The Remarkable Life and Legacy of Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color Thomas Day

By Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll

In the furniture and woodwork he crafted for a region’s elite, free Black Thomas Day (1801-1861) combined his cabinetmaking talents with his personal interpretations of fashionable styles to create a distinctive woodworking idiom unique to the mid-nineteenth century Dan River region of North Carolina and Virginia. His remarkable legacy of furniture and architectural woodwork reveals a familiarity with popular pattern books, mastery of furniture-making techniques, incorporation of emerging technology, and expression of a personal aesthetic that elevates him beyond the role of a craftsman to that of an artist. With his great artistic autonomy, Day is one of a few free people of color to leave behind a substantial body of work, one that includes more than 200 pieces of furniture as well as interior woodwork in more than eighty houses.

Born in Virginia to mixed-race parents, Thomas learned the woodworking trade from his father, John Day. When Thomas was a teen, the family migrated from Virginia to North Carolina, eventually settling in Warren County. In 1821, Thomas left his father’s cabinetmaking shop to set up his own shop in Hillsborough. Just two years later he joined his older brother John’s shop in the bustling town of Milton where access to the Dan River and two railroad lines generated a thriving community of artisans and merchants. Although John subsequently left for Liberia to become a Baptist missionary, Thomas remained in Milton where he continued to build his cabinetmaking business, purchasing property in 1827 and establishing his reputation as an artisan. In 1830, Day married Aquilla Wilson, a free Black from Virginia, but she could not join him because an 1826 law prohibited free people of color from migrating to North Carolina. In an unusual response that speaks to Day’s importance within the community, sixty-one prominent white men in Milton and Caswell County successfully petitioned the General Assembly to permit Aquilla to move to North Carolina. Romulus Saunders, the state’s attorney general, endorsed the petition adding:

I have known Thomas Day (in whose behalf the within petition is addressed) for several years past and I am free to say, that I consider him a free man of color, of very fair character — an excellent mechanic, industrious, honest and sober in his habits and in the event of any disturbance amongst the Blacks, I should rely with confidence upon a disclosure from him as he is the owner of slaves as well as of real estate. His case may in my opinion, with safety be made an exception to the general rule which policy at this time seems to demand.

The petition was granted in late 1830, and Aquilla joined Thomas in Milton. During the decade that followed their household grew to include three children and eight enslaved people. Day was a husband, father, church-going Christian, and respected member of the community. He was also a gifted artisan and a clever businessman. As his clientele expanded and his business grew, he purchased more properties in Milton, eventually acquiring the prominent Union Tavern on Main Street to serve as his shop and residence.

Day benefitted from the economic boom-era in the Dan River region that sprang from the 1839 discovery of a process for curing tobacco with heat creating vivid yellow “Brightleaf” tobacco. As the wealth of white planters soared, Day was in the right place at the right time, ready to accommodate their aspirations for refinement and gentility. Many chose Day to express their status through his interpretations of the fashionable Grecian style of furniture that paralleled the emerging Greek Revival architectural style. A savvy entrepreneur, Day capitalized on the planters’ social network to establish the largest cabinetmaker’s shop in the state by 1850 — a shop with a diverse workforce of enslaved men, white and mulatto journeymen, and apprentices.

His furniture and woodwork were primarily crafted for the homes of wealthy planters and middle-class merchants, including such prominent citizens as physician and planter John T. Garland, attorneys Bartlett Yancey and Romulus Saunders, merchant John Wilson, and planters William H. Long, William H. Holderness, and Thomas M. McGehee. In addition, Day also received some institutional commissions, including furnishings for the Dialectic and Philanthropic Society Debating Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also fabricated the pews for the Milton Presbyterian Church where he and Aquilla were respected members.

Day’s early furniture reflects a familiarity with popular pattern books illustrating classically inspired pieces he skillfully replicated. Day was also quick to incorporate the emerging stylistic trends appearing on the national scene, including French, cottage, and Gothic influences. By the 1840s he adopted a more idiosyncratic design aesthetic that distinguished his work from his contemporaries and from the pattern books and broadside posters of the period. Day fabricated much of his furniture from imported mahogany, or he employed mahogany veneers over secondary woods. His repertoire included all the pieces needed to accommodate a genteel lifestyle, and his embrace of technological innovations such as a six-horsepower steam engine dramatically enhanced his productivity. Between his steam-powered shop equipment and large workforce, Day could rapidly produce orders even as large as Governor David Settle Reid’s 1855 request for forty-seven pieces of furniture.

