On grief, kindness, rage and why we have to fight for the communities we love in the times we face
Above: A Helene memorial arch made of woven branches, overlooking the devastation around the rivers. Locals have written their griefs on slips of paper hanging from it
On a small patch of grass on a side street, at the top of the hill overlooking the French Broad, there is a woven arch of branches and plants rooted in the ground. Hanging from it are slips of paper, tied on with string, listing the griefs of the people who have stopped by.
If you go there on a grey afternoon and look through the center of the arch you can see the utter ruin that still remains around the rivers, over four months after Helene.
This small memorial was not sanctioned by local government or backed by the tourism authority. What it shows and the deep loss it reflects are something they would, at all costs, love to keep out of the sight of the wider world. It does not sit well with their marketing push to present our city as bustling with recovery, ready to welcome back tourists to a town that’s surely their amusement park once more.
It shows, in short, reality. They can’t have that.
What that small piece of art — and others like it painted on walls and scrawled in the margins — embody is the tattered, endlessly tough communal care that’s at the heart of this city. There is much wrong with this town, but it’s what I love about this place that is, in the end, my home.
I know I am not the only one.
It is a hard time to call this place home. Hell, it’s been a hard decade. Long before Helene hit the runaway gentrification of the tourism “boom” made life even harsher and more desperate for most of the people living here. The happiest place in America was also the least affordable in the country, where rents doubled and cops hunted the homeless with drones.
After Helene, as locals were scrambling to save their neighbors and organizing heroic feats of rescue and aid, the courts resumed evictions before the water was even back on. They’ve ramped up ever since, as the wealthy shout “Asheville strong” while doing everything they can to kick out the very people whose strength saved countless lives.
Combined with paltry rental aid from local governments deathly afraid someone in poverty might get some extra cash, and many of the largest non-profits mired in their own bullshit, we are now in a full-blown crisis after the crisis worsening by the week.
“Since Helene happened we have been left out: no one wants to hear us, no one wants to help us, from our local government all the way to the White House,” Lenora Wells said at a Jan. 14 city council meeting. “There’s people out in tents, trailers, anything trying to survive this. It’s inhumane.”
“There is a family of seven kids out on the street today,” Maryjo Tucker said at the same meeting. “There’s options and there’s funding. Use it, please.”
But the gentry in power have other priorities. It is telling that government and establishment media overwhelmingly talk about the disaster in terms of businesses, property and lost tourism. To them this city is an asset, something to be exploited. They care about dollars, not the dead. Or the living who are getting kicked out in the cold every single day.
This has consequences. On Jan. 14 council also voted 5-1 to give a front group for the chamber of commerce and other conservative business organizations $1.25 million, raised from tax hikes on downtown residents, to hire its own private security forces. Their purpose, in their own words, is to target “any behaviors deemed out of the ordinary.” This open power grab by the wealthy, known as a Business Improvement District, is massively unpopular. But even after the destruction of Helene they were hellbent on pushing it through anyway.
Repeatedly, at multiple meetings, council members have spoken about wanting to use relief dollars to bail out commercial landlords and well-off business owners.
This malignant apathy towards most of the people living here is a literal matter of life and death. The locals kicked out of housing are facing freezing temperatures in a harsh winter. On Feb. 13 it emerged that, in early January, a 96-year-old woman died from hypothermia in Henderson County after her home was destroyed during the storm.
A few days later Mayor Esther Manheimer, who lives in a mansion, chided the public for daring to expect anything from her other than cruelty. She declared in an astoundingly callous press release that “recovery is never fast enough” and snidely quipped that “I know that for many, it does not feel like enough.”
Nor is this mentality confined to her. After meeting for two whole days in a retreat about Helene recovery, city council collectively emerged not with promises of major rental aid or direct cash assistance, but a block of consultant gibberish.
We should, they declared, be reassured to hear that their recovery vision involved “rising in unity” and “rooted in resilience.” Those facing hypothermia were no doubt warmed by the thought of city manager Debra Campbell invoking “repairing with care” as she rakes in yet another massive raise on the way to retirement.
At both city council meetings in February, at a time when groups on the ground were desperately calling for help, the amount of rental aid council passed was exactly zero dollars.
