Birdwatch

BIRDWATCH

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July 2025

Call of The Wild

The summer sound of the Eastern forests

By Susan Campbell

It is the sound of summer: You may not be paying attention, but it’s there. The slurring “pee-a-wee” of the eastern wood-pewee is echoing all over central North Carolina at this time of year. On the hottest of afternoons this bird continues to call even though its brethren are now quiet. The spring cacophony of breeding birds may have been replaced by the buzzing of cicadas and chirping crickets, but the pewee continues making his trademark vocalization. The species has long been considered a hallmark of Eastern forests. Although not as plentiful as it was before humans began altering the landscape, it can still be found widely throughout the region.

Eastern wood-pewees are flycatchers: carnivorous birds that have the talent for snapping insects out of midair. They are acrobatic fliers that use a perch to scan for large, winged insect prey such as dragonflies, butterflies, moths and beetles. As a result of this foraging strategy, pewees spend much of their time in the open during the warmer months. However, if it were not for their loud calls, these little birds would be easily overlooked. Both males and females are a drab gray-brown above, dusky below, and have buff barring on their wings.

Flycatchers found in the Eastern United States are, as a whole, not a colorful bunch. They tend to be brownish with subtle differences in bill shape, tail length or the color of the small feathers on the wing or around the eye. Habitat may lend a clue, since they have preferences for different types of vegetation. When they vocalize, however, it is a different story. In fact, the eastern wood-pewee has virtually indistinguishable plumage from the western wood-pewee, which is found closer to the West Coast. The western wood-pewee makes a nasal “bree-urr” call that has a much rougher quality in tone. These birds may give a thin, whistled “peeaa” as well. Generally, the quality of the vocalizations is very different from that of our Eastern birds.

Given their diet, the eastern wood-pewee is not likely to appear at a feeder. However, this species may frequent birdbaths or water features within their territory. Also, individuals tend to use the same perches for foraging and can be found predictably in an area. They prefer forest edges so they’re easier to spot than their forest-dwelling cousins, such as the Acadian or willow flycatcher. Pewees also hover for very short periods to catch prey, and will actively move through the vegetation in search of caterpillars and slower moving insects in the canopy. They tend to utilize the midstory in locations where there are deciduous trees. As a result, it is believed that their occurrence in some areas of the Northeast has been affected by the over-grazing of white-tailed deer. The loss of smaller trees and shrubs has eliminated not only pewee perches but the necessary vegetation for their prey species.

Female eastern wood-pewees build a shallow cup nest of woven grasses lined with plant fibers, animal fur and/or moss. It’s well camouflaged on the outside with lichens and blends in with the horizontal limb that it is built on. Pewees have a limited ability to defend their eggs and young, so invisibility is the name of the game.

These little birds are migratory, spending the winter months in South America, where prey is abundant. Eastern wood-pewees can be found through Peru down into Brazil during the non-breeding season. They become active, solitary hunters that pursue prey in a variety of habitats that time of the year.

Before they begin to head south in August, see if you can spot one of these vocal, talented fliers. You may have to look closely to find this familiar summer friend motionless on a favorite perch.

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

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July 2025

The Essential Twain

The life of America’s premier writer

By Stephen E. Smith

Most Americans — and a generous portion of the literate world — probably consider themselves experts on Mark Twain, even if they have never read a word he wrote. After all, the white-suited former riverboat pilot was his own best PR man. The cottony hair, drooping mustache, bushy eyebrows and cutting one-liners were all a product of his unrelenting quest for fame and fortune, and his physical and intellectual attributes remain ingrained in our national character. His knack for producing quotable and acerbic squibs has left us with the impression that he was an urbane 19th-century Yogi Berra. Which is reason enough to read Ron Chernow’s latest biography, Mark Twain. In 1,000 pages of beautifully crafted prose, Chernow explores in excruciating detail the life and times of America’s premier writer and consummate self-promoter, setting the record straight, for the time being.

Nothing about Twain is simplistic or straightforward. He was endearing, irascible, temperamental, plainspoken, mean-spirited, sentimental, generous, loving, neglectful, conscientious, lazy, etc. And he lived a triumphant and calamitous existence as a typesetter, riverboat pilot, journalist, failed businessman, stand-up comedian, world-renowned author, inventor, book publisher, political wit, and staunch campaigner for racial equality and against jingoism and imperialism. To his immense credit, he was the bane of every benighted politician, from presidents to school board members. He was also guilt-ridden, holding himself responsible for the fatal scalding of his younger brother in a boiler explosion and the death of his 19-month-old son, Langdon, whom he had taken out in inclement weather. He buried his wife and two daughters, and during his later years, his behavior was often problematic.

Chernow manages to include every significant detail of Twain’s life, and he supports his occasional judgments with meticulous research, including 180 pages of endnotes and citations. He also energizes the most mundane elements of Twain’s existence with his talent for narrative pacing and a prose style that reads effortlessly. It makes little difference if the reader is a longtime Twain aficionado or a superficial fan who learned of Twain’s achievements from Cliff Notes; Chernow’s narrative is so enthralling that his copious text seems vaguely insufficient.

More than half the book details Twain’s Horatio Alger years, his ascent from Hannibal to Hartford. The halcyon days of his literary success and blissful family life make for pleasurable reading, but the latter years of Twain’s existence — his descent from Olympus — will likely be a challenge for the casual reader.

The last quarter of the biography, which covers the three periods of Twain’s life that are the least fascinating and most disquieting, is not an easy read. His obsession with his “angelfish,” girls ages 10 to 16, with whom he surrounded himself, requires a lengthy and convoluted explanation that is likely to strike contemporary readers as, well, a trifle creepy.

