Month: October 2006

“Charlottesville”? Sometimes it seems like they may as well call it “Musicville.” From eager bards lining up at open-mic nights to secretive electronica geeks hunkering in basements, this town has more than its share of musicians.

With many would-be stars orbiting the community, perhaps it’s natural that someone would serve as a center of gravity. Call them impresarios for the way they foster talent. Call them founding fathers for the way they mold a dynamic scene from the raw material of clubs, musicians and audience. Call them masters for their mentoring relationships with young apprentices. Fred Boyce of the The Prism, Atsushi Miura of Tokyo Rose, and jazz trumpeter John D’earth of Miller’s and UVA are pillars of their scenes.

The three have very different interests and styles. But they’re all well regarded in Charlottesville for their commitment to music—not only as performers in their own right, but as the centers of their respective musical scenes.

The best little coffeehouse in Virginia
Of all the colorful metaphors Fred Boyce uses to describe his role at The Prism (formerly Prism Coffee House), perhaps the most apt is the hourglass. On one end, he says, is a wide world of musicians, on the other, a collection of enthusiastic listeners. And in the center, at the narrow point through which everything else must pass, is Boyce himself.

Another way Boyce describes being The Prism’s program director is “holding a wolf by the ears.” The challenge of running a venue that routinely books three shows a weekend is daunting, he says.

“You think about having 150 people to your house, and the preparation that goes into that,” he says, “plus the artists and all their problems, trying to keep posters up around town, compete for coverage in the press….”

Yet Boyce doesn’t intend to let the wolf go, since his role at The Prism is also intensely rewarding. “It’s something I feel very strongly needs to be seen through. I have this compulsion to get people to listen to something they don’t normally listen to,” he says.
He felt that urge to expand horizons from his earliest college days: “Everybody else was playing ‘Freebird’ and I was blasting newgrass revival out my dorm window.”

In 1990 when he took on his role at The Prism on Gordon Avenue near UVA Grounds, Boyce says, the venue (started in 1966 by a group of UVA students) “wasn’t really going in any direction at all, except maybe downhill.” He has since turned it into a vehicle for exploring the broader meaning of the word “folk”—what he calls “folk with a small f.” He says worldwide folkloric traditions form “an underlying firmament under virtually every type of music. They’ve been around for hundreds of years and never gone out of style,” he says.
“They’re almost like organically accruing substances.”

In addition to The Prism’s core Celtic and bluegrass offerings, Boyce brings in old-time Appalachian string bands and avant-garde jazz and classical musicians, many of whom are wowed by the venue’s living-room intimacy (it seats about 80). In fact, Boyce says, the Prism is more of a regional and even national institution than a local one, better known by artists and enthusiasts around the country than by many who live in Charlottesville. “We get the impression that people talk about it a lot in other music scenes, like in Austin,” he says.

Prism performers often conduct master classes and workshops while they’re in town, but Boyce says the shows themselves are educational in their own right. “I think that’s really valuable for young musicians to come to a place where they can really see the stage,” he says, “see what their hands are doing.” He recalls a young Celtic fiddle player, Cleek Schrey, who grew up seeing his musical heroes at The Prism and is now pursuing music seriously in Chicago.

All this hangs on something rather rare—Boyce’s willingness to work for mostly nonmaterial rewards. As a non-profit organization, with no alcohol sales to augment income, The Prism pays Boyce a stipend only for doing the booking. The rest of the details depend on a group of volunteers, headed up by Boyce and his wife Kenyon.

“It’s definitely a labor of love,” he says. “If I didn’t have other ways to augment my income there’d be no way to make a living here.” (A longtime banjo, guitar and fiddle player, Boyce teaches privately on the side.)

A onetime Folk Director at UVA’s FM radio station, WTJU, Boyce now volunteers as a DJ, and a comfortable synergy often exist between the two jobs. He says installing a live broadcast loop from The Prism in 1992 was key; there have been regular Saturday night broadcasts of Prism shows on WTJU ever since.

“It’s a great way to expand the Prism’s audience without damaging the intimacy of the venue,” he says.

Overlap between WTJU broadcasters and Prism volunteers makes for a tight community and a large body of collective musical knowledge.

Boyce’s involvement since the late ’80s in the Charlottesville scene has left its mark. Chris Munson, a booker and production manager at Starr Hill Music Hall, notes a change in the town’s collective musical taste.