Day’s custom-made cabinetry and furniture exhibit a powerful energy and a vocabulary of individualized motifs that define both form and detail. While his designs adhered to the principles of symmetry and balance, and utilized classical details, Day pushed beyond standard conventions with bold three-dimensionality, serpentine curves and exuberant ornamentation. The fluidity of his forms suggests a sense of motion that by contrast made the work of his counterparts appear staid. The popular S-shaped scroll motif is incorporated into many of his pieces such as the rocking chair arms and the mirror brackets of his open pillar bureaus. Day lightens the massiveness of Caleb Richmond’s sideboard with S-shaped pillars terminating at the base in scrolled feet, and he embellishes the mirrored gallery back with a pair of whimsical S-scrolls set on the diagonal.

Day often detailed his side chairs and rocking chairs as well as other pieces with ornamentation composed of scroll shapes, ogee and reverse ogee forms, and foliage motifs. While such shapes are certainly not unique to Day, he applies them with more vitality and three-dimensionality than his peers. In particular, Day’s distinctive whatnots with pierced galleries illustrate his use of the jigsaw to create positive and negative shapes. Still balanced and symmetrical, these playful serpentine shapes convey motion and whimsy as do the S-shaped scrolls that support each of the shelves.

The unique, signature lounge is the furniture form most closely identified with Thomas Day. It evolved from an upholstered lounge form popular in the early 1800s that incorporated a low back at one end. Day transforms this earlier model by suspending a slender backboard between arching rear pillars so it appears to float effortlessly across the length of the lounge and creates a complementary negative space in the open back below. Likewise, the side arm rails of the lounge mirror their shapes in both positive and negative forms.

Like his furniture, the distinct and innovative architectural woodwork of cabinetmaker Thomas Day emerged from a specific context of race and place as planters in the 1840s and 1850s expressed their gentility through new boom-era Greek Revival houses and front additions to earlier homes in the Dan River region. More than eighty houses constructed or expanded over a quarter century radiate out from Day’s shop in Milton on either side of the Dan River, revealing the volume and scope of his work. Six intact North Carolina houses illustrate Day’s fully articulated woodwork ensembles of the mid-1800s. Two were built as additions to older houses: the 1856 front section of the Bartlett Yancey House and the ca. 1855 side addition to Longwood (lost to fire in 2013). The other four properties are large Greek Revival period houses: the Holderness House (ca. 1851), the Friou-Hurdle House (1858), the Richmond House (ca. 1850), and the Bass House (ca. 1855). In the next decade, Day embraced the emerging Italiante style with lively sawnwork crafted for the exterior and interior of the Garland-Buford House ( ca. 1860).

Commissions from wealthy planters provided a springboard for Day to create his own artistic signature writ large through architectural compositions. Using staircases, mantels, niches, corner blocks, baseboards, and casings as his palette to sculpt interior spaces, Day developed a fluid, exuberant, idiosyncratic interpretation of the Greek Revival style adopted throughout the Dan River region — all the while operating within the legal and social systems that constrained free Blacks at the time.

Day brought the vivacity of the curving line to his woodwork in innovative ways that continue to amaze and delight. In his entrance halls, bold and varied S-shaped newel posts with tightly coiled spirals and sinuous curves spring from the handrails, all in sharp contrast to the straightforward turned newel posts in most houses of the era. Many of these houses typically have turned newel posts or the more traditional circular ring of balusters supporting a horizontal spiral that terminates the handrail. In contrast, Day rotated the relatively serene horizontal spiral 90 degrees and enlarged the vertical spiral to form the entire newel, conveying a sense of energy and motion that extends the movement of the ramped handrail into the entry hall. Day’s signature newel posts proclaimed the owner’s social status to all who entered.

Complementing his newel posts, curvaceous stair brackets at the end of the treads display fluid-lined variations on standard patterns. While most Greek Revival staircases incorporate decorative stair brackets, only Day’s utilized coordinated motifs to reinforce the S-shaped newel post statements, such as those he crafted for the Glass-Dameron House and Hunt House staircases.

Day’s mantels, the focal point of many a planter’s parlor, invigorated standard Greek Revival idioms with robust serpentine mantel friezes to create a sense of movement unlike the static paneled friezes of their counterparts. As seen in the Holderness House parlor, Day reinforced the hierarchy of the parlor as the most formal interior space by flanking the mantel with arched niches framed by deeply fluted moldings. Likewise, around door and window openings, Day installed bold casings animated by the shifting patterns of light and shadow on their deeply fluted surfaces. The undulating forms and sharply cut sawnwork characteristic of Day’s interiors play upon the tension between positive and negative space.