After the death of his wife, Olivia, Twain sought out the company of young girls. These visits were frequent, occurring almost daily. In his 40s, Twain wrote, “Young girls innocent & natural — I love ’em same as others love infants.” Twenty years later, he said, “Nothing else in the world is ever so beautiful as a beautiful schoolgirl.” Twain didn’t find these liaisons embarrassing or shameful: “I have the college-girl habit,” he confessed, and when he visited Vassar to speak at a benefit, he surrounded himself with 500 college girls and noted that almost all were “young and lovely, untouched by care, unfaded by age.”

A few biographers have claimed that Twain was a latent pedophile, but Chernow maintains that Twain “had an insatiable need for unconditional love and got it from the angelfish, not from his daughters.” His daughters regarded the angelfish camaraderie with a mild degree of jealousy, but Twain had, over the course of his later years, intentionally disengaged from his grown children. Susy was dead at 24 of bacterial meningitis, Jean suffered from epilepsy, and Clara avoided her overbearing father by pursuing a singing career.

There is never a hint of sexual involvement with any of the angelfish. Chernow notes: “If Twain thrashed himself with guilt about many things, he never had regrets about the angelfish. Far from being ashamed, he was positively proud of this development and posed with the girls for the press.”

Twain’s writing and lecturing made him rich, but he was an incompetent investor. He poured money into the Paige typesetting machine, a device so complex that it never functioned correctly. He also lost money investing in a publishing company. Having made a small fortune by issuing the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, he frittered away the money on foolish projects. Eventually, the publishing company failed, and Twain went bankrupt and had to embark on a world lecture tour to repay his creditors. Chernow manages to untangle Twain’s complicated finances while holding the reader’s undivided attention.

Later in his life, a disconcerting soap opera entanglement developed within Twain’s household. After his wife, Olivia, died, he and his surviving daughters relied on Isabel Lyon as a stenographer, confidant and household assistant, and an ambiguity arose regarding Lyon’s position in the household. Was she an employee or a family member? Had she assumed the position of Twain’s late wife? As Lyon gradually took over Twain’s affairs, her attachment to Jean and Clara grew strained. She eventually contrived to have Jean hospitalized, and her relationship with Clara collapsed. Twain fired Lyon for misappropriating household funds and became embroiled in a series of scandalous and exasperating lawsuits.   

In setting the record straight, Chernow tarnishes Twain’s carefully crafted image, revealing a human being who could be greedy and vindictive, but also a writer whose words are as fresh and clear today as when he first wrote them.

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

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July 2025

On the Pontoon

Life on the disquiet waters

By Cynthia Adams

The pontoon boat, bearing coolers of food and drink plus sweaty bathing-suit clad adults and children munching on chips, slid across the brown-gray waters of Lake Lookout. The boat slipped into a shoal, a barely-there sandbar where the children jumped off into the waist-high water as adults waded over to unload the coolers for a communal Fourth of July cookout.

Oppressively hot when still, the boat, thankfully, moved back into the lake and resumed a meandering tour.

Life on a major holiday on Lake Lookout, about halfway between Hickory and Statesville, was comatose by comparison to the buzz-sawing jet skis and power boats thrashing the waters of nearby Lake Norman. There were no water skiers, and little noise broke the quiet. Lookout also lacked Norman’s NASCAR mansions, replete with elevators.

A woman aboard pointed, murmuring approval of a new A-frame, clad in stained cedar, that could have been a mountain chalet. “That’s nice,” she affirmed. It reminded her of the understated family places on lakes she and her family knew in upstate New York.

Others nodded.

Such places, where working people could get a toe — or a fishing line, or a pontoon boat — in the water — are the holy grail of vacationers.

Her neighbor, a retired community college instructor, had spent several years fixing up his Lookout cottage. “He’s at it all the time,” she said. “Works hard. It’s his kid’s inheritance.” She had bought her own place, a rustic fisherman’s cabin, before things “got so crazy.”

Little by little, she was working to make it a home. Adapting to a one-bedroom, one-bath place. “The water is why I’m here.”

The boat owner had bought-in a decade before the market pushed it out of reach. He’d since invested as much as it cost, but his children loved it. They talked about how much they liked the simplicity and quiet, and bemoaned certain sections, where the affluent were building bigger, fancier homes.

“I don’t want it to change,” the woman said quietly.

As the pontoon continued, the boat owner suddenly slowed to a stop. In one of the busiest channels and the most developed section of the lake, another pontoon boat passed and, nearby, a few fishermen cast lines from a Jon boat. He pointed to the very top of a power line.

The New York woman lowered her voice. “The eagles.”

And there they were. One suddenly swooped down into a nest.

Nobody spoke; nobody needed to mention the symbolism: Fourth of July. Bald eagles in the wild.

Opposite their nest, someone had stacked three pallets of fireworks, enough for a commercial fireworks show. More fireworks than anyone on board had ever seen.

“Here?” the woman suddenly said. “So many. That’ll make an awful racket.”

Her face fell. “I worry about my dogs. They are petrified of fireworks.”

Somebody ventured, “You could commit the perfect crime during a racket like that.”

All eyes returned to the eagles’ nest.

Eagles soon to be subjected to a violent blast of fireworks.

The woman exhaled. The soaring of wings, the exhilarating sensation of only moments earlier, seemed ruined.

“I hope they come back next year,” someone muttered.

The boat bobbed over a gentle wake as the boat owner navigated back to drop us before returning to the sand bar. The eagles grew smaller and smaller until invisible.

Silence swallowed the boat. Sweat trickled down faces. Collectively, we struggled to shake off a disquieting mood. 