“Bluegrass has become very popular the last couple years,” Munson says. “I think Fred helped on that. Fred was into bluegrass when bluegrass wasn’t cool.”

The Prism refracts
Beyond that, the volunteerism of the Prism seems to draw in people with a passion for music, steeping them in acoustic and folk genres and inspiring them to expand the scene even further. Mary Gordon Hall and John Hill, president and booker, respectively, for monthly concert series the Acoustic Muse, were both schooled as Prism volunteers.

“My whole record collections stems from going to concerts at the Prism,” says Hall, a guitarist and songwriter who moved to Charlottesville in the late 1980s in part because of its folk scene. At The Prism, she started the Songwriter’s Stage, a monthly series of singer/songwriter concerts, headlined by name acts and opened by locals on an open-mic basis. At each show, up to 10 local musicians would get a few minutes in the spotlight.

Eventually, nearly five years ago, Hall, Melissa Farina and Adam Slate decided to begin their own monthly concert series to showcase singer/songwriter acts—a category slightly outside the Prism umbrella. With a $100 donation, the Acoustic Muse was born. Local heroes Terri Allard and Barb Martin played the first show.

“They already had a following, so they brought a huge crowd,” Hall says. “It was like a benefit. It gave us a cushion. Then we could bring in other people.”

Ever since, AM has presented acts like Richie Havens and Cheryl Wheeler. Though the series (which floats between Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, Starr Hill and occasionally other venues) draws crowds by booking well-known artists, locals like Nickeltown and the Jan Smith Band usually open the shows.

“It still gives somebody a chance to be heard in front of an audience who’s not on the nationally touring set,” Hall says.

Hill, meanwhile, had been involved at The Prism and WTJU, and then hosted the Acoustic Sunrise morning show during the early years of another FM station, WNRN, on which he interviewed hundreds of musicians. He now handles booking for Acoustic Muse and says that the series serves a core audience of regulars.

“I’ve had people tell me they have kids, they’re busy, and they can only come to one or two of our shows a year,” he says, “but please don’t stop doing it.”

Even without a permanent home, the Acoustic Muse serves as a focal point for a cooperative, interconnected scene. Many of the local acts who open Acoustic Muse shows are the same people who filtered through Hill’s and Hall’s radio shows (Hall also volunteered at WTJU) and the Songwriter’s Stage. And many are involved with Acoustic Charlottesville, a monthly showcase for local musicians co-founded by local songwriter Danny Schmidt and held at Live Arts.

Hall says the scene is growing. “Since we’ve been doing this for a while, we can see younger people coming in, and people moving to Charlottesville to be involved in this scene,” she says. Like Boyce, Hall and Hill are certainly not in it for the money. “We’re as nonprofit as it gets,” Hill says.

Modest master
Mostly separate from the folk and acoustic world, sushi restaurant and underground club Tokyo Rose on University Avenue is no less a hotbed of musical activity than The Prism. And, just as The Prism might falter were Boyce to depart, Tokyo Rose’s particular contribution depends on owner Atsushi Miura. Yet Miura’s management style could hardly differ more from Boyce’s.

“I don’t think he cares at all about specific genres,” said Christiane Knight, who runs the Rose’s weekly Goth party, The Dawning. “He just wants to promote music itself.”
She says Miura (who declined to be interviewed for this story) concentrates on the restaurant side of the business and leaves the music to a group of bookers, giving them almost total free reign. “He’s interested, but he’s not a dictator,” she says.

The bookers have made Tokyo Rose Charlottesville’s primary outlet for punk, indie rock, and Goth. Rocking harder, and opening all shows to the under-21 crowd, means that occasionally the club gets a bit rowdy. Shawn Stagner, a booker and bartender, remembers “One night [a musician] sprayed a whole tube of K-Y Jelly on the floor, like an ice rink, so people were dancing and moshing and couldn’t get their footing.

“They would run and slide and hit the wall,” Stagner says. “And Atsushi just said ‘Clean up after yourselves.’”

Miura’s tolerance of such antics depends on trusting that his employees and their friends will in fact clean up their messes. Despite occasional complaints from neighboring businesses—and one foyer incident involving gunshots that put a stop to hip-hop shows at the club—the arrangement seems to mostly work out. Katie Nye, a former employee, says, “I’ve never seen a club that functions like that, just by the goodwill of the owner.”

What Miura now has on his hands, after nearly eight years of goodwill, is a club that both musicians and fans love to call home.

