Share a Table, Make a Friend

FEATURED AUTHOR—DARNELL ARNOULT Share a Table, Make a Friend Tom Rankin Darnell and I met twenty-six years ago in a dining hall on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We met for coffee early one morning, either before or after Daniel Patterson's "British and American Folksong" class, which we both were taking in 1980. 1 had just moved to Chapel Hill to pursue a graduate degree. Darnell had been there for several years as an undergraduate student, after moving from Camp Lejuene. That morning in the Pine Room she walked up to me and pointed to a little triangular sign that was visible on all the dining hall tables. The sign read, "Share A Table, Make A Friend." "Want to share a table?" she asked, making sure I saw the sign. I carried my coffee to the table nearest her and we sat down. I mostly remember her talking, telling about how she'd come to Chapel Hill from the marine base, about her former marine husband, about her two young children, Chad and Beth. And she continued talking. My recollection is that all there was to do was listen while she talked, drinking my coffee slowly. And I'm still listening. At the time we met, Darnell was a single parent in UNC-Chapel Hill family housing, attending school while raising her two young children, balancing her role as a mother and student. In addition, she was primary guardian and caretaker for her mother, Juanita. Many of her college friends, me included, had little else to worry about other than our course work or next paper or small commitments that accompany such things as graduate assistantships. Darnell talked about her desire and commitment to write long ago, certainly as long as I've known her. I well remember her telling me, maybe even during our very first visit, that she planned to write fiction and poetry. And what has always impressed me is that she has written regardless of what else has gone on, regardless of the other impediments to having time and quiet moments, regardless ofwhether anybody seemed to really care if she wrote or not. She wrote because she wanted to, and as if there was never any choice. My friend Larry Brown used to talk about learning to write as an apprenticeship much like learning to be a carpenter or a bricklayer. That's the good news, he 22 would say. The bad news is that no one really knows how long their apprenticeship will be when they start out. He would tell students it may be five years, could be ten, could be more. Darnell seems to have known this as well, and has never really worried about the length of her apprenticeship or expected anything to come easy. She's just continued to write. I've always been impressed by Darnell's modest tenacity, her persistence without complaint or ostentation. She's just kept at it, between raising two wonderful children, becoming a grandmother, and looking after her mother's care since she turned eighteen years old. She's worked all kinds ofjobs, including in a furniture factory, as a house cleaner with her own business under the 'corporate' logo of "Jill ofAll Trades," and, blessedly, as one of the first people hired to work at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She's taught writing through the Duke Writer's Workshop and through Continuing Studies at Duke, among many other places. Since my first morning of sharing that table with Darnell, I've been enthralled with how she extracts laughter from solid darkness and compelling poetry from the hard toil of the day to day. Darnell can walk across the street to buy a stick of candy and return with a fully developed story from the most ordinary of interactions. Last year on one of her visits to North Carolina, Darnell stopped in to see her mother who lives in a small assisted-care home in Hillsborough. Always the dutiful daughter, she picked her mom up and drove her to Durham to get Juanita a favorite treat, a Wimpy's hotdog. Since they...