"You Just Do the Work"

A conversation with writer Piko Ewoodzie

In summer 2021, several friends kept telling me, “you must meet this Davidson College professor Piko Ewoodzie.” Between schedules and the strangeness of some kind of blind friendship date, it took a few months before a chain of text messages turned into a meet-up. We pulled up to a spot on the greenway near Charlotte’s Seversville and Wesley Heights neighborhoods to go for a long walk. 200 yards in, we were already old friends. 

Every few weeks, we’d walk another neighborhood, just paying attention. We both encountered the world similarly. A long walk is a chance to observe spaces and people, to think about how places come to be and how they help to form the people who inhabit them. 

Ewoodzie is a sociologist and ethnographer. His book Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South, published in 2021, won several awards, and was nominated for a James Beard Foundation award. Reading it is a lesson in how to think about a place and the people who inhabit it. I learned a great deal about how to do my own work from reading Piko’s. 

When we first got to know one another, he was the Vann Professor of Racial Justice at Davidson College, about 20 miles north of Charlotte. He is now on the faculty of Rice University in Houston. Just before Ewoodzie and his family moved to Houston, we got in one more walk around Charlotte’s West End, a historically Black neighborhood which over the past decade has seen absurd levels of gentrification. Below are a few highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity:

PE:  I initially wanted to live around here, because I was so enamored with [Charlotte HBCU] Johnson C. Smith University and wanted to be as close to it as possible. Man, look at these houses.  

GJ: Yeah, the new construction is quite the contrast with the publicly subsidized apartments right across the street. 

(We stop in front of an enormous house under construction, with a large advertisement posted in front.)

Marketing for new construction in Charlotte's Biddleville neighborhood

PE: Even in their advertisement they put white people! Look, they added in a white lady up on the rooftop deck, keeping an eye out on the block. 

GJ: They’re saying, “We cannot imagine Black people living in this house. Just so you understand.” 

PE: Right. We know who belongs and who doesn’t.

(A block later, we’re at the newly renovated Five Points Plaza.)

PE: When I first got here, I had a Ghanaian student who wanted to do his senior thesis by just posting up on this corner. He said, ‘Dr. E., I just want to make friends with people, see what I learn. and then write about it.’ This was before the plaza and the renovations. 

So one day I get a call at home. It’s this student, and he is a bit panicked, saying, ‘Dr. E, people are showing up with guns and stuff, and the homeless people are getting a bit aggressive with them…’ and I cut him off and said, ‘Grab your stuff and get out!’ Now, a few years later, they have this little splashground and the pizza place next door. You wonder where those folks went.

GJ: We have corners like that on Tuck [in my neighborhood], where the street used to be a lot more lively, but sometimes that would spill over into violence. We still do a bit. As they change, people get defensive over those spots. I feel it myself! I kind of miss it when it was a little rougher. 

PE: People become a bit nostalgic for those spaces. Now there are these nice chairs and landscaping, but it looks sanitized. It’s sterile. You look around and the space does not feel as friendly for those folks who were here. That’s the nature of designing space. You have to ask “For Whom?”¹

(The conversation turns to Ewoodzie’s former class, “The Sociology of Beattie’s Ford Road.” The road begins at the plaza and extends a dozen miles to the former Latta Plantation, and a bit further beyond that.)

PE: One fascinating thing that happened in my class was that one of the white Davidson students and one of the Black Smith students figured out that the ancestors of the white student had enslaved the ancestors of the Black student. 

That had happened up near Latta Plantation, and we were meeting down here at Smith. We figured it out through having access to the archives of Hopewell Presbyterian Church, right across the street from the old plantation house. The ancestors of the white students took the people they enslaved to Hopewell Presbyterian.

And the Black folks are the family of Nellie Ashford [a beloved Charlotte artist]. We commissioned Ms. Ashford to create a huge painting. She called it “Deed of Transformation,” and it hangs in the library at Davidson now. 

Nellie Ashford, “The Deed of Transformation,” hangs in the library at Davidson College, Davidson, NC

Sometimes I’d tell the students, “meet me at Latta Plantation. Class is meeting there.” We’re reading about slavery, and we’d talk underneath a big tree and then go on the tour. I’d tell the students, “Pay attention to how these white folks talk about slavery.” And then we’d just tattoo them with questions. 