“If it wasn’t for Atsushi, there’d be a lot of boredom,” Stagner says, “and a lot less bands that would come out and be able to express themselves.”

Knight says that The Dawning attracts regular show-goers from Lynchburg and Richmond, and that Tokyo Rose is a place where parents feel their teenagers are safe.

“If we ever lost the Rose, I don’t think we’d have anything as nice for a long time,” she says. “He provides a space for us to develop our scene.”

Miura himself is a musician, fronting Atsushi Miura and the Dirty Round Eyes, and many of his bookers say this explains his sympathy for nascent bands still finding their musical footing.

“If it wasn’t for Tokyo Rose a lot of these indie rock, punk and Goth bands wouldn’t exist,” Stagner says. “This place helped them get a name for themselves and kind of work out the kinks. They could make mistakes here and then go out on the road to bigger markets.”

Stagner says his now-defunct punk combo the Counselors, like many other bands, had their first show—and many subsequent ones—at Tokyo Rose. “You finally get comfortable here and you go other places, and there’s just no other place like this,” he says. “Everyplace else you play is crappy little sports bars. Then you come back here and you’re like, this place is insanely hospitable.”

Bella Morte, whose Goth stylings are now supporting national tours and gaining a European audience, also built up their confidence and reputation through repeated Tokyo Rose appearances after forming in 1996. Gopal Metro, an original member, says Miura was an early champion of Bella Morte.

“When we started out, there wasn’t a place to play, and we were doing something that was not respected at all,” Metro says. “The Goth scene in Charlottesville didn’t exist. Atsushi approached us and said ‘I really want you guys here.’ Without him, the Charlottesville underground would be incredibly crippled.”

We’re only in it for the money
Clearly the leadership of a dedicated few can lead to a cohesive and supportive environment, as the punk, jazz and acoustic scenes in Charlottesville show. The City’s relatively low-key electronica scene, for example, may well be explained by the fact that, at the moment, no one person is truly central to that genre.

For some, a defining characteristic of a true musical “pillar” is volunteerism. But if that were accurate, there’d be no room for mention of the very popular jam band genre, which centers around acts like Lake Trout and Soulive, mostly showcased in upscale Starr Hill. The scene has musical ties to Dave Matthews Band and financial ties to DMB manager Coran Capshaw, whose empire includes Starr Hill as well as locally based, online music merchandiser Musictoday and Red Light management. In some ways, that makes jam band music a local phenomenon and Capshaw a pillar of the jam band scene. Yet Nye, who also worked for Musictoday, says the scene has a very different vibe than others without big-money backing.

“I think it’s cool what [Capshaw] has done with Starr Hill in the sense that there’s bigger acts coming to Charlottesville,” she says, adding that the club fills a void left by the demise of Trax. “But I hate that place. You just get the feeling that it’s so for-profit.”

Learning by example
Capshaw lets his money do the talking, eschewing personal visibility in the community. Not so John D’earth, the jazz trumpeter who is eminently easy to locate. Every Thursday at Miller’s, the Thompson D’earth band upholds a weekly tradition at least a dozen years old. The way D’earth describes this phenomenon fits with his calling as a teacher: “The Miller’s gig and the UVA gig are sort of dynamic centers where people can come in and learn things and participate,” he says.

D’earth’s “UVA gig” is directing the UVA Jazz Ensemble, as well as teaching improvisation and trumpet. Matt Kunz, a UVA senior whose second major is music, says D’earth is an inspiring teacher.

“He’s a brilliant guy,” Kunz says. “He’s so eloquent, and he teaches you the philosophy of music so well. It’s such an asset to have him here.”

D’earth is clearly passionate about working with students—inspiring them to improvise, to compose, to experiment. He remembers challenging a classical cello player to improvise a duet with him on the spot. The student was terrified, but D’earth guided him into a successful improvisation.

“It had nothing to do with me,” he says. “But what a thrill to see this guy go from zero to 60 in two seconds.”

D’earth says he wants students to take ownership of their own musical development, rather than simply imitate the masters. “What about putting the means of production in the hands of the workers?” he says. “You have to see yourself as the creative agent if you want to do creative work.”

D’earth has been able to integrate his role as teacher with his notable performance career in many ways, from bringing jazz greats to UVA to inviting students to sit in with his various bands (including the Freebridge Quintet and the Charlottesville Swing Orchestra). He points to a great tradition of teaching in jazz: “You’re a young player who’s promising, you get gigs from the older players. The amount of information and sheer generosity of these older people—this is true all through the history of this music.”

