Inspired by the poetry of Maya Angelou at a young age, Staunton artist Lady Taij delivers thought-provoking, silky rhymes that detail a rarely observed female perspective on a scene filled with “sex, drugs and rap.” Her edgy lyrics float over an infectious R&B accompaniment and confident social commentary.
Thursday 2/18. $5-8, 8pm. The Ante Room, 219 W. Water St., 284-8561.
The commercial real estate website Loopnet.com lists 200 E. Water St. for sale for $53 million as City Council went behind closed doors February 16 to discuss with counsel acquisition or conveyance of its parking spaces in the Water Street Garage.
Just a coincidence, according to Charlottesville Parking Center owner Mark Brown, who says his real estate agent routinely puts his properties on Loopnet to generate contacts from out-of-towners looking to buy property in Charlottesville. The $53 million listing is “just a teaser,” says Brown.
The parking garage is on City Council’s agenda, says Brown, because of its “very complicated structure” in which the city owns 629 spaces in the garage and CPC owns 390, as well as the ground underneath. “It is as convoluted as humanly possible,” says Brown. “The city and I are looking at a way to simplify. Either they buy it or I buy it.”
And those wondering about another listing on Loopnet, the $7 million property near West Main and Ridge Street, should know that’s the ice park, another Brown property that’s another teaser.
“The only thing I’m actively trying to sell is the Whiskey Jar building,” he says.
Jason Huber and Jordan Kelley burst out of a tiered cake wearing cowboy hats. Kelley pops and pours champagne. Both men strip down to nothing save metallic underwear, hats and boots.
So begins the NSFW video for “Doses and Mimosas,” the Nashville-based electro-pop band Cherub’s breakout 2012 hit. As the video plays on, it’s clear the song’s a party culture send-up—a Southern “Sexy and I Know It” with love handles.
But Huber and Kelley aren’t looking to be a joke. Two years after Year of the Caprese put them on the map as one of Music City’s few non-country success stories, they’re touring as a four-piece band while working on a new album that will feature more sophisticated instrumentation.
“A lot of the lyrics are tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a fine line,” Huber says. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the music seriously. From the live show, we want people to take that away.”
The current tour includes a two-night engagement at the Jefferson Theater on February 17 and 18. The 48-hour party stands to give the boys a chance to see the city (one they’ve visited before with relish), as well as get a little more creative with the set list.
“We can play things we might not normally play,” Kelley says. “There’ll be a couple of songs we’ll play both nights for the people that can only come one night. But we’ll make it fun for everybody that comes both nights. It’ll be more fun for us too.”
The set list will include a good deal of the duo’s serious songs along with its party anthems, according to Kelley. And it’ll feature Jordan Bartlett, a relative newcomer to the band, on guitar, and drummer Nick Curtis, who has mixed, produced and mastered all of Cherub’s EPs and full-lengths.
The more serious approach to the live show—despite what the lyrics and party atmosphere might indicate—means Cherub takes the stage sober every night, Huber and Kelley say. And it means bringing a rock-band sensibility to the performance that wasn’t there in the past. They’re “slowly getting away from EDM,” as Kelley puts it.
“I’ve actually been able to do less on stage because the other Jordan plays guitar,” he says. “I’m able to take the mic off the stand, kind of walk to each side of the stage and be more of a frontman. Everybody is doing a whole bunch of shit on stage.”
A more serious and collaborative approach to songwriting has taken center stage for Cherub, as well.
“Taking it from the studio, to the song, to making the songs live, it involves everyone equally,” Huber says. “It’s one of those things where everyone does their part—on an album and on stage.”
Bringing live instruments into the fold is nothing new for electronic dance bands. The lines between rock, pop and EDM become more blurred every day. But it certainly points to an evolution in Cherub’s sound, which the duo’s been refining since meeting at Murfreesboro’s Middle Tennessee State University in 2010.
Kelley, originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, and North Carolina-native Huber moved to Nashville soon after they started the band. “The first couple of years touring around as a duo, that started with the two of us in a personal car,” says Kelley. “It’s to the point that we have a bus full of crew members. We couldn’t do it without the crew behind us.”
Touring has taken Cherub across the country and found the musicians success in Europe, where EDM fans are typically surprised to hear electro-pop coming out of Nash-
ville. Audiences tend to skew younger, Huber and Kelley admit, but as they’ve brought in more live instruments and started to look more like a traditional stage act, the demographic has grown— “people up to 60 years old” come to the shows, Huber insists.
It’s a testament to how genres have bent in recent years, with even the most traditional rock fans becoming accustomed to seeing synthesizers and keyboards.
“Even though country music is the dominant genre Nashville is most known for, it has so many other genres, and we are really stoked on this tour,” Huber says.
He points to one of the tour openers, Nashville-based rapper Mike Floss. “You wouldn’t expect his style of music,” says Huber. “It’s cool he’s going on the road and helping broaden people’s perspective.”
New York-based synth-pop artist Gibbz rounds out the bill.
Kelley and Huber are blunt about when their next album will drop. They have no idea. They’ve just played the first few cuts for their record company, Columbia, and are waiting on the initial feedback while they keep humping for Caprese.
“There’s no breaking news as of yet,” Huber says. “We haven’t even named the thing.”
Kelley and Huber both have a laugh when they mention how slow they’ve been to title the record. There’s a joke in there somewhere. But it certainly ain’t on them.
Have a listen to Cherub, here.