Like his furniture designs, Day’s architectural woodwork grew out of the framework of classical architecture, respecting formality, symmetry and hierarchy. To his interiors, Day brought fluidity and movement as he abstracted, distorted, rotated, intensified and distilled to transform that vocabulary. Day skillfully maximized and celebrated the fluidity of form as someone who knew the rules and understood how to break them.

The remarkable design aesthetic of his furniture and architectural woodwork speaks to us of the complexity of the life and work of Thomas Day — an entrepreneurial free person of color who crafted a remarkable legacy equally complex in its style and expression. His amazing tangible body of work continues to astound and inspire far beyond the Dan River region. Day’s work also reveals the enduring power and innovative evolution of his appealing aesthetic, an aesthetic ironically empowered by the most powerful and wealthy white citizens of his time and place. 

To Learn More

If you are interested in knowing more about Thomas Day, check out Blandwood Estate current exhibit, “New Perspectives on Thomas Day — Pairing Furniture by North Carolina’s Free Black Master Craftsman With Contemporary Pieces From Governor Morehead’s Blandwood,” April 1 through Sept. 30. The exhibit will generate conversations about the acclaimed free Black cabinetmaker and artisan. Displayed with Day’s furniture are pieces once owned by Gov. John Motley Morehead. According to Blandwood, the show also examines Day’s furniture in period rooms and “introduces new approaches to understanding the work of this master craftsman as a successful Black entrepreneur operating within elite white social circles.”

“This special presentation of Day’s furniture acknowledges his role in American history and speaks for the legacy that people of color gave Blandwood,” says Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro. “This exhibit is dedicated to a more equitable approach to understanding the experiences of these individuals who have been overlooked in the past.”

A National Historic Landmark, Blandwood’s mission as a traditional house museum is to interpret historical narratives related to North Carolina history, architecture and the decorative arts. The exhibit’s mission is to expand the traditional narratives around race, gender and class in mid-19th century North Carolina during the mid-19th century.

The Day exhibit is open from April 1 through Sept. 30, Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. and Sundays 
2 p.m. – 5 p.m., with the exception of major national holidays. The last tour begins one hour prior to closing. Tickets are $8 at the door.  OH 

Reprinted with permission from Preservation Greensboro. Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll is a preservation architect and a Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Fiction by Daniel Wallace   
Illustrations by Harry Blair

We were listening to Vivaldi the night I died, the bed so soft, so warm, my wife of nearly half-a-century perched beside me with a cup of ice chips, there to wet my tongue, my lips. Even though I die at the end of it, this is not a sad story, really: I was very old, comfortable, cared for, weary and loved, loved my whole life long, ready to fade into whatever night was waiting for me. And of all the moments I might have conjured to accompany me as I was leaving, it was our very first date that I recalled.

Clara and I were grad students in English, just classroom friends, weeks away from defending our dissertations — hers on lute music in Shakespeare’s early plays, mine on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and the birth of modern science. I’d always liked Clara, but I think everybody did. She was smart but didn’t seem to care that she was, and made the rest of us — who were battling with each other, always burnishing the myth of our own brilliance — seem dumb. She was also funny, and the kind of pretty I was drawn to. Her nose was just a little longer than one thought it might have been, her eyes too big. They were emerald green, though, and rested on her big cheeks like marbles. Her knees were oversized for her long thin legs, like two snakes that had just swallowed one rabbit each. The truth was she wasn’t really picture-pretty at all, but carried herself as if she were, or didn’t care that she wasn’t, and that made her more beautiful than anyone I’d ever seen. She seemed wild to me, beyond anything I could ever capture. I was 27 and looked like a young man overly acquainted with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, by which I mean bookish in a sun-starved sort of way, shy around actual humans, shiny brown hair, still waiting for the peach fuzz on my upper lip to turn to fur. Somehow she let me know that she was free — “I’ve been kind of seeing somebody, but now . . . ” And she shrugged.

And there we were.

So we decided to go out for a beer one night. I picked her up in the first car I’d ever owned, an old Dodge Dart I’d bought used five years before, beaten and bruised, 210,027 miles and counting. There was a hole in the passenger side floorboard a mouse could have slipped through, and the engine was seriously flatulent.

“Nice car,” she said, hopping in. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, variations on which seemed to encompass her entire wardrobe. “Is it new?”

“Very funny.”