Kunz calls D’earth “a second father to me”, but D’earth says the relationship is reciprocal. “I’m just as enriched as he is, even more so sometimes,” he says.

They both agree that the atmosphere in the UVA jazz department is one of openness. “There’s no competition,” Kunz says. “Everyone learns from everybody.”

D’earth credits his colleagues with fostering an environment on and off Grounds that makes young players want to stay. Jamal Millner, a former student, has played guitar on some of D’earth’s recordings and tours and records with blues great Corey Harris.

“The jazz scene just seems to get better and better,” D’earth says. “It’s been invaded by some really obsessed people— like myself, like my wife Dawn Thompson, like Robert Jospé, Jeff Decker, Pete Spaar. We’re obsessed. We want to play.”

A: That’s a pretty sharp question, Needling (sorry, Ace couldn’t resist). But seriously. Ritualistic piercing has been a part of the “body modification” menu since at least 1979, when Fakir Musafar, known in some circles as the “father of the modern primitive movement,” presented his personal piercing work at the first International Tattoo Convention. On his Web site at www.bodyplay.com (featuring lots of…interesting pictures), Musafar explains that he had been practicing his hobby of “body play” for decades, an act his “inner spirit revealed to him as a valid but non-sanctioned way to reach the spirit through the body.”
    That’s the crux of ritualistic piercing: It’s an approach that involves the spirit and mind just as much as the body part about to be spiked. If that definition seems nebulous, that’s because it is. According to Lyons Hardy, a nursing student at Virginia Commonwealth University, sometimes-Charlottesville resident and body piercer who studied under Musafar through his San Francisco-based courses, ritualistic piercing is by its nature a very fluid, personal practice.
    “A piercing that’s done as part of a ritual is being used to symbolize or influence something in the [piercee’s] life. It’s intended to serve a specific purpose for them, and there’s a conscious intent by the piercer and person being pierced to meet that goal,” Hardy says. For example, Hardy performed a ritualistic piercing for a young woman whose father had recently died. She wanted to get her nipples pierced to help relieve some of the feelings surrounding her loss, and move forward. After the piercing the client experienced strong emotional reactions, from laughing to crying.
    Although those kind of reactions can happen following more conventional, non-ritualistic piercings, they are the intended results of ritualistic piercings. “Piercing affects people’s energy fields, so there can be changes made to push things in a certain direction,” Hardy says.
    Any piercing can be performed ritualistically, Hardy says, from earrings to navel piercings to more unwholesome holes. The only difference is the approach, which varies greatly from person to person and piercer to piercer (one Internet diary of a ritualistic piercer details his regime of fasting and meditation prior to having his nape pierced).
    Hardy prices ritualistic piercing the same as more traditional piercings ($35 on average for a piercing above the neck, for instance, and $45-60 for anything from the neck down). She says she doesn’t know of anyone else in Charlottesville who performs ritualistic piercings (and Ace couldn’t find any others, either) and that demand hasn’t been high for the practice, but she does the deed part-time on weekends at Acme Tattoo, 9 Elliewood Ave.

When Joy Johnson moved into Westhaven, the City expected public housing residents to follow the rules, not help make them. With little else besides willpower and her own commanding voice, she has given residents unprecedented influence in the notoriously raucous world of Charlottesville housing politics. As an activist, Johnson has relished her role in the mix, but as a mother, she is ambivalent about the challenges her family has faced as a result.

