The original lineup of the groundbreaking quartet Béla Fleck & The Flecktones celebrate at the Paramount on Sunday. Image: Jim McGuire
Bin buster. In the early days of their career Bela Fleck and the Flecktones posed a challenge to record store clerks. By incorporating classical and jazz, bluegrass and African music, plus electric blues and Eastern European folk into their music, the group defied catgorization while opening fresh perspectives among their peers. “I think we gave other musicians the courage to be different, “ says Fleck. The multiple Grammy-winning legendary act is currently on an expanded 30th anniversary tour.
Sunday 12/1. $35-65, 8pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.
Expert pickin' and a whole lot of grinnin' will hit C'ville Coffee on Saturday night when Dry Branch Fire Squad takes the stage. Publicity image.
Burnin’ bluegrass: Dry Branch Fire Squad has played at every single Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival, a bi-annual gathering that will celebrate its 80th concert in 2020. That’s 40 years of performances, and it speaks to why DBFS describes itself as “aggressively traditional.” Frontman Ron Thomason has been called the “Forrest Gump of Bluegrass” because he’s so connected to the genre’s history. Known for his comedic live banter, Thomason employs social commentary and catchy lyrics to weave the band’s instrumental talent into pure entertainment.
Saturday 11/30. $16-19, 7pm. Prism Coffeehouse at C’ville Coffee, 1301 Harris St. 978-4335.
Jalane Schmidt, a community activist and professor of religious studies at UVA, was recently sued for defamation for a comment she made in a C-VILLE Weekly article. PC: Eze Amos
On a chilly Thursday evening last week, several dozen people gathered at the Central Library for a talk on “the risks and rewards of public engagement” by someone who knows them all too well.
Jalane Schmidt, a community activist and professor of religious studies at UVA, was recently sued for a comment she made in a C-VILLE Weekly article about the plaintiffs suing the city to stop it from moving its Confederate statues. One of those plaintiffs, Edward Dickinson Tayloe II, objected to the story’s mention of his family’s history of slaveholding, and to Schmidt’s observation that the family had been “roiling the lives of black people” for generations. He sued Schmidt, this paper, and former news editor Lisa Provence for defamation, seeking $1.7 million. The lawsuit was dismissed October 28.
Schmidt’s case highlights current threats to academic freedom and public engagement, says Herbert Tucker, president of the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which sponsored the event. “If she is at risk,” he wrote in an email to C-VILLE, “in pursuing a call to community engagement that UVA now expressly encourages, and speaking her mind on a topic of public urgency that she has extensively studied, then all of us are at risk.”
In the McIntire Room, named for the man who commissioned the Lee statue, Schmidt began her speech with a deep dive into her background. She became passionate about “participatory cultural work” while conducting research in Cuba, where “learning was often conducted in the streets, or other open air spaces, or public forums,” she said.
After receiving tenure at UVA in 2015, Schmidt began teaching critical whiteness studies, which, in turn, piqued her interest in Zyahna Bryant’s petition to remove the city’s Robert E. Lee statue. In 2016, she started going to meetings of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, which the city created to consider the issue. She was disappointed that, of the few people who attended, most were in favor of keeping the Confederate statues.
Wanting to “step up” her game about Civil War history, she did more research and connected with historians on Twitter, leading her to the work of respected Civil War scholars.
“It was from Ervin Jordan that I learned…that 52 percent of the local population was enslaved [before emancipation,]” Schmidt said. “Because this was such a compelling fact, I began to mention it every time I spoke to the BRC…if 52 percent of the population was enslaved, then those statues are lying to us.”
She, along with several other community activists, encouraged more people to attend BRC meetings and speak out against the statues. Before the commission’s final meeting, they handed out T-shirts saying, “I stand with the 52%.”
Following the release of the BRC’s report, City Council voted in February 2017 to relocate the Lee statue, and the announcement of the Unite the Right rally soon followed.
“It was not an option for those of us who oppose white supremacy to allow these groups to appear in public spaces unopposed,” Schmidt said. “That is what happened in the 1920s when the Klan crested here. I have not found any record in all of my research of any white people standing up to the Klan.”
Schmidt helped to organize counterprotests and publicized the Klan’s 1921 gift to UVA. Though she was “shell-shocked” after witnessing the violence of the rally first-hand, she continued to voice her opposition to the monuments, including by leading popular tours, with Andrea Douglas of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, that aim to provide a more complete story about the Confederate statues.
Of the lawsuit filed against her, Schmidt said she stands by her statements about Tayloe’s family, one of the largest slave-holding dynasties in Virginia. She called the lawsuit a “textbook case of white fragility” and an attempt to silence her.
Though the case was dismissed, with Judge Claude Worrell ruling that it had no legal basis to proceed, Schmidt remains displeased with way UVA handled the lawsuit. Virginia’s Office of Risk Management turned down her case, and the university did not ask the Virginia attorney general to overturn that decision.
Instead, the ACLU represented Schmidt and covered all of her legal fees.
“UVA has been encouraging [professors], especially as of late, to do public engagement scholarship,” she said. “But then the institution has not yet figured out what that means.”
Despite the risks, especially for those who do not have tenure, Schmidt encouraged more professors to speak to the press and be publicly engaged.
