NABS on the Road: Beverly Fields-Burnette, Raleigh, NC
- Ilene Evans
- Jul 23, 2025
- 4 min read
Documenting 2024 Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellows
A Ten-Post Series by Ilene Evans Editor: Karen Abdul-Malik
Beverly Fields-Burnette is a treasure trove of family history and blossoms with a love of stories, traditional and personal. Beverly is working on a new book of poems and family history, helped by the fellowship award. Last fall, September 2024, Tropical Storm Helene devastated parts of North Carolina. As we traveled, entire roads were shut, and we had to alternative routes. It seems that the locals have gotten used to it as the repairs to the Interstates I-26 and I-40 are undergoing complete reconstruction. The challenges have not slowed Beverly down, however.
Beverly and her daughters, Tara and Teri, took us on a tour of Tryon and Asheville, NC, to share her family Black Appalachian history and connections. Although much has changed from her childhood since the sixty years she has lived there, some businesses are still utilizing the ironwork hat her grandfather and great grandfather made by hand as blacksmiths. Their traditional work is still being used in local establishments, although few people know the story behind them. Beverly has been sharing her unknown and forgotten family stories.
In her fellowship research, she discovered photos of the men carrying the 500-pound fireplace andirons used in the great fireplaces at the Grove Park Inn and Spa, a grand monument of a hotel made large rough rustic stone at the top of the hill in Asheville. The andirons sit in the Great Hall which is one hundred feet in length and twenty-four feet high. The fireplaces are at either end of the imposing lobby and can hold twelve-foot logs in the Omni Grove Park Inn. Beverly’s tenacity as an historian made the connection and preserved the names of these workers who carried those 500-pound andirons up the steep mountainside which are still in use today.
Though they were not named in the photo published in the local newspaper at the time, the family knew who they were and kept those names with pride.
The black families residing and working in and around Asheville and Tryon, NC became a small communities in ways that are often described as “days gone by.” In the early 1900’s, the practice of segregation made people hold together well into the 1930’s and 40’s and even into the 1960’s. Beverly remembers.
We visited some places where the family story is still living on. We had the added pleasure of her daughters’ company while driving us around Tryon and Asheville. They too helped tell the family story. Teri gave us technical support in photos and documentation. Beverly’s younger daughter, Teri, is a filmmaker. She helped bridge the stories her mother told with stories of local celebrities like Nina Simone and her cousin, James Payne of Tryon. Both Tara and Teri have become wonderful storytellers in their own right from witnessing and listening to their own mothers’ wit. We heard the stories of James Payne and saw an interview with him in honor of his service to the county. “James Payne: Respect” on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9emFlUHgtik.
Beverly’s cousin, James Payne was a local celebrity because of his service to the community. He was the taxi, the bus, the trolly, the cab, the car, the limo, the reliable driver to places far and near in a time when people of color were prohibited from riding with the white folks. James Payne was a lifeline helping people get to the airport, the train and even travel to far away New York City. He was also a man of integrity and moral character.
Beverly is proud of her families’ legacies, the folklife traditions and their entrepreneurial spirits. She shared, “Eagle Street in Asheville, NC is STILL a “BLACK” business district in Asheville…near where our family church (Mt. Zion Baptist Church) is located…and where my uncle John Fields had his barber shop…and where my aunt Frances Fields Roland owned her beauty parlor.”
In a time when our history, our story, and our contributions to America’s prosperity are being erased and forgotten, Beverly has made it her mission to create a legacy of memory for her children, and her community to cherish.
One of the poems Beverly shared with us was from our storytelling retreat in North Carolina. She describes an unforgettable event that occurred; a scene that could have been used for the recent movie Sinners. Read on below:
FREEING The “Hanging Tree”
By Beverly Fields Burnette; Raleigh, NC (6-4-01) ©
Note: The poem was written because of the occurrences at the African American Storytellers Retreat in 2001 at The Franklinton Center at Bricks (Whitakers, NC). This poem was read on “A Season’s greetings” for Kwanzaa: Dec. 2001-Jan. 2002 on National Public Radio (NPR)
We lined up to the solitary beat
of the Indian drum,
marched, chanted
the wailing, hollow requiem
the Black Tuscaroran Priestess taught us;
a cortege braving midnight and history,
gathering in darkness,
like a coven of wizards
around the hanging tree…
its high boughs pointing
in each direction:
its branches stumped,
bearing portions of leafless limbs lost…
lost to decades,
to thoughtless ice storms and floods,
lost to the agonizing weight of black men
writhing, dangling
like “strange fruit” in southern winds.
The storytellers chanted,
prayed elegies,
flung wide-mouthed wailings to a waxing moon
that watched from a navy sky.
We huddled beneath the silent stare of stars,
as Baba Kala Jojo wept the weeping of fearless men,~
woke the tree by pounding its sleeping bark…
assuring it
that it was “gonna be all right.”
We called restless ancestors,
summoned them
in soprano, tenor, bass
and in the tender voice-tones
of childhood innocence.
When the wailing ceased,
Gran’daddy Junebug approached the tree
and William Cullen Bryant’s African Chief flowed off his tongue
like a silky, healing honey-butter
caressing hot skillet bread.
As we hand-circled the tree,
the wind lifted lofty branches,
and the tree knew what we had done…
knew that it was finished with stale, ancient sorrows.
With a calming voice, Baba Jamal
smoothed our ruffledness
back into taunt skins,
and we marched back…
back to the steady beat of the single drum,
moving our feet to the music-less rhythm
of ancestors singing,
returned with new sight to the light of this century,
re-entered the house…with the amber glow of
black story-bearers,~
marched back…
back to begin
back to begin
the RE-telling….!
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