Janice Faulkner - What it Means to be a North Carolinian
This article describes Janice Faulkner's life. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: "What it Means to be a North Carolinian," ECU Report, Spring 2001.
Janice Faulkner is definitely a child of North Carolina. Born Janice Gray Hardison in 1932, she grew up on a tobacco farm in the eastern part of the state. After earning two degrees -- a bachelor's in 1953 and a master's in 1957 -- from East Carolina, she went on to become an educator, state political party executive director, Commissioner of Revenue, Secretary of state, and, most recently, Commissioner of the North Carolina Division of Motor Vechicles. She has been on campus in recent months as a member of the Chancellor Search Committee.
As a prominent North Carolinian, Janice Faulkner was asked by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation (a granting organization formed in 1936 for "the accomplishment of charitable works in the state of North Carolina") to contribute an essay for part of a collection entitled, "What it means to be a North Carolinian". Here she shares her words with The ECU Report.
My reflections on what North Carolina means to me are more emotional than intellectual. I am a lifelong resident of eastern North Carolina, the daughter of a depression era farmer, who clawed and scratched a decent living out of a small patch of earth owned by his father-in-law who was my grandfather. As a child, I lived in an isolated rural community where all life revolved around the family, the church, the school, the baseball field, the tobacco barns, and the school gymnasium.
I lived in a place where everybody was kin to everybody else, where the only crime was stealing fresh melons and raw peanuts or a bunch of daffodils off a neighbor's ditch-bank. It was a place where no doors were locked; where the only known addictions were to chewing tobacco, snuff, and bootleg whiskey; where embarassed families sheltered their own black sheep; and where already over-burdened off-spring cared for their elderly kin until they were safely buried in the family graveyard.
We were an agrarian people bound to the land. And the land served us well. I grew up with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration for me to say that most of the good things that have happened in my life have happened because I grew up in a family of North Carolina farmers.
I've seen my father, now more than 30 years deceased, look anxiously into the skies for signs of rain, or pick up his hoe and straighten up storm-damaged tobacco, row after endless row, one stalk at a time.
I've stood huddled with my brother in the eerie light of an early dawn to watch a barn full of tobacco go up in flames while our neighbors risked their lives to move farm equipment, tools and tobacco trucks away from the sheds and shelters threatened by the fire ignited by an overheated wood furnace.
The sights and sounds of tobacco are as much a part of me as the Hardison blood that runs through my veins. Tobacco paid for the house we lived in. It bought me a college degree, and it paid for the coffin we buried my father in when he dropped dead of a heart attack while the farm hands were hitching up the mules to go into the fields early on a hot Saturday morning in August.
For me North Carolina was a land of farmers whose life's work was farming. In that time and in that place, the one that faulty memory and fuzzy recollection have made so nearly perfect, the value of the community was measured by the number of acres of crop land under productive cultivation. And the value of a family in that community was based upon its personal wealth in land and hard dollars.
That is what North Carolina was for me. It is something quite different now. It is a time and place in which our best and greatest asset is not our land, but our people. It is a North Carolina in which the value of a community can be measured by its capacity to accomodate and to value diversity among its members. The best resources in this North Carolina are not natural or economic; they are human.
Today, we develop human skills for use in the management of massive amounts of information and for the delivery of widely diverse services to an equally diverse population. Today, we build our knowledge on understanding of national and international issues, not on the pursuit of local and regional markets for our farm products. Today, we train our young people for jobs that didn't even exist 20 years ago. Today, we work primarily with our brains, and almost always in teams with others.
As good as the North Carolina of my childhood was, this one is better. It is not better because we are putting aside the old ways in deference to the new. It is better because the complexities of these times have stretched our minds and our imaginations to the outer limits of our capacity to cope with them. This North carolina has called forth all of the collective good that is the essence of the people.
As North Carolinians we are proving to each other, every day in numerous ways, the limitless capacity of the human mind to create and invent, to assess and analyze, to reconstruct and reconcile, to make new the old ways of responding to human need.
Every day in numerous ways, we affirm the resilience of the human spirit, its noble resistence to the onslaught of external forces over which natural logic would say we have no control, its capacity to recover from misfortune and calamity, and to emerge from the worst disaster with a strong will to endure.
Every day in numerous ways, North Carolinians demonstrate the largess of the human heart, its unlimited capacity to care and to share, to forgive and to follow through, to accomodate and to respond to every manifestation of human frailty, to love humanity in all its forms, to heal human hurt and inspire human achievement.
In North Carolina, I am left free to respect and revere the best aspects of my heritage while called upon to surrender its worst aspects to history. As a North Carolinian I have been encouraged to move beyond my humble beginnings toward enlightened awareness of better and broader opportunity. I have embraced it with energy and enthusiasm. And it has rewarded me richly. The experience has no equal anywhere in the world.