“Not everybody needs to be out in the barricades. There’s a whole lot of infrastructure that…supports the people who are,” she said, offering the example of making food for an activist group, babysitting kids during a protest, or supporting activists in court.
“There’s so many ways to be supportive that don’t require actual physical presence in the line of fire.”
Jens Soering, pictured here in 2003, was granted parole after spending more than three decades in prison for the brutal 1985 murders of his then-girlfriend’s parents. PC: Clement Mays
“Finally.” That was the first word tweeted on a Twitter account for Jens Soering November 25, the day he learned he and former girlfriend Elizabeth Haysom had been granted parole, 34 years after the savage murders of her parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom.
Upon their release, Soering, 53, and Haysom, 55, will be turned over to ICE. He’ll be deported to Germany and Haysom will be sent to her native Canada. Neither will be allowed to return to the United States.
The sensational case of the two UVA Echols scholars who fled to Asia and were arrested in England has long enthralled central Virginia. Soering was an 18-year-old virgin when he met femme fatale Haysom, 20, and fell under her spell.
He initially confessed to the slayings of the Bedford couple, whose throats were slit and who were stabbed multiple times, to protect his lover from execution, believing that as the son of a German diplomat, he’d have diplomatic immunity. He quickly recanted his story, but authorities chose not to believe his denial, nor did they accept Haysom’s initial confession.
After fighting deportation for four years, his 1990 murder trial was broadcast, a rarity here. Haysom was sentenced to 90 years as an accomplice before the fact, and Soering received two life sentences.
He has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and over the years has gained many prominent supporters, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Irwin Cotler, and Albemarle Sheriff Chip Harding.
In 2009, then-governor Tim Kaine, on his way out of office, agreed to transfer Soering to Germany, but Kaine’s successor, Bob McDonnell, immediately quashed that plan.
In 2016, German filmmakers released a documentary on the case called Killing for Love. In letters, Haysom frequently expressed her desire to see her parents dead, and suggested that her mother sexually abused her—although she denied that at her trial.
Harding became involved in the case about that time, and with other retired cops—Chuck Reid, who was the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office initial investigator of the murders, former Charlottesville police investigator Richard Hudson, and former FBI agent Stan Lapekas—became convinced there were gaping holes in the evidence against Soering and that Haysom had the motive for the vicious attack.
Haysom’s rare type B blood was found at the scene, as was a bloody sock print. An expert witness at Soering’s trial testified that it could belong to Soering, but other investigators have derided that opinion as “junk science.”
Later testing showed that the O type blood found at Loose Chippings, the Haysoms’ Bedford home, did not belong to Soering, and no physical evidence links him to the crime scene. DNA testing indicates blood found there belongs to two still-unidentified men, says Harding.
He wrote a 19-page letter to the governor in 2017 and said, “In my opinion, Jens Soering would not be convicted if the case were tried today, and the evidence appears to support a case for his innocence.”
Harding learned of the parole when a reporter called. “I’m ecstatic for Jens,” he says. “It’s his life and this is the most important thing for him. As an investigator, I’m not satisfied.”
He says parole investigators won’t tell him what they found, nor what they determined wasn’t credible. “We’ll probably never get the answers we want.”
Soering’s attorney Steve Rosenfield represented the now-exonerated Robert Davis, another false confession client who spent 13 years in prison.
Rosenfield filed a petition to pardon Soering in 2016. Governor Ralph Northam rejected an absolute pardon, as did the parole board, which calls Soering’s claims of innocence “without merit.” But the board did agree to parole after rebuffing requests from both model prisoners many times over the years.
In a statement, Board Chair Adrianne Bennett said parole and deportation were appropriate “based on their youth at the time of the offenses, institutional adjustment, and their length of incarceration.” She notes that their expulsion from the United States “is a tremendous cost benefit to the taxpayers of the Commonwealth of Virginia and we have determined that their release does not pose a risk to public safety.”
Rosenfield, who spent more than 3,000 hours working pro bono on Soering’s case, learned of the decision when he read Frank Green’s Richmond Times-Dispatch story, and at press time had not spoken to Soering.
On Twitter, Soering expressed frustration with the decision: “Without a pardon there might be freedom, but there won’t be justice.”
To those who believed him, he says, “I owe this freedom to my fantastic supporters, who worked so hard, never lost hope and stood by me throughout the decades. Apparently, ‘thank you’ isn’t enough.”
Observes Harding, “People in Virginia, if innocent, once convicted, their chances of being vindicated are pretty slim.”
Sarad Davenport and Tanesha Hudson discuss "A Legacy Unbroken: The Story of Black Charlottesville" at the film's premiere.
Untold stories
“There’s a whole story of black Charlottesville that no one knows about,” Tanesha Hudson narrates over the opening sequence of her film A Legacy Unbroken: The Story of Black Charlottesville. The documentary premiered in front of a sold-out crowd at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Saturday. Hudson has been working on the project since 2017.
Hudson’s film is a rich repository of local oral histories. “It’s important that we start to document history and catch people while they’re living,” she said before the screening, adding that she wishes she had made the movie 15 years ago.
