Chapel Hill in Plain Sight: Notes from the Other Side of the Tracks - Softcover

The book is a collection of essays originally published separately, one as early as the 1950s and the latest in the 1990s. Athas divides the text into sections, roughly in chronological order, but each essay can stand alone.

In the chapter Betty Smith Looks Homeward, Athas talks about going to high school with Nancy and Mary, daughters of writer Betty Smith, who rocketed to fame overnight with her novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In 1940, Smith and her family were as poor as everyone else in the aftermath of the Great Depression; they lived on credit at the grocery store and stayed in a drab olive green cottage.

Although Athas talks about her own idiosyncratic Greek father and the trials her family endured to finally have a house of their own, she never intrudes upon the text. She acts as a guide, showing the reader the forgotten history of Chapel Hill firsthand. As much a poet as a historian, Athas s language is full of metaphor and Greek mythology; you don t so much read Chapel Hill in Plain Sight as experience it. --Our State Magazine, Sept. 30, 2010

Daphne Athas knows a good story, even before she knows she'll write it. I just knew I knew things that other people didn't know,; she says of her latest book, Chapel Hill in Plain Sight: Notes From the Other Side of the Tracks, which covers the Depression, World War II, McCarthyism and the present.

Finally brought out by Eno Publishers, Athas' latest work is full of local tales that wouldn't be told unless she told them. No one else would have quite the detail that comes from having lived them. Her family downsized from a sprawling Massachusetts home to a Merritt Mill Road shack when they lost it all in the Depression. She grew up with the daughters of Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She remembers Richard Wright and Paul Green as they adapted Native Son for the stage. She befriended Junius Scales, who later became the only American imprisoned for being a member of the Communist Party.

But even more so than her unique life story, Athas stands out because few are courageous enough to give a naked view of a town and region fond of romanticizing itself.

"Myth is the basis of this place. The Old Well is a myth. Gimghoul Castle is a myth, she says, referring respectively to the tale that if you drink from the Old Well on the first day of class, you will receive A's, and the legend of a love-inspired murder at the castle.

"Everything was funny, everything was sophisticated, Southern good old boy witty. Nothing is as simple as the stuff they put out."

But Chapel Hill, full of myth and town characters, made the perfect backdrop for a young writer, she says. "I loved what society was, in a strange sort of way," she recalls.

Most of the content in the new book was written in the '70s and '80s and published in local newspapers. It was only recently that Athas, who lectured at UNC for 31 years before retiring in 2009, realized, at the prodding of students and colleagues, that her articles could become a book. She was surprised that so many readers responded, more than she had ever heard from about the novels she had already published, and began the difficult task of tying them together and updating them to include such recent changes as the Greenbridge development and recent tragedies, such as Eve Carson's murder.

The book is not intended as a memoir, and essays are loosely tied together and able to be read separately. Still, the stories carry the arc of Athas' six decades of local experience, crystallizing her point of view as a poor literary artist who grew up on kidney beans and stolen books.

"We were book-crazy because there was nothing else,";she said. "We had to even steal money to get to the movies. It was exotic, but we were subversive. It was very adventurous."

The book is filled with historical photos proving her point. Take, for instance, the front cover, where Athas' outstretched thumb attempts to flag down a ride from a passing truck. --IndyWeek, September 22, 2010

Last year brought Daphne Athas s long-awaited social memoir, Chapel Hill in Plain Sight: Notes from the Other Side of the Tracks.

For the cover of the book, the late Reynolds Price wrote: The richness of vision in Daphne Athas s fiction has led many of her readers to hope that we could someday read a collection of her essays Daphne speaking directly to us in Daphne s own voice. Now, in Chapel Hill in Plain Sight, we have exactly that; and a joy it is to read.

The book begins with Athas s 1938 transplantation from a storybook New England childhood to a shack, dubbed by Athas and her family The Shack, at the top of Merritt Mill Road in Chapel Hill.

( I was glad that our Shack was technically inside the Chapel Hill limits, she writes, which spared me from the onus of being from Carrboro though Carrboro would soon have magic to share.)

There she grew up with her two sisters and brother, with pleasures that surpassed the hardships. Athas s father, a stockbroker, had lost his money in The Great Depression. He wanted an education for his children, knew it could be had inexpensively in North Carolina, and, moreover, had been told by a man up North that Chapel Hill was the Athens of the South.

I think Daddy liked that, Athas says. Pan Constantine Athas was a Greek immigrant, a graduate of Harvard Law School, an eccentric and an explorer.

He nosed around, Athas says. My father explored everything. ... He d just walk anywhere and talk with anybody. Be equal with anybody. He didn t consider himself lower or higher than anybody.

Everything about my upbringing just completely didn t fit into a category, she says. I never fit into a category. Nothing was practical about the Athases. It was fantastic fun.

The Athas household was the bohemian thing to all comers, from university professors and students to ambitious young sons of Carrboro millworkers, like Wayne Williams, Athas s first boyfriend.

I didn t belong to cliques, she says of her place in local society. I didn t fit into any of them. I was acceptable to the top cliques, but I wasn t that Sweet Briar type.

She and Williams grooved on feeling like criminals, and occasionally appropriated inconsequential items, but only for good cause: It was so unjust to be poor. --Carrboro Citizen, Sept. 1, 2011