Talking Location With author Elaine Neil Orr – Winston-Salem, North Carolina

19th July 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… author Elaine Neil Orr, who shares her knowledge of the West End neighborhood, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the locations in her latest novel Swimming Between Worlds.

I was born to travel. My parents were missionaries to Nigeria where I was born in 1954. By the time I was six, I had voyaged four times across the Atlantic, on one occasion celebrating my birthday aboard ship. In my Nigerian years, we did settle in to concrete bungalows my parents made beautiful by painting the walls a rainbow of pastels and adding lush window treatments. In my fiction, characters travel across the Atlantic. They go out; they come home. Or they try to. There are always two countries. In my current novel, Swimming Between Worlds, Tacker Hart, a young white college graduate with a promising career in architecture goes to Nigeria and back in the late 1950s. While there, he encounters the art of Suzanne Wenger (fictionalized in my novel as Anna Becker); his encounters with this woman lead to his sacking.  I grew up knowing about this Austrian woman who became a Yoruba priestess after she restored the Sacred Forest of Osun (a local divinity). Her extraordinary work was familiar to me.

What was less familiar, even exotic, was Winston-Salem, where I lived with my parents on a furlough year in 1960, the smell of Reynolds tobacco wafting through the air and narcissus popping up in the spring after a winter of sleet. In my new novel, it becomes my protagonist’s home town.  First conceived in the late 1900s as a residential and resort community, West End District was a street-car suburb. I went back to explore the old neighborhood, with its curvilinear roads and terraced front yards. It’s where my novel’s action takes place, and though the tobacco smell is gone, I retraced the steps of my six-year old self until found the house we had occupied at the corner of West End Boulevard and Jarvis Street. I gave it to my character, reasoning that a budding architect would be attracted to the inviting front porch, the symmetry of windows, the commanding roof line. (Because of a fence across the front yard, I had to capture the house on a winter day and at an angle.)

Winston-Salem is the only hyphenated name city in the U.S. Winston was the industrial town; Salem the pious village. They were amalgamated in 1913. While Winston is not the destination that Asheville is in western North Carolina or the Outer Banks to the east, its tagline is known as the “City of Arts and Innovation,” with its own symphony, lots of local musicians, theater, and a strong visual arts community.

It’s an easy walk down West End Boulevard to Hanes Park, the centerpiece of the neighborhood. Accented by stone walls and deeply carved in its center by Peter’s Creek, the park was segregated during the period of my novel, 1959-60, and the question of a pool being built there ripples through the plot of Swimming Between Worlds. My white characters traverse the park often and so did I as I wrote, visiting in every season, observing with joy that the park now serves all of Winston-Salem’s citizens, an outcome my characters would be glad of.  Hanes is notable primarily for is grassy areas, the creek, and a wonderful playground, but to me, it served as a Greek theater as my characters came on and off stage, crossed paths, ran into each other at a hedge break as characters do in a Jane Austen novel.

Bordering the park is Glade Street, where my second protagonist, a woman, lives. I selected a lovely house for her with one of those steep, ivy-covered front yards. Later, I composed a defining scene in the alley behind her house. It occurs on a fall day. The young woman, Kate Monroe, sees a young “Negro” (remember this is 1959) walking with a bottle of milk at the edge of her property. Immediately she imagines that he stole the milk and then she worries that he may cross into her yard and attack her, stereotypical ideas. But he merely lifts the bottle in a salute before disappearing down the lane.

The “Negro” man is Gaines, the third major character, an African-American man who will draw the white characters into confronting their privilege as the Civil Rights Movement dawns.

Alleys in a Southern city are a promising avenue for exploration. In the fall, fences cascade with the colors of Virginia creeper. For a writer, they open imaginative doors since back yards and back doors are more intimate than front doors. The secret lives of characters abide in backyard gardens. Back yards and back doors are exactly where “the help” came and went.

All roads in West End lead back to Hanes Park. When I lived in Winston-Salem, my sister and I walked to Summit Street Pharmacy, only a few blocks from my characters’ houses and facing the park. Our object was a frozen orange push-up after piano lessons. In Swimming Between Worlds Kate goes for notions or stationary or a cold Coca-Cola on a hot day. One day she walks up to find picketers in front of the store, demanding the right to sit down at a table. The building is one of the most architecturally unusual in West End, built in a Mediterranean style with apartments upstairs and a five bay arcade with a recessed entrance. Recently the building has found new life as Colony Urban Farms, with bee-keeping equipment, and better yet, honey, being a central focus of sales. A visitor to Winston-Salem renting an airbnb in West End can visit this store for organically grown and raised fresh fruits and meats, along with honey and locally made candles.

It’s all uphill to get to dinner at what was once the Toddle House at the crest of Fourth Street. Today it’s Mozelle’s, expanded from the original, though the windows in the photograph look on to the original restaurant where, after the Christmas Parade, a family could come in for hamburgers and fries and a milk shake at the bar or in a booth. In Swimming Between Worlds, the would-be lovers Tacker and Kate come here often. Frequently they ride Tacker’s Indian motorcycle to avoid the hill. Today, a customer can still get Toddle House Chocolate Pie! After the pie, a walker can head straight downtown to locally owned coffee houses, art galleries, and stores.

Happily all of these venues are now welcoming of all Winston-Salem residents. If you’re planning a trip to Winston-Salem, I suggest the fall if possible.  The colors are gorgeous and you’ll get some good hiking in, going up and down the hills of this renewed and multi-cultural Southern neighborhood.

Thank you so much to Elaine for a wonderful look at Winston-Salem, who knew it was the only hyphenated named city in the US! Do give Elaine a follow on Twitter and Facebook and do pop over to pop over to her website. You can buy her book through the TripFiction website

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