The statue of Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea shows the Native woman cowering behind the two white men, when in fact she guided them throughout their journey. Photo: Eze Amos.
On Saturday afternoon, just hours after the Confederate statues in downtown Charlottesville were removed, the city’s contractors also took down the statue of Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea from the intersection of Ridge and Main streets.
Local activists and descendants of Sacagawea had long called for the statue’s removal. It portrays Lewis and Clark standing tall, gazing out over the horizon, while Sacagawea, who guided the feckless explorers throughout their expedition, cowers behind them.
In November 2019, City Council invited Sacagawea’s descendants to town for a work session to discuss the statue’s removal. Descendant Rose Ann Abrahamson said she’d visited nearly every statue of her ancestor in the country, and that “this statue in Charlottesville is the worst we have ever seen.”
Area activists had made similar points for years. Monacan tribe members Karenne Wood and Ken Bradham had spoken out against the statue, as had Anthony Guy Lopez, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe. In 2009, the city placed a plaque at the foot of the monument in an effort to add context to it.
In 1919, local philanthropist and segregationist Paul Goodloe McIntire commissioned sculptor Charles Keck to produce a statue of Lewis and Clark, who each had ties to Albemarle County. Keck added Sacagawea of his own accord. “The sculptor threw in the Indian and she is the best of the lot,” McIntire said at the time.
At the 2019 work session, after hearing from the descendants, City Council resolved 4-0 to get rid of the bronze eyesore. On Saturday afternoon, council convened an emergency meeting to vote on the immediate relocation of the statue—the construction crew that had come to town to remove the other two statues finished “in record time,” said City Manager Chip Boyles, giving the city a golden opportunity to remove the third statue at no additional cost. The impromptu meeting lasted 25 minutes, and saw council vote 5-0 to take speedy action, with Vice-Mayor Sena Magill calling in from her car to cast her vote.
The monument has been sent to the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center in Darden Towe Park. Alexandria Searls, the center’s director, joined the emergency meeting, and committed to working with Indigenous peoples’ groups to properly contextualize the statue in its new setting.
Abrahamson joined the call as well. “I feel it’s entirely offensive, and it should be obliterated,” she said. “But if it can be utilized to give a greater message to educate the public, that would be an opportunity. So I’m very pleased with what is taking place. It’s been a long road.”
Have no fear: Jurassic Park's roars, stomps, and awes are as thrilling today as they were when the film was first released almost 30 years ago. File photo.
Paleo diet: Thanks to Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park, we learned that theme parks populated by cloned dinosaurs are a bad idea. Revisit the Costa Rican island where plans for a new tourist attraction go horribly awry when the dinosaurs break out and go on the attack. The billionaire park owner desperately tries to underplay the catastrophe, even as the plucky paleontologists get up close and personal with the pointy end of a T. Rex.
Saturday 7/17, $5-8, 3 and 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. theparamount.net.
Friday’s fired up: Channeling ’60s soul and ’70s disco funk, Erin & the Wildfire tackles everything from female solidarity to pizza. That quirky range is backed by the solid grooves of Matt Wood on bass, Ryan Lipps on guitar, and Nick Quillen on drums, a rhythmic soundscape bolstered by Erin Lunsford’s powerful, soaring vocals. Spudnik opens the Fridays After Five show.
Friday 7/16, Free, 5:30pm. Ting Pavilion, 700 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. tingpavilion.com.
Locally made jam: Mama Tried is a local supergroup, pulling talent from Charlottesville favorites like Alligator, Mojo Pie, The Cows, and The Skip Castro Band. The all-star band features Susan Munson (guitar and vocals), Charlie Pastorfield (guitar and vocals), Stuart Holme (bass), Kent Raine (drums), and Sam Johnston (keys, vocals, and harmonica). Expect an evening of all-out improv and Grateful Dead covers, along with originals and jam-band classics so good that Mama doesn’t have to try and steer ’em right.
Saturday 7/17, $10-15, 6pm. IX Art Park, 522 Second St., SE. ixartpark.org.
Longtime NPR host Diane Rehm will be in Charlottesville this week for a screening of her documentary Whem My Time Comes. Publicity image.
Longtime NPR host Diane Rehm is arranging flowers as she talks about death.
Rehm became involved in the right-to-die movement after watching her husband of 54 years die from Parkinson’s disease. John Rehm could no longer stand, walk, or eat by himself, but his Maryland doctor said there was nothing he could do to hasten the inevitable. John’s only option: to refuse food and water until he died 10 days later.