“Kidding,” she said. “But seriously, it’s a real car, right?”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m just having fun with you.” She punched me in the shoulder. “But honestly, want me to give it a good push? Happy to.”

She went on like this for a little while and stopped just before it became tedious. Maybe just a beat after it became tedious. But I was laughing. “For someone who doesn’t even have a car, you have strong opinions about mine.”

“I kid you,” she said. “But seriously.”

Off we went to a place called Brother’s, famous for its jukebox and onion rings and frosty beer mugs. We slipped into a booth and talked about what graduate students talk about — dissertation directors, anxiety, our cohorts and more anxiety. That was the thing: It was fine and fun and comfortable; we just got along so well. Even after a few minutes together it felt like we’d been coming to Brother’s forever and talking about nothing and laughing — when this guy appeared, an apparition materializing from the dark of the bar beyond us. Tall, wiry, a small face made angular by a well-trimmed goatee, and eyebrows like a mossy overhang. Our age. He was wearing a black jacket and a black T-shirt beneath it and black pants, and I’m assuming black socks and underwear as well. He sat down next to Clara — they clearly knew each other — and he smiled at me and shook my hand. A strong grip. Very strong.

Clara covered her face with her hands and moaned. “Jeremy,” she said, she sighed. “Jesus. Jesus Jesus Christ.”

Jeremy looked at me and rolled his eyes, like we were having so much fun and now Clara has to come and ruin it for us.

“I saw you and I had to say hello,” Jeremy said to her. Then to me, conspiratorially: “We were together, not too long ago. Clara and I.”

Clara nodded, but it was a grudging nod. I’m sorry, she mouthed to me.

Jeremy saw her. “You should be sorry,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “Jeremy. This is not the time or the place for this.”

Jeremy shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know why. This used to be our place.”

“Our place?” She mocked him. “We came here twice.”

Someone put two quarters in the jukebox and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” began to play. Clara looked at me. “We should go, Richard. This isn’t going to get any more fun than it already is.”

“Richard,” Jeremy said. “What a great name. May I call you Dick, Dick? Great. So, Dick, about how long have you and Clara been an item . . . Dick.”

I didn’t answer. I was in a difficult position: Clara and I really weren’t an item, yet; I didn’t feel it was up to me — or in my wheelhouse — to step up and eject the interloper from our midst.

But then, slowly, Jeremy’s smile dimmed and died, and he looked at Clara as if she were a hideous thing.

“You’re a coward, you know,” he said to her. “How could you just
. . . disappear? No call back. Nothing. Not cool. Not how you break up with somebody.” He looked at me, back to her. “Just . . . not cool. In case you didn’t know.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if she were about to plunge underwater.

Slowly, she exhaled.

“We didn’t ‘break up,’ Jeremy. We were never even really seeing each other, not like that. We were never even — .” She stopped, giving up the postmortem. “Listen. I’m sorry, okay? I should have called you or maybe written you back to say thanks and everything, it was great while it lasted but a talent-free hobo novelist who doesn’t know the difference between a semicolon and an ampersand is just not what I’m looking for in my life at this time. All the best, Clara.”

Jeremy tried to rally with a comeback, but he didn’t have one. “I’m not a hobo,” he said. “Just . . . between places.”

“For a year and a half,” Clara said.

Poor Jeremy. He had been defeated. “Raindrops” ended and began again. Jeremy shook his head, stared off into the faraway-somewhere. He looked like he was standing on the shore of a deserted island watching the ship that was supposed to save him sail on by. 

“Okay, well, I feel like it’s time for me to hitch a ride on the next prevailing wind! But before I go, I have a message for you, Richard. You’re going to be me one day. You’ll have the time of your life with this one. You’ll be so happy. It’ll be like the world went from black and white to color. Then everything will go to shit and you won’t be happy anymore because Clara will move on, and it will suck for you, just like it’s sucking for me now.”

By the look in his eyes he was taking a moment to relive some of the colorful times he’d shared with her, and he smiled. “But it will be worth it,” he said. “Because Clara . . . well, nobody is Clara.”

Then he stood, and just as quickly as he had come was gone, a shadow fading away into the darkness of the bar.

We paid up and left and walked to the car in the dusky quiet. We were a little unsettled.

A breeze ruffled the trees but fell short of the two of us, standing on either side of my car now in the gravel parking lot. No stars out yet but the moon was rising, low still and smoky white.

“Well, that sucked,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, but — ”

“But what?”

“You have to admire his pluck.”

“I love that word,” she said. “He’s not plucky, though. He’s . . . indecorous.”

