So you think you know North Carolina….No. 36

1. What decorative object at the Hickory home of U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger caused a racial dispute in 1994?

2. What Duke University student did Reynolds Price recognize for writing fiction “as if a kind of perfect pitch had been inserted into her head by God”?

3. In 1987, Kivett’s Inc. of Clinton, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of sanctuary seating, designed and donated an ornate, 600-pound, bulletproof oak chair for a famous visitor to the United States.

Who was he?

4. “It came to me that I had been generally retracing the migration of my white-blooded clan from North Carolina to Missouri, the clan of Lancashireman who settled in the Piedmont in the eighteenth century. As a boy, again and again, I had looked at a blurred, sepia photograph of a leaning tombstone deep in the Carolina hills. I had vowed to find the old immigrant miller’s grave one day.” From what popular 1982 book does this passage come?

5. What influential 1997 book accused state government of mishandling research on pfiesteria, a tiny, toxic organism preying on fish in the rivers of Eastern North Carolina?

Answers below

 

 

 

 

 

1. A lawn jockey. The local NAACP chapter criticized it as “a reminder of the cotton-field days, the days when we were called ‘boy.’ ” Ballenger said the cast-iron statue was a family heirloom — nicknamed “Rochester,” after the black valet on the old “Jack Benny Show” — and refused to remove it. Eight years later he had it painted white.

2. Anne Tyler, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Tyler was born in Minneapolis, but graduated from Broughton High School in Raleigh and then Duke.

3. Pope John Paul II, who sat in the chair during his stop in Detroit.

4. “Blue Highways: A Journey into America.” William Least Heat Moon did find the site of his ancestor’s grave, near Asheboro, but it had recently been covered by a reservoir.

5. “And the Waters Turned to Blood” by Rodney Barker.