“I sat by my husband’s side as he slowly died,” Rehm testified before the Maryland General Assembly in 2019. “Watching John in those last 10 days of his life made me angry. Why did our laws infringe upon an individual’s decision to peacefully die when dying was inevitable within a few months?”
In 2016, director Joe Fab contacted Rehm. “He says he was stalking me,” laughs Rehm. “He waited for me to announce I was giving up my daily show.” Fab asked if she’d be interested in doing a documentary on the right to die.
Her response: “You bet I would.”
The documentary, When My Time Comes, will be screened at the Paramount on July 15, with Rehm on hand for a conversation afterwards.
Despite Rehm’s strong feelings that end-of-life decisions should be made by the person dying, she approached the documentary as a journalist. “As a talk show host for 37 years, my role was always to hear all sides of an issue, to question, to listen, to spur the discussion on, but never to put anyone down because of their ideas,” she says.
“I went into it feeling as if I’d like to learn why there are such strong feelings on both sides,” she says. “I really wanted to understand better. I heard sincere religious, ethical, compassionate views as to why people felt so strongly against it and also why they were so much in favor.”
She is adamant that medical aid in dying is not suicide.
“The whole idea of suicide is that you commit it because you no longer want to live,” says Rehm. “People in favor of medical aid in dying—they all want to live.”
She talked to a woman in the film who was dying from breast cancer. “She said, ‘If I had my druthers, I’d live to be 90, but I know I’m dying. I don’t want my children to see me suffer.’” The woman didn’t want her 13-year-old son to experience what she did watching her own mother die. “She said, ‘That’s not suicide. I want to live,’” recounts Rehm.
Another misperception she encountered was the idea that “somehow people are being forced into this, when in fact it takes a lot to accomplish this.”
Medical aid in dying is now legal in 10 states—Virginia is not one of them—and the District of Columbia. The laws require the person seeking aid to make two requests and to be approved by two doctors, says Rehm. Some states require a psychiatric exam to be certain the person is of sound mind.
“This is no spur-of-the-moment decision,” she says. “This has to be decided within six months of death. In some cases, the patient, who is very ill, who has had all kinds of treatment—all kinds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy—has tried to stay alive. They don’t want to die. They have suffered physically and emotionally. They are really, really ready to go. That’s the difference between suicide and medical aid in dying.”
Rehm, 84, is leaving nothing to chance with how she’d like her own death to play out. In the documentary, she has her grandson film her. “I tell him exactly what I want,” she says. “I’ve written my plans. I’ve spoken with my doctor.” While doing the film, she changed doctors because her former physician didn’t want to participate in medical aid in dying.
Most states require the person to self-administer medication, which is a problem for people with neurodegenerative diseases like ALS. “In California, the largest number of people who go through medical aid in dying are those with ALS,” says Rehm.
Alzheimer’s disease, the fifth leading cause of death among Americans 65 and older, is another tricky situation. Rehm says she’s fortunate to have no history of that in her family, but she’s already talked to her children. “If I experience early signs of Alzheimer’s, I want to be able to go to Switzerland, which has [nonprofit right-to-die org] Dignitas, which is available for those with Alzheimer’s. I’d make sure I’d go while in the early stages so I could state my own wishes so everyone could know.”
Maryland has not passed medical aid in dying. “I am hopeful,” she says. “The particular time I testified we lost by only one vote. I believe more and more legislators are coming around and hearing the pleas of those who believe medical aid in dying is a right that should be afforded to each of us.
Or as one legislator says in the film: “Each of us is just one bad death away from supporting these laws.”
