It never occurred to me that I might move back to North Carolina. But in 1993, after my 30th AIDS funeral, I found my role as night nurse suddenly ended. I was off duty thanks to an improbable and undeserved survival. Hollowed out, I assumed the default position; I retreated to my native state. Unbelievably, I still believed in progress there! As a responsible Carolinian, I would now help un-elect Jesse Helms. But I missed the activist lobby of St. Vincent’s Hospital, missed the phone poles so stapled with Act Up posters they looked like hula skirts.

Mourning, I chanced into Quail Ridge Books in 1994. I smelled hardbacks, I recognized fellow travelers. I had just co-founded Writers Against Jesse Helms. Our veteran senator would back any goon-squad dictator branded “anti-Communist.” Helms, a great churchman, blocked every penny meant to fund a cure for AIDS. I’d moved south to cast just one more vote against “Senator No,” to publicize his death-dealing record. Quail Ridge soon became my refueling think-tank haven. And today, feeling again under attack, I cannot help longing for Nancy and the catacomb safety of her Quail Ridge.

Her store had the cheer of a maintained bulletin board. Nancy presided, salon hostess, den mother. Her white hair she kept in bangs. Nancy Olson was a Unitarian Universalist Grace Paley. Her laugh created other laughs. She sensed when to demonstrate, when to smile, when to try both. Nancy retained even her most far-right customers, hoping they’d “get over themselves” and come around. She and Jim guarded a space where the very outsiders our legislators seek to scare from public toilets always felt valued, welcomed. Store hours then ran 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. You could find kindred spirits before or after work. Under the Art Books sign, you might even get lucky of a Friday night.

Nancy and Jim saw the writers of our state as extended family. She made secret loans to local authors between books. Nancy even read chapters from customers’ novels-in-progress. One part-time teacher named Charles Frazier worked for years on an epic he called “Cold Mountain” while Nancy promoted it to every publishing rep. Humane politics and empathetic fiction became a single saving force. And Nancy’s sense of the local, her knowledge of her customers, gave Quail Ridge its sense of being everyone’s library-playhouse away from home.

Nancy also practiced the art of “hand selling.” This was a political act, and unlike the gender-inspecting of all public bathroom users, it proved a generative one. Nancy didn’t just point her reader to a shelf; no, she set the perfect volume into that customer’s very mitt. Nancy’s hand selling often involved intervention: Taking a bad book out of a customer’s clutch, replacing it with something better, with a work more ambitious, spiritual, more beautifully wrought.

If Nancy were alive this week she might have pointed out how hateful acts like the “HB2” law have deep American precedents — like the legal quest of 1692 to “abjure Satan’s Magick among us,” to quote the Salem witch trial transcripts. Given our country of obsessives, sex itself is always the witch.