Nearing the woman’s dock, only the sound of waves gently slapping the pier beneath the silent, sheltering pines. “I have cold drinks,” she said, as an old, shaggy dog lumbered down to greet us, his tongue hanging, panting.

“Fireworks got real bad last year,” she added, staring sadly as she disembarked before opening her arms to give him a hug. “I’ll stay with him.”

Sharp reverberations would pierce the night across this and other lakes, across parklands and the most remote of places. Refracting off the rooftops of the hamlets, towns and cities of a fitful nation.

As contrails of explosives still lit the sky, a gibbous waning moon rose at midnight.

It is said that those born under such a moon are attuned to the natural world, yet feel as if they never quite belong.

Simple Life

SIMPLE LIFE

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July 2025

Bravo, Ben Franklin

And may there be more questions and answers on the road ahead

By Jim Dodson

My wife, Wendy, and I are a true marriage of opposites. She’s your classic girl of summer, born on a balmy mid-July day, a gal who loves nothing more than a day at the beach, a cool glass of wine and long summer twilights.

I’m a son of winter, born on Groundhog Day in a snowy Nor’easter, who digs cold nights, a roaring fire and a knuckle of good bourbon.

With age, however, I’ve come to appreciate our statistically hottest month in ways that remind me of my happy childhood.

Growing up in the deep South during an era before widespread air conditioning, I have fine memories of enjoying the slow and steamy days of midsummer.

Like most American homes in the late ’50s and early ’60s, the houses where we lived during my dad’s newspaper odyssey across the deep South were cooled only by window fans and evening breezes. The first time I encountered air conditioning was in a small town on the edge of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where only my father’s newspaper office and the Piggly Wiggly supermarket were air-conditioned.

Trips to the grocery store or his office were nice, but I had my own ways to beat the heat. I’d pedal my first bike around the neighborhood or crawl beneath our large wooden porch, where I’d conduct the Punic wars with my toy Roman soldiers in the cool, dark dirt.

On hot summer afternoons, I’d sit in a wobbly wicker chair on the screened porch, reading my first chapter books beneath a slow-turning ceiling fan, keeping a hopeful eye out for a passing thunderstorm, probably the reason I dig ferocious afternoon thunderstorms to this day.

July also brings the Fourth of July, our national Independence Day, which I unexpectedly gained a new appreciation for during my long journey down the Great Wagon Road over the past six years. The Colonial backcountry highway brought my Scottish, German and English ancestors (and probably yours) to the Southern frontier in the mid-18th century.

My fondest memory of celebrating the Fourth was sitting on a grassy fairway at the Florence Country Club, watching my first fireworks display. My mother brought along cupcakes decorated with red, white and blue icing.

That same week, Mr. Simmons, a cranky old fellow on our street, told my best friend, Debbie, and me that “only Yankees celebrate the Fourth of July because they won the War Between the States.”

My dad, a serious history buff, told me this was complete hogwash and began taking my older brother and me to hike the Revolutionary War battlefields of South Carolina at Camden, Kings Mountain and Cowpens, drawing us into the story of America’s fight for independence from Great Britain. When we moved to Greensboro in 1960, one of our first stops was the  Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, where the pivotal battle of the Revolutionary War was fought.

My favorite Fourth of July celebration took place at Greensboro’s Bur-Mil Club in the mid-1960s. It was a lovely affair that featured races in the swimming pool and a par-3, 9-hole golf tournament for kids, followed by a huge company picnic in the dusk before a fireworks display.

That summer, I joined the club’s swim team and even briefly set a city record for 10-and-under in the backstroke, developing a daily routine that made beating midsummer heat a breeze. Every morning after swim practice, I played at least 27 holes under the blazing sun (bleaching my fair hair snow-white by summer’s end), grabbed a hot dog and Coke in the club snack bar for lunch, then headed back to the pool to cool off before my dad picked me up on his way home from work. Looking back, it was hard to beat that summertime routine.

Fast forward several decades, I was thinking about these pleasant faraway summers on the first day of my journey down the Great Wagon Road, beginning in Philadelphia. The city was still draped in the tricolors of Independence Day amid a record-breaking heat wave. After a morning hike around the historic district, I walked into the shady courtyard of the historic Christ Church, hoping to find some relief, but found, instead, Benjamin Franklin sitting on a bench.

I couldn’t believe my good luck. Rick Bravo was a dead ringer for Philly’s most famous citizen and said to be the most beloved of Philly’s Ben Franklin actor-interpreters. 

He invited me to share the bench with him while he waited for his wife, Eleanor, to pick him up for a doctor’s appointment.

Over the next hour, Ben Franklin Bravo (as I nicknamed him) regaled me with several intimate insights about my favorite Founding Father, including how “America’s Original Man” shaped its democratic character and even had a hand in designing the nation’s first flag, sewn by Betsy Ross.

I thanked him for his stories and wondered if I might ask one final question.

He gave me a wry smile and a wink.

“God willing, not your last question nor my last answer,” he replied with perfect Franklin timing, casually mentioning that he was scheduled to undergo heart surgery within days.

I asked him what it was like channeling Benjamin Franklin.

Rick Bravo glanced off into the shadowed courtyard, where a mom and three small kids were cooling off with ice cream cones, chattering like magpies. My eyes followed his.

He grew visibly emotional.

“Let me tell you, it’s simply . . . wonderful. Next to my wife and children, being Ben Franklin is the most meaningful thing in my life.”

He told me how he met Eleanor many decades ago in the first of their many musical performances together, a major production of Oliver!