“Unseemly.”

“Boorish.”

Looking down like there was something on the ground for her to see, her hair fell into her face and it was as if a big CLOSED sign went up. Even after she pushed it back behind her ears it was hard to really see her. “Jeremy,” she said. “Such a mistake. What if every mistake you ever made followed you around for the rest of your life? Like a parade of mistakes. The too-small shoes you bought, the undercooked chicken. Jeremy.”

“That would suck a lot.”

“I was mean to him.”

“He asked for it.”

“Really?”

I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but I was on Clara’s side now. I looked back at Brother’s. I kept thinking Jeremy was going to follow us out here and stab me.

“I think we should make a mistake,” she said.

“Really?”

“We need to do something,” she said. “That or go home. And I don’t want to go home. Let’s do something stupid that will follow us around forever like undercooked chicken.”

“Sure,” I said, not really sounding like the devil-may-care-crazy guy she may have wanted just then. But what to do? I couldn’t think of anything: I’d always veered to the quiet, safe side of life. But she had an idea.

“You know what we should do?” she said. “Or what we shouldn’t do, I mean?”

She sat on the hood of the car and waited for me to join her. I did. This was as close as I’d ever been to her.

“What?”

“Go to the zoo.”

There was a small zoo in Bellingham, somewhere between a real zoo and a place where a bunch of animals had been collected from around the world and housed by a larger-than-life intrepid explorer in makeshift pens and a pit for lions and tigers, a skinny elephant, a fence for the giraffe, a cement island for the monkeys. The animals didn’t look abused, just disappointed.

“Great idea,” I said. “But it’s closed. It closes at dusk.”

“Who said anything about it being open?”

And she told me a story she’d heard, about an entryway at the bottom of the 12-foot-high metal fence, one you can slither through with ease, gaining access to the entire place. No alarms, no cameras. Just you and the animals in the dark.

“I know the way.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping to impress her with my newfound recklessness. I handed her the keys to the car.

“Really? Seriously?” she said, like a kid. “You’re up for this?”

Her face was so small I could cup it in one hand, and in the half-light of the parking lot outside of Brother’s she had the patina of a film from the ’40s. I think I was already in love with her. We got in the car and she looked at me, and it was as if she were saying, Are you ready? Because this is happening. If you’re going to wimp out this is your last chance. In just the few minutes we’d been outside night had fully fallen. A couple of frat boys came out of Brother’s braying at each other, and the tail end of a song comes out with them — “Raindrops.”

“Let’s do this,” I said.

She started the car and winked at me as she revved the engine. “Big mistake,” she said.

It was a terrifically muggy night but with the windows down I could feel a cool undercurrent to the air. I remember thinking that one day it would be fall, then winter, then spring and then summer again, and that whatever was about to happen will have happened a long time ago. The wind made Clara’s hair go wild, half of it flying out the window like streamers on a bicycle, the other half in her mouth and in her eyes, blindfolding her for seconds at a time. “I’ve got this,” she kept saying. “No problem.” Then she looked at me, mock-scared with a frightened smile, like the other part of her was saying, Don’t believe me! There is a problem! I don’t have this!

She took a sudden turn off of Greene Street, and then the road whipped around to the right, up and then down, the car beams breaking into what felt like a virgin dark. Just a pine tree forest, a forgotten road, nothing else.

She pulled over to the curb and cut the lights and we were under the cover of night.

“We’re here,” she said.

Gradually the world around me came into focus, and over the trees I could see the throbbing red light at the top of the WRDC radio tower. I positioned myself in the world and I realized we were in fact right behind the zoo, near a farm, an overgrown pasture. She put the car in reverse, pulled back, angled it, then turned the lights back on, spotlighting the secret entrance through the fence. She raised her arms into the air, fists clenched: victory.

“You’re pretty impressed with yourself.”

“I am,” she said, nodding. “As I should be.”

She turned off the car and threw the keys back to me.

“It’s go time,” she said.

The hole in the fence was big enough for a mandrill to crawl through. We got in on all fours. Neither of us said a word but communicated through hand signals and raised eyebrows and then suddenly — What’s that? Oh. It’s nothing. Continue . . . inching through the inky dark toward the animal quiet.

The woods ended, and we were on a path, dirt and gravel first and then lightly paved uneven asphalt. A yellow light spilled on the elephant cage, that fenced-in patch of hard dirt no bigger than a poor man’s front yard. There was no elephant there now — he or she was sleeping inside. I’d been here a couple of times, thrown a few peanuts over this wall. Clara looked at me. She was so excited she seemed to be vibrating. She leaned in close and stood on her tiptoes to whisper-yell in my ear: “We did it!” She held onto my elbow. “But it’s important to stay quiet,” she said. “That way they won’t know we’re not one of them. They’ll do things most people never get to see them do.”