Charlottesville’s City Councilors, like most politicians, usually conceal their emotions. Aware that TV cameras and an audience are looking on, the Councilors sometimes can be seen struggling to suppress eye rolls when they hear something they regard as rubbish. Joy Johnson does not cultivate that skill.
    On May 5, she stood in the back of City Council chambers, her arms folded across a red flowered dress, glaring at the five Councilors and City Planner Satyendra Huja. The official faces were stoic as Prospect Avenue resident Yvonne Shackleford commented on the City’s plan to purchase, refurbish and resell rental homes on the 700 block of her street. Shackleford wondered why, when Council says it welcomes citizen participation, no one bothered to tell Prospect neighbors about the plan or the meeting. Also, Shackleford was angry about language in Huja’s report that implied it was renters on Prospect, like her, who sold drugs.
    “I am a 66-year-old female who continues to be employed,” Shackleford said, giving voice to the decades-old frustration felt by many of the City’s low-income residents. “I also have a 66-year-old husband who is disabled. Does this sound like someone who causes trouble in the community? Why should blacks continue to be uprooted to allow housing for the median income? Will this again be another Vinegar Hill?”
    Others had signed up to speak about Prospect at the beginning of the meeting, which is typically devoted to public comment, but Mayor Maurice Cox closed the public comment period when Shackleford finished.
    Johnson, like other housing activists and Prospect residents, had come to hear Council discuss Huja’s report. Between the public hearing and the Prospect report, however, three other agenda items consumed two-and-a-half hours. Johnson, a single mother who raised her four children in public housing, withstood the tedium of bond refinancing and cable TV franchise agreements, breaking her glare only to make funny faces at an infant a few rows ahead of her.
    Huja’s report outlined his plan to extend the City’s housing strategy to Prospect Avenue. The City partners with the Piedmont Housing Alliance, a non-profit funded largely by anonymous “interested parties,” according to the report. The City and PHA buy homes in poor neighborhoods, evict the renters who live there, then refurbish the homes for resale to middle-income homebuyers. Council unanimously approved the plan for Prospect’s 700 block.
    “That was some bull,” Johnson said after the meeting. “Maurice knew people were there to hear about Prospect. He could have moved it up on the agenda…he’s done it before, with stuff he likes.”
    When City Council talks about its “housing strategy,” Johnson says, many people still think of its first such strategy––the bulldozing in the 1970s of black-owned homes and businesses to make room for commercial development in a neighborhood known as Vinegar Hill. When PHA moves into black neighborhoods, Johnson sees the same old racist agenda.
    “One thing I’ve learned is that the situation doesn’t change,” she says. “Who is it that they want out of Charlottesville? Poor people.”
    Johnson has spent the past 20 years fighting “them” in what she casts as the neverending struggle between the poor and the powerful. With no weapons at her disposal except her own voice and a will to learn the terms of battle, she’s given low-income residents a significant influence in City Hall. In the political arena, Johnson has been successful drawing lines between “us” and “them” and attacking the enemy with the full force of her giant personality.

But the struggles of single motherhood have been harder to vanquish. Indeed, Johnson’s recent challenges as a parent, played out in daily newspaper headlines and meeting rooms, have earned her as much notice as her advocacy work ever did.

Like water, Joy Johnson’s voice expands to fit the room. Her voice can be soft and punctuated by her distinctive chuckle, or it can deliver unmistakable anger and the occasional expletive. Her speech is still spiced with the Jamaican accent of her homeland.
    When Johnson was very young, her mother left the island for New York City. Johnson divided her time between grandparents, living sometimes in the Jamaican countryside and sometimes in a Kingston tenement. To this day, she hates cold weather and refuses to drink coffee because she picked so many beans in her youth. But her fondness for tenement life never subsided.
    “I didn’t appreciate it then, but when I grew up there were always family members around,” she says. “There was no such thing as living in a neighborhood by yourself. I think that’s why I have a strong connection to public housing. That’s where my roots are.”
    Johnson’s first experience with racism’s “us” and “them” came when she moved to the United States at 13. She stayed briefly with her mother in New York before moving to Charlottesville to live with her aunt, Ruby White. “New York was O.K., but Charlottesville was the pits,” she says, recalling her reaction to the town’s racial segregation.
Somehow her aunt maintained a positive outlook—and inspired her niece with that attitude. Johnson still gets teary thinking of White. “Aunt Ruby was my rock,” she says. “Her gift was seeing the good in everybody. I wish I could be that way, but I’m not there yet.”
    Johnson dropped out of high school during her junior year (she later earned a G.E.D.) She trained as a nurse’s aid in 1977, when, at 19, she became pregnant with her first child, a boy she named Adrian. Three years later, she had twins, a boy, Jamie, and a girl, Janie. Another daughter, Eva, was born in 1983. That year, Johnson moved into the Westhaven public housing complex on Hardy Drive.
    “If there was a statistic, I was in it,” she says. “Poor, black, single mother. I was in an abusive relationship.”
    Yet Johnson didn’t behave like a statistic. When the City’s Housing Authority raised its deposit requirement to $100, it asked longtime residents––some who had paid deposits of as little as $15––to pony up the difference. Johnson saw this as unfair to her neighbors, so she joined the Westhaven Tenants Association and successfully fought the Authority’s attempt to collect back deposits.
    At about the same time—the mid-1980s—UVA and the City started talking about “redevelopment” after a UVA professor was killed in the 10th and Page neighborhood adjoining Westhaven. Many neighborhood residents feared UVA would initiate a second Vinegar Hill by wiping out low-income neighborhoods to build a basketball arena in central Charlottesville.
    “It was a real fear,” says Jay King, president of the Charlottesville Foundation of Neighborhood Associations. The group’s goal at that time was to organize neighborhood associations against the mighty UVA and persuade City Council to direct Federal money into neighborhood improvement instead of commercial development. Joy Johnson became the group’s vice president.
    “We wanted a network that wasn’t Democrat or Republican, that was committed to the collective interests of the neighborhoods,” says King. “Joy was a major leader in that.”
    Johnson’s political education took a leap forward around 1990. Thirteen-year-old Adrian was extremely bright but doing poorly in school, she says. Rick Turner and William Harris, black UVA professors known for their local activism, organized a Saturday school for black students.
    “At the time, 80 percent of youngsters in Westhaven had been labeled for special education,” says Harris, who now teaches at Jackson State University in Mississippi. “In a short time, we had them able to handle physics and abstract algebra with substantial improvements in reading and writing. They had been relegated to special education because of their address, not their abilities.”
    Harris noticed Adrian’s talent for numbers and drawing and encouraged the boy to pursue engineering. He also appreciated Johnson’s willingness to do what few others do––speak fearlessly to City leaders on behalf of low-income people.
“There’s no woman, black or white, in Charlottesville who has her courage,” Harris says.
    Johnson was earning a reputation as a tough and effective advocate for poor people. “I learned that if you go to the meeting, you have to speak out,” she says. “If you don’t say anything, then you’re just a quota.”