“Like America itself, we’ve weathered the ups-and-downs of life with lots of grace from the Almighty and a good sense of humor. As Ben Franklin himself observed, both are essential qualities for guiding a marriage or shaping a new country.”

Looking back, my hour with the man who was Ben Franklin proved the most memorable conversation of more than 100 interviews I conducted along the Great Wagon Road.

He even suggested that I drop by Betsy Ross’s shop over on Arch Street to buy a replica of the young nation’s first flag as a symbol of the birth of America.

Over the next five years, I carried this beautiful Ross flag, with its red-and-white stripes and circle of 13 stars, the only purchase I made during my entire 800-mile journey, down the road of my ancestors.   

To celebrate publication of my Wagon Road adventure this month, my Betsy Ross flag will proudly hang in front of my house for the first time, a gesture of gratitude to the dozens of inspiring fellow Americans I met on my long journey of awakening.

It will also hang in memory of my dear friend, Ben Franklin Bravo, my first interview on the Great Wagon Road, who died in January 2022.

I understand that Eleanor sang “Where is Love?” to him from their first musical together as he passed away.

It’s Her Churn

IT'S HER CHURN

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July 2025

It's Her Churn

For Shafna Shamsuddin, cardamom is the spice of life

By Cassie Bustamante

Photographs by Bert VanderVeen

Dessert is just a way to tell the stories,” says Shafna Shamsuddin, creator of her own cardamom-infused and globally-inspired ice cream company, Elaka Treats. Even though she’s inspired by the Indian traditions of her childhood, she’ll tell you with a laugh that her own story doesn’t begin there.

“My story started at Williams-Sonoma,” Shamsuddin admits with an easy smile. Born and raised in United Arab Emirates by Indian immigrant parents, Shamsuddin, as well as her siblings, came to America for college. She began her studies at Purdue University in Indiana, studying psychology and Earth science. From the time she was a child, she had her sights set on becoming a psychologist. However, she was matched with her husband during her undergrad years and relocated with him to Gastonia. In the end, she earned her bachelor’s degree from UNC-Charlotte. From there, her plan was to enroll in a clinical psychology graduate program at Duke University. “But due to personal reasons . . .” she trails off, preferring to look forward instead of into the past.

After a moment, she picks back up. Pressure from her community was overwhelming and first loneliness and then restlessness followed. “Everyone advised that I should focus on my marriage,” she says. “I am not Indian enough for Indians because I am not born and raised there,” she says. “And I am not American either, so, it’s like, where do I belong?” So she put her goals on the back burner, “hoping that one day I could pick it up and go back.” But, little by little, she began throwing herself into all sorts of projects: “plumbing, electrical, carpentry — I’ve done all kinds of stuff.” She found herself often wandering through the glimmering displays of kitchen-and-entertaining merchandise at Williams-Sonoma. “The kitchen tools and gadgets really fascinate me,” she says.

But there was one small appliance in particular that she kept coming back to. “I used to see the Cuisinart ice cream maker and that always caught my eye.” However, she says, the price tag was too much for her wallet. After years of gazing at the machine in wonder, she says, “finally, one day, I was like I am going to make the splurge.”

That small and mighty Cuisinart has long since been retired, but it got Shamsuddin’s wheels churning. Her first endeavor with it was kulfi ice cream, a traditional frozen Indian treat flavored with pistachio, cardamom and saffron. While kulfi is generally a no-churn dessert, Shamsuddin gave it a whirl in her ice cream maker.

But all of that tinkering didn’t ease her homesickness. She started dreaming of the anything-but-frozen unnakai, a sweet treat from back home, “especially where my parents are from in India, from their home state of Kerala.” The labor-intensive dessert, according to Shamsuddin, is made of a mashed plantain that’s been stuffed with coconut, cardamom and cashew nuts, then deep-fried. And while the flavors indeed melt in your mouth, it was the ritual around it, tea time, that she was missing.

“I was really craving having that experience of not just having the treat, but the experience of getting together with people and family and relatives, and just sitting and chatting over tea and tea-time snacks,” she says wistfully. But, she adds, “I felt that it was really sad for me to go through that process and eat it alone.”

Shamsuddin wondered how she could take the unnakai flavors and create a frozen dessert that she could enjoy. An idea hit her: Use plantains as the base. “I knew I had something here,” she says.

She began testing out her confections on friends when she’d host dinner parties. The result? “Everyone loved it.” Shamsuddin found gratification in serving others. And watching people savor her creations filled her cup. “It’s something that gives me a lot of pleasure.”

Plus, she says, the Indian tradition she learned from her own mother is that, when you entertain, you make everything from scratch as a way to celebrate your guests’ presence at your table. As her dinner-party pals spooned in bite after bite, they confirmed what she’d suspected — she was indeed onto something.

By the early-2010s, Shamsuddin and her husband had settled in Greensboro and later that decade welcomed their only son, Zahin. But that desire to make her confections into something bigger kept nagging at her. The only problem was she had no idea how to start a business. And she knew that she’d be on her own in this endeavor.

In Greensboro, Shamsuddin began to find her way. She joined a training group at Club Fitness, but she got much more than she expected out of those gym sessions. Her workout comrades and trainer also became her support system, her social circle and her laboratory, allowing her to test samples on them. “My gym buddies, they were really my everything,” Shamsuddin says.

As luck would have it, her trainer coached another client, Lindsay Bisbee, who had launched the homemade pickle brand Kyōōkz. He connected the two women, and Bisbee, in turn, introduced Shamsuddin to the Piedmont Food Processing Center, aka PFAP. The 10,000-square-foot building in Hillsborough offers commercial kitchen space as well as support for food entrepreneurs.