The Jefferson Theater
February 17 and 18
February 16 marked crossover, when each house in the General Assembly sends its bills to the other body.
From the House of Delegates floor last week, House Minority Leader David Toscano chastised legislators who continue to try to curtail gay and transgender rights, saying such moves are bad for business, according to radio station WINA.
Meanwhile, the Senate passed 20-19 its “Kim Davis” bill February 12, which allows religious organizations and affiliated businesses to refuse to marry same-sex couples or provide them a wedding cake if doing so would violate a “sincerely held religious belief.”
The House of Delegates passed a bill that would prohibit state agencies from punishing discrimination against same-sex couples or those who are transgender, and a last-minute addition made it okay to discriminate against those who are having affairs, the Washington Post reports. Supporters say the bills protect religious freedom; critics say they protect discrimination.
One way the General Assembly escapes public scrutiny is the committee and subcommittee unrecorded voice vote, which kills legislation without anyone’s fingerprints—or name—attached. Delegate Ben Cline’s bill to change that, not surprisingly, died in committee with no documentation on how members voted.
UVA faculty salaries, an annual Cavalier Daily feature, may be in danger, thanks to a Senate bill that would remove the names of public employees—and the fun—from salary database requests. Area state senators Creigh Deeds and Bryce Reeves voted for the measure.
Delegate Rob Bell’s charter school constitutional amendment, which must pass both houses, passed the House 50-48 on February 15, but likely will be torpedoed by the Senate, which killed its version of the amendment.
And a bright note for leadfoots: The Senate passed a bill that ups the speed at which reckless driving charges kick in from 81mph to 85mph, giving a little more leeway to speeders in a 70mph zone.
In his recollections, Israel Gillette, born into slavery on the Monticello plantation in 1800, recalled a striking conversation in 1824 between his master, Thomas Jefferson, and the visiting Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette, who had served in the Revolutionary War as an extremely young American major general, was visiting the property with his son, George Washington Lafayette.
Although Gillette had labored as both a household and personal servant, on this occasion he was serving as a postilion, riding one of the horses pulling his owner’s open-top carriage. Seated inside within easy earshot were Lafayette—whom Gillette called a “venerable patriot”—his son and the 81- year-old Jefferson (fewer than two years away from the grave).
Perhaps the jet-black vehicle was rolling along one of Monticello Mountain’s roundabouts, the former president and his guests enjoying the numerous breathtaking views. But when Lafayette started talking about “the condition of the colored people—the slaves,” Gillette’s ears eagerly took in every word.
“[T]he slaves ought to be free,” the Frenchman bluntly told Jefferson. “No man could rightfully hold ownership in his brother man.” He said that he’d freely “given his best services to and spent his money [on] behalf of the Americans . . . because he felt that they were fighting for a great and noble principle—the freedom of mankind.” Yet here they were, 41 years after the end of the revolution, and “instead of all being free, a portion were [still] held in bondage.” As Gillette remembered, this notion “seemed to grieve [Lafayette’s] noble heart.”
The sickeningly horrible institution of slavery was a blight on our nation until the Civil War ended it in 1865 at the cost of 750,000 American lives. Despite the passage of 150 years, however, and despite the country’s best attempts at education, the interpretation of slavery at historic sites—the presentation of the lives of those enslaved—is still controversial, emotionally charged. At some historic properties, the perceived emotional comfort of the visitors, and that of the guide staff itself, preclude the accurate retelling of the awful conditions under which slaves toiled and lived. Here in central Virginia, however—at the plantations owned by Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe—slavery interpretation is thriving. Indeed, it’s expanding.
“Slavery is an important part of the American story,” says Katherine “Kat” Imhoff, president of the Montpelier Foundation, the organization that operates Montpelier, the Orange County home of our fourth president, Madison. After his presidency from 1809 to 1817, he lived out his remaining 19 years at Montpelier.
“Without understanding the role of slavery in the founding era,” says Imhoff, “you can’t understand what happened afterward. …It’s such a painful subject for all Americans that we’ve tended to turn away from it, to gloss over it. I really believe strongly that that’s a disservice to all of us. As the leader of a cultural institution dedicated to telling a complete, accurate and human story about our country, I see the improved interpretation of slavery as crucial.”
Standing in front of Montpelier on an overcast day, guide Mike Dickens delivers a slavery tour.
“Dolley’s favorite slave, a lady’s maid, was named Sukey,” says Dickens. “She was raised here in slavery and had 10 children. In 1819 Dolley wrote that Sukey had committed so many depredations against the house—by this Dolley meant stealing food, objects, pins and needles, etc.—that as punishment she sent her to Black Run, another plantation down the road. Now, this was a pretty serious punishment, being cast out of the big house into the common labor pool, no longer having ‘most favored’ status.” But then Dolley later wrote that replacing Sukey was too difficult, and she decided to bring her back “lest I [have to] labor myself.”
Slavery interpretation began at the Madisons’ home right after the Montpelier Foundation was formed in 1999, explains Vice President for Museum Programs Elizabeth Chew. (Montpelier had been open to the public earlier, but slavery there was not emphasized.)
“Soon thereafter,” she says, “Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (a slavery scholar) came here with the idea of doing research and learning what there was to learn about this slave community.” From this effort blossomed a better understanding of the Madisons’ enslaved African-Americans. Taylor has since left Montpelier—she subsequently published
A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons and was interviewed by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show”—but Chew’s staff continues searching for more Montpelier slave narratives. In central Virginia they’ve found what they call a descendant community—direct descendants of people owned by Madison still living nearby.