The Monticello Area Community Action Agency (MACCA) sent her to national conferences where she learned about poverty issues in the company of other activists. On her own, she religiously studied the Federal manual on public housing published by the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
    Johnson was getting a rep around Westhaven, too. Her daughter Eva remembers that even classmates knew of her mother. “If kids were teasing me or whatever,” says Eva, “then others would say, ‘You better watch out, her mom is Joy Johnson.’”
    Johnson stumbled across an age-old principle of rising celebrity––your own people turn on you first. Some public housing residents began to see Johnson as a self-promoter with friends in high places.
“They started to see me as the Housing Authority, not as a resident,” Johnson says.
    Never one to shy away from a fight, Johnson met these challenges with characteristic fervor. Once, in a political argument with another Westhaven resident, Johnson threw a bottle at the woman’s car. The outburst earned her a stint at court-ordered community service.
    “That was dumb, dumb dumb,” says Harris. In what would become a familiar scenario, Johnson’s opponents used the occasion to criticize, while her supporters defended her.
    Her growing activism and self-sufficiency was, ironically, taking a toll on her personal life at about that time. Partly in response to burgeoning awareness of the conditions affecting Charlottesville’s poor—awareness that Johnson fomented—UVA in the early ’90s initiated a program offering City residents jobs at the Medical Center. Johnson worked nights in the records office, which left her days free to volunteer for community work. Almost simultaneously, Adrian and Jamie were becoming rebellious teenagers.
    “That’s when I lost control of my sons,” she says.

Charlottesville’s political class is fond of saying that democracy is in the hands of “whoever is in the room” for the debate. Johnson became a familiar figure in the room, often chastising a City Councilor or waving a dog-eared copy of public housing regulations at a Housing Authority commissioner. What she discovered, she says, is that while City leaders call for public participation in government, they’re not always comfortable when poor people challenge the status quo.
    “I was raw,” says Johnson. “If there was a curse word in there, it would come out. I’m still raw, but I do my homework now.”
    Johnson was earning reputation in City Hall as a formidable and knowledgeable activist. When Alex Gulotta arrived in Charlottesville to direct the Legal Aid Society in 1994, he says, Joy Johnson was on the top of his “people-to-meet” list: “At the time she was the most visible and vocal advocate for low-income housing in the community.”

At that time, each of eight public housing sites in Charlottesville had its own tenants’ association, and Gulotta says, the Housing Authority knew how to play one site against the other. The Authority would tell Westhaven, for instance, that there was no money to fix the sidewalk because South First Street just had received a new playground.

“Joy could see the structure pitted one low-income community against another,” Gulotta says. “She knew the solution was to connect people in their common interests. It was crystal clear to everyone that she was right, but it didn’t happen until she put energy into it.”