It turned out that animals in the zoo at night do what most animals do. They sleep. It was absolutely still. The elephants, the giraffes, the monkeys, the spiral-horned antelope — they were all asleep. You could hear them; it was the humming sound of a living forest. Blue-black shadows everywhere. An ibis had a bad dream and shrieked, and a striped hyena answered (maybe it was an ibis, maybe a hyena), then it was silence again. What lights there were were kept low, and the moon was hidden behind a cloud. It turned out that sneaking around in a zoo full of sleeping animals was not unlike sneaking around in a zoo with not a single animal in it. Clara thought she saw something and gave a little involuntary gasp and turned and — it was a rabbit. She shrugged her shoulders, smiled, but I could tell she’d had high hopes for this adventure. It hadn’t lived up to its hype. “We can go now if you want,” she said.

I did want to go. I wanted to be back in the car talking about what had just happened, how great it was and can you believe that we actually did that? Clara had no idea how careful I normally was, how meticulous with my life, had no way of knowing that I was a man who folded his pants at the crease and arranged his shirts by kind and, within kind, color, whose life-plan was to be invisible on command, to follow directions, to go as far as a man with a Ph.D. in Frankenstein could go. So yes, I wanted to leave.

But she was just too defeated. 

If this were even our second date I would hug her, even kiss her until my kisses made her smile. A second date meant options. A first date, you couldn’t — I couldn’t — do more than take her hand. There was an old stone wall surrounding a duck pond, and I stepped up on it. It was only 2 feet high. Clara looked up at me and sort of laughed and said, “What are you — ?” but before she could finish the sentence I had my hand out and she took it and I pulled her up to stand beside me. “Listen,” I said. She listened and heard the same thing I did: almost nothing at all, just that humming sound. “Now listen,” and with my hands cupped around my mouth I shouted a quote from the book I had memorized: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

That did the job: The night blew up. The animals rose. Plodding out of his concrete bunker pounded the elephant, the curious giraffes loped into the moonlight, and the island of monkeys began to wildly chatter. Every animal was baying and woofing and screeching. The animal world had awakened — just for us.

“Richard,” Clara said, still in whisper-mode. Wings flapped in the dark above us, water roiled somewhere nearby. Clara grabbed my arm and pulled me close. Our shoulders bumped. “This is just . . . so great!” Her big eyes were wide, the size of saucers for a miniature teacup. The moon, the stars, the sky, the animals of the Earth, this beautiful woman, all here, before me — and I felt as if I had created a moment that had never been created before, never in the history of the world. And I was sharing it with Clara.

But I woke up more than the animals. The zoo actually had a keeper. I saw him before I heard him, the beam of his super-powerful flashlight bouncing off of everything.

“Who’s there?” he called out, in a deep voice. “You’re trespassing, assholes. And yes, it’s a felony, and yes, I will prosecute. Do not think I won’t. Course I’ll let you spend some time in the hippo pond first, goddamn it.”

 

He sounded tired, and very serious. This had gone too far for me, and for Clara. She was frozen against my side, had stopped breathing I think, statue-still. I took her hand and we jumped down from the wall. I had no idea now where the hole in the fence was, but what choice did we have but to try and find it? We ran into the woods. I scratched my face on the lower branches of a pine tree and could feel the stripes of blood across my cheeks. But we didn’t stop running. The zookeeper could hear us, of course, and shined the light into the woods following our path. “Come out come out wherever you are, moron,” he said gleefully. He followed the sound of us, sweeping his light through the forest, coming closer. I had no idea where we were. But we came to a huge tree, and I pulled Clara behind it, wrapping my arms around her until we were as small as two people could be. The light of his flashlight fell all around us, but not on us. We were that close to being seen — inches away from being caught and caged. But we were not.

He gave up. “Damn it,” he said to himself now, thinking we were long gone.

Then he turned around and headed back the way he came.

Still pressed up against me she looked up at me and smiled.

“You did it,” she whispered. “You saved us.” She kissed me on the cheek, but her eyes did not leave mine. “Richard,” she said, “that was truly magical.”

