Heather Blanton

A Lady in Defiance

Dec 3, 2010
2 min

It’s Too Danged Windy

My father’s family is from rural Georgia, and his uncle, Lloyd Whippoorwill Harris, was known for being quite a character; among other things, he was infamous for his awful excuses. Whether out of distaste, disinterest, or sheer laziness, Lloyd would avoid partaking in unsought activities by crafting thinly veiled, and often nonsensical, explanations for why he couldn’t participate. He would use these silly alibis to avoid going to anything from a theatrical production to bru

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A Lady in Defiance

Dec 3, 2010
2 min

To Thine Ownself Be True

Relaxers are a popular way to restructure your hair—to use chemicals to alter the protein chains in hair. In the African American community, relaxers are especially popular for straightening typically coarse or kinky hair. However, relaxers are usually detrimental to the hair because they deprive it of moisture and then break down the structure of the hair. While many Black women choose to get relaxers anyway in the pursuit of straighter hair, I never even had the opt

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A Lady in Defiance

Dec 3, 2010
2 min

If You Love Me, You’ll Resecue Me From Hawaii

Back in the early 50’s, my grandma was a young divorcee with an 8 year old daughter by her first marriage, and my granddaddy was a young widower. When they met, my grandma had taken a bookkeeping class at a local college and her teacher recommended her to my granddaddy, who had recently returned home from the war and started a furniture business. He hired her and they soon began dating after meeting at work. However, Burlington was a pretty small town at the time, and

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The Voices of the Angels

A Lady in Defiance

Dec 1, 2010
2 min

It’s All True — Just Ask Your Mom

To my knowledge, there is not a large cache of stories told in my extended family: my younger brother parents and I live in North Carolina while the rest of our family lives between Maryland, Wisconsin, Montana and California. We do not get to see them very often, and as a result are simply not close with much family other than ourselves. Thus, my brother and I have few stories to tell about the wild things our grandparents and beyond have supposedly done. We do have one dev

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A Lady in Defiance

Nov 28, 2010
1 min

“He Swallowed What?!”

My grandmother would always tell my sister and I some interesting stories about my Uncle David when he was growing up. These anecdotes ranged from putting mashed potatoes into the vacuum cleaner after dinner one night, breaking more than his fair share of bones (sometimes even two at once!), and writing a poem for his class the morning it was due–and winning a prize for it! One of my favorites that she would often tell us all around the dinner table is of the time that my Unc

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