But the biggest thing Shamsuddin picked up at the gym wasn’t the heavy weights, nor was it the connections. It was confidence. Shamsuddin, who describes herself on LinkedIn as a “Rule Breaker,” learned, she says, “I am physically strong and mentally strong, so what is holding me back? Nothing, I can depend on myself.”

With a new-found belief in herself, Shamsuddin began her production in 2019 at PFAP, where executive director L. Eric Hallman provided her with the guidance she’d desperately needed. “It was Eric who kind of gave me that first big missing piece of the puzzle,” she says, laughing about how basic those missing pieces were — business registration, insurance, scheduling inspections.

Registration meant Shamsuddin needed a business name, which was something she hadn’t even considered. Elaka is what people in the Indian state of Kerala call cardamom. Every confection Shamsuddin offers features the exotic flavor — a warm, aromatic spice known for its peppery and piney palate. So, she decided, why not call her business Elaka Treats? Officially in business at PFAP, Shamsuddin learned how to navigate a commercial kitchen, essential in the ice cream business. After months of back and forth between Greensboro and Hillsborough, often hauling Z with her and hiring a babysitter there, she scheduled her Department of Agriculture inspection for March, and, a week later, was due to officially launch at the 2020 RiverRun International Film Festival, held in Winston-Salem each year. “And then COVID hit, cancels the RiverRun International Film Festival, cancels my inspection,” she says, “and I panicked.” In tears, she called her brother, feeling as if she’d brought the pandemic upon herself. “You think the whole world is going through a pandemic because you decided to run a business?” he asked her. She laughs now at the memory, but, at the time, she answered him with a resounding, “Yes.” After her momentary meltdown, Shamsuddin picked herself up off the floor and trudged onward. “I wasn’t ready to give up. I’d barely started.” While inspections were on pause, Shamsuddin says, “I found out that if I can convince the Department of Agriculture that I am going to do everything per code and my product is safe to consume, then they will give me a letter that says . . . it is OK for us to be in business.” She was able to obtain the approval letter and, like many businesses in 2020, made a new plan.

“I started thinking, How did Coke create a market?” Salesmen originally went door-to-door, coming face-to-face with potential customers, she says. And now? “There isn’t a soul on this planet that if you tell them ‘Coke,’ they don’t know what it is.”

Shamsuddin, donning a mask, began peddling her pints at farmers markets, everywhere from Raleigh to Charlotte, and at The People’s Market in Greensboro. She ran pop-up shops, even setting up where it all began — at Friendly Center’s Williams-Sonoma.

Farmers markets opened doors, allowing Shamsuddin to take steps toward her goal of eventually adopting a business-to-business (B2B) model. At the Chapel Hill Farmers’ Market, Vimala Rajendran, owner of Vimala’s Curryblossom Café, introduced herself — and, soon after, Shamsuddin had her first wholesale account.

Since then, she’s grown to having a dozen wholesale accounts. “It’s been a slow build,” she admits. But that pace has given her room to expand her small but mighty part-time teams. She’s also relocated her operations to the much more conveniently located Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship, where she rents an office and a warehouse-style storage space, and utilizes the shared-use kitchen, which is managed by Out of the Garden Project, for production.

Her menu has grown, too, including a half-dozen collaborations with local brands. She’s added a variety of cream-based flavors as well as vegan options and says that every flavor has its own story. Z’s lemonade, a flavor her son requested on his fifth birthday, is popular among the kiddos.

Zucchini orange blossom resulted from the purchase of a giant zucchini. “It was really big, more than my whole family needs,” she says, and it was the last remaining piece of produce a young girl had under her People’s Market tent. With no idea of what to do with it — she just wanted that young vendor to have the satisfaction of a sold-out day — she bought it. Zucchini, which she says “doesn’t have much of a flavor,” is popular in Middle Eastern cuisine, as is orange blossom, which tickles the tongue with hints of honey and citrus. Shamsuddin blended a cream base with the two, plus, naturally, her signature cardamom.

And then there’s the time that she added dates to ice cream. Working on a batch of plantain ice cream, Shamsuddin knocked the last of her plantains onto the floor. In an attempt to save the rest of her ingredients, she grabbed some dates to use in their place. “Sometimes it’s accidental!” she quips.

One day, Shamsuddin would like to see Elaka Treats stocked in national grocers’ freezers. In fact, her desserts are under review at Whole Foods currently and she feels hopeful. “It’s a global brand, that’s what the dream is.” And the cherry on top? That would be to see Elaka pods, self-serving freezers, in every cultural space.

“Initially, Elaka was about me. It was about telling my story,” says Shamsuddin. Over the past six years, it’s grown into something else. It’s about community, belonging “and how, through food, you can see how we’re all connected.”

Art of the State

ART OF THE STATE

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July 2025

Without Stopping

Juan Logan keeps creating

By Liza Roberts

On a sprawling industrial site on the banks of the Catawba River, beyond a cabinet maker, a boat rental and a rum distillery, past hundreds and hundreds of pallets of overstocked, shrink-wrapped, big-box merchandise, lies a repository of an entirely different sort.

Here, in an open, 5,000-square-foot space, stand sculptures and paintings, drawings, prints and multimedia creations that address, mostly through abstraction, many of the issues of our time: race and memory, history and geography, stereotype and expectation, imagination and potential. This is the studio of the artist Juan Logan, the place where he creates and stores the work from a career spanning more than 50 years. He is one of our state’s most accomplished contemporary artists, and one of its most prolific.

