming at waving at us, most of whom showed to witness Hillside's marching band. In Durham, the band is legend. The Adrian Carroll HBCU & High School Battle of the Bands that went down at Durham County Memorial Stadium was what I feigned for every year as a child. The snares, the horns, the lean of the drum major that I wanted to mimic. This was the Durham I knew and grew to obsess over. That same high school ushered in generations of talent who performed in our 1500-seat theatre for countless adoring fans who marveled over the theatrical efforts of young Black artists.

Durham is life. It's the strength of the bull and the wisdom of the tree. It's the Bimbe. It's the recognition of Pauli Murray, queer activist, lawyer and priest with a mural in Hillside's, her alma mater, halls honoring her legacy. It's running into somebody who knew you when you were three and is somehow your cousin. It's running into your cousins unexpectedly at Food Lion. It's slowing your car and removing your hat when a funeral procession is pulling into Beechwood Cemetery by G-ma's house. It's discovering the new downtown with your mom and landing at Exotique, an African goods store that sells that lemongrass she likes. It's surprising your mom after hopping out of an uber from the Amtrak in the 'West Village' district for her 50th birthday. It's birthdays with cousins on the front lawn in the dead of summer eating fruit, all of you missing your two front teeth. It's gathering at this cousin's house or that aunt's house to play Phase 10 and bring up new memories and old pictures nobody's ever seen before. It's asking your mom to join you on the porch and just sit, and be. Durham, Bull City, is family.