GJ: They’re rethinking what to do with that space now. They’re trying to figure out how to tell the truth, or something closer to it.

PE: What do you think? What could you do? What might you do?

GJ: Burn it down.

PE: You’re burning down history?

GJ: What would you wanna preserve that shit for?

I’m half kidding about burning it down. But you have to find a way to tell the truth. This is the question motivating my project–How do you redeem a space? Is redemption possible with a of that brutality? How do you keep it from becoming just some lukewarm symbolism that launders the depth of the depravity that happened there for the comfort of the descendants and heirs of that legacy?

PE: One place I’ve seen that has tried to be honest is Bordeaux, in the south of France. It’s incredibly beautiful. My favorite place in France. You’ll be walking along and come across a vista or a plaza, some gorgeous site, and there will be a small statue of an enslaved person. The city put these up all across the landscape. The little statues quietly say, “Yeah, you see how beautiful this is? This is slavery money. That’s how all of this was built. Let’s never forget that.” 

I saw them and thought, “Oh, some of this belongs to me, too. Let me get some of this!” 

I don’t think the statues redeem anything, but it is a gentle recognition and acknowledgement.

GJ: I’ve also heard you describe to me your trips to see your parents in Ghana, and the ongoing material suffering in your home country that is directly related to places like Bordeaux and the legacy of enslavement. Those things are 100% tied together.

PE: Sure they are. So, are reparations redemption?

GJ: There is some sense in which things can’t be redeemed. You’re stuck. What happened happened. The people who were harmed are gone, too many wounds have been compounded in the meantime. But you also can’t allow that to become a reason for nihilism or moral stagnation.

PE: I’ve always thought that, as important as historical recognition and remembrance are, they have to be baked into socially progressive policies today. I think that progressive policies of today that get too far entangled with opening the wounds of yesteryear are–in a pragmatic sense–unsuccessful. 

In other words, William Darity is right–baby bonds. 

GJ: Or solving the wealth gap. 

PE: Right. Let’s not argue with the buffoons about who did it or whether slavery is the origin of the wealth gap. The answer is obvious whether they admit it or not. But if we don’t fix the wealth gap of today, the democracy is gonna crumble. There are a lot of steps to getting that done, which is part of what is important about your work. 

GJ: When Darity was here not long ago, he was talking about this. His solution was that there are a lot of things to fix–y’all go ahead and write the check and we’ll get the other stuff figured out. 

I agree, actually, but given the psychological and political nature of the work–the ways power is distributed that extends beyond money–there is deep cultural work that white people have to do at the same time.  

We wrapped our conversation over cold drinks on a nearby patio. Both of us were in the middle of professional pivots, trying to figure out how to do work that matters, whether in scholarship, writing, activism, or organizing.

PE: Now that research is becoming the center of my work, I’m having to adjust myself to the belief that scholarship matters. That’s not what I’ve solely focused on here. I’ve done lots of activist-oriented work, especially for a professor.

GJ: Have you convinced yourself that it does?

PE: Matthew Desmond once told me: you don’t get to decide whether the work matters. You just get to do it and do it well. 

It matters to the extent that the film Moonlight mattered or that Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” mattered. 

Think about that with paintings. A lot of these artists you know of now, nobody cared about their work in their lifetimes. If they had stopped painting, think of what we would have missed. 

You just do the work as well as you can.

On Tour: I’m quite excited to be on tour with Our Trespasses the week of October 20. Here’s the schedule. I’ll send a dispatch and a few photos from each stop.

I’m beginning to book some travel and appearance for January-May 2025. Let me know if your group is interested.

One Last Note: This past week included the birthdays of Thelonious Monk, Yusef Lateef, and Kenny Garrett. Here’s one track from Kenny Garrett’s incredible album Songbook, which might be the best album of the 1990s, across any genre.

1. On the subject of violence and displacement and memory, there is so much to say about the complexities of how spaces develop, how they maintain safety, how they are remembered, and what kinds of development might bring about peace with justice, rather than the violence of bulldozers and calling the police. Piko and I glossed by it here, though it has been the subject of inquiry for us individually and in our work together as friends and thinkers. One resource for thinking about these subjects is Mindy Fullilove, Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities, New York: New Village Press, 2013. Fullilove is a public health psychologist who has put theory into practice, especially in her hometown of Orange, NJ.