In 1998 Johnson organized the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR) with the goal of empowering low-income residents to protect and improve their communities through collective action. PHAR brought a resident’s perspective to a Housing Authority accustomed to making policy without consulting the very people who would have to live with it.

Now PHAR members help new public housing residents understand their lease agreements, survey residents to learn about their concerns and lobbies City Council on affordable housing and other low-income issues. PHAR developed a program to hire public housing residents as interns, training them in community activism. One of the graduates includes Johnson’s daughter Janie.

“It’s one of the more successful organizing tools I’ve ever seen,” Gulotta says.

Last year, PHAR received a $100,000 grant from HUD to partner with Piedmont Virginia Community College to create a program called Connecting People to Jobs. It’s designed to move public housing residents into higher-wage jobs by connecting them with job training, education and support services.

“I think PHAR has really shaped the way the City treats low-income people,” Gulotta says. “Now there’s not a substantial Housing Authority policy residents don’t have a say on, because they’ve been able to demand it through PHAR. That’s definitely a product of Joy Johnson’s vision.”

PHAR became the megaphone allowing Johnson to make an even louder ruckus in housing politics. While the organization helped inject the views of the poor into City politics, PHAR was not without its own internal strife. In April 2002, a mediation group surveyed public housing residents as well as PHAR and Housing Authority employees. Many of the respondents said they perceived PHAR as too “strident, confrontational and reactive,” in the words of the resulting report, and that its “leadership is suffering due to personal problems and internal turmoil.”

Indeed, there has been a high turnover rate among PHAR employees. Current and former PHAR staff, as well as Executive Director Audrey Oliver, would not comment on whether Johnson’s personality has contributed to PHAR’s internal problems.

“We don’t always agree,” says Oliver, a childhood friend of Johnson’s. “But Joy is always there for me, when I get in a bind.” In 2000, Oliver was elected to chair the board of the Charlottesville Housing and Redevelopment Authority. She credits Johnson with getting her involved in politics.

“She said she’d always be there for me,” Oliver says, “and if we didn’t have that agreement, I wouldn’t have taken that seat.”

In November 2001, police arrested Johnson’s eldest child, Adrian, after he twice sold crack in the presence of an undercover witness four months earlier.
Then, last June 28, officers from the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force (JADE) executed a Federal search warrant on Johnson’s Westhaven apartment. The warrant was based on tips from informants that 21-year-old Jamie was selling crack cocaine and in possession of an illegal gun. Agents recovered a .25-caliber Beretta handgun and crack cocaine from Jamie’s room. At that time, both Adrian and Jamie had been banned from Westhaven for prior offenses.
    Police conducted a second raid on Johnson’s apartment on August 7. Officers found Adrian and Jamie again at the apartment this time with marijuana and fake cocaine.
    After the arrest, the Housing Authority initiated eviction proceedings against Johnson, her two daughters and granddaughter who all lived together at 842 Hardy Dr. PHAR’s lawyer, Legal Aid attorney Claire Curry, helped Johnson battle the eviction proceeding. Through the course of the high-profile drama, the Housing Authority’s “one strike and you’re out” policy came under scrutiny. Johnson had supported the policy as a Board member in 1999.
    The heart of Johnson’s argument against eviction was another Housing Authority policy that requires the Authority, once it begins eviction proceedings, to notify residents that the proceedings remain ongoing every time the resident pays rent.
Yet again, Johnson became a polarizing figure. Her detractors, including many in public housing, said she should be evicted because many other residents had been evicted under similar or exact circumstances. Her supporters, however, believed Johnson had been targeted because of her high-profile activism. The Housing Authority dismissed Johnson’s case on a technicality, letting her and what remains of her family keep their residence. But that positive outcome was not without a price. Johnson was eventually forced off the Housing Authority board.

And Johnson’s case leaves a bitter—and familiar—taste in the mouths of those who suspect the powers-that-be don’t like a loud-mouthed black woman calling them to task.
    “I believe it was political retribution,” says Harris. “No person should get away with violation of the law, but it would take a perfect fool or a racist to think that was the only drug-related criminal activity going on in Westhaven at the time.”
    Ed Wayland, former director of Legal Aid, doesn’t buy the conspiracy theory. “It would be uncharacteristically effective of the Housing Authority,” he says.
“Luck, chance and incompetence are much more common ways for things to happen than orchestrated conspiracy.”
    Gulotta says he has no evidence that Housing Authority officials tipped off JADE about the presence of Johnson’s banned sons. Still, he allows that Johnson was a being watched carefully by the Authority.
    “I interviewed an ex-employee of the Housing Authority who said that once she caught Joy in a violation and brought it to [then director] Del Harvey saying ‘Have I got a present for you.’ That speaks to the mentality around there,” he says. Harvey declined to comment for this article.

