As a child, I loved maps showing the mythical place of the story. I was drawn to them the way children are drawn to pictures before they know how to read words. I knew nothing about cities, boundaries, or responsibility.
These maps were not the modern kind on our cell phones, but the old ones, yellowed, mysterious, edged with seas that curled and places left unfinished.
What fascinated me most were the margins. Along the edges of those maps, there were drawings, sea monsters, serpents, dragons. Sometimes a simple warning appeared, Here Be Dragons.
Only later did I learn that Here Be Dragons was not a claim about monsters. It was an admission of limits. It meant, we have not been here yet, or we do not fully understand what lies beyond, or this territory has not been carefully navigated.
The dragons were placeholders for uncertainty. Rocky Mount has edges on its map, but they are known and visible.
Neglected neighborhoods. Boarded houses. Crime. Darkness. Failing historic structures, including shotgun houses that once told a clear story about how this city was built. They are left to deteriorate because they offer no financial return.
We know what is at Rocky Mount’s boarders. The uncertainty is not about what lies beyond. It is about whether we can vote for leadership across the board that is willing to go there.
On old maps, dragons marked places that had not yet been explored. In Rocky Mount, dragons remain because the edges of the city are inconvenient.
Fractured leadership with personal agendas cannot make money from restoring a shotgun house, even when that house carries the history of the city itself. Wards without a champion allow the edges to darken further. I have seen and felt this darkness with my own eyes, talked to people on these streets and felt their despair that nothing is going to change.
Here Be Dragons.This is not myth. It is consequence.
What I have come to believe is this; some of the most important work in a city does not happen in the well lit center of the map. It happens at the edges. At the places that require commitment, without thought of financial gain in order to help. Before another election, Mainstreetrockymount.com is calling for action: cultivate new leadership who will do more than talk about the revitalization of Rocky Mount.
Historically, dragons disappeared from maps not because the world became safer, but because people went there. They explored. They made what was uncertain known. The mapmakers could remain true to mapping only what they knew.
Rocky Mount shouldn’t have dragons at its edges. It needs elected leadership whose priority is their constituents rather than personal gain. Until self serving leaders are replaced, the edges of our map will remain as is.
With our map in hand, the call to action in this post is to identify new leadership and develop them starting now. Ask them if they can and will go to these ignored edges and take charge of helping them.
We need determination to change the way we vote in order to restore what is broken.
How we do this will be posted on Sunday, February 8
Main Street Rocky Mount 