In May, a major exhibition of his work, “Without Stopping: Juan Logan,” opened at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, where it will run until Feb. 14, 2026. Featuring 48 works from Logan’s decade-long Elegies series, including many never before seen in public, the exhibit will feature a massive new piece commissioned by the museum to commemorate the residents of Africatown, an area of Mobile founded by the descendants of enslaved people brought in 1860 to Mobile Bay aboard a wooden ship called the Clotilda. At 6 1/2-feet tall and 16-feet wide, Logan’s commissioned piece, Elegy CLXXXVI, Without Stopping, is by far the largest of this seminal series.

“I think of it as a series on memory, but not just mine,” he says. “Collective memories.”

Though the word “elegy” often refers to a poem for the dead, “it can also mean a serious reflection,” Logan says. With abstract shapes and symbols, Logan reflects on the fragmented, imperfect and haunting nature of memory, including cultural memories shared in various and ever-changing ways. He mentions the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence. “There are no perfect memories. And I don’t have any trouble portraying them that way.” Forgotten memories, too: “The absence of memory, how it depletes us . . . how it kills us. It leaves us very alive, but missing so much. We are so sure we hold on to things, even happy memories, but they fade away as well.”

A repeated image throughout his work over decades, beginning in the late 1970s and regularly appearing in his Elegies series, is the silhouette of a black head. The subtle shape shows up in painting, drawing, collage and sculpture (including Beacon outside Charlotte’s Harvey Gantt Center) as a symbol of memory, loneliness, identity and of the Black experience.

Lately, the head shape on its side may represent a boat, Logan says, a boat transporting memories, knowledge, thoughts, hopes and ideas: “Sometimes it’s completely filled, sometimes it’s empty. Such is the nature of humanity. We hold on to things, we lose things.” But always, he says, the head represents humanity: “All of our imaginings, and everything we ever were or will be takes place there first. It is who we are.” The featureless cameo offers a blank-slate Rorschachian challenge to the viewer: What do you fill in here?

Other symbols that make regular appearances in Logan’s colorful, abstract work include starry skies, clouds, maps and boats. Like a poet, Logan uses these allegorical images in individual works and as leitmotifs to represent many things: the collective unconscious; the workings of the world and the role of the individual in creating it; reserves of knowledge; the power of imagination and perception. Most important, Logan says, is not what he says these things mean, or what his own point of view might be, but what they provoke or challenge in the viewer.

Logan has been challenging viewers over the decades of a celebrated career that has seen his work shown across the country and around the world in solo and group shows. He has pieces in the permanent collections of some of the nation’s foremost museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Baltimore Museum of Art and Charlotte’s Mint Museum.

Storyteller

Wearing the uniform of black T-shirt and jeans that he has made his own for at least 40 years, the former University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of studio art is a voluble host in his Belmont studio, eager to unpack the meaning and message of his work, which surrounds him in a vibrant, living archive. He does it through story.

There’s the story of a treacherous treadmill used to try to break the spirit of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1837 that inspired The Sugar House, a 16-foot canvas of paint, glitter, lottery tickets and thousands of glued-on puzzle pieces.

There’s the story about the high school shop teacher who encouraged him to make his first work of art, an eagle carved of white birch. This is a man Logan is so determined to credit with launching his life’s trajectory that he spells his name: “Harold McLean, That’s M, C, capital L, E, A, N.” McLean told Logan that what he made didn’t have to be like anyone else’s. “It can just be yours,” the teacher said. The words unleashed something in Logan: “It changed everything.”

There’s the tragic story of his father dying of a heart attack after a doctor didn’t believe his chest pains were real. It’s an example, Logan says, of racial bias, and one of his many inspirations for work that address injustice, oppression and alienation.

And then there are the many stories of home. The shape of a canted roofline in one of his works has him describing his own 114-year-old house, which was built by his great-grandfather and grandfather. It’s a 10-minute drive from his studio in a neighborhood Logan illustrates with a quickly jotted map: “Here’s my house right here. Here’s my mom’s house over here. Here’s my aunt’s house, here. There’s another aunt here. Here’s my sister’s house, here. Here’s my uncle’s house down here. And then my grandfather’s road, that’s named after him . . .” The foundation of another house his great-grandfather built out of handmade bricks and lived in after slavery still stands in the woods nearby. “These things serve to anchor you in a particular way,” Logan says. “I think more than perhaps other places, the South does that for so many people.”

Asking Better Questions

“For many years now,” Logan says, “I’ve tried to simply ask better questions. I think that’s the only thing that allows us to deepen our investigations about what we’re doing, regardless of discipline. If we can ask better questions, we’ll learn more, be able to do more.”

Doing more is clearly not a problem for Logan. At any given time, he’s got a dozen new projects in various stages underway. After the Mobile show opens, his work will be featured in an exhibit in Chattanooga in July and one on American and German abstractionists in Berlin in October.

“We want so much out of this,” he says. “And we are here for such a brief period of time. So we try to do as much as we can for as long as we can, with the hope that someone will take the time to preserve it and pass it on and share it with others.”

NC Surround Sound

NC SURROUND SOUND

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July 2025

Feast of Festivals

A magical musical tour

By Tom Maxwell

There are music festivals across the length and breadth of North Carolina this year — more than you will have either the time or gas money to attend. July alone features four worthy of mention, existing on the widest possible spectrum of musical and geographic diversity. We’ve got fiddles in the highlands, jazz on the beach, classical quartets in the Nantahala National Forest and a regular smorgasbord of sounds in the Piedmont.

The 46th annual Festival for the Eno kicks off in Durham on Friday, July 4. The two-day event features over 60 artists performing on four different stages, including former Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Dom Flemons, local poet and musician Shirlette Ammons and the Empire Strikes Brass.

