Blood Games (21 page)

On Bart’s birthday, August 17, Joanne was driving him and Emory and some of their friends to the Pizza Hut in Danville for a party. Joanne drove past the business where Judy worked and saw Jim’s truck parked outside, rekindling her turmoil and anger.

“I was falling apart,” she recalled later. “I was miserable.”

Although Joanne had a volatile nature, she knew it would do no good to confront Jim and scream at him. He would just clam up and walk away. Besides, she had no proof that he was actually having an affair. A few days after Bart’s birthday, Joanne noticed a change in Jim.

“I knew something was wrong,” she recalled later. “He was like a cat, slipping around, getting his stuff together.”

The next morning, Jim broke the news.

“I’m going to move in with Carolyn for a while,” he said.

He offered no explanation. He just loaded his things in the truck and once again was gone. Joanne was left to explain to the children that their father would be staying with Carolyn for a while. This time, Joanne felt, it did affect the children. Emory, a sensitive boy just entering his teens, showed his pain. Bart, as usual, displayed no emotion and seemed less bothered by it.

“Somewhere subconsciously I was aware they were having trouble,” he said years later, “but it was not something I focused on. I just went on with my day-to-day routine. Go-with-the-flow type thing. Mainly, it was inconvenient.”

“That was the time Bart told me that he loved his dad but he didn’t respect him,” Joanne said later.

Not until after Jim left did Joanne get confirmation that he was having an affair. But it was something more than just a fling, she discovered. He was in love, he said, with Judy Gold. She planned to leave Ted, and they already were looking for a house together in Milton.

“It tore me up,” Joanne recalled later. “I’m a very faithful dog. I couldn’t accept that he would do that. I said, ‘The hell with this. I can’t live with this.’”

She was furious and determined to get back at her rival. She called Ted Gold to make sure that he knew what was going on. When Judy arrived at a meeting Joanne was attending, Joanne quickly departed, proclaiming loud enough for others to hear that the facility was “not big enough for me and a whore.”

When Carrie and Alex came home from a visit to Carolyn with presents they said Judy had given them, she called Carolyn and made it clear that the woman was never to be allowed anywhere near her children and she would do whatever was necessary to prevent it.

Her spleen vented, Joanne decided to get on with her life. She would do what she had wanted to since high school: work in medical care. She went to Danville and got a job as a supervisor in the support department at Danville Memorial Hospital, where all four of her children had been born.

Once the consequences of their actions became clear, the ardor began to cool between Jim and Judy. They broke off their relationship only weeks after Jim left home. Judy remained with her husband and children. Jim stayed on with his mother for a while. Then, less than three months after he had driven away from his family for the second time, Jim drove back to the farm and asked Joanne to allow him to return.

“He could not live without the farm and without the children,” she said later. “I knew that.”

She allowed him to come back, but her unforgiving nature could not allow her to erase what he had done from her mind.

“I never did get over it,” she said years later.

20

If there is a center of community life in Caswell County, it is Bartlett Yancey High School in Yanceyville, the county’s largest town with some thirteen hundred people. Indeed, the auditorium of the county’s only high school doubles as the civic center, a place for community gatherings and entertainment.

The school has an enrollment of about one thousand, half of whom, like the population of the county, are black. Those students who don’t come to school in big orangish-yellow buses usually drive their own cars, and the student parking lot is always jammed during school hours.

In its athletic conference, Bartlett Yancey is known as “the hick school.” Future Farmers of America is one of the school’s major extracurricular clubs. Vocational training programs are popular courses of study.

Teachers who come to Bartlett Yancey from outside Caswell County often are surprised by the behavior of the students. The school has no big drug problem, no real trouble with violence. On the whole, the students are attentive, well-mannered, and respectful. A veteran staff member could not recall a single incident of a student confronting a teacher in a violent way.

On the other hand, Bartlett Yancey is not known as a bastion of academic excellence. The Caswell County school system hires only the state-allocated teachers. It employs no extra or special teachers on its own and offers no salary supplements to attract better teachers, as many school systems do in wealthier areas of the state. Despite this, a sizable number of Bartlett Yancey students go to college and do well, although many feel deprived when they meet students from the cities and realize the differences in academic opportunities.

The best students at Bartlett Yancey all bear a single identity. They are proudly known as Slayton’s Kids. Weldon Slayton started the program for gifted and talented students in Caswell County in 1975, and he still directs it. At any given time, the number of gifted and talented students, or GT students, as they also are known, numbers about fifteen at each grade level. They begin studying together in junior high school, and by the time they reach high school, they are a unit. Before they leave, they all look upon Weldon Slayton as a guru of sorts, not just a teacher but a friend, confidant, and advisor.

“I have a tendency to invest a lot of my emotional self into my students,” says Slayton, who never married. “I get attached to them. I get very possessive of them in a sense. I work hard to keep professional so I don’t adopt them.”

Even in high school, Slayton, who grew up in Caswell County, realized that he had a gift for teaching, and after working his way through college, he returned home to follow his calling. “I really did want to give something back to the county,” he said.

While teaching, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, got a master’s degree in teaching the gifted and talented, and became one of the first GT teachers in the state. So effective did he become with the best students in Caswell County that people often ask why he hasn’t left to pursue greater opportunities elsewhere. His answer is simple. “I keep thinking if I were to leave, they wouldn’t get anybody who would care about my kids like I do.”