And I thought, I actually remember thinking this as we huddled together behind that tree: in 30, 40, 50 years — whenever she buried me — no matter what may have happened through the decades of our life together, this was what I’d remember, this night, the story she’d tell too many times to our children, our grandchildren, our oldest friends, the story of that night we broke into the zoo and woke everyone up. And not because it was the best thing that ever happened to us, but because it was the first. It set the tone, she’d say, for the rest of our lives. That night at the zoo we were in our own cocoon, arms encircled, closer than close. She burrowed into me, and we stayed that way for a while, longer than we needed to, until the night returned to its rhythms, until all the wild animals in the world went back to sleep.

So of course, out of all the moments of my life, this would be the one I chose to see me out.

I felt a chip of ice on my lips, a damp cloth on my forehead. I didn’t know if my eyes were open or closed, but it was all dark now, and getting darker. I found my wife’s hand and held it.

“Clara,” I said. “Oh, Clara!”

Yes, your name was my very last word, so sweet I said it twice.

“Clara?” Gwendolyn said, and she shuddered, seemed to freeze and harden as if she’d died herself. “Richard, who is Clara?”

And I might have told her, but it was a long story from a long time ago, and by then it was much, much too late.  OH

Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish and, most recently, Extraordinary Adventures. He lives in Chapel Hill, where he directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina.

What constitutes a home library varies from one book lover to another

By Cynthia Adams

Imagine a library with 51,000 books towering two stories to the ceiling, amassed by Johns Hopkins professor Richard Macksey. Though Amazon’s Kindle debuted 15 years ago, print survives. Writer/actor Stephen Fry declared in 2013, “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”

In January, The New York Times released a photo of the late Macksey’s dream library, which included extraordinarily rare editions. The image was retweeted nearly 40,000 times in a mere month. Although the library was dismanted after Macksey’s death in 2019, the Baltimore bibliophile, a towering intellect, curated a stunning dreamscape of books reaching two stories in height, with the surreality of a movie set.

Macksey was book wrapt — i.e. enchanted by his own home library.

George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore library contained 20,000 books, many of them first editions. When eight graders are taught North Carolina history, field trips to Biltmore Estate provide a breathtaking example of what it means to be book wrapt and want to assemble a library.

Gen Z and Millennial readers, whose affection for printed books mirrors screen-time fatigue, still dream of such a place. A real library, it is variously estimated, requires 1,000 titles — or 500 — or fewer. With the advent of e-books and so many people downsizing their homes, a small assembly of treasured volumes, artfully displayed, is very much a library.

On these pages you find a number of book-wrapt Triad readers who have created personal libraries with varying numbers of titles and configurations — the largest of them symbolically filled with family heirlooms, like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities — yet all of them inspire.

Sharon James is snugly book-wrapt in her Stoney Creek study/library. She is surrounded by artwork, collectibles and books as she works from home for a company that conducts international hospital inspections.

Here, she spends hours. Her husband, Tom, a High Point University economics professor, keeps a desk nearby.

“I love the warmth of books!” Sharon James says. “I have them lying around in every room. I love leather-bound books, the richness of their color, and I often wonder what prompts someone to write what they do.” Countless other volumes spill into the downstairs. Like many book collectors, James recently undertook a purge to make way for more. This led to a discovery that some favorite titles were duplicates. Lucky friends inherited those.

“I have always had to have bookshelves in my homes,” James says. “If there were none, then I had them built as I did here. Nothing is more relaxing to me than sitting in my favorite French chair, with a good book and a glass of wine. And once I start reading and am into it deeply, I hate being disturbed!”

A former nurse, James enjoys “biographies about women who do great things,” prizing a first edition of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing. She is an avid collector of English and American antiques, so amasses books on the decorative arts.

This is a common thread among bookies: Private passions are revealed in their private libraries.

Recent New York transplants Rick and Randy Burge-Willis own approximately 1,500 to 2,000 volumes and remodeled to accommodate the excess. (See March 2022 O.Henry: www.ohenrymag.com/a-leap-of-faith.)

“There were existing bookshelves in the living room, but our previous home had a ‘main’ library and a ‘kitchen’ library. When we moved here, we only had enough space for about a quarter of our books. It seemed natural to turn our large office space into a library, so we had half of the walls lined with bookshelves.”

They were careful to maintain the original pecky cypress paneling. “We also wanted to mirror the classic moldings and trims of the rest of the house.”

Cookbooks comprise the former restaurant owners’ largest collection, “from church cookbooks to James Beard – award winners, including every edition of the Southern Living Annual Cookbook since 1979.”

