The Grove Project

It was the wine talking

We went last night to a distributor wine tasting that the Wilmington Wine Shoppe has every Thursday night and quickly fell into conversation with a wonderful, tipsy Russian named Luba, who was living in Sunset Beach, who loved Checkov and Putin and followed Turgenev’s footsteps around Baden Baden, where the great writer desperately pursued his lover (Pauline Viardot?). She’d taught Russian to special forces at Fort Bragg and other places after graduating from Chapel Hill in English poetry and was, as she said, always running away.

We were discussing Baja, books, wine, but paying scant attention to the pouring list, having a wonderful time and even thinking we’d like to interview this Luba (”Russian for liebe!”, as she said) for the Grove Project, when an older woman in big lips and a furry pastel sweater muscled her way to the bar between us and began monopolizing our conversation with German “du bist schlau” wink-winks and heavy geographical name-checking. This woman, a Ms. Freeman, had us know that she was there with Curtis White, host of “The Big Talker” and self-professed “Bill O’Reilly of Wilmington”, and that they had just come from a filming at WWAY of their show Carolina Talk, in which Mr. White interviews local politicians and others.

We all of course began talking politics and Luba said how bad she thought Bush was and of course we agreed and Ms. Freeman did not and in this larger, national context Luba said something really racist about African-Americans and the future of our nation, and Ms. Freeman just lit up and was, according to this journalist, positively gleeful to deliver this factoid she’d just heard from our own police chief in the interview she and Curtis White had come from (she is the producer of Carolina Talk, apparently), which is that 90% of all violent crime is committed by blacks, who make up only 24% of the population.

I said to Ms. Freeman that she looked like she was relishing these statistics. Suddenly she started talking about how beleaguered she felt as a German-American, said that Germans like her mother had bricks thrown through their windows and were accused of being nazis, cited the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, &cetera. Said that media was rife with these negative, duck-walking portrayals of blond-haired blue-eyed Germans, that that made them all feel like animals. And I said she sounded like she was being evasive, like she was claiming some victim’s rights in order to continue slurring blacks. I told her she was ridiculous and that it sounded like she thought that German-Americans were worse off than African-Americans, and she said yes, she did think so.

Luba—Luba in the ermine gloves and go-go boots—with whom we’d been having such a great conversation, was positively abject at the turn the conversation had taken at the hands of the tactless, presumptuous Ms. Freeman. So were we.

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