There will be some novel attractions as well. “Since the festival’s inception, our Grove stage has focused primarily on traditional music through the lens of Americana,” festival director Bryan Iler says. “This year, there is still going be all that bluegrass and country and clogging, but there’s also going be a wider representation of traditional cultural music that I think is a little more representative of the Triangle community. We’re going to feature a full mariachi band, a traditional West African Senegalese pop band and Congolese percussionists. Oh, and Rabbi Solomon [Hoffman] from Chapel Hill has put together a klezmer group.”

And there’s more than just music. Attendees can learn fly-fishing, poster-making or browse handmade arts and crafts from 80 different vendors. “It’s really a salad bar of ways to have a good time and plug into at a deeper level with our community,” says Iler.

July 4 is also opening day for the Ocean City Jazz Festival on Topsail Island. “It’s a three-day event with three artists per night,” says Carla Torrey, who has organized the festival with her husband, Craig, for the past 12 of its 15 years. “We are trying to promote the history of the community and support its legacy.”

The Ocean City Beach Community is a neighborhood 3 miles north of Surf City that stretches from beach to sound. It was founded in the late 1940s as an interracial corporation where African Americans could own beach property in the days of segregation. A 700-foot lighted pier constructed in 1958 — at the time the only pier in the South Atlantic open to people of color — and many of its 100 or so Black-owned homes were destroyed by Hurricane Fran in 1996. Though those structures were not rebuilt, the community remains, and the festival is committed to preserving and expanding on its legacy.

This year’s Ocean City Jazz Festival features artists like Jackiem Joyner, Jazz Funk Soul, Nathan Mitchell, The Double Bass Experience and the John Brown Little Big Band, featuring Camille Thurman. Related events include an exhibition of paintings by artist Rik Freeman called “Black Beaches During Segregation” (on display starting June 28), day parties featuring line dancing instructors, food vendors and a boozy “Uncle Nearest Experience” with executive bourbon steward David Neeley. (Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey honors the memory of Nathan “Nearest” Green, the formerly enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel the art of distilling.)

“We’re truly a jazz festival,” Torrey says. “All the music is going to be jazz, and we do a mix of smooth and straight ahead so that everybody gets to appreciate it as a genre.” Music plus an ocean breeze and sand between your toes? Sounds like a plan.

The 44th annual Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival kicks off July 5 in the southwestern counties of Jackson and Macon, roughly 400 miles from Topsail Island. You don’t have to be in a rush to get there, though; this festival lasts until August 10, featuring four concerts every weekend.

“It is a six-week festival of predominantly classical music,” Executive Director Nancy Gould-Aaron says, “but we do bring in other things to mix it up a little bit. We have jazz versus classical this year. In the past we’ve brought in Mark and Maggie O’Connor, so we’ve had a little bit of bluegrass, too. We probably have three or four quartets a season. Not too many duos, but we have a lot of soloists and put them together. For our gala event, we’ll have enough musicians to make up an orchestra.”

This year’s Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival features the North Carolina debut of Paul Colletti’s Viola Quintet featuring The Viano Quartet, poet laureate Rita Dove, the Whitehead Family Young Pianist Concert with Zitong Wang, the Pacifica Quartet featuring Sharon Isbin on classical guitar; and, a final gala “Cellobration” — a concert with eight cellos led by the Grammy-winning cellist Zuill Bailey.

The two-day 54th annual Old Time Fiddlers Convention, held in Ashe County Park in the state’s northwest corner, begins July 25. It takes place rain or shine, so bring your camping gear and get ready to hear a slew of banjo, fiddle, guitar and mandolin by the likes of Sassafras and the New Ballards Branch Bogtrotters. As usual, there will be open jam sessions galore, as well as competitions for young and old musicians alike, featuring several thousand dollars in prizes. Proceeds from the festival go to support JAM, the Junior Appalachian Musicians program, an organization that instructs third- to fifth-graders in fiddle, banjo and guitar.

This quartet of festivals barely scratches the surface of North Carolina’s musical itch. What an opportunity to explore the state and expand your musical horizons.

Sazerac July 2025

SAZERAC

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July 2025

Sazerac July 2025

Unsolicited Advice

Nothing makes us prouder to be American than watching people stuff their faces with as many hot dogs as possible in 10 minutes. No, we’re not talking about mealtime around your cousin’s table. We’re talking about the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest, held annually on the Fourth of July. We don’t recommend you try it at home, unless you’re up for more explosions than the celebratory fireworks that night. But how ’bout a trip across America (courtesy of hotdog.org) to discover which toppings reign supreme in each region. And don’t forget to try ’em on a veggie dog. We’re not saying it will help the flavor, but it might just mask it enough.

In our home state, chili, slaw and onions are the name of the game. Because nothing pairs better with meat than more meat. And nothing follows it better than breath mints.

Boston’s Fenway Frank is both boiled and grilled, then served with mustard and relish, sometimes topped with baked beans. It’s basically a Beantown protein bar when you think about it.

The New Jersey boasts strong Italian vibes, served up on thick pizza bread and topped with onions, peppers and deep-fried potatoes. Fun fact: For just $3,500 a night, you can stay at the actual Jersey Shore house, but this hot dog will whisk you there for about $5 a pop.

Chicago-style dogs are more loaded than the bases at Wrigley when the visiting team is at bat. May we recommend going all the way with yellow mustard, dark-green relish, chopped raw onion, pickle spear, sport peppers, tomato slices and a dash of celery salt, which might just be enough explosive flavor to make that vegan dog palatable?

Window on the Past

Greensboro’s  love for downtown’s Zesto soft-serve ice cream shop, frozen in time in this early-1950s image, must have melted quickly because, according to records, the establishment lasted only a little longer than a soft-serve cone on a hot July day. Too bad — a 15-cent sweet treat would hit the spot right now.

