Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 2, 1995 TAG: 9510020094
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There was the night when Turtle Neugent wrecked his Chevy with his cousin Frog in the car. They climbed out uninjured, chainsawed the nearest tree, covered the car with limbs and walked home. The next morning, they brought the Chevy home with the tractor - evading the police.
There was the time when matriarch Mamie Neugent watched her granddaughter, Brenda, speed by in a cloud of dust and remarked: ``Ought not to let that baby drive that car like that.''
Brenda was 10 years old.
And there was the time when documentary photographer David M. Spear first discovered he had such ``fabulous neighbors'' living three tenths of a mile down his North Carolina dirt road:
The year was 1973. And Spear, a longtime journalist and Madison newspaper publisher, had just started pouring the footers for his new Rockingham County home.
``I heard a gunshot,'' Spear recalls. ``I didn't pay it any attention. But then I heard another gunshot, and that kinda got my attention.
``I looked out and saw this old woman and a man coming down the street and they were running, both of 'em, they were haulin' it.''
Then gunshot No. 3 went off, hitting the tree just above Spear's head. He called the sheriff, who brought in a convoy of cop cars to confront the shooter. . . and found the entire Neugent family, sitting on the porch just as calm as could be.
``Aw hell, it wasn't nothin','' the Neugents explained. ``Daddy's just drunk, but we've put him to bed and everything's fine now.''
When Spear got home that day, he remembers thinking, ``I'm gonna love living over here. These people are for real.''
Ten years later, Spear sold the newspaper, retired and took up photography. He went through a two-year beginner phase - shooting old barns, sunsets, flowers - before he realized the best story of all was literally shooting distance away.
That the Neugents are for real - and that their spirit deserves to be saluted - became the theme of his work and subsequent book, ``The Neugents: `Close to Home'.'' Pictures from the book are on display at Hollins College through Oct. 15.
The heavy drinking is one focal point of the black-and-white exhibit. So is the fighting and carrying on - Coon Neugent holding up the tail end of a black snake just for fun; Ricky Neugent standing there shirtless, showing off the stitched-up knife cuts on his back.
There's the poignant scene of Mamie Neugent's Friday night ritual - washing her hair in a metal bowl on the kitchen table. Followed by a picture of her washing down a possum for supper.
Spear's portrayal of the tobacco-farming family shows them doing everything hard - working, playing, driving and drinking. It has earned him many positive reviews as well as the inevitable comparison to Walker Evans, known for his Depression-era photographs of dust-bowl families.
Spear bristles at the comparison.
While both men took viewers inside houses they might otherwise never visit, Evans's images were of dispirited people who were hungry and depressed because they had no work and no hope for a future.
The Neugents, Spear points out, eke out a subsistence life by choice. Fiercely independent and funny, they are hell-raisers and proud of it.
``We live in a world of presumed privilege, where people generally look down their noses at people like the Neugents,'' Spear said recently in an interview at Hollins. ``What I learned is that their way of life is just as important as anybody's
precisely because they're hell-raisers and because they don't subscribe to anything.
``I mean, the Neugents aren't interested in cyberspace. They wanna live in the damn real world. They wanna look you in the eye.''
Spear spent six years looking the Neugents in the eye.
But he didn't just squint through the lens of the photojournalist. He opened up his heart as a friend and neighbor.
When he first approached 80-year-old Mamie about the project, he used geraniums to woo her. She was unimpressed.
After she refused get comfortable in front of his camera - his first Neugent photograph reveals a stiff and distrustful Mamie - he realized the project required more than the standard journalistic approach. .
An agreement was soon hammered out ``to level the playing field,'' as Spear says. He agreed to split half of the proceeds from the prints with Mamie. The family retained veto rights on any picture they didn't like.
``Newspapers follow the capitalist ideology. They rape, plunder and pillage, and everybody knows it's that way,'' he says. ``When I was in the business, I thought I had all the rights in the world.
``But the Neugents taught me that there [has to be] a real connection between people for the truth to come out. It has to be even.''
They also left him with a skeptical view of modern-day life. ``The Neugents, they're out there working all the damn time and clawing out their living in their own style just like Mr. and Mrs. Yuppie - only they're having a lot more fun.
``People today are clawing, trying to get that speed boat or that BMW to make 'em happier. But the Neugents really are happy. There's a hardness about them, but there's real resolution in their faces.
``I mean, they're not confused at all.''
With the publication of the book in 1993 by The Jargon Press, a small Winston-Salem publisher, Spear officially ended his project on the Neugents, though he still visits regularly and keeps up with the events of their lives.
Pointing to a 1992 photograph of Ricky Neugent, he says, ``That's Ricky's wedding and there he is in the back there, looking like the ghost of Hamlet. It didn't last long. And now she's married to his first cousin, Eddie Rabbit.''
Spear dedicated the book to Mamie Neugent, who died of cancer shortly before the book was printed. She was 85.
``Ten thousand resounding `hell nos' to the first one of you who would have pity on her,'' he writes in his dedication. ``She is not interested in a world full of idiot fools that mass produce false dreams and make false promises by the screaming minute.
``Take a look and maybe you will see some truth. As you look at her, understand that her strength comes from toil. . . only toil. And from her, we can be renewed.''
Spear's current project is set in rural Southern Mexico. It's the first time he's ever worked outside his home state.
Geographically, it's a world away. But the subjects aren't that different from the neighbors down his dirt-road hollow back home.
``Southern Mexico reminds me of North Carolina before the Industrial Revolution came South. Nobody's in a hurry. Everyone wants to sit and talk.
``And the only type of fighting that goes on is like the Neugents' - family squabbles, amongst themselves.''
David M. Spear will lecture on his work Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Green Drawing Room, Main Building, Hollins College. ``The Neugents: `Close to Home' '' will be on display in the Hollins College Art Gallery through Oct. 15. 362-6451.
by CNB