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RALEIGH, NC — John Virgil Turner knows how it looks: a skinny old man sitting alone in a white plastic chair next to his mother’s grave, shaded by a thinning copse of trees that divides the Oberlin Cemetery from a parking lot and a roll of land.

If the air is cool enough, Turner walks there from his house — it’s practically next door — holding fresh flowers and a cloth to wipe down the headstone. He arranges and cleans, then settles into the chair, crosses his legs and smokes. Sometimes the retired professor, who is 77, stays there a long time, watching people watch him. A woman once gave him $20 — to help out, she told him vaguely — and insisted he keep the money even after he insisted he didn’t need it.

“I’m sure people at the Y see me out there and say, ’Look at that poor little old man, out there by himself on the chair,’” he says. “That’s what it looks like, I know.”

Lately, everyone seems to be worried about John Turner and his neighborhood, Oberlin Village. A developer named Neal Coker owns that roll of land beyond the cemetery, and if the Raleigh City Council decides July 3 to let him, he intends to turn it into a tall and modern complex of shops, homes and offices called The Oberlin.

Some of Turner’s neighbors say if this project is built, it will surely mean the end for Oberlin Village. People from the old white neighborhoods around Oberlin say so, too. They meet at Turner’s church, Wilson Temple Methodist, write council members on behalf of the village, hold protests, and sing songs about the cemetery. They say they understand.

Turner has not attended the meetings, called any politicians or written any letters. He says he is not the type to join causes, especially ones that get so overtly political. But don’t mistake this restraint for apathy: He does not want Coker’s project — or any other big development — in his neighborhood. He can’t stand any more traffic on Oberlin Road, which is already a pain for a retiree with thick glasses to navigate.

And anyway, how could the son of Tulia Turner, the woman who spent five decades fighting the office complexes that sprouted like mushrooms around her, like the idea of a big development right next door? He saw what happened when the Cameron woods near his house became the Cameron Village shopping center in 1949. The land around the mall became a business district and its value shot up. Tulia’s neighbors were offered good money for the land. Some sold. Others passed the land on to children who sold. Soon, there wasn’t much left of Oberlin Village. That seemed to be the story of many African- American neighborhoods around the country.

What a shame, Tulia would say, to lose that history.

People thought she meant the history on paper, which told a dramatic story: Former slaves and free blacks carving a town right after the Civil War out of the farmland and woods that once belonged to slaveowners. They paid top dollar for the land, which landowners sold at almost 10 times the cost per acre of other land in Wake County. They founded a cemetery, two churches and two schools. They built homes along the red dirt of a wagon trail. They were artisans and craftsmen, and, a generation later, teachers, doctors, lawyers. They named their town Oberlin after one of the first colleges in the country to admit blacks. And for many years, they flourished, without any help from anyone but one another.

Now the schools are gone, Oberlin Cemetery is a tiny sliver of land bordered by parking lots, and the wagon trail is a busy road connecting two sides of Raleigh. Office buildings, condominiums and rentals surround the old village, which still glints in a few of its stately old homes.

And something else seems to be fading, too: an inimitable sense of community that had protected Oberlin so many years. That’s the history Tulia Turner didn’t want to lose, her son says.

So understand this: John Turner knows how it looks, a few old families clinging to Oberlin Road, the spine of a village that used to be grand.

But from a distance, things always look simple.

Only one Oberlin

More than a year ago, on a Sunday in April, Neal Coker went to John Turner’s church on Oberlin Road.

Coker told the congregation of Wilson Temple Methodist Church that he wanted to build something big and grand — something with shops, offices, condominiums, a retirement home, a movie theater and a hotel — on the land right behind the Oberlin Cemetery. That land is already zoned for office development, so this would be an opportunity to do something creative, he said.

He offered to give the church free parking, to give money to keep up the cemetery, to be a good neighbor.

The way the Rev. Walter McLeod remembers it, Coker’s enthusiasm didn’t ripple through his congregation, almost all of whom are African-American and have some connection to Oberlin. They worried that property taxes would get so high that people living on Social Security or pensions wouldn’t be able to pay them. They worried that traffic would get nightmarish. They worried that the people living in the expensive high-rises would look down on the old-timers at Oberlin Village.

Leonidas “Sonny“ Haywood, who lives in a brick house across the street from the Coker property, could only imagine cold people there - - people who would look at him and just see a simple man in a T- shirt, laughing too loudly. Not the curious son of a Columbia University-educated school principal and a wry, pretty wordsmith who played pinochle with Tulia Turner. Not the man who shares a name with an ancient king or who writes poetry, plays piano, sings with all his heart at church and dances like a Greek when he talks about a favorite actress, Melina Mercouri.

“Some say we’re preserving backwoods over here, but that’s not it, you see,“ says Haywood, 56. “Those backwoods made us who we are. They built us.“

The congregation is concerned; McLeod knows that. A tall, barrel- chested man with a deep voice that is virtually smooth of inflection unless he is preaching, the 54-year-old minister says he wants to do the right thing. Does that mean fighting Coker off, like people in the white neighborhoods are doing? They put “No To Coker Towers“ signs in their own yards and in the yards of some Oberlin residents, including John Turner’s. They call the development monstrous. They tell the politicians at City Hall that they would be crazy if they let him build it.