Among those kids he came to care about were Bart and Emory Upchurch. After Bart had completed the fifth grade and Emory the third, Joanne and Jim took them out of faltering Piedmont Academy and allowed them to return to the public schools, which were improving. Later, the school system classified Emory as a gifted and talented student. Bart was not accepted in the program.

Joanne was incensed. Although Bart’s grades were above average, they rarely were exceptional. Bart applied himself to that which interested him and got along without great effort in those subjects that didn’t. Joanne knew that Bart was smart, however. His IQ was 135, in the highest percentile in the county school system. He always did well on achievement tests and she thought he deserved the best the school system had to offer.

Joanne demanded that he be retested and reconsidered for the gifted and talented classes, and he finally was accepted in the program, beginning in the ninth grade at Dillard Junior High in Yanceyville, not far from Bartlett Yancey High. Weldon Slayton, who then taught English and social studies to gifted and talented students from the ninth through the twelfth grades, thought that the class load that GT students had to bear was a shock to Bart, who, to his mind, had just been cruising through school to this point. Bart, who insisted on being called James outside his family, failed both history and English in the first nine weeks of GT classes. His mother came to the school to meet with Slayton and Bart about the problem.

“He’s lazy,” Slayton recalled Joanne telling him.

“I think he’s going to be fine,” Slayton replied. “He’s understanding what we’re doing.”

Joanne said that she and Jim had discussed taking him out of the GT classes.

“Bart said, ‘You’ll take me out over my dead body,’” she told Slayton. “We’ve never known him to care before.”

“Give him some time,” Slayton said.

And time was all it took. Before the year was over, Bart had brought his failing grades up to Bs, although he was capable of even better. But Slayton was troubled by one thing his mother said in that first meeting.

“She said, ‘I told him when he gets to be eighteen, he goes out the door. He’s going to have to fend for himself.’ I think if bothered James for me to hear that.”

Slayton saw that Bart kept an emotional distance from everybody, and Joanne’s remark caused him to wonder if there hadn’t been pain at home that caused Bart to shut himself off and deny things that were distressing.

By the time Bart found himself under Slayton’s influence, something other than schoolwork had caught his imagination, an escape that was taking a bigger and bigger hold of his time and energy.

An avid reader since early childhood, Bart had gravitated to science fiction and fantasy. In his reading, he’d come across mention of a game called Dungeons and Dragons, and he was curious about it. In the summer after he finished the seventh grade, Bart went into a toy-and-hobby shop in Danville, found the basic beginner’s game, and talked his mother into buying it for him. He brought it home, read all the material, and taught his brother Emory to play it. He next brought his cousin Kenyatta into the game.

After classes resumed in the fall, he found more players in school friends. They usually played after school, sometimes by telephone. By the time Bart began ninth grade, he was bringing the game to school. Soon a group of students was playing at lunchtime each day in the school cafeteria. Others, curious about the game, began their own groups, called dungeons.

Weldon Slayton hadn’t heard of the game until Bart got it going at school, and he took the time to find out how it was played. The game, he discovered, is a medieval fantasy in which the players assume various roles—thief, fighter, magic user—and set out upon adventures in which they face danger at nearly every turn. It is a game of castles and catacombs, of knights and assassins, elves and wizards, swords and daggers, truncheons and longbows, a game of gods and demons, of “lawful good” and “chaotic evil,” of deformed beasts and horrid monsters. The object is to use basic abilities granted to each character in a point system to slay enemies, overcome monsters, and obtain treasure without taking “hit points,” which not only sap strength and skills but can kill and end the game. Much of the action is determined by the throw of odd and many-sided dice, but the game is controlled by a godlike player, the dungeon master, who creates the often terrifying scenarios and settles disputes.

The game is immensely complicated, and can be played in brief adventures or in campaigns that go on for weeks, months, years, in which the characters move through many levels of development and gain immense powers.

Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D, as it is more often called by devoted players, was invented in the early ’70s by an enthusiast of historical and war games, Gary Gygax, who started his own company to manufacture the game in 1973. Within six years,
Parade
magazine was calling D&D the hottest fad on college campuses since streaking. By the early ’80s, the game had made millions for Gygax and had spread into high schools and junior high schools, even into isolated spots like Caswell County.

Slayton realized that the game was a genuine stimulus to imagination and creativity, and the students most interested in it clearly were among the brightest in the school. But he was concerned that some of them seemed to be getting too deeply involved. They played for many hours each week and talked about the characters they were playing as if they were real people. Were some of the students getting so wrapped up in the game that it became more real than reality? Slayton couldn’t help but wonder, especially after some of the players’ grades began to suffer.

What bothered him more was the nature of the game itself.

“The underpinnings seem to be without any moral base,” he said. “The object in winning is not that the good guy has won and justice has been served but that you’ve used your power to outwit and outsmart and come out on top. Evil or good doesn’t really matter as long as you win. D&D takes the accepted moral values and turns them on their ear.”

But when he tried to caution students about his concerns, they showed little interest in listening. It was, they countered, just a game, and one in which they found not only escape from the isolation and boredom of Caswell County but great pleasure as well.

For Bart Upchurch, D&D apparently answered a need on an even deeper level. From the time he was small, he always wanted to be in charge. At first, there was only his younger brother to control, later his cousin, Kenyatta. Years later, Kenyatta would recall wonderful games that Bart created for them to play, but he always made up the rules, and she and Emory always had to follow them. Emory was easygoing and usually let Bart dictate their play. On the occasions when he balked, however, Bart would run to his parents, saying, “Emory won’t play. Emory won’t play.”