Ashley Culler’s Emerywood home library literally rose from the ashes. It is a pastiche of past and present — a mini-Biltmore, but she says their previous library was far grander.

Leather-bound volumes collected for decades burned in a fire that ravaged the entirety of High Point’s Shadowlawn, a French Revival Tudor, in a Gothic style straight out of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. No personal images of the architecturally significant 1926 house survived.

Their current home is a smaller version, one that stood mere yards away. It is a beautiful echo of Shadowlawn, destroyed in 2010 by a Christmas fire. (See December 2016 O.Henry: www.ohenrymag.com/out-of-the-shadow-of-shadowlawn.)

The Cullers bought the carriage house that lay in its shadow, renovated decades earlier by Harold and Peg Amos. Over two years, the Cullers incorporated a few pieces from the ruins; stone from fireplaces, a few leaded glass windows, and a salvageable rear entry, and made it their own. (The Amoses had sold them Shadowlawn, as well.)

The “new” library built by the Amoses in the converted carriage house, as I wrote then, “most demonstrates the fineness of rooms in the lost house.” A paneled library, complete with a soaring, beamed ceiling, plaster friezes, marble fireplace, leaded windows, spiral staircase and balcony, is the Cullers’ “favorite room.”

Hundreds of collected leather-bound books in the Cullers’ former library were destroyed, along with family pictures, memorabilia and all but a few salvaged items — including a sword from Braxton Culler’s time at military school.

“He said to me, ‘I wish I had my sword back.’ So, one day I went through the ashes and the rubble, and I found it,” says Culler, who took the blackened sword to a local jeweler for cleaning and polishing.

“I surprised Braxton with that, giving it to him a year later.”

It again hangs by the fireplace.

Now, their library features inherited, irreplaceable family items: a “worry” chair possibly bought in the Far East by Jack Rochelle, Ashley’s father, and a cock-fighting chair that was possibly reproduced by Globe Furniture, where he was president; an opium pipe from Burma; solid mahogany elephants that Braxton Culler acquired in Honduras; a bust of Rochelle by his niece, Kitty Montgomery, wearing his top hat from the Sedgefield Hunt.

But the most prized of all is a handmade chess table made for Rochelle and presented by Globe artisans on Christmas Eve in 1952. Here she now plays chess with her grandchild.

“Braxton’s daddy’s dog tags from the war,” are on the mantle, Culler says. At last, new photos from their parents, fill the room. It’s become a repository of memories.

The fire’s hidden blessing is this, Culler says: “We are able to incorporate treasured heirlooms into our newer home.”

Like Culler, many book lovers experienced a library lost.

They discussed how downsizing forces more attrition, less accretion.

Retired Greensboro anthropologist Tom Fitzgerald now raids Little Free Libraries while out on walks in Sunset Hills, returning later to donate. He reads extensively, but no longer stocks a personal library.

Attorney Charles Younce, lover of biographies, history and fiction, keeps stacks of books by his bed — but, he says regretfully, no library. He is winnowing out possessions, something he counsels friends to do.

Former Greensboro librarian Pam Norwood and her husband, Phil, downsized a library of 2,000 books when they retired. They culled in earnest. “We kept about 200 books,” she estimates. “We have books in each of our little condo’s rooms. There is not a room for a separate library.”

Norwood buys books, borrows from the public library and reads on Kindle when traveling. “I have been accumulating books all my life, and we still have some books from our childhoods.”

Bibliophile Regula Spoti, a Swiss transplant to the Triad, was inspired by Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books. She buys e-books monthly but estimates now owning 150 books despite “giving books away liberally — and I only want meaningful books in my library.”

Greensboro reader Nancy Jones belongs to several book clubs, now keeping a minimum of 300 books in her home. “I have four different areas with books collected — one whole wall book-cased in my family room with mostly books, a few art objects. And a lawyer’s bookcase at the end of my hall.”

Virginia Cummings, avid reader and fellow “bookie,” created a wall of bookcases in a living room filled with books she and her husband still pull off the shelf to reread. “I love to see my family and friends browsing and conversing about the books,” she writes. But there’s a caveat: “One son, who reads classics, tries to sneak them back to his house.”

The Tender Bar, based on J. R. Moehringer’s book, features a scene in which the writer’s uncle opens a closet stuffed with classics. These, the uncle says, must be read before he can consider himself educated.

Moehringer’s first bosses at a bookstore explain that every book on the shelf is a miracle; “it was no accident they opened like a door.” Whether that door is discovered within a grand library, like Vanderbilt’s, or a closet, like his uncle’s, it opens us too.  OH