Word: helmsely
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At one time, more than one-fifth of the county's residents were slaves. Cotton was the mainstay of the economy, but this was not grand plantation country: small family parcels made slavery mostly pointless. North Carolina came late to the lost cause of secession. Jesse Helms claims no fallen...
On Christmas Eve, 1912, a Monroe boy, Jesse Alexander Helms, married a distant cousin, Ethel Helms. The couple settled, naturally, in Monroe (pop. 3,000 then, 12,700 now). It was a town with five churches, four Republicans, one pool hall and one whorehouse. Helms was a gigantic (6 ft...
Helms reveres life in the long-gone frame house and the simple bliss it afforded. "You did things at home," he recalls. "There was never a day in my life that my mother was not at home when I got there. I spent time with my father. He had a...
When not at home or church or school (where the children, all of them white, prayed daily), Helms seems to have lived one gamboling, summery pastorale. Along with Wriston, Gilmer, Bill Hinson and sometimes a black child or two, Jesse would trek down to Richardson Creek to whoop and splash...
Somewhere along the way there must have been normal childhood terrors and chills. But in Helms' memory, any trauma is lost in the harmonious glow of oldtime, small-town pleasures. The only local recollection of something like misbehavior was a climb he made up the courthouse clock tower, which sits...