Richmond collective Butcher Brown made its major label debut last year on Concord with the release of #KINGBUTCH, an expansive full-length album that showcased the group’s unique fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and soul. Now, the quintet of DJ Harrison, drummer Corey Fonville, bassist Andrew Randazzo, trumpeter/saxophonist/MC Marcus “Tennishu” Tenney, and guitarist Morgan Burrs returns with a companion EP, Encore, featuring five tracks that were recorded during the #KINGBUTCH sessions. “Truck Fump” is an energetic instrumental trip, while tracks like “VA Noir” give a nod to the region. It’s the latest installment in Butcher Brown’s ascent; the crew recently played NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, while ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” tapped them to contribute to an updated version of the show’s theme song “Rip It Up” in 2020. Appropriately titled, Encore provides further insight and depth into the psyche of a band that never stops evolving. (Released June 4)
Lucy Dacus
Home Video, Matador
Across the span of two albums—2016’s No Burden and 2018’s Historian—and a collaborative project with fellow songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, Richmond native Lucy Dacus has garnered national success and secured her status on the indie rock landscape. Along the way, Dacus made the move to Philadelphia, a city that boasts its own underground scene in the same vein as Richmond. Her third album, Home Video, harkens back to Dacus’ roots in Richmond, reflecting on mentors, friends, venues, and the experiences that forged her identity. On this coming-of-age account, Dacus turns her incisive, sharp songwriting lens inward, questioning how iterations of her current and past selves align as a cohesive journey. She debuted the album’s lead single, “Hot & Heavy,” on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” The track’s music video traces the record’s theme, combining home video footage of Dacus as a singing child with modern-day montages of her visiting the Byrd Theatre. She performed the follow-up single, “Brando,” on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” and the video was filmed at another Richmond haunt, the Theatre Gym at the Virginia Repertory Theatre. This hometown homage is Dacus’ strongest work to date, and is a contender for one of the best albums of 2021. (Released June 25)
Free Union
No Pressure, Self-Release
After dropping a double single in January, the Charlottesville-based collective spearheaded by Michael Coleman and Rob Dunnenberger is back with a career-spanning five-song EP. As a group, Free Union aims to unite genres, places, and people—and follows suit on No Pressure, enlisting co-production from neighboring Richmond artist DJ Harrison, and engineering and mixing from Adrian Olsen and Montrose Recording. Comprised of new compositions and songs that were written years prior, No Pressure traces the band’s trajectory and is a testament to its musical prowess. Standout track “Someone Like Me” is the perfect summer bop, but the entire crop of songs combines elements of pop and R&B in a groovy blend owned by the band. (Released May 28)
Swing out sisters: Straight from low-lit honky-tonks and dusty dance halls, TheQuebe Sisters saunter in with their progressive take on the traditions of Western swing and songs from yesteryear. Archtop guitar, upright bass, and fiddles add to Grace, Sophia, and Hulda’s captivating three-part harmonies. The Sisters combine jazz, country, and Texas-style fiddling to sweep you off your feet.
“It’s a dirty place,” says Earl Swift. He’s talking about the moon.
The moon is covered in fine dust, an endless desert of gray particles that smear when disturbed in the breezeless atmosphere. When the Apollo 15 mission landed there in 1971, the astronauts found that the dust meant danger for them and the brand-new rover they’d brought. The moon dirt worked its way into the seals of the astronauts’ helmets and gloves, making them difficult to remove. Dirt coated the instrument panels of the rovers, making them nearly impossible to read. Fine dirt lined the angled walls of the moon’s craters—if the rover slid into a crater, there’s no guarantee that it would ever make it out. On Earth, the astronauts had been swaggering cowboys, but on the moon, they moved slowly, crossing the barren expanse one dust particle at a time.
Swift’s eye for fine, granular detail is a hallmark of his writing. In his latest work, the esteemed Nelson County journalist and author turns that passion for detail to space. Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings tells the story of Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17, which took place in 1971 and 1972 and saw three moon rovers wheel across the lunar surface.
Even chatting in a cozy coffeehouse in Crozet, Swift can conjure the vastness and loneliness of space travel. “Forget about interplanetary colonization,” he says, “lunar colonization might not be practical.” The Apollo 17 mission took the rover as far as any human has ever gone, he says. As he writes it: “Here they’d leave humankind’s outermost footprints.”
Swift’s earlier books and magazine articles describe more terrestrial, but perhaps equally dramatic, environments—the sinking Tangier Island (Chesapeake Requiem, A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, on many Best Book of 2018 lists); points where native Americans and then colonists aimed to prosper along the James River (Journey on the James); and the beauty and the beastliness of America’s interstate highway system (The Big Roads). There’s also a book about a risky sojourn to locate, identify, and honor the remains of a crew of a U.S. helicopter downed in Laos (Where They Lay) and the tale of one ’57 Chevy told through the many stories of its owners (Auto Biography).
Swift, 62, keeps his feet on the ground nowadays. He starts almost every day with a five-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail, which is near his house. Sometimes he strolls out to a protected ledge on the trail and scribbles away before returning home to write through the evening. Don’t be fooled by the steady routine: He hasn’t been to the moon, but he’s been just about everywhere else.
Writer Earl Swift says the final three Apollo moon landings were distinguished by the astronauts’ use of
the brand-new rovers they brought along. Photo: John Robinson.