Just down the hill from the visitor center, in a grove of poplars separated from the Madison family cemetery, lie the remains of at least 38 of Madison’s slaves. Although the one-half-acre burial ground boasts no headstones—slave graves were normally only marked with fieldstones—a recent photograph on the adjacent signage taken after a light snowfall clearly shows a grouping of perfectly aligned human-size depressions, the result of coffin deterioration. According to the reader-rail, these “graves were dug on an axis so that the eyes of the deceased faced the sunrise.” Because close to 200 slaves lived out their lives at Montpelier, this small cemetery is but one of many. Unfortunately, none of the inhabitants can be identified by name, but one may be Sawney, who in 1769 accompanied an 18-year-old Madison to the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Back at Montpelier, Sawney later supervised a work crew responsible for several hundred acres of tobacco. He was described as “the very picture of [Father] Time with his scythe.”
Sylvia Jennings
Montpelier is in the process of expanding its slavery interpretation in a big way. In November 2014, David M. Rubenstein—the co-founder of The Carlyle Group, a global private equity investment firm—announced he was giving Montpelier $10 million, $4 million of which was to go toward improving how the lives of Madison’s slaves are presented to the public. Imhoff says they’re now rapidly scaling up their work on the South Yard project, the reconstruction of six slave structures within a stone’s throw of the Madison mansion. One of these buildings, a 16′ by 32′ duplex for two slave families, already stands framed and roofed over, awaiting its siding.
Chew explains that, eventually, along a South Yard dirt row, “there’ll be two duplex dwellings at one end, a third dwelling perhaps not a duplex, and in between two smokehouses” and a kitchen building from an earlier period. And along with these reconstructed houses and outbuildings—and their interior furnishings—they’re going to interpret the swept-yard space in between, the area where a lot of living and working took place. It will suggest the way the South Yard functioned as the home of enslaved domestic workers. All of this is based on Montpelier’s ongoing archaeological investigations, digs that have revealed not only the exact sites of these structures, but also—based on nails and other hardware unearthed—how they were constructed.
“Madison was somewhat sensitive about the image of being a large slave owner,” says Dickens, “so the houses for those who worked in Madison’s home were better constructed and looked nicer than those of the enslaved field hands. These [South Yard] buildings had elevated, finished floors, glass windows, brick chimneys and siding instead of mud and log construction.”
“Starting in the spring of 2017,” says Imhoff, “we’ll have a permanent exhibition on slavery in the cellar level of the house. …By 2018, the work we’ve begun in the South Yard…will be open to the public. Between the two exhibitions, and in conversation with the ongoing research and oral history work we’re doing with the Montpelier descendant community, we believe we’ll have one of the best sites in the country to come face-to-face with the history of slavery in the founding era.”
Located in eastern Albemarle County, just six miles from downtown Charlottesville, Ash Lawn-Highland was the official residence of fifth president Monroe and his wife, Elizabeth, from 1799 to 1823. Monroe, who was our nation’s chief executive from 1817 to 1825, called the estate Highland. The historic property is now owned by the College of William & Mary, Monroe’s alma mater.
Executive Director Sara Bon-Harper says the interpretation of slavery is important to Highland, “because, like all the local presidential homes from this era, slave labor was integral to the construction, maintenance and life of the plantation.” Slave labor was the basis for the plantation’s financial well-being, too. “What we’ve tried to do,” she says, “is make sure that slavery is part of all the historical interpretation…” She says they not only touch upon the lives of Highland’s slaves, but also larger slavery-related topics such as Gabriel’s Rebellion and Monroe’s involvement in the American Colonization Society.
Monroe was governor of Virginia when, on August 30, 1800, he learned that slaves just outside of Richmond, led by Gabriel Prosser, were planning—that very night—to murder their masters, set fire to the city and arm themselves with weapons taken from the state penitentiary. The rebellion was aborted when a massive thunderstorm flooded the approaches to the Virginia capital. In the atmosphere of panic that ensued, Monroe reacted with a strong hand, posting militia units about the city, fortifying the prison compound and putting the captured slaves on trial. He pardoned six of them—writing Jefferson that it was “difficult to say whether mercy or severity is the better policy”—but eventually 35 of the insurrectionists were executed.
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 with the goal of sending free African-Americans to the African mainland—“colonizing” them. Southerners felt strongly that the presence of free blacks in the South threatened their slave-based society. In December 1816, Monroe was part of the committee that penned and adopted the organization’s constitution. The society raised money, and in 1822 began sending free blacks to the west coast of Africa to establish the colony that eventually grew into the nation of Liberia. In 1824 the capital, Christopolis, was renamed Monrovia after then-president Monroe.
Interpreting slavery at Highland is not new—it goes back to the 1980s. Most of the guide staff’s slave references back then, however, were to unnamed cooks and house servants. “In the mid-1980s,” says Bon-Harper, “Ash Lawn-Highland reconstructed the three-room slave quarters” in back of the house. “At that moment that was fairly cutting-edge, building a dwelling that was for enslaved people. It wasn’t universally accepted as a good thing to do, reminding people about a really bad period of our history.”
In the kitchen yard behind the Monroe home, Education Programs Manager Nancy Stetz stands before the whitewashed, 33.5′ by 16′ slave quarter. “This reconstruction,” she explains, “is based on a 1908 photograph of a building that stood right here. This would have been where the domestic slaves lived.” The elongated structure features three rooms, or bays, each intended for an entire slave family. Alongside it, standing apart, is the reconstructed plantation overseer’s house.
