November 17, 2007
Blues Brothers
Hunt and Mitchell were inseparable in the summer of 1984.
They were part of a crowd, a way of life in Winston-Salem that centered on illegal liquor houses people ran out of low-rent apartments or houses. These places functioned as a poor man's country club - a kind of neighborhood bar where a man could grab a drink when he got off work and a man without a job could drink all day.
Hunt and Mitchell didn't have to go far. A number of apartments in the "Pink Palace," the brick building on Patterson Avenue where Mitchell's mother lived and both men kept their clothes, had been converted into "drink houses.''
Hunt said he looked for a job that summer, but mostly he and Mitchell hung out together, usually starting the day with a vodka.
People knew them that summer, too, by the two prostitutes they were often seen with. Mitchell's girl was Ann Wilson, and Hunt's was Margaret Crawford, a 14-year-old from Eden who had run away from a juvenile-detention center and ended up in Winston-Salem. People in the neighborhood took notice of her because she was a white girl in a black world. Her nickname was "Little Bit."
Hunt was 19; Mitchell, 29. On the street, everyone called them the "Blues Brothers" or the "Gold Dust Twins."
Hunt had spent his early childhood with his grandparents on Maryland Avenue. His grandfather, William Stroud, was a foreman in the city streets division; his grandmother kept house. Hunt wore thick glasses as a little boy, delivered newspapers and played baseball.
Hunt's mother, Jean Hunt, often came to the house on Maryland Avenue, but he always thought of her as an aunt. No one told him that the regular visitor was his mother. The truth came out when his older brother, Willie, misbehaved and their mother spanked him. The boys protested, and their grandfather let it slip. That's your mother. You better mind her.
Two weeks later, Jean Hunt was murdered in a lover's quarrel. Darryl was 9 years old.
As he grew older, Hunt said, his mother's death haunted him. At 16, he started looking for people who had known her, eager for anything that he could learn about the woman he knew so briefly as his mother.
She had lived on Patterson Avenue, just north of the apartments where Mitchell grew up. There, Hunt met Mitchell, who became his guide to his mother's old crowd.
By then, Hunt had dropped out of school. He moved to Monterey, Calif., for a while with a cousin, but when he turned 18 Hunt returned to Winston-Salem to claim a $10,000 inheritance his grandfather had left him.
Soon he had a new girlfriend. He used the majority of his inheritance to set up an apartment for himself, the girl and her baby, and he got a job in construction with the girl's father. A little after a year, the romance ended. He lost the girl, the job, the apartment and the baby girl he had come to think of as his own. "The hardest part was being separated from Tahara," he said. Mitchell was still around, though. They did some odd jobs, but mostly they hung out. In November 1983, Hunt and Mitchell were visiting one of Mitchell's old girlfriends. There was a fight with the woman's boyfriend, and Hunt went to jail.
The charges were dropped in June 1984 and Hunt was released. He had no job and no home, so he went back to what he knew - the drink-house life as Mitchell's sidekick.