As a kid, his father’s job with Firestone tires took the family all around the country. Swift inherited a “geeky appreciation for cars,” he says, learning to tell the difference between a Chevy and a Pontiac based on design elements from year to year, and taking joy in the numbering scheme of the North American highway system. His father was also a huge aviation fan, and by the time Swift was 11 he could identify nearly every commercial airliner.
The fascination with cars remains: Swift has owned “six or seven” convertibles, he says, and he whizzes around town in a Miata MX-5. “A two-seater forces you to make decisions about what’s important to you—and who’s important to you,” he says. “You have to be careful about how much you pack, and you can only bring one other person with you.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Swift doesn’t shy away from technical details in describing the moon missions. When he talks about the moon rover’s drive train, his voice speeds up with excitement. Each wheel was powered by a device that produced just 1/4 horsepower per wheel, or one horsepower for the whole lunar rover. (A Prius has 121 horsepower.)
“The transmission for each wheel was made of just three parts and only two of those moved,” Swift says. “It violates all of your suppositions about a transmission.”
The rover weighed 460 pounds on Earth, but much less on the moon. When a Velcro clasp in a cord would not open up easily, one astronaut nearly picked up the entire rover by accident.
Up there, instant invention was a constant necessity. When a fender broke off the rover, the Apollo 17 team used U.S. Geological Survey maps bound with duct tape to shape a makeshift fender that lasted long enough to let the scheduled work continue.
In his younger days, before settling in Nelson to hike, write, and tinker with his automobiles, Swift traveled widely. Everywhere he’s been triggers vivid and fond memories. When he moved to Alaska in 1984 for a job at the Anchorage Times, the Last Frontier State was just right for him.
“There was a boomtown feel about the whole state. Money was everywhere and cocaine was a terrible problem in Anchorage. Organized crime was a terrible problem, too,” Swift recalls. It was “one of the most dangerous places to live in the United States, per capita, but boy, what a great place to be a reporter.”
He adjusted to wild Alaskan life. “If you’re not at the top of the food chain, you have to have a gun,” but he quickly adds, “It’s the kind of place, if you see a motorist broken down by the side of the road, you have to stop.”
After Alaska, Swift worked for the Virginian-Pilot from 1987 to 2008. Recalling his days at Norfolk’s daily newspaper, he kvells. “One of the best newspapers in the country, story for story. Best job in the world,” he says. The Batten family, who owned the paper at the time, “had installed really smart, hard-thinking management who had hired exceptionally well from top to bottom. It was a writer’s newspaper.”
The paper liked him, too, and granted leaves of absence to write books, some developed from his newspaper work.
In 1998, Swift took a 22-day sojourn on the James in a canoe, and returned with 22 dispatches from the wilderness. From his campsites, he wrote on a Tandy 1000 computer that “gave you one line of text as you typed, so you had to remember what you had typed.” The project was a big hit, and UVA approached him about becoming a Virginia Humanities fellow, a position he still holds.
His Virginian-Pilot work also took him to Tangier Island, the isolated crabbing village in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. He wrote a few stories about the island’s local life before convincing his editors that the real story was about the water creeping over the island’s shores and not receding. When Swift returned to the island in 2016 to work on his book, he says he was “completely floored” to see how much more of the Tangier land mass had gone under water. “Tangier is a test case that announces we have got a problem,” he says. “Respond as you will, but how you respond will say much about how we are going to get through this problem—or not.”
After his years in Norfolk, where he enjoyed the beach and bay life immensely, he now enjoys the trees along the mountains in Nelson County. He’s proud to have raised his daughter from age 11, with the support of “the proverbial village of friends and relatives,” he says. “Looking back, I think there were far fewer challenges along the way than there were rewards. She reordered my whole existence. She introduced me to true joy, pride, worry, and more joy.”
Swift takes about two years to write a book, and says his next project is already underway. He assures that his next book will be as different from Across the Airless Wilds as that book is from Chesapeake Requiem. Swift has to sell his next project, one he’s been working on for a decade. Much of the research is done, but he will not divulge the subject. “I won’t jinx it,” he declares.
Like in his previous work, he’ll try to become“the expert” on his new subject.
Actual experts don’t talk to each other, he explains, and are full of slights, competition, and secrets. “But they will all talk to the reporter,” he says. “You are the sum of their collective wisdom.”
“Expertise may reach its sell-by date, and it may be outdated by the time a book is published,” the author continues. “But you have exercised the ability to dive deep”—or even go to space.
