Down East: It's in everybody's best interest for things to start looking up.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover Story

After rocky, tumbling journeys from their headwaters, the Cape Fear, Neuse, Tar and other rivers flow flat and sluggish east of the Fall Line, near where Interstate 95 slices through North Carolina. Wetlands and flat fields separate farm towns stitched together by threads of two-lane blacktop. Here, south of Fayetteville, Raeford took root when the railroad came to Hoke County in 1898.

John Heneger lives in a pea-green house amid cotton fields outside town in the state's poorest county. Pots simmer on a wood stove as cold rain drums the roof. Heneger, who takes anti-seizure drugs for epilepsy, sits on a couch, speaking haltingly. "Christina needs new shoes." Rose Townsend, a soft-spoken welfare worker, nods. A portrait of Heneger's 6-year-old daughter stands on an end table. His Food Lion work cap hangs on the door. "Forty dollars for a little ol' pair of shoes."

Townsend shakes her head. "You still at minimum wage?" Heneger, 31. seems troubled by the question. He sits erect and, with a hurt tone, corrects her. "I'm still part-time, but I wasn't ever at minimum wage. They started me at $5.50." He exhales slowly. "I'm $5.75 now. I'm not no high-school student."

Eastern North Carolina, twice the size of New Jersey, is a state within a state, a place apart that has been left behind. If you live outside it, how far behind might startle you. Almost everything here is measured on a different scale. Even a man's pride.

Though the region is in no way poverty's only province--it festers within sight of Charlotte's gleaming skyscrapers and the Triangle's bustling research campuses, packing every region of the state--nowhere is it more prevalent and pervasive than here. There are places in the East that have more in common with the Mississippi Delta than with the rest of North Carolina.

That's why U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre, a Lumberton Democrat, has introduced a bill to create the Southeast Crescent Authority, which would pump $90 million a year into Coastal Plain regions of seven states. Modeled on the Appalachian Regional Commission, it would be the first official recognition that flatland poverty, from Virginia to Mississippi, is more entrenched than in the mountains of Appalachia, long considered the nation's neediest region.

Taken as a whole, the East is poor and getting comparatively poorer. In 1965, when the Appalachian Regional Commission began work, per capita public-assistance payments in North Carolina's 23 westernmost counties averaged $31.50, 17% above the state average. In 40 Eastern counties (excluding Johnston), the figure was $49.51, 83% above average. In 1997, it was $417.12 in the western reaches, 27% above the state average, and $664.49 in the East--102% above it. The 7th District congressman says there's a good chance the bill could pass before spring.

On another front, Gov. Mike Easley will convene the One East summit this spring, a project of the Foundation of Renewal for Eastern North Carolina--FoR ENC--a new nonprofit that is backed by some of the region's biggest businesses, including Progress Energy and RBC Centura Bank. The three-day meeting in Greenville will focus on a message increasingly trumpeted by the region's advocates: Continue to ignore us at your own peril.

Organizers say the conference will concentrate on more than arm-twisting policy makers for money. That's tacit acknowledgment that the state's effort to pay companies to move to the region has often not succeeded. Despite incentives weighted to favor poor counties, most businesses prefer to locate near cities, says Al Stuart, a UNC Charlotte geographer and co-editor of The North Carolina Atlas, which details the state's physical, social and economic landscape.

FoR ENC co-founder Phil Carlton, a former state Supreme Court justice, says One East will explore what he calls audacious new approaches. If you can't pay industry to come, for example, why not pay grants to young, next-generation leaders to stay? Why not create what amounts to a foreign-exchange program to match struggling Eastern towns with sister-cities in the Piedmont?

Mounting job losses in manufacturing, natural and man-made disasters such as hurricanes and hog-lagoon spills, the reeling tobacco and agricultural economy and an influx of immigrants have created a spiral that has Eastern North Carolina near the tipping point. Unless quickly corrected, argues Al Delia, an expert on the region's demographics, a third of the state will be mired...