On Tuesday, May 6, Johnson was sitting in her apartment mulling her prospects as an activist and mother with an interviewer. She had just spent the morning working in the Westhaven computer lab and was eating lunch before going to the Westhaven nursing clinic, which she helped keep open after UVA pulled its support three years ago. Her daughter Janie was leaving for a PVCC class with an armload of books. Her granddaughter, 2-year-old Ajayla, scampered down the stairs in her underpants as her mother, Eva, chased behind.
    Johnson’s wall is covered with pictures of her family––one of her favorites is a large double portrait of Jamie and Adrian. She muses on the personal cost of her activism. While in 20 years her work has brought new opportunities for political involvement for low-income people in Charlottesville, it has taken a high personal toll on Johnson herself. Maybe the activism took up time she could have used to finally get out of public housing; maybe if she hadn’t worked so hard for others, her sons wouldn’t be in jail.
    “Looking back on it, I’m not sorry that I did it,” she says, in an uncharacteristically quiet tone. “I didn’t see it as taking away from them. I saw it as doing the right thing. If I could do it over again, though, I’d find a way to get a handle on that peer pressure. It whipped my behind.”
    Eva says she no longer discourages her mother from attending meetings and speaking to City Council.
“I realize that if you’re not paying attention, if you’re not getting heard, then nobody will know you’re out there,” she says. “If she hadn’t been going though all that, we might be out on the streets right now.”
    Public housing has been Johnson’s life and source of community for the past two decades. But she says she’d rather live quietly with her family now.
“If I could find something I could afford, I’d probably go away” she says, “and the City would never hear from me again.”

She didn’t appreciate Jamaican tenement life as a child, Johnson says, but now she realizes “there were always family members around. There was no such thing as living in a neighborhood by yourself. I think that’s why I have a strong connection to public housing. That’s where my roots are.”

“If there was a statistic, I was in it,” Johnson says of her early years at Westhaven. “Poor, black, single mother.”

“There’s no woman, black or white, in Charlottesville who has her courage,” says one admirer.

“I think PHAR has really shaped the way the City treats low-income people,” Legal Aid’s Gulotta says. “Now there’s not a substantial Housing Authority policy residents don’t have a say on. That’s definitely a product of Joy Johnson’s vision.”

Hold on to your seats—apparently, America is in a library-related crisis. “File Not Found,” a September 2006 Atlantic Monthly article, elaborates on the “digital preservation problem,” an issue that spans from the Library of Congress all the way to the UVA Library System. Basically, since we stopped storing information on stone tablets and papyrus scrolls, changing technology has made it pretty darn hard to keep from losing data.
“The most stable format is paper,” says Bradley Daigle, head of rare materials digital services for UVA Library System. “We have examples of paper that go back a thousand years, or at least pretty close.”
Libraries are nonetheless moving toward digital preservation. Though it may seem easy (and wise) to keep a digital backup of everything, Daigle says it’s much more complicated: “We have image files that are a gigabyte in size,” too large to simply put copies of every book on CD-ROM.
So, UVA is currently focusing just on its “special” collections—things like rare books or Jefferson’s letters. “We’re trying to take the long view for managing and being good stewards of these materials. It’s fabulously expensive to do digital preservation.” Daigle adds, “It doesn’t make sense to digitize our collections for the sake of digitizing.” UVA has spent $2 million in the past two years on digitizing rare collections, says Charlotte Morford, library spokesperson.
Besides costs and file size, part of the “digital preservation problem” is that changing technology is constantly challenging the formats of stored data. If you don’t believe it, just try sticking a floppy disc in a brand new laptop.
To combat this, Daigle says, UVA is diligent about managing its formats. “Each form of media has a certain refresh rate, so for DVDs, if they say it’s good for five years, we would generally try to refresh around three years. The main strategy we have is to control the different types of digital formats that come in.” All of UVA library’s digital files are currently stored in TIFF format, the image medium that packs the most information for its file size, Daigle says.
Safeguarding the images once they’re created and stored is also fairly elaborate. One UVA server is divided among three locations that are “not even remotely near each other,” Daigle says. “Something pretty dramatic would have to happen to Charlottesville for that to be a problem.”