Just One Thing

The intense stare of a 15-year-old Pablo Picasso reaches across one-and-a-third centuries vis-a-vis an India-ink-and-watercolor-pencil sketch by Greensboro artist Roy Nydorf. The retired Guilford College professor has works in the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian, the Honolulu Academy, Weatherspoon — and now in the theater wings of the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts. Curated by GreenHill Center for NC Art and on display until December, the exhibit features portraiture by a rich and varied cross-section of artists who have strong connections to the Triad area, including Sachi Dely, Aimée García, Zoe Grace Kamiya, Travis Lee Hicks, Jalen T. Jackson, Isabel Lu, Zaire Miles-Moultrie, William Paul Thomas and Joyce Williams. Nydorf once said, “If the simple image contains a vast complexity while retaining its purity and grace, then I have achieved my purpose.” We think Picasso would have agreed. Info: greenhillnc.org/portraits-from-the-triad.

Sage Gardener

Happy 249 years of flowering Democracy, America! And what better way to celebrate your birthday than to reflect on what the Founding Fathers would think of cultivars such as Stars-and-Stripes Petunia, the Freedom Flame Tulip and the Presidential Peony? 

These are just some of the star-spangled blooms that sprang from my hiking buddy’s iPhone when he asked it for a list of patriotic flowers. 

Randall’s a big fan of artificial intelligence, while I have my serious doubts. 

“American Beauty Rose,” Chat GPT chirped, “is a classic red rose symbolizing love and patriotism, and Liberty Bell Iris is a bearded iris named after the famous American symbol.” Not bad for a brain made up of ones and zeros, I conceded.

Next he turned to Microsoft Copilot. American Gold Rush Coneflowers led the list, “reflecting the historic pursuit of American dreams.” What? “Wasn’t the gold rush inspired more by greed than dreams,” I asked. Picky, picky, picky. Copilot also came up with Union Jack Phlox! Isn’t the Union Jack the national flag of Britain, whom we fought to become the United States? Copilot also recommended Edelweiss, puzzlingly, with the following explanation: “While not exclusively American, its white, star-like shape can symbolize the stars in the American flag, and it also symbolizes bravery.” Really? We both decided if we were students desperately using AI to write a term paper for American History the night before it was due, we might want another copilot.

Then Randall turned to his favorite artificial brain, DeepSeek, the Chinese latecomer that’s shaking up the whole AI industry by delivering high performance at a fraction of the development cost. Although it may not be particularly patriotic to point out, DeepSeek was, in our opinion, smarter, much more conversational and able to produce 20 decent candidates, compared to Chat GPT’s 12 and Copilot’s 13. And it sussed out some salute-the-flag names the other artificial brainiacs missed: the Betsy Ross Rose, for instance, “named after the historic flag maker, this white rose with a red blush honors early American history.” Sorta poetic, eh? Also, the Yankee Doodle Coreopsis, “a cultivar with red-and-yellow blooms, referencing the patriotic song.” And, finally, the “Old Glory Rose, named after the iconic U.S. flag’s nickname, often featuring red, white or blue hues.” These were well-penned, we decided, and certainly not sounding as if they had been made in China. 

Which got us thinking about how the Founding Fathers themselves would have reacted to the emergence of artificial intelligence. The answer came in seconds using Meta AI, a division of the company that owns and operates Facebook and Instagram. 

Thomas Jefferson would have been fascinated by it, we’re told. Benjamin Franklin would likely see it as a natural extension of human ingenuity. George Washington and John Adams would have been wary of it, worrying about job displacement, privacy concerns and its implications on social structures, morality and the human condition.

How about Alexander Hamilton? “Hamilton’s creative and imaginative nature might have inspired him to explore AI’s potential in science fiction or speculative writings, envisioning a future where humans and machines coexist.” 

At that point, we decided to put our phones away and be thankful for the fireworks display of wildflowers all along the trail.   — David Claude Bailey

Writing Contest Last Call

We will accept submission to our 2025 writing contest only until the end of the month. What are you waiting for? This one is a bit unique in that we’re asking you to write your own obituary — a faux-obituary, that is. Get to your keyboard and let it RIP. Is this an exercise in imagining how you want to live the rest of your days or is it all about what you want to be remembered for? Whether dead serious or playful and fun, let it be something to make O.Henry readers remember you forever.

Don’t forget the rules.

  • Submit no more than 250 words in a digital format – Word or Pages document, a PDF. Paste it into an email, or carve into stone. More than 250 words? You’re dead to us.
  • One submission per person: Email entries to cassie@ohenrymag.com
  • Deadline to enter is July 31, 2025.
  • Winners will be contacted via email and their submissions will be printed in a forthcoming issue.
  • Lastly, life is short. Have fun with this assignment!

Poem July 2025

POEM

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July 2025

July 2025

Balancing Act


I was once content with walking railroad
tracks to school, stone walls to church,
touching my toes to the sidewalk
for balance, stepping over cracks
that needed mending.

I balanced on city curbs,
my arms extended like wings
that would fly me to a nearby tree,
a wild turkey perching safely
on the lowest limb.

In school we balanced skinny legs
on beams six inches off the floor
to please Miss Brown,
especially proud
to do it backwards,

and I heard the story of
Dayton’s Great Flood of 1913,
how victims inched their escape
across telephone wires from the railway
station to Apple Street and safety.

Now I walk one tight rope after another,
and wonder about people
who tread on pavement with no cracks,
no broken mothers’ backs,
in sensible shoes, arms to their sides,
with no inclination to fly.

— Marsha Warren