The film’s wide-ranging interviews offer an intimate view of black life in Charlottesville through the last several decades. Marcha Payne Howard describes her father, who spent 54 years working at Joker’s Barbershop in Starr Hill. Pete Carey recalls the opening and closing of two music clubs, the Pink Panther and the Ace of Hearts. Bill Byers speaks about his early days as a caretaker at Washington Park, where Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald performed. And Randy “Hollywood” Jones tells the story of the Charlottesville chapter of the Black Panthers.
As the evening unfolded, education became a key theme. The film features interviews with Alex-Zan, a member of the Charlottesville 12, and Kathy Johnson Harris, a former Vinegar Hill resident who attended Jefferson School.
In a panel discussion after the film, Hudson shared her hope that the material can be adapted for classrooms. “I think it’s necessary to teach our children this,” she said.
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Quote of the Week
“Being named first for business and 51st overall for workers isn’t something Virginia should be proud of.” —Destiny LeVere, communications director of the Virginia AFL-CIO, on Ralph Northam’s support of right-to-work laws
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In brief
Bad deeds
“No property in this subdivision shall be sold to any person not of the Caucasian race,” reads a 1928 Charlottesville property deed. The Jefferson School’s Mapping Cville project has identified more than 90,000 Charlottesville deeds with similar language, and project organizers are enlisting the community to help sift through the heaps of digitized documents. The end goal is a map of discriminatory housing practices in Charlottesville through the decades. “We will be doing this undoubtedly for months,” says Jordy Yager, the project’s leader.
On Saturday morning, more than 30 volunteers showed up at the Jefferson School to review the deeds in an online database. “I couldn’t think of a better way to contribute to the community,” said volunteer Julia von Briesen. “It’s a responsibility of everyone in this community who gives a shit to participate.”
Yager hopes the accessibility of the online system will encourage community participation. “It’s live, it’s ready for anybody and everybody,” he says.
Mapping Cville found racially restrictive language in the deeds of the properties highlighted in red, near the intersection of Second Street NE and Park Plaza.
Feet of strength
Charlottesville ballerina Savanna Walton set a world record on Saturday. At local dance store The Hip Joint, Walton balanced en pointe—legs extended, body weight fully on the tips of her toes—for an hour and 21 minutes. After breaking the record, she naturally asked for a bucket of ice water for her feet.
History lesson
UVA’s Curry School of Education has launched a website exploring the histories of Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, the school’s namesake, and William Henry Ruffner, whose name is on the school’s main building. Spoiler alert: They weren’t good guys. “Up through the Civil War, Curry was not only a slaveholder himself, but an ardent defender of slavery,” the site says.
Powered down
On November 21, state regulators rejected Dominion Energy’s proposal to increase its return on equity rate—in effect, what the corporation is allowed by regulators to earn in profit—from 9.2 percent to 10.75 percent, a move that would have cost Dominion customers around $1.2 billion dollars over the next 25 years. Dominion was seeking the rate increase to attract investors and to fund its planned projects, including an off-shore wind farm. Clean energy and low-income advocacy groups––as well as 40 members of Virginia’s legislature––had strongly opposed the rate adjustment.
A life supreme
Legendary jazz music theorist Roland Wiggins died at his home in Charlottesville Wednesday, November 20. He was 87. A piano prodigy by age 10, Wiggins spent his decades-long career sharing his musical knowledge with others, from students in Philadelphia public schools to those at various colleges and universities, including UVA. He worked with some of the biggest names in jazz and pop music, including Yusef Lateef, Billy Taylor, and Quincy Jones; when John Coltrane hit a creative block in the mid-1960s, he rang Wiggins for advice. “I’ve developed a system of atonality,” Wiggins said of his unique approach. “That means, it purposely breaks all the rules of Western tonal music.”
Director Diane Kuknyo has been working with CDSS for more than 26 years.
The Charlottesville Department of Social Services oversees a broad array of programs; everything from Child Protective Services to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, and more.
In its November 18 annual report to City Council, the department’s advisory board highlighted some of the complicated challenges CDSS faces, along with its dedication to internal improvement. Medicaid expansion has been a particular focus over the past year.
“An individual who had lived in a tent with medically complex issues is now housed and receiving medical care,” CDSS Advisory Board Chair Christine Gough said, citing one example of the effect that Medicaid expansion has had on the lives of city residents.
Virginia’s statewide Medicaid expansion took effect on January 1, 2019, and local applications more than doubled: the CDSS received 903 Medicaid applications from October to December of 2018, compared to 458 in the same period the preceding year.
“It’s incredible to see the difference in health care for our homeless. It’s really amazing. There’s no more standing in line hoping you can get some meds,” said Diane Kuknyo, the director of the department, at the council meeting.
Of course, an increase in services rendered means additional work for CDSS staff. “The agency has faced some challenges during this period,” Gough said. “There has been a 50 percent increase in ongoing Medicaid renewal work. However, the positive results in our community far outweigh the increase in work.” The state has provided funds for two additional employees, but the department hopes to add another administrator as well.
More localized concerns have also shaped the recent work of the department. Charlottesville’s lack of affordable housing has been felt in particular by Child Protective Services—unstable housing creates unsafe situations for children.