Or does the right thing mean suggesting that this could be an opportunity? Maybe Oberlin residents could get jobs there. Maybe the city and the developer could help beautify parts of the neighborhood that are run down. Maybe the old and new could coexist, facing each other, separated by narrow and busy Oberlin Road.

One thing he knows: The project’s name isn’t going to work. Coker says he wants to call it “The Oberlin“ to commemorate the village. Oberlin residents and some of the city’s black leaders don’t like this. The Rev. H.B. Pickett, filling in one Sunday at the neighborhood’s other church, Oberlin Baptist, said people only name buildings after places already gone. Oberlin, he said, is very clearly still here. McLeod said some thought the name was a “a slap in the face“ because there is only one Oberlin — a black community founded in 1865. (Coker, meanwhile, says he will change the name if there is concern over it.)

But the minister, who has been at Wilson Temple for four years, won’t say much more than that. He doesn’t want to take sides. He doesn’t have an anti-Coker sign in front of his house, which sits next to his church, though many on Oberlin Road do. He doesn’t criticize Coker or his opponents, saying that both make good arguments for their cases.

Some who oppose the project complain about this. They say he is abandoning his people. They say Coker bought him out.

McLeod frowns at these notions.

“Do you see me wearing a $3,000 suit and driving a great big car and taking expensive vacations?“ he says. “I don’t know why people start these rumors. I’m trying to be fair to Oberlin and to Neal. If Neal wants me to pray with him, I will. If his opponents want me to pray with them, I will. I am not taking sides in this. That’s the way I am.“

The woods disappear

John Turner didn’t hear Coker’s speech, though his cousin Mable Patterson, whose mother used to live across the street, told him the news later. Turner hadn’t gone to church in months, mainly because his mother was too weak to join him. A stroke the previous November had constricted her throat, leaving her unable to eat anything but Ensure. She had lost weight and had trouble walking. She had also lost some of the stubbornness that used to fire up her voice when she would say: “John Virgil! Don’t you hear me calling you?“

Yes, Momma, her son would say. His mother had always been the boss.

Tulia Turner had also spent decades fighting developers. She came to Raleigh in 1919 from her home in Washington County, studied vocational arts at St. Augustine’s College and fell in love with a Shaw University student named John Jerome Turner. They married in 1923 and moved into a house purchased in the late 1880s by her husband’s father, John Thompson Turner, on Oberlin Road.

Tulia worked as a dressmaker, John Jerome at his father’s business, the Raleigh Shoe Co. on Hargett Street. They had three children — John Virgil, Jerome Hall and Geraldine Marie — and lived next door to the Oberlin School, the graded grammar school for African-American children.

On the other side, past a few houses, were the Cameron woods. The Oberlin School teachers took children there for class projects, such as building wigwams to learn about Native American history. In the summer, those woods became camps for gypsies, who knocked on the Turners’ door and asked John if his mother needed her knives sharpened or umbrellas fixed.

Turner biked past the woods when he went to Raleigh to attend Washington High School on Fayetteville Street and, when the weather was bad, he rode past them in a crowded cab driven by a neighbor. Those woods — once the land of the Cameron family, who claimed to own 1,900 slaves — seemed as impenetrable and fixed as the canopy of sky above.

He left Raleigh for Durham in 1941 to study business education at the North Carolina College for Negroes, now N.C. Central University. By 1949, after a stint in the military and a master’s degree from Boston University, he was a professor at Central.

When he visited his parents that year, he saw that those impenetrable woods where the gypsies camped and schoolchildren studied had been sold and cleared for a giant new shopping center. It had been built, despite considerable public outcry, by a young Raleigh developer, 37-year-old James Wesley “Willie“ York.

Tulia Turner worried. The city had reached her village.

Tulia Turner decides to fight

Willie York got the idea for Cameron Village, a shopping center and apartments in what was then the suburbs, from an Urban Land Institute meeting. Getting the money to do it wasn’t that hard. Getting the City Council to rezone the 30 acres for the project was tougher.

Three public hearings produced angry neighbors who called York’s idea outrageous. One Cameron Park resident, a powerful lawyer, said he worried that the crowds would spill into his yard and trample his wife’s azaleas and camellias. When the City Council approved the rezoning, the lawyer and his wife put up a wall between the shopping center and their house.

After Cameron Village opened, Oberlin became valuable real estate. Commercial office space was in demand, and Tulia Turner watched her neighbors sell their land. She had not spoken out before Cameron Village was built — few of her neighbors had — but in February 1969, she decided it was time to fight. That was the year the lot that used to hold Oberlin School, which had been torn down, went on the market. Tulia pictured an office building or a nightclub going up just outside her yard.

So she called her neighbors. They met at Wilson Temple, strategizing and writing letters to City Council members, including Clarence Lightner, who would go on to become Raleigh’s only African- American mayor. They called themselves the Concerned Citizens of Oberlin.