“We know from the 1810 census that Monroe had 49 slaves,” says Stetz. “One was a manservant named Roger. He and his wife had been separated at a sale; she’d been sold south to New Orleans. Apparently Roger beseeched Monroe, asking him, if the opportunity arose: ‘Would you sell me south?’ And Monroe ended up doing it. Now, Monroe benefited, he made a profit selling a manservant to a friend in New Orleans, but I’d love to know if Roger ever met his wife again.”
Like Montpelier, Highland is expanding its slavery interpretation. “We’re working to get transcriptions of Monroe’s letters available online,” says Bon-Harper. “Slavery pervades his letters, and if we could have access to more letters we’ll have a better understanding.” There’s also a new slavery tour at Highland, which Stetz organized, that premiered last year. “Similar to the current models in museum interpretation,” she explains, “it can be guided by the visitor—they can drop in and ask questions. You can go on the traditional house tour…or you can have an interaction with somebody outside [in front of the slave quarter] who knows all the details.”
“Monroe,” sighs Stetz, “has the irony of having the capital of Liberia named after him and yet none of his slaves went. …He wrote a letter at age 71 saying he was still making his mind up on the subject of slavery.”
On a “little mountain” overlooking Charlottesville from the east stands Jefferson’s neoclassical home. After serving as third president from 1801 to 1809, he retired to Monticello for his remaining 17 years. Jefferson’s troubling contradiction, of course, is that despite being the principal author of the Declaration of Independence—and penning its marvelous Enlightenment phrase, “All men are created equal,” he owned African-American slaves throughout his adult life.
Leslie Greene Bowman, president and chief executive of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the organization that owns and operates Monticello, concurs. “Jefferson gave the nation a vision for equality,” she says, “that neither he nor the nation realized in his lifetime. As one of the best documented, preserved and researched of the period’s plantations, Monticello has human stories to tell that poignantly express the paradox of slavery in an age of liberty.”
“We want to render the slaves’ lives as fully as possible because for so long they were invisible,” explains Manager of Special Programs David Ronka. “We know these people were fathers, sons, mothers, sisters and brothers. They had real lives that we can document. We’re not about facts and figures. …We tell the stories, because the power of storytelling is really unmatched.”
On Monticello’s second floor, Steve Light, manager of house tours, shows off the newly restored family bedrooms. One was used by Ann Marks, Jefferson’s widowed youngest sister. “In her later years,” he says, “an enslaved woman named Cila stayed by her side night and day caring for her.” A bedroll in the corner illustrates this fact. In another bedroom—one occupied by Jefferson’s granddaughters, Ellen, Cornelia and Virginia Randolph—clothes strewn across the floor highlight the white attitude that it was acceptable to make work for the house slaves, because otherwise, as noted Ellen, “they’ll be infallibly idle.” In the room next door, where a cradle and a small painted wagon reveal its use as a nursery, enslaved woman Priscilla Hemmings tended the white children until they were 8. She and her husband, John, lived nearby in Building T on Mulberry Row. (Other family members spelled the last name Hemings.)
Running for 1,000 feet alongside the main house, Mulberry Row, which Bowman calls Monticello’s “epicenter of slavery and plantation life,” now includes two reconstructed slave structures completed in 2015. Their letter designations—T and L—come from labels Jefferson used when drawing a map of Mulberry Row in 1796 for insurance purposes. (Of the 17 structures then extant, two remain: the stable and a building commonly called “the weaver’s cottage.” At present there are no plans to reconstruct more.)
“These buildings allow us to add another dimension to our tours,” says Ronka. “Instead of evoking stories from bare earth, now we can look into these cabins.”
Building T, the Hemmings’ cabin, measures 20.5′ by 12′ and features a large hearth, a sub-floor pit for storing produce and a sleeping loft above. Built to house a family of as many as eight, it’s sparsely furnished with a rope bed, a three-legged stool and a small table below the sliding-glass window.
“These were a step above the housing for the field slaves,” says Ronka. Work clothes and a straw hat hanging on hooks, dominoes, marbles and a broom leaning in a corner add life to the cramped interior.
One of Jefferson’s primary woodworkers, John Hemmings, was extremely talented. He built a number of siesta chairs—named Campeche after the Mexican state where the design originated—based solely on his master’s description. He also constructed a desk for Ellen Randolph, and he built the body of Jefferson’s open-top carriage.
A short distance away, Building L was used in the production of nails, and for the storage of nailrod (the strips of iron from which nails were made). It features a brick forge, a large bellows and a workbench topped with nailrod and various nailmaking tools. “Later,” says Ronka, “it was lodging for nail boys who worked next door in the main 87-foot-long nailery and blacksmith shop.” One of Mulberry Row’s light industrial shops, the nailery ran on the labor of 10- to 16-year-old enslaved boys, who could be heard pounding nailrod into nails from dawn to dusk.
Slavery interpretation at Monticello commenced in 1993. A major Mulberry Row archaeological dig a decade earlier had provided much insight into the lives of its enslaved community. So too did the Getting Word initiative, started in the same year, Monticello’s oral history outreach to the descendants of the 600-plus individuals Jefferson owned. Over the next 18 years, three groundbreaking books on slavery at Monticello were published by Cinder Stanton, Monticello’s senior research historian. And, in 1998, the results of the Jefferson DNA study performed by Dr. Eugene Foster were released. The study indicated a strong possibility that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, Sarah “Sally” Hemings’ youngest son. (Sally—an enslaved, mixed-race lady’s maid and seamstress—was an older sister to John Hemmings.)
