This is My Hometown

OK, Jamie, you have convinced me that the origin of all evil, the epicenter of mindless hate, the cathedral of banal viciousness--in short, the place of my birth, Charlotte, NC--is worth taking on in print. It isn't enough just to survive to 20 and then move far, far away. The place itself goes on, like a fifty-story tire fire, and its existence serves as an affront to every decent person who has ever been exposed to the disease-ridden corpse of the New South.

So what's the matter with Charlotte (to borrow a title from notable nitwit Tom Frank)?

The place is and always was meant to be a manor of sorts. Originally dreamt up by Daniel Tompkins, a cotton mill baron whose fortune was made--or wrung, rather--ruthlessly, inhumanly from the scorched earth of the postbellum South and who later founded and ran the Charlotte Observer, a booster's paper if ever there was one. His father had owned a plantation, I recall, in upstate South Carolina, and after the war Tompkins was very much a man of the industrial New South while also quite determined to see the faith of his father(s) raised again. Tompkins' cotton mill (and cottonseed oil) empire allowed him the financial means to look beyond his own acreage to the epitome of hateful Yankee conceit: the metropolis. He, more than anyone else, raised at the crossroads of Trade and Tryon streets--no old Indian trading paths, damn you, but incidentally useful intersecting lines--a great city that would burn bright with the vulgar appetites of a vengeful new class of capitalists. The new men were political and severe; there was no wild spending in early Charlotte, but rather a pathological thrift that promised to build the city's wealth beyond compare, until the day when the city fathers might look upon Northern capital and laugh.

And hence Charlotte has become a city of banks. Not of people, but banks. Vaults and time-locks, paperwork and promises of greatness. Repressed? You answer that (of course). If you live there and do not have a hand in the financial institutions, you are chaff and get out of the wheat's way as it gets carted towards the grindstone. How many people know that Bank of America is headquartered there? That, save for New York City and Chase Manhattan (and goddamn even that venerable institution; it can be bought!), Charlotte would be the pre-eminent financial center in the world? No one knows, or very few, because it isn't yet time for them to know. Whether the schemes and best laid plans of the cavaliers our fathers can come to fruition is an open question--after all, no one foresaw the international corporation. Does it mean anything to BofA or Wachovia/First Union to be a "world-class city"? Is regionalism dead? Whither the chain-dragging ghosts of WJ Cash and Lewis Mumford?

Charlotte-town is as old as North Carolina, or almost. Founded, most likely, by Scotch-Irish Protestants in the mid-1700s, it played an interesting, if inconsequential, role in the Revolution. It would have been immortalized, however, if General Cornwallis, resting there with the ague, had only died but, alas! he lived and made it to Yorktown and everlasting humiliation. The town--or village, really--had few residents in 1775 when the unofficial census was taken, but the number may be something like 200. When the British army arrived for rest and provisions after being bushwhacked all through North Carolina, and particularly at Guilford Courthouse, following the landing at Wilmington in 1780, it is said that townspeople (who until then had been quite suspiciously loyal to the crown, calling the place "Charlotte" after George III's Hapsburg queen and even naming the main street after the royal governor, Lord Tryon) took umbrage to the looting and sporting of the redcoats and began a series of skirmishes. The biggest one happened at a farm north of the village, and it is said that the building still showed the holes from musket balls almost one hundred years later. Naturally, being the proud sons of history that they are, the Charlotte city council allowed that structure to be demolished in the 1970's to make way for a factory. Isn't the ironing delicious?

Back to Cornwallis. At the skirmish at McIntyre's farm, as it was called, a beehive was upended and, of course, so-called historians, like UNCC's Dan Morrill, and others who value a good story over a true one have asserted for years that this incident 1. involved a strange, now unknown type of bee that only stung British soldiers 2. was later called the "battle of the bees" by damn near everyone in the whole fucking country and 3. that this may be the start of the hornets' nest myth. The aforementioned "historians" and others don't call it a myth, though. They call it a fact. See, what happened is this: Cornwallis, apparently too sick to lead his troops but aware and alert enough to make quips, supposedly called Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is) a "hornets' nest of rebellion" because his men, being used to fighting, killing, battle, roughing it, rape, pillage, and murder, were scared by the feeble protests of 200 toothless retards in a loyalist village. And there you have it: Charlotte, NC, gave the British all they could handle. Case closed. And it is a powerful myth: the town boasts a Hornet's Nest Park, a hornet's nest plaque to designate historic sites (though the oldest, by my count, is from 1905--everything else got the wrecking ball); policemen's badges are shaped like beehives, the NBA team bestowed upon us in 1989 was the Hornets--and on, and on, and on.

Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the described events of the Revolutionary era actually occurred (and there are even crazier versions of the Cornwallis story that insist, among other things, that a young Andrew Jackson--native of Waxhaw, NC to the west of Charlotte--insulted Cornwallis as he left the region). Cornwallis' memoirs don't mention a word about it, though they do contain an after-the-fact account of his time in Charlotte full of memorable witticisms (he was, after all, a lord and a scholar). Nor are such things contained in the accounts of his dandy second-in-command, Dragoon commander Banastre Tarleton--he of the inaccurate portrayal in Mel Gibson's "The Patriot"; Gibson's character kills Tarleton at the end of the film, but Banastre lived many years after the war as a drunken libertine in England. Huh. To ice the cupcake, George Washington, who visited the burg after the war, was wined and dined by the best families in town but recorded in his diary that it was no more than a "trifling place".

So, who made this story up? Why? What has this to do with the rest of Charlotte lore, like the absurd claim that city fathers authored the Declaration of Independence only days before the real Constitutional Convention? Oddly enough, both stories are best known through the writings of one man: the original city booster, Hezekiah Alexander, who wrote in his memoirs that he recalls both the hornets' nest quote AND the "Meck Dec" as it is called. He reproduced the declaration from memory, by the way, after the "original" copy had burned in a desk drawer in his home twenty years prior. This is no joke; people actually believe this. Alexander also implied (because Southerners don't accuse, they imply) that Jefferson stole large parts of the US Declaration from the Mecklenburg Declaration--and then he hid the evidence and denied everything. To my knowledge, there is no document anywhere in which Jefferson even admits being aware of the town of Charlotte or the existence of Mecklenburg County.

What kind of city continues to thrust itself into the spotlight despite an utter absence of memorable traits? What sort of a place raises its young to remember and spout such drivel--and with such cocksure arrogance? What kind of place inspires such love amongst surburban-dreaming shit-eaters and such revulsion among human beings? This is a community driving itself, positively suicidally, into the maw of class, race, and political war--and all for the Foundational Myth--which may or may not still have meaning.

Charlotte does these things, and more. And again, I ask: what's wrong with Charlotte?