“We feel Oberlin has been and is being invaded,“ they wrote. “There seem to be those who are determined to take possession of it by diverse and subtle means. We have no desire to impede progress, but we are asking that progress be tempered with justice and judgment.“

They won a victory, of sorts. The lot later became the YWCA.

In 1971, Tulia’s husband died of emphysema. Her oldest son, worried about her getting by alone, started visiting more often.

He saw that she was still fighting the land-use war. The year John Jerome died, she and her neighbors persuaded the council to keep an office building out of a small tract between Van Dyke Avenue and Mayview Street. But developers continued to ask for rezonings, and the city started talking about widening the road.

Tulia stood her ground.

“I won’t sell,“ she told a newspaper reporter in 1983. “I hope my children won’t.“

Changes at home

John Virgil Turner certainly has no intention of selling, though the tax bill on the house quadrupled — from $600 to almost $2,400 — after last year’s tax revaluation. That’s with the 50 percent break he gets because the house was designated a historic landmark in 1995. He will likely be the last Turner to live here, unless his sister, Geraldine, who lives in New Jersey, or her children, who live in Utah and California, want it.

“I want to be comfortable as long as I’m here,“ he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when I’m gone.“

He moved back to Oberlin Village, to his childhood home, for good in 1998. A year later, he retired from N.C. Central University after spending 50 years in the business department, living near the school in Durham most of those five decades. He had been so busy with students and university business — so ensconced in his duties, he says — that he never found the will to get married.

But he has been in love: once when he was a college freshman, with a young woman from Philadelphia, and again, much later, with a colleague at Central. But the woman from Philly moved to New York and became a social worker, and the colleague moved to Virginia. They both died, and Turner never became a husband.

“Now I’m just a crabby old man,“ he says, and laughs.

When he came home, he noticed right away that Oberlin Village was nothing like he remembered it. Many of his old neighbors were gone, either dead or living in rest homes or in other cities. The traffic had worsened. And his mother — tough, smart, no-nonsense Tulia — was wearing out. By the end of the year, around Thanksgiving, she had a stroke. Eight months later, in the early morning of June 6, 2000, she died.

Her son couldn’t believe it. She had seemed fine the night before, staying up late to talk to him. When she looked tired, he asked her if she was ready to go to sleep.

“I’m ready, partner,“ she told him. He helped her to her room.

The next morning, like every other morning, he and the nurse looking out for her went to her room. Her son noticed she was curled up in the same position as the night before. The nurse tried to wake her. Nothing. She had no pulse, no other vital signs. She was dead, but still warm.

“My friends used to tell me I should have expected it,“ Turner says. “They used to say, ’How long did you expect her to live, John Virgil?’ But I expected her to be here for the Fourth of July. I expected her to be here for her birthday in October. I expected her to be here for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for New Year’s. And then I thought I’d do it all over again.“

He is sitting on his porch, legs crossed, smoking. It is a year to the day that his mother died, and he has just returned from the flower shop, where he bought a hydrangea for Tulia’s headstone. He plans to go to her grave later and sit for awhile next to her.

He has lost weight. His clothes — a button-down shirt and slacks — hang loose on his thin frame. His friends say he spends too much time sitting in his parlor, lit by Christmas lights still massed in the rectangle from the box they came in. The lights illuminate miniature Victorian-style ceramic houses and four house plants in front of an old fireplace, a display of the old-fashioned comfort his mother had guarded like a sentry.

What’s best for Oberlin

Outside, his neighbors and friends at church are still talking about Coker’s development.

Some, like Leonidas Haywood, still believe it would be an intrusion on the village. He wonders why something small and charming can’t go there, maybe some homes and a school. “You hate to lose the character that you’ve gotten used to your whole life,“ he says.

Others dislike a different kind of intrusion. Everyone — white people from nearby neighborhoods, Coker, politicians — seems to knows what’s best for the village. Hubert Poole, who spent most of his 75 years in Oberlin Village but now lives in Southeast Raleigh, says maybe the white residents who oppose the project are just invoking the name of Oberlin to save their own back yards.

“I think the white neighborhoods are talking for us,“ he says. “I don’t like that. They don’t understand Oberlin.“

Then there are the graves. One of Turner’s friends, a 30-year-old N.C. State University graduate student named Jennifer Hallman, says a handful of graves lie in Coker’s land, just past the border of the cemetery. She has been researching the neighborhood for seven years and knows more about it than some of the residents, Turner says. She wants a state archaeologist to survey the land and make sure no one is buried there.

Coker says if he finds graves he will move them, just as scores of developers in the area do every year. He has no intention, he says, of disrespecting the dead or Oberlin Village.

John Turner appreciates what Coker is trying to say. The retired professor, though, wonders if the young developer really understands.

Let me explain, he says.

Imagine a young John Turner, maybe 6 or 7 years old. He runs past the cemetery, where his father is cleaning the headstones, past the planks of wood that mark Oberlin’s oldest graves, past them to the middle of a field that is now part of Neal Coker’s land.

Time and weather have worn the wood on the old graves smooth, erasing any vestige of name and date. When he looks back, he sees only stumps of dead bark obscured by blackberry vines, weeds and wild grass.

Funny, he says, how simple things look from a distance.