My long-time friend and collaborator, Charlie Thompson, will be reading from his new book, Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land, at the Madison Container Company in downtown Marshall on Friday evening, March 6, at 6:30p.m.
We will also share the stage together for a few minutes looking at photographs from our trips and talking about them.
Man with fire ant bites, the Hurricane Floyd Flood, eastern North Carolina 1999.
In 1999, Charlie Thompson and I travelled through eastern North Carolina documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd and the ensuing flood, which left the eastern third of the state under water. We were working with the Southern Oral History Program at Chapel Hill and our goal was to try to understand the effects of this unprecidented natural disaster on the numerous small, rural communites in its path.
We met an elderly man in front of his home and he described the night the waters rose around him, flooding first his fields and then his home. As he waded four feet of water, trying to get to higher ground, believing he would die, he noticed massive balls floating in the water around him. Fire ants.
That day, two months after the storm, he lifted his pants leg for us to reveal his limb, still covered with ant bites.