“Housing is a problem. The cost of housing is a problem. Along with drug use and domestic violence,” Kuknyo said at the council meeting. The cause of many CPS interventions “is not abuse, it’s neglect, and the neglect falls into inadequate housing or inadequate supervision.”
Assistant Director Sue Moffett expands on that point in a later conversation at the CDSS offices. “We’re really active with the mainstream housing programs,” she says. “Families and individuals can grow when they don’t have to worry about where they’re going to sleep at night and how they’re going to keep themselves safe.”
Moffett emphasizes that more affordable housing isn’t a cure-all, however. “It’s certainly easier to feed your children, and have adequate child care, and have a house that’s adequate, when you’re not poor,” she says.
The city councilors in attendance expressed their admiration for the department’s work given the resources available. “I’m rather perplexed with the amount of help that’s still needed,” Councilor Wes Bellamy said. “With our three new councilors still in the room… I hope and pray that all of you can push this up to the front of our budgetary needs.”
Moffett, however, draws a distinction between the funds required to complete the day-to-day work of the department and the resources required to innovate. The department currently has 107 employees. “Based on the current caseload standards, we’re not understaffed, we’re essentially right on target,” she says.
“I will say this in comparison to other localities,” Kuknyo says, “generally City Council has been pretty fair with us.”
The city budget doesn’t affect the department’s major programs like SNAP and Medicaid, which are federally funded. City money can help the department push forward in other ways, though. “We know that if we want to continue to be a best practice agency, and a trauma-informed agency, that we need to do some innovative programming, which would require some local dollars,” Moffett says.
Some of that innovative programming is already underway. The CDSS has displayed commitment to turning a critical lens on its own practices, exemplified by an ongoing study undertaken in conjunction with UVA. Professor Michele Claibourn runs the university’s Public Interest Data Lab, which has produced a detailed report examining racial disparities in the city’s child welfare system.
“We asked for it,” Moffett says of the study. She says CDSS is “the only agency in the state” examining its practices in this way.
One of the study’s major findings was that black and multiracial children were referred to child welfare services more frequently than white children. In response to the study, the CDSS has begun to run experiments in which CPS reports are processed without any identifying information available to the intake worker. The department hopes that any racial disproportionality coming from within the department will become apparent through this blind review system.
From Claibourn’s perspective, the study offers an opportunity for her students to learn hands-on social science skills while at the same time putting the power of the university to good use. “The students learn to use data in ethical ways towards equity and justice, not just towards industry and Google and commercial interests,” Claibourn says. They also “extract more university resources to answer questions that the community has.”
The department has conducted these experiments on top of completing its regular responsibilities. For Claibourn, that sets it apart. “I think the overall existence of this collaboration is a signifier of how hard the department is working,” she says. “In doing the work, you don’t always have time to take a step back and evaluate in a really deep dive kind of way.”
“I’d love to see the possibility of doing more work like we’ve done here,” Claibourn says. “And I think the city’s been very open, actually.”
As the current City Council’s term winds down, it’s clear that some things will be left for a new council to wrestle with, while other long-standing issues have, perhaps surprisingly, been resolved.
Implementing a new kind of zoning south of downtown, a project especially championed by Councilor Kathy Galvin, will have to wait until next year. But an ordinance and bylaws establishing a permanent Police Civilian Review Board was passed earlier this month, and despite some lingering frustrations with the proposal, new members are set to be selected in December.
Last week, council settled another long-simmering source of contention: the fate of West Main’s statue of Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea. A work session with Native American consultants to discuss the issue resulted in a resolution for the statue’s removal being written and passed in that same meeting . It took five hours of debate, or, if you’re counting from local artist Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell’s 2007 protest, at least 12 years.
I’m writing this at 10:25pm, just as many of the subjects of this week’s feature are starting their workdays. Charlottesville isn’t generally an up-all-night kind of place, but there are still plenty of people who keep things moving when the rest of us are asleep (or wishing we were). When photographer Eze Amos teamed up with our arts writer Erin O’Hare to take a closer look at the night shift, they found a mix of camaraderie and loneliness, satisfaction and boredom.
Mostly they found a lot of hard work, from a refugee who juggles two full-time jobs to a high school student who heads to class after a 4am shift at the airport. As one overnight street sweeper told us, “Everything in life requires a job to be done.” The work goes on. —Laura Longhine
Michael's Bistro owner Bo Stockton (left) tends to business in the kitchen with chef Matt Lechmanski. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith
Thanksgiving is a great holiday. It means a four-day break from work for many of us, and gluttonous consumption of food is encouraged. And then there’s the Macy’s parade, which we should all be thankful to watch on TV, because it’s a kick to see the hosts (Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, and Al Roker) try to come up with clever commentary about high school marching bands, cartoon-character balloons, and spectacles like Ronald McDonald (he’s not creepy at all, right?) in the Big Red Shoe Car, which, if it were a real shoe, would be a men’s size 266.
Anyway, be glad you’re here instead of New York, not just because you’re avoiding the crowds but also because Turkey Day in and around Charlottesville offers so much to do, eat, drink, and see—none of which involves Savannah Guthrie, alas. In fact, we think the four-day weekend isn’t sufficient to partake of the local Thanksgiving goodness, so we’re starting today and won’t stop until December 1, at which time we’ll take a deep breath and brace for the arrival of the Solstice (December 21), Christmas, Kwanzaa (December 26-January 1), and Hanukkah (December 22-30).