The Hemings Family Tour is a recent addition to Monticello’s interpretation of slavery, and, according to Bowman, they’ve introduced “a mobile app to further reveal the landscape and lives of the enslaved.” The Hemings Family Tour presents daily slave life through the eyes of Monticello’s most famous, and best documented, slave family. And more is coming soon. “We plan to restore the south dependencies (one of Monticello’s two one-story wings) and interpret for the first time a room where curators think Sally Hemings lived,” Bowman says. “Archaeological research continues around the plantation, allowing us to engage our community with the artifacts and information we find.”
Driven by Gillette, the carriage containing Jefferson and Lafayette continued rolling across Monticello Mountain. After hearing the Frenchman boldly declare his ideas concerning emancipation, the slave anxiously awaited his owner’s response. “Mr. Jefferson replied that he thought the time would come when the slaves would be free,” wrote Gillette in his Monticello recollections, “but did not indicate when or in what manner they would get their freedom. He seemed to think that the time had not then arrived.” Despite the vagueness clouding Jefferson’s words, Gillette wrote that his statement sent the slave’s mind soaring with its promise of freedom—one day—and perhaps a fully equal seat at the American table.
At Jefferson’s Monticello, two tours focus specifically on slavery:
The Slavery at Monticello Tour is a guided 45-minute walking tour of Mulberry Row featuring the two newly reconstructed slave structures. It’s offered Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in February and Presidents’ Day at 11am and 1 pm. The weekends of March 5-6 and March 12-13 you can take the tour at 11am and 1pm. During peak visitation, March 19 through October 31, it’s offered every hour on the hour from 11am until 4pm. (It is included in the price of admission or a day pass: $9 children, $20-25 adults. Reservations for this tour are not required. Tours begin on Mulberry Row near the Hemmings cabin.)
The Hemings Family Tour is a two-hour small-group interactive tour that explores slave life in both the main house and along Mulberry Row—the industrial heart of Jefferson’s plantation—using the stories of seven members of the Hemings family. It’s offered Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in February and Presidents’ Day at 1:45pm. (Charge is $27, and the tour is not recommended for children under 12. For more information, go to monticello.org.)
At James and Dolley Madison’s Montpelier, the Slavery at Montpelier Tour is a 90-minute presentation about the historical establishment of slavery in America, the enslaved individuals who lived at Montpelier and James Madison’s personal struggle with the institution. It’s offered December 1 through February 29 on Sundays at 1pm. (Charge is $20 for adults, and it includes a tour of the mansion. For more information, go to montpelier.org.)
By next spring, Montpelier will have opened its cellar-level exhibition on slavery. And by 2018, all of the South Yard slave structures will be completed.
At James Monroe’s Ash Lawn-Highland, the Slavery at Highland Tour is offered on Saturdays, April through October. A completely interactive tour—one during which visitors can ask questions and direct the narrative—it will give visitors an in-depth understanding of slave life at Highland. (For more information, go to AshLawnHighland.org.)
“[T]he slaves ought to be free,” the Marquis de Lafayette told Thomas Jefferson. “No man could rightfully hold ownership in his brother man.”
But then Dolley Madison later wrote that replacing Sukey was too difficult, and she decided to bring her back “lest I [have to] labor myself.”
“Without understanding the role of slavery in the founding era, you can’t understand what happened afterward. …It’s such a painful subject for all Americans that we’ve tended to turn away from it, to gloss over it. I really believe strongly that that’s a disservice to all of us,” says Katherine Imhoff, president of the Montpelier Foundation
“In the mid-1980s, Ash Lawn-Highland reconstructed the three-room slave quarters” in back of the house. “At that moment that was fairly cutting-edge, building a dwelling that was for enslaved people. It wasn’t universally accepted as a good thing to do, reminding people about a really bad period of our history,” says Ash-Lawn Highland Executive Director Sara Bon-Harper
“We want to render the slaves’ lives as fully as possible because for so long they were invisible,” explains Monticello Manager of Special Programs David Ronka. “We know these people were fathers, sons, mothers, sisters and brothers. They had real lives that we can document. We’re not about facts and figures. …We tell the stories, because the power of storytelling is really unmatched.”
–Rick Britton
Local attorney Jeff Fogel filed three lawsuits February 11, accusing Albemarle County Police officer Andrew Holmes of unlawfully targeting African-American males in stops and intrusive searches.
One plaintiff, Rodney Hubbard, details a September 11, 2015, interaction with Holmes in which he was stopped in his black Denali driving north on Route 29 from Lynchburg. Officer Holmes insisted he smelled marijuana and ordered Hubbard out of the car and searched him, specifically reaching down the back of Hubbard’s pants and searching around the groin area, Hubbard says.
“It’s humiliating to be pulled over and basically you’re being accused of traveling with your mother with drugs in your car,” Hubbard says, adding that his mother, Savannah, was in the front seat of his car.
Holmes then handcuffed Hubbard and forced him into the back of the police car, head first. He searched the elder Hubbard’s purse and instructed her to wait in the back of the patrol car while he searched the Denali for several hours, ultimately finding no drugs, says Hubbard.
The officer then gave Hubbard a summons for driving with a suspended license and let him go.
Hubbard calls the experience “mentally tormenting” and says he still has “bad dreams” about it and feels uncomfortable around police officers.