Of course the disasters we face aren’t just local. Crises, sadly, never have the dignity to bow out before another one comes along. So we now face an openly fascist federal government, one that’s threatening to make further relief funds conditional on officials here going along with its plans for ethnic cleansing.
Considering local governments’ usual line for dropping support of a marginalized group’s basic rights is “they talked back to us” or “a conservative lawyer told us to” no one should find that particularly reassuring.
It is clearer than ever that a position wielding power over others removes one both from any sense of reality and from community in any way that matters.
But, coming back to that simple memorial overlooking the devastation, I am reminded once again that there is so, so much more than them.
The city that’s worth fighting for is the one that kept people fed while governments bickered. It’s “fuck this” scrawled on a segregationist monument and people in the streets that the police could not contain. It’s located in the moments they’d like us to forget: smiling for the first time that week after the storm, sharing food together, entrenched solidarity even amid all that destruction.
It’s art and grief among the ruins.
Those in power try to claim this, to conscript it into their myths, but it ain’t theirs. In fact their actions are, from start to finish, intent on destroying it. Over the past few years Asheville city government tried to make the very act of mutual aid de facto illegal.
They like things nice, after all, not kind. “Nice” is the Asheville they slap on all the brochures. It’s hospitality without warmth, smiles without joy, culture with all the edges sanded down to nothing for the tourists. It has no place for tears of mourning or the hard reality of rivers strewn with wreckage.
But kind, well that’s something else. Kind means action. It breaks social barriers (while “nice” insists no one ever raise their voice too loud). Kindness gets angry, demands change, creates, screams in grief and refuses to excuse the atrocities we face as “just the way things are.”
The spirit that spurred locals to hand out food to everyone in need after Helene is the very same one Asheville’s powers-that-be drenched downtown in teargas to crush.
Kindness is dangerous.
So there is hope then, in the fact that people here have a strong sense not just of mutual care, but of growing defiance as well. In the month after the storm “Loot your local Ingles” graffiti appeared around town, referring to the grocery chain infamous for price gouging and withholding supplies from those in dire need in the aftermath of the storm.
‘Loot your local Ingles’ scrawled on a wall downtown after the grocery chain infamously price gouged and denied supplies to locals during the aftermath of Helene
In early February a large anti-ICE demonstration swept downtown and took the center of the city. The police deployed close to their entire on-duty force and loudly ordered them back to the sidewalks. But they couldn’t contain the crowd, and were reduced to blocking off streets and trying to appear in control. No one was arrested.
Notably, the handful of statements that emerged from local officials distancing themselves from ICE raids did so in that demonstration’s aftermath.
But for these to grow beyond some powerful and promising moments will take a cultural shift. Sadly, the “Asheville nice” programming runs deep, even among those who genuinely want change. It has always been damaging. It is, at this point, incompatible with our collective survival.
Getting anything meaningful done will require embracing all those tactics that those in power declare “aren’t constructive” because they fear that they could reduce their hold over the rest of us. It will require ignoring the politicians and non-profit complex, eyes firmly on their wealthy donors, telling the people of this city to tone it down or dismissing the idea that no one should freeze to death because of a landlord’s greed as too radical.
If progressive jargon and officially-sanctioned dissent changed a damn thing we wouldn’t be here right now.
Anti-racist graffiti on the segregationist Vance monument in the summer of 2020. Outrage and action against the monument stopped city hall’s attempts to rebrand it, and led to its removal. Special to the Blade
But if we remember the power of defiance, we have a chance. If the outpouring of aid after Helene is not viewed simply as a brave exception or an opportunity to add a few more non-profits, but as an example of what we, collectively, can do then there’s hope. We can entrench our communities, our care and our resistance in ways that will be very difficult for any force to destroy.
I’d be lying if I said I knew what would happen over the coming weeks, months and years.
But I know this: our enemies are far from invincible. The dangers we face are real, but not unstoppable. The more we fight the better our odds are. Everything and everyone that we’ve lost demands that we do so.
This city — our city, our home — is worth fighting for. Yours is too.
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Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with nearly 20 years’ experience. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.
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