Wednesday, November 20
Sign up today for the popular Boar’s Head Turkey Trot, a 5K run/walk benefiting the UVA Children’s Hospital. Registration is limited to 1,400 participants, and fewer than 100 spots remained 10 days before Thanksgiving. $60 (kids 5-12 $40), 9am. Thursday, November 28, 200 Ednam Dr., bit.ly/run-turkey-run
Thursday, November 21
Market Street Wine and Oakhart Social team up to showcase holiday wines in the restaurant’s private dining room. Snacks from Oakhart’s kitchen will be served, and wines will be available to order at 20 percent off. $50, 7-9pm, reservations required. 995-5449, bit.ly/oakhart-wine
Drop by the Spice Diva to get your kitchen knives sharpened and ready to prepare the holiday goodness! $7 per blade, 10am-1pm (store closes at 6pm). Main Street Market, 218-3482, thespicediva.com
Friday, November 22
Un dîner pour deux? Gordonsville’s cozy French fine-dining spot, Restaurant Rochambeau, celebrates the release of this year’s Beaujolais nouveau with a $75 prix fixe meal. 5:30-9pm. (540) 832-0130, reservations highly recommended, bit.ly/beaujolais-va
Saturday, November 23
Don’t cut class—go to this one to sharpen your knife skills. Chef Antwon Brinson’s Culinary Concepts AB teaches you how to slice, dice, and julienne without losing a finger. $55.25 (sign up by Nov. 21), 4-6pm. 2041 Barracks Rd., 218-2637, bit.ly/cut-veggies
Sunday, November 24
Grab a movie and a meal at Violet Crown. How about Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, followed by some Japanese-influenced food at Kama? You don’t even have to leave the building! Evening screenings at 5:10 and 7:50pm; Kama 5-10pm. 200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, Kama 529-3015, Violet Crown 529-3000.
Monday, November 25
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative’s Give & Take event turns “the gallery space into a swap shop meets free store meets surplus redistribution meets ‘curb alert.’” Drop off a gift, and if you see something you’d like for yourself or someone else, pick it up. Free, 5-7pm through November 27. 209 Monticello Rd., 218-2060, bit.ly/bridge-swap
Tuesday, November 26
Call in sick from work. Read a book. Stay in your pajamas. Binge-watch “The Crown” on Netflix.
Wednesday, November 27
Get in the true spirit of Thanksgiving by learning about the indigenous people whose land you now occupy. The interactive Native People map will enlighten and humble you. native-land.ca
Thursday, November 28
The 91st annual Blessing of the Hounds at Grace Episcopal Church provides a glimpse into another world right in your backyard. Mounted riders in blazing red coats stand by while the dogs are blessed, and then the hunt commences. Arrive early to beat the mob and enjoy doughnuts and coffee in the parish hall. Free, 10am. 5607 Gordonsville Rd., Keswick, 293-3549, bit.ly/grace-hounds
Let someone else do the cooking and cleaning up: Many restaurants that offer special Thanksgiving meals are booked weeks in advance (The Ivy Inn, 1799 at The Clifton, The Mill Room, Prospect Hill Plantation…), but at press time, these spots still had some room.
Blue Ridge Café & Catering, $12 kids 5-12, $24-37 adults and 65+ seniors, seatings at 11am and 1:30pm. 8315 Seminole Tr., Ruckersville, 985-3633, bit.ly/gobble-blue
Al Carbon, regular menu served 9am-6pm; $75 pre-order 10-12 pound roasted turkey (takeout only; call to reserve). 1875 Seminole Tr. 964-1052, alcarbonchicken.com
Restoration Restaurant, turkey and all the sides, plus pecan pie! $30, $15 kids 6-12, free for tykes 5 and under, noon-5pm. 5494 Golf Dr., Crozet, 823-8100, bit.ly/crozet-turkey
Michael’s Bistro owner Bo Stockton is offering a turkey-and-all-the-fixins feast at no charge. “I want to give back to the community,” he says. “Anyone who needs a solid meal and people to share it with is welcome.” Free, 1-3pm. 1427 University Ave., 977-3696, michaelsbistro.com
Friday, November 29
Get ready for Christmas by cutting your own tree at 12 Ridges Vineyard, in Vesuvius. Formerly Skylark Christmas Tree Farm, the new winery has 5,000 Fraser firs growing on the scenic mountain site. 10am-4pm, $40-80 for trees (wine and small plates priced accordingly). 996-4252, 12ridges.com
Saturday, November 30
Step back in time at the community tree lighting in Scottsville, with hot cocoa, caroling, and a visit by Santa (go ahead, pull on the beard). Free, 5:45-6:45pm. Canal Street Basin, 286-9267, bit.ly/scottsville-tree
Sunday, December 1
Free food distribution by anti-violence activist group Food Not Bombs takes place today and every Sunday in Fifeville’s Tonsler Park. Volunteers collect and store donations from area bakeries, supermarkets, and other sources to give to those in need. Drop by, pitch in, and learn more. 1pm. 500 Cherry Ave., bit.ly/food-not-bombs
Charlottesville’s never been known for its nightlife. Sure, there are some late-night restaurant-bars, and concerts, dance parties, and other entertainment events that go past midnight. Those who venture out in the dead of night, onto Charlottesville’s open streets and empty sidewalks, past closed businesses and dark houses, might say that the city is, well, dead.