Savannah Hubbard says black people shouldn’t be targeted by cops. “We are not all drug dealers or drug pushers or drug users,” she says. “We are hardworking people. We work for what we have.”
Leon Polk and UVA football player Malcolm Cook allege in their suit that Holmes ordered them out of Polk’s car at gunpoint last June, accusing the two of smoking marijuana and searching the car for several hours with no probable cause while they sat on a curb in the Kmart parking lot. When Holmes didn’t find anything illegal in the car, he ticketed Polk for not having a front license plate, excess window tinting and not having his registration, the lawsuit alleges.
In the case of plaintiffs Bianca Johnson and Delmar Canada, Holmes gave Canada a summons for driving with a suspended license in April 2014. He then obtained a search warrant for their home to look for the DMV’s suspension notification form, which was issued more than a year earlier, according to the suit, and showed up at their house with several other Albemarle police officers to search it on a Friday at midnight.
“It was totally unexpected and unnecessary to be woken out of your sleep and to look through your peephole and see three police officers,” says Johnson, who is the retail advertising manager at C-VILLE Weekly. “You know that you’re not a criminal and you’re not involved in any illegal activity and you’ve been asleep for a couple hours so what in the world could have taken place for police to be banging at your door at midnight?”
Johnson believes Holmes thought he was going to make a big bust when he saw her black fiancé driving a BMW. She says she feels unsafe in her own home, and adds, “Someone could just knock down the door at any time.”
After the officers raided their house, Johnson and Canada filed a complaint with the police department, but never learned if any disciplinary action had been taken. Albemarle police spokesperson Madeline Curott says she cannot comment on Holmes’ personnel record.
Fogel says the officers lacked probable cause to search the home for the “supposed paper.”
He met with other potential plaintiffs who were not willing to file suit against Holmes. “Many people are afraid to come forward,” he says. “They’re worried about retaliation.”
The day after his press conference, Fogel said 14 people called to say they had similar experiences with Holmes and he plans to interview each person before deciding how to proceed.
Holmes has been an officer with Albemarle police since August 2004. In 2011, he rear-ended a stopped car on Barracks Road. He was charged with reckless driving and convicted of improper driving.
The Albemarle County Police Department says in a statement it takes claims of alleged misconduct involving officers very seriously and the department “has well-established mechanisms in place to determine if there has been any violations of our policies and procedures.”
Fogel has subpoenaed the Albemarle Police Department to produce all of Holmes’ tickets, which include a person’s race, warrants, criminal complaints and search warrant affidavits over the last several years. His next step will be to analyze the documentation to see if he has a strong case against the officer, who is white.
View the complaints here:
Rodney Hubbard and Savannah Hubbard vs. Andrew Holmes
A new route proposed for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline February 12 will dodge sensitive areas in the George Washington and Monongahela national forests, but will impact about 249 additional landowners in Virginia and West Virginia.
The new route—which will go through Highland, Bath and Augusta counties in Virginia and Randolph and Pocahontas counties in West Virginia—will add about 30 miles to the $5 billion natural gas pipeline, which was originally slated to be 550 miles long, and reduce total mileage in national forests from 28.8 miles to 18.5 miles, Dominion spokesperson Aaron Ruby said in a press release.
“This new route would still cause dramatic forest fragmentation through some of the most high-quality forest habitat in our region,” says Ben Luckett, staff attorney with Appalachian Mountain Advocates. His organization notes that the new proposed route would cut through Fort Lewis, a historic site in Bath County, and still “slice a large and permanent clear-cut” through the George Washington and Monongahela forests.
“While we’re pleased Dominion has chosen not to ram this pipeline through sensitive habitat areas, it remains a wrecking ball for our climate,” Drew Gallagher, a field organizer with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said in a press release on the day of the announcement. “There’s only one sure way that Dominion can help protect a livable future for vulnerable species and all Virginians: by investing in truly clean energy solutions, not a dirty and dangerous pipeline.”
Brookville baker launches Arley Cakes and offers custom-order sweets
Despite growing up in a house full of family members who love to cook and bake, Arley Arrington admits she didn’t make her debut in the kitchen until she was a student at UVA. Now the owner of a new local baking company, Arley Cakes, Arrington, 26, splits her time between shifts at Brookville and all-nighters in her home kitchen coming up with new recipes, filling custom orders and rolling out baked sweets in bulk for local events. She started out making birthday cakes for her friends in college, and has since developed recipes for treats that taste good, look good and meet her standards of “real food.”
“I like to know what I’m eating, and that’s generally how I like to approach food,” Arrington says, adding that it’s all about moderation and balancing sweets with vegetables and other healthy food. “I don’t want, like, vegetable spread. I want butter.”
One of the first recipes she developed from scratch in her college apartment kitchen was a crumble apple pie, filled with fresh apples she and her friends picked together. Perhaps one of her most surprisingly successful experiments was a grape cobbler, based on a friend’s grandmother’s recipe that she embellished with muscadine grapes, sage, rosewater and rose sugar. Arrington doesn’t have the sweet tooth you might expect from a baker who churns out sweets every week, and she loves incorporating savory elements into her products, such as a rosemary buttercream she’s been playing with recently.
Her recent foray into the wedding industry opened up new avenues for creative baking, especially as more couples choose to get away from the traditional cakes.
“People are asking for a lot of dessert spreads, cookies, hand pies, whoopie pies. It’s fun, people are just getting desserts they actually like,” Arrington says. “Wedding planning can be so stressful, and I’m able to provide some wiggle room, like if people can’t afford a five-tier cake. It’s nice to try to make things a little less stressful.”
