A man child, age three, sits in front of a mirror. His hands claim his focus. Dark bronze knuckles opening and closing the unknown worlds mapped in his earth-tinted palms. The child studies the lines in his hands, then his face in the mirror. "As I sat there in the mirror looking into my eyes and looking at my hands, I became aware of myself." Then he notices the floor pulsing to the beat of a blues song playing in the other room. "It was then that I realized I was alive. This is my very first memory."

TJ Reddy is still alive. "Six and a half decades and I'm still here. I wouldn't change my life for anything. I have done some of the most wonderful things and have been rewarded with some of the most awesome gifts," Reddy said. "I feel like there is a balance and if I keel over and start pushing up daisies right now I have no qualms. I have no regrets. Most of what I've done, I'd do it all over again. My legacy is being here now, after all the ordeals I've gone through. I'm here now. I'm still here."

Reddy testifies to his life's journey in his work. As a visual artist, performer and writer he has touched every corner of the Carolinas. Whether artist in residence at a university, being featured in a museum exhibit or completing a mural for a school or neighborhood, Reddy's work has become a part of North Carolina's root system. Reddy says he stays here because this is where he started.

"My family is from North Carolina. I grew up in Savannah, but my great-great grandfather is from Wilson, NC." Reddy's eyes refocus as he fixes on his forefather's memory. "If you see a picture of my great-great-grandfather people say, 'Oh he looks just like you.' His look is tense. He's a powerful- looking man."

"He was run out of here," Reddy says. William Grier Farmer, according to family lore, was born in the 1850s and in the early 1900s worked as an NAACP organizer. As a youth in Wilson, NC, Farmer was confronted and attacked one night by three white teens. His life was changed forever.

"Some white boys decided that they wanted to make him a victim of their abuse and started to attack him and he fought back. Just armed himself with lots of rocks and bricks and stuff and bloodied some of them," Reddy recounts. "And they decided, the parents of the youth who made the initial attack, they decided that my grandfather would have to be taken to the public square, tied to the stockade and whipped. Overnight he left and ended up in Savannah because that wasn't going to be allowed. My great-great-great- grandparents said, 'No.' So, they eased him on out of here."

Aside from a physical resemblance to William Grier Farmer, Reddy requires the same dignity and unrelenting self-determination his ancestor demanded. When asked why he works...