But that’s not the case at all. Plenty of people are awake and active, particularly those working the night shift.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 15 million people in America work regular or sporadic night shifts—that’s about 5 percent of the country’s total population. For some, it’s a choice (they prefer to work at a time when they’ll mostly be left alone), for others, a necessity: A number of workers in this story have two, or even three, jobs. In some fields, night shifts do pay slightly more than day shifts.
Here in the Charlottesville area, many people work all night to make life easier, better, or safer, for others. Their labor often goes unnoticed and unappreciated, though, because it’s done when most people literally have their eyes shut.
Over several recent nights, photographer Eze Amos and I took at a peek at some of the things that go on in town long after the sun goes down. It’s a chance to get to know some of the people who do that work and see, just briefly, what their lives are like.
Photos by Eze Amos, words by Erin O’Hare
Click photo to enlarge
Kroger
The Kroger at Barracks Road Shopping Center is open 24 hours a day. And while the store’s not exactly humming with customers overnight, it is bustling with hustling employees.
Between the hours of 10:30pm and 7am, Kroger’s overnight staff restocks bags of potato chips and boxes of Pocky, cans of beans and bottles of beer, piles of apples and containers of almonds. They update price and sale tags, clean up the back room and storage areas, create end displays, unload nightly truck deliveries, and make sure in-store machinery runs smoothly. And, of course, they assist customers (like a Domino’s delivery guy) who shop after their own late shifts.
Mike Page has worked the night shift at Kroger for about four years now, and he likes it quite a bit. It pays better, he says, and having fewer customers in the store gives the staff a chance to build a really unique camaraderie. “We play when it’s time to play, and work when it’s time to work.”
Page is a shift lead, but he still straps scuffed knee pads over his work pants to push pallets and stock shelves alongside his colleagues. He manages truck deliveries, too, and on this particular night, he’s facing an unprecedented situation: both trucks (it’s a two-truck delivery night) are stuck in the shopping center parking lot, a mere few hundred feet from the Kroger delivery berth.
For safety reasons, the Department of Transportation limits freight and truck drivers to 11 hours of driving time before a mandatory 10-hour break. Page has had delivery trucks stop a few towns, or even just a few miles away, but never this close to the store; the trucks cannot legally drive the final few feet until the following morning. It might mean a longer in-store shift for Page and some other folks, but Page says he understands. They’ll make it work.
Click photo to enlarge
Newspaper delivery
Every Tuesday night, Dale Anderson waits for the call.
It comes late, usually around midnight, the indication that a few thousand copies of C-VILLE Weekly are hot off the press and ready for him to deliver. For the next 12 hours, Anderson will drive all over Charlottesville, putting weekly papers into blue boxes and designated racks, picking up any left over from the previous week’s delivery, and seeing which of C-VILLE’s magazines, such as Knife & Fork, Abode, and Unbound, need to be restocked at which locations. Then he stocks those, too.
He has to be purposeful about where he delivers, when: While most news-paper boxes are in public places, a number of racks are located inside buildings and businesses that aren’t open until the morning.
In addition to distributing for C-VILLE, Anderson delivers Crime Times and the Blue Ridge Buck Saver. He also owns and drives a taxi.
“It doesn’t hurt me none,” Anderson says about working night shifts that often extend into the morning, or even afternoon. “I’m only a four-hour sleeper anyway. I’m just used to it! My body likes four hours of sleep.” Maybe, he wonders out loud, because he and his wife have seven children, so he’s “used to being up and down” at all hours of the day and night.
Anderson started delivering more than 20 years ago, “back when newspapers were king” and daily deliveries kicked off somewhere around 2am. He worked for The Washington Post, and then The Hook (which merged with C-VILLE in 2011); now, he’s delivered for C-VILLE for so long that he knows every route by heart and is often the one to pick up other drivers’ routes when they’re on vacation or call out sick.
“The thing about working late at night is that it’s much easier. You don’t have people in your face, you don’t have traffic,” he says, laughing. “Charlottesville’s not a super happening town in the middle of the night.”
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Emergency Communications Center
When Lisa Fitzgerald applied to work at the Charlottesville-UVA-Albemarle County Emergency Communications Center 31 years ago, she thought she’d just be answering phones. But during her yearlong training, she realized that taking 9-1-1 calls is a way to actively help people…just without the blood and guts. Now a public safety communications supervisor, she not only works a full-time shift load, she helps train new hires for the job she’s come to love.
Fitzgerald has worked days but she prefers nights, in part because night calls tend to be more urgent. “And it’s never the same night twice.” A couple weeks ago, she delivered a baby over the phone. The next night, she took a call for a shooting.