For now, Arley Cakes accepts custom orders, and Arrington is the mastermind behind the desserts at Brookville, such as the Mardi Gras-inspired gâteau mille crêpe (essentially a crêpe cake) with a bourbon cream filling.
As for a brick and mortar shop, she’s working on it. And not only that, but she’s working on creating a shop with a cause. Her first job out of college was working as a mentor and director of girls’ programs with Abundant Life Ministries, and when she began selling her baked goods, she was inspired by a teenage girl who told her she never knew someone from her neighborhood could start their own business.
“I’ve been working at Brookville for a while, which is fine dining and on the Downtown Mall scene, while also working and living in the Prospect neighborhood, which is a lot of times forgotten,” she says. “I want my business to be something that addresses that tension, that distance between these two very separate worlds of Charlottesville, and I think that having a shop would allow that.”
For more information and to place orders, go to arley cakes.com.
Bring on the bacon
Pork—it’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And dessert.
For the sixth year running, Gordonsville’s Barbeque Exchange is gearing up for Porkapalooza, which is exactly what it sounds like: two days of all-you-can-eat pork. Tickets are $16 per person ($8 for kids under 10), and BBQ Exchange chef-owner Craig Hartman describes it as a giant anniversary party for the restaurant and its loyal following.
“We do it because we’re so thankful for the way we’ve been received by the community and the support everybody gives us,” Hartman says.
The event begins at noon on Saturday, February 21, and will run until 7pm both days. Guests can pile their plates with locally made smoked sausages provided by JM Stock Provisions, Kansas City-style burnt ends, Kentucky-inspired burgoo stew, North Carolina classic whole-hog meat, chicken fried in lard and, of course, bacon as far as the eye can see. For dessert, Sweethaus cupcakes and Carpe Donuts will be available, with a whole bar of topping options, not to mention make-your-own s’mores.
“If you’ve never had a s’more with a bacon marshmallow on it, you haven’t lived,” says Hartman.
For more information and to buy tickets ahead of time, check out the Porkapalooza Facebook event.
Open for business
It’s been about six months since West Main: A Virginia Restaurant closed its doors so that owner Andy McClure could revamp the space into something entirely new. Now introducing Tavern & Grocery, which made its debut on West Main Street at the end of January.
Dishes include a classic cheeseburger, steak and fromage, bucatini pangrattato and a banh mi sandwich, plus for-the-table items such as squid and eggs, caviar and sweetbreads.
Downstairs you’ll find Lost Saint, a separate cocktail bar that opened in early February. One of the featured cocktails is Seven Years a Baker, with Baker’s bourbon, blueberry shrub, lemon juice, peppercorn tincture and tiki bitters.
A new policy proposed by City Council for those who wish to comment at regular meetings aims to make the process more inviting, but it has some doubting the new rule’s integrity.
Currently, a sign-up sheet is made available an hour before the start of each meeting and those hoping to speak must wait in line to snag one of 12 open slots on a first-come, first-served basis.
The new procedure would require prospective commenters to call, e-mail or meet in-person with Clerk of Council Paige Rice to request a spot on the list, and a digital selector would randomly choose 12 winners, whose names would be posted by noon Monday.
But some locals who routinely sign up to speak at City Council meetings believe the new lottery process is council’s way of pushing them out.
“It’s really hard to quantify the many ways that I think it’s a bad idea,” says frequent speaker Brandon Collins, who calls the new lottery process a “deliberate attempt to limit public comment.”
He says this City Council, under the new leadership of Mayor Mike Signer, already seems “sort of perturbed by things they’ve heard during public comment.” Council isn’t favorable to anyone who criticizes them, according to Collins.
One problem with the lottery process, he says, is that some people who sign up to speak have time-sensitive concerns that need to be addressed immediately.
The clerk already receives several inquiries a month from people who want to reserve a spot to speak, says Signer. Both Rice and City Manager Maurice Jones think at least twice as many people would be interested in speaking if they could put their names on the list ahead of time, he says.
Signer says the new commenting policy will increase access at council meetings and make it easier for the disabled, elderly and people with uncertain schedules to sign up. He also says it’s important to put this policy in context with the other proposed changes council members came up with at a recent work session to make meetings more orderly and efficient.
According to Signer, the public currently expects councilors to respond to each commenter. The new procedure would defer these general responses to the city manager, who would address remarks at the next meeting, while still allowing councilors to address individual comments. For their own comments, councilors will also have the same time limit for speaking that the public has, which is three minutes, and they’ll have five minutes to speak when introducing a motion or ordinance.
Another change will limit most items on the agenda to only 20 minutes of discussion.
“Last week, we spent over an hour talking about whether two trees could be moved,” says Signer. As for public comment, he says anyone can still speak at the end of the meetings, and with the newly imposed time constraints, it won’t take nearly as long to reach that portion of a meeting.
But Louis Schultz, another frequent speaker, believes the policy change aims to “dilute the voices of people who [sign up to speak] regularly.”
He thinks those who want to speak at meetings should make a commitment to arrive early enough to sign up. “I leave work earlier than I usually would,” Schultz says. “I lose money when I go to City Council meetings.”
The rule changes City Council is proposing are about “controlling what you can say as a citizen,” Schultz says. He particularly dislikes that responses to public comments will be deferred to the city manager because he wants to hear from City Council.
Local attorney Jeff Fogel says that while he’s suspicious of the new commenting policy, it “might not be a terrible idea.” His deepest concern is with the proposed increase in the mayor’s powers.
“He wants to muzzle his own councilors to no more than three minutes,” Fogel says. Questioning Signer’s motives for wanting the authority to turn off the cameras and audio during the taping of the meetings, which are always broadcast on local television, in the case of a disturbance or disorderly conduct, or his desire for the power to evict people from meetings and bar them from coming back, Fogel says Signer is “reminiscent of an authoritarian figure.”
The mayor is already authorized to oust trouble makers from meetings and bar them from coming back for a reasonable period of time.
A Charlottesville Tomorrow poll shows that 69 percent of those responding are against the new commenting policy.
However, Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy stands behind council’s attempts to increase community engagement.
“Change is hard. Some will like it, some won’t,” he writes in a Facebook post. “But what I fear most is that if we don’t try something new, we will continue to have the same broken system.” Bellamy ends his post by saying, “I heard over and over how we wanted things to be different, progressive, fresh and new…well now is our chance.”
The new policies were proposed at the February 16 City Council meeting, after C-VILLE went to press, and if approved, go into effect March 7 for a trial period of six months.
“I want to be crystal clear the point of this is to open this up to more people, make the process more accessible and to connect us with the broader section of Charlottesville’s populace,” Signer says.
Updated February 16 at 2:15pm to clarify that the mayor already has the power to evict and bar people from meetings.
Playing with the art in a gallery is not always the viewer’s first instinct. “I always worry that video [art] is intimidating, but then you put on a lab coat and it changes things,” says multimedia artist Fenella Belle. In an exhibition this month with photographer Stacey Evans, Belle’s lab coat is both symbolically and physically present. It points to the creative experimentation that the two artists seek to inculcate in gallerygoers, but it’s also an interactive element in one of the works. Titled “LOOPLAB,” the full exhibition includes video and fabric installations as well as small cyanotype prints and an interactive collage at the McGuffey Art Center.
Belle and Evans originally met through their day jobs as art instructors at Piedmont Virginia Community College and both became McGuffey members approximately two years ago. While teaching a summer camp together, “We noticed that we have some similar styles in terms of teaching, approach and trying to get people to be playful and not intimidated by art,” says Belle. Based on this, the idea for this exhibition was formalized in the summer of 2015, motivated in part by the McGuffey Art Center’s annual call for member exhibitions.
Since then, the two artists have shared many hours in each other’s studios, meeting once a week to swap ideas and play with various materials. The collaboration has largely focused on interaction and experimentation from day one. “We just took out a piece of paper and we really didn’t have any plans. It was just, ‘Let’s throw some stuff on here and see what happens,’” recalls Belle.
Though both artists share a tactical approach, their aesthetics diverge drastically. Belle is bright colors and organic shapes; Evans is more subdued, with a tendency toward the technological. “Fenella’s really good with a hammer and I’m really good with a computer,” says Evans. Where Belle might use a flower or the looping silhouette of a leafy vine to accent a piece, Evans is more likely to incorporate an outdated credit card machine or flip phone. “In our practices, we each have discarded materials that are hard to throw into the trash can,” says Evans. “So, we have a lot of material that we want to recycle and reuse, transforming that into something new.”
The McGuffey exhibition also includes the display of two prior individual works that are featured in “LOOPLAB.” The first was created for the 2015 PVCC faculty show and featured magnetic shapes on steel wall panels. “[It’s] the most free-form since it gets completed by the viewer,” says Belle. Indeed, it invites the viewer to touch and play, rearranging the shapes and colors while also acknowledging the impermanence of any one configuration.
The second display from their partnership took the form of an interactive video during PVCC’s annual Let There Be Light event. Belle and Evans engaged viewers as co-experimenters. Clothed in lab coats, they encouraged visitors to project their shadows onto the video in an improvisational performance.
While both of these previous works are engaging, the highlight of this exhibition is a new series of oversized cyanotypes. Making use of this process to create silhouette prints on light-sensitive surfaces, Belle and Evans created an immersive and playful installation that plays off their skills. “I’m really committed to interactive stuff,” Belle says. “I like to make spaces that people can walk into. I know how to do big fabric, and [Stacey] knows how to do cyanotypes.”
Collecting found materials from other projects, the two artists assembled boxes of objects to use as the negative space in the cyanotype exposures. Belle and Evans coated 7′ silk panels with photosensitive chemicals and allowed them to dry before being stored in light-blocking black garbage bags to await the perfect, sunny day.
“We got the coldest day of January, but the sun was out,” says Evans. They constructed a temporary tent on McGuffey’s front lawn, allowing space for one fabric panel in its shade, then composed each panel, placing objects directly on the fabric to create patterns and shapes. When Belle and Evans were happy with the arrangement, they pulled back the tent to expose the large sheet of photosensitive fabric to the sun. The exposure time for each panel was 15 minutes, after which they would take it inside to rinse and then start the process again on the next panel. Once rinsed, the images on the fabric are permanent. Seven of these printed panels hang from the gallery ceiling and the result is a gauzy maze, submerging viewers in the blue waves of floating fabric punctuated by lighter swirls and blocks that are abstract and free-form.
As with the other two pieces, the cyanotypes are, in a sense, completed by the viewer. Until someone interacts with the magnets, the video or the immersive space created by the cyanotypes, the pieces themselves are incomplete. The act of play is the final component of the collaboration, and one in which we all are invited to take part.
What are your favorite artistic collaborations?
Tell us in the comments below.