Fire, police, and EMS workers are often heralded as “first responders” for being the first to arrive on the scene of an incident. But “we’re answering the phone. We’re really the first ones,” says Fitzgerald of emergency call takers and dispatch operators. Depending on how an incident is handled over the phone—if she’s able to calm down a hysterical caller and get more information to relay over the radio—it can make a big difference for when fire, EMS, and police do arrive on the scene.
Full-time ECC employees like Fitzgerald work 12-hour shifts, and it’s not an easy job—each call is unique, some are very stressful, and call takers are under a lot of pressure to respond responsibly and well. It takes a year to be fully trained, longer if the ECC is shorthanded (as it has been recently) and needs experienced workers to take calls instead of teach trainees.
There’s often a personal price paid, too. Sleeping during the day can be difficult. It’s noisier, and more people are apt to contact Fitzgerald via phone or email, expecting an immediate reply. “People who don’t work the night shift don’t understand,” she says, adding that “family life suffers a bit, too,” though she says her two children have come to understand her unconventional schedule. For instance, she says, “Christmas is whatever day I’m off around Christmas. But I think I’d be bored doing anything else.”
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Planet Fitness
Nighttime isn’t terribly busy inside the 24-hour Planet Fitness gym located inside 5th Street Station, says front desk clerk Christian George, with just a handful of people coming in after their own late work shifts. Activity picks up around 3:30am, when folks start to trickle in for their pre-work morning workouts. The televisions are always on, as is the music, and George is always busy—when she’s not greeting people who walk through the door, checking them in and tidying up the desk area, she’s doing gym-related paperwork. The 10pm to 4am overnight shift works well with her schedule—it’s a part-time gig for her; she also works at UVA hospital. During her shift, she often chats with Planet Fitness custodian Carl Monroe, who cleans during the overnight shift five nights a week.
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“I love working in the gym because I talk a lot,” says Monroe (to knowing laughter from George). He likes to chat with customers as he cleans the 90-or-so machines, plus mats, mirrors, floors, bathrooms, and locker rooms. Monroe, who’s 62, worked at Gold’s Gym on Hydraulic Road for years; when Gold’s closed, he was worried that, at his age, he wouldn’t be able to find a job, as businesses seem to prefer to hire younger workers. “How are older folks supposed to live?” he asks.
“This is one of the cleanest gyms out there,” says Monroe. “We take pride in it, but we don’t get the credit for it.” He notes that when he’s not at work, people ask where he’s been.
It’s true, says George. Customers want to know if he’s okay…and they notice when the gym hasn’t received Monroe’s golden touch.
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Omni Hotel/UVA Hospital
Joseph Sesay arrived in Charlottesville in August 2004. One month later, he started working as a bellman at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel, and he’s been there ever since, working the second shift, 2:30 to 11pm. He escorts guests to their rooms, gives them the rundown of amenities available at the hotel (indoor pool, outdoor pool, bar and restaurant, fitness center, etc.) and in the immediate vicinity. He makes sure guests have their luggage, enough towels, anything else they may need or want. It’s not heavy work—talking with guests is mostly quite enjoyable, says Sesay, who came to Charlottesville as a refugee from Sierra Leone.
Sesay’s heavy work begins after his Omni shift, when he heads directly to his second full-time job as a housekeeping team lead at the University of Virginia hospital. He inspects all of the recently vacated rooms on floors three through eight, assessing whether they’ve been cleaned well and with the appropriate chemicals based on what’s happened in the room. Sometimes, as is the case with labor and delivery, there’s a lot to clean up—extra sheets, blood, other bodily tissues and fluids. When the morning shift takes over at 7:30, Sesay’s done with room inspections, but he still has to do payroll. He gets home around 8:30am, goes to bed around 9:30, and manages to sleep for about 4 hours until he gets up to return to the Omni.
Working two full-time jobs, Sesay’s got to be tired. “At times, I am,” he admits. But he does it to support his family—his wife and daughter here in the States as well as his sister and her three children back in Sierra Leone; all three kids are doing spectacularly in school and in their trade programs, Sesay says, smiling.
On his precious days off, he cooks.
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Lucky 7
Lucky 7 is the only 24-hour food spot in downtown Charlottesville, so it’s a bit of a destination. The 10pm to 7am night shift isn’t slow, but it’s not terribly busy, either, says Ron Jude, who’s worked at the convenience store for a few weeks now. “It’s something to do to keep me occupied, keep me out of the house,” he says.
There’s a fairly steady stream of customers and a nightly pre-midnight rush when folks come in to buy cigarettes and alcohol before sale of the latter is prohibited per state liquor laws. Things pick up again a bit after 2am, as bars let out and customers are looking for a bite to eat, or for more alcohol (when they can’t buy it at that hour, says Jude, some people try to steal it). Many of the store’s nighttime customers are homeless folks or people stopping in after working their own late-night jobs.
Jude’s lived in Charlottesville off and on for about 30 years, and he says that while Charlottesville’s not as “crazy” as other places he’s lived, Lucky 7 customers still manage to surprise him, like a guy who recently came in flamboyantly dressed, fresh from a rave (yes, a rave…in Charlottesville).
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Red Carpet Inn
Travis Hilton says his job is “pretty boring 99 percent of the time.”
The 11:30pm-7:30am front desk shift at the Red Carpet Inn on Route 29 is relatively quiet. Hilton, the night auditor, spends most of that time doing the hotel’s general accounting, though he’s occasionally summoned to check in guests (between three and eight on a regular night, upwards of a dozen on UVA basketball and football game weekends), and tote bottles of shampoo, extra towels, and rollaway beds to one of the hotel’s 115 rooms.
Hilton started working hotel night shifts when he was in high school. In his 20-plus years in the industry, he’s learned that those hotels with ballrooms, event spaces, and full-service bars and restaurants are more active at night (this isn’t the case at the Red Carpet Inn). He’s seen his share of drunken antics, and at least one room completely destroyed by cats (it required a complete reupholster). He’s seen a drug bust go down, too, but he says his stories aren’t nearly as flashy as those his boss has told about working at a hotel across the street from the Pentagon, where there were tales of car chases and briefcase switches.
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Parking lot cleaning
From about 9pm to 7am most nights of the week, Brian (who asked that we not used his last name) drives a truck for Sweeping Corporation of America, sweep-cleaning the asphalt and replacing garbage can liners in shopping center parking lots all over town (like 5th Street Station and Barracks Road Shopping Center, to name just a couple). It’s a fairly quiet job, one best accomplished at night when there’s not a lot of traffic in the lots. But there’s always someone in every lot, he says. People traveling in RVs often park in shopping center lots overnight, as do people who live in their cars. Teenagers, he’s noticed, tend to hang out in movie theater parking lots.
Brian is quick to point out that “everything in life requires a job to be done.” When he brings his truck back to the garage at the end of his shift, someone else is going to wash it, he says. A third person will put air in the tires and make sure that everything’s running smoothly under the hood. And so on, and so on.
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Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport
By 3 o’clock in the morning, a few passengers are already waiting to check in for their flights at Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport…but there aren’t any staff in the place yet. That is, except for Steve, the morning shuttle bus driver who picks up airline, runway, and TSA staff from the employee parking lot and delivers them to the terminal to prep for the first flights.
Steve, who lives in Culpeper and has driven the CHO shuttle bus for seven years, wakes at 1am in order to arrive on time for his 12-hour shift. He knows every staff member who gets on the shuttle, greeting almost all of them by name and asking if there’s anyone left in the parking lot so as not to make them wait 10 minutes for his next loop. He inquires after children and grandchildren, and happily answers questions about his own grandbaby (who just turned 2).
Most airport workers have two jobs, Steve explains. One man works on the runway from 4-8am before heading to work at CVS, where he’s a manager. One young airline desk and gate attendant is a high school student, who comes in to work that 4-8am shift before heading to homeroom. “He’s an amazing young man, really intelligent,” says Steve, and damn good at his job. “One day, we’ll look back and say ‘we knew him when.’”
Most of them also do it for the flight benefits. One airline gate agent who drives over from Harrisonburg every morning says that her airline job allows her to visit her daughter in Houston a few times a year, something she might not be able to do otherwise. Hers is a pretty common story, says Steve.
By 4 o’clock—just one hour later—CHO is up and running. Taxis and hotel buses and cars pull up to the terminal doors to drop off travelers. Desk agents check bags and boarding passes as TSA agents run security checks. Concession stand workers brew coffee and make breakfast sandwiches near the gates, and out on the runway, more workers (including air traffic control) ready the planes for takeoff.
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Insomniac
The older Sean Tubbs gets, the more he yearns for an early bedtime. Most nights, he can get to sleep early, but he can’t seem to get the recommended eight consecutive hours.
After working as a journalist for many years, where he often had to stay up very late or wake very early to cover an event or make a deadline, Tubbs is used to running on maybe four hours of sleep a night. And while he’s no longer a journalist (he currently works as a field representative for the Piedmont Environmental Council) he says he still can’t manage to sleep more than a few hours at a time and is often awake at 3am.
At that hour, he tunes in to the industrial hum coming from the nearby UVA hospital, or the sound of the Pegasus helicopter whirring to its landing pad. Most nights, he hears the rumble of a dump truck, or a fox screaming in the field behind his house. In the summer, he hears mockingbirds.
Tubbs knows he’s not the only insomniac in town: Through his windows, he notices a “surprising amount of people” awake, driving and walking through the neighborhood.
He prefers to wander around his house in the wee hours, “relishing” his thinking time. He resists picking up his phone to tweet about public transportation, and while he tries not to work (something he’d have done were he still reporting), he does allow himself to think about work.
“I think about what my day’s going to be, the challenges I’m going to have. It’s useful, that kind of worry.”
After a couple hours, Tubbs is sleepy enough to return to bed.
Tanesha Hudson's documentary A Legacy Unbroken: The Story of Black Charlottesville, premieres on Saturday at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Publicity image.
Truth focused: In promoting the premiere of her documentaryA Legacy Unbroken: The Story of Black Charlottesville, filmmaker Tanesha Hudson includes a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’m gonna tell the truth,” before she makes her own statement: “Hard work pays off eventually, even if it takes a lifetime.” Hudson has been active in the fight for justice and equity in Charlottesville for years, and her film furthers that work by focusing on the rich history of Charlottesville’s African American community.
Saturday 11/23. $20, 6pm. Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, 233 Fourth St. NW. 260-8720.