Over the last year, thousands of Virginia renters have been able to stay in their homes thanks to a variety of eviction prevention measures, including a statewide rent relief program. But on July 1, Governor Ralph Northam lifted Virginia’s state of emergency, which spells the end for some of those protections. And on July 31, the Center for Disease Control’s nationwide ban on evictions will permanently expire.
“We’ve definitely seen an uptick lately in the [eviction] filings,” says Brian Campbell, co-chair of Charlottesville Democratic Socialists of America’s housing justice committee. “I don’t know if that’s because landlords were anticipating the end of the moratorium and went ahead and started filing. But I definitely think that when the moratorium ends, [this] is a preview of things to come.”
“Even some of the larger complexes…have started filing for evictions for people who owe less than a month’s rent,” he adds. “It seems like they’re really going to go hard after people.”
Now that the state of emergency is over, landlords no longer have to apply for rent relief on behalf of their tenants, don’t have to notify their tenants about available rent relief programs, and are allowed to initiate eviction proceedings more quickly. They also no longer have to wait 45 days after they (or their tenant) apply for relief to proceed with an eviction.
“If a landlord doesn’t want to bother applying for rent relief, or accept the funds, they don’t have to,” says Caroline Klosko, a housing attorney for the Legal Aid Justice Center.
A few key state protections remain in place, though. Through the end of September, renters facing eviction can request a 90-day continuance of their case if they can prove they were unable to pay their rent due to the pandemic. Until July 1, 2022, landlords must also give tenants two weeks—instead of five days—to make a missed payment. And landlords who own more than four units must offer payment plans for late rent.
Virginians are still able to apply for rent relief from the state. Because some tenants have struggled to access that program, LAJC is hiring someone to assist local residents with their applications over the next few months.
Despite these efforts, Klosko expects to see a “vast increase” in evictions in the area when the CDC moratorium expires at the end of the month.
In the coming months, DSA and LAJC hope Charlottesville gets its right-to-counsel program, approved by City Council in April, up and running. Though City Manager Chip Boyles said the new program—which would provide lawyers for low-income households facing eviction, significantly increasing their chance of staying in their homes—will be paid for by American Rescue Plan funds, the process for distributing those funds is not yet underway.
“The next challenge is to try to get Albemarle [County] to pass something similar,” says Campbell. “That seems like it’s going to be a little bit more of an uphill battle.”
In the meantime, Klosko encourages residents who receive an eviction notice to contact LAJC as soon as possible.
“We want to figure out if there’s a way we can help,” she says.
Friends of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library is holding a warehouse book sale July 9-11, from 10am-6pm each day. Photo: Rammelkamp Photo.
“We have a book town,” says Peter Manno, manager of the Friends of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library. The group is excited to welcome community members into the former Northside Library building this weekend, for the first book sale Friends of JMRL has held since the onset of the pandemic last year. “The sales are a big part of people’s lives,” Manno says.
Friends of JMRL is a nonprofit organization that helps financially support the library system, and also manages the Books Behind Bars program, which ships requested books to incarcerated individuals throughout the commonwealth.
Friends supports its mission through giant, biannual book sales that can bring in as much as $120,000. The sales have become a community staple over the years. Manno says he knows one volunteer who went to her first book sale in 1965, when she was in high school, and has been to every sale since.
Like everyone else, Friends of JMRL had to get creative when COVID shut everything down. The lockdown came right before its spring 2020 sale. “We were poised to have a sale,” Manno says. “We were full, we had our books out on the shelves ready to go, and had to close the doors and not have volunteers, not be taking donations.”
They did hold COVID-safe bag sales, where people could drive up and get a bag of five books for $5. They had some success, but the modified events couldn’t match the genuine article. “It was something to do and it was real good for us,” Manno says. “[We] moved some books, saw some folks.”
Book donations reopened in November, and the organization was inundated right away. The group reached out to the Albemarle Square landlords, who gave them the old Northside Library space for book storage. (In the past, the sales have been held in Gordon Avenue Library basement.)
This weekend’s warehouse sale, the first of its kind, will take place at 300 Albemarle Square Shopping Center on July 9-11 from 10am-6pm each day. It will be limited to 80 shoppers at a time, and most of the books will range in price from $1-$3.
For repeat customers of the spring or fall sales, this warehouse sale will be a bit different. There will be no members’ preview night, and rare and specialist books will not be on shelves. “It’s going to be about 20 percent or less the size of our normal spring or fall sale,” Manno says. “It’s really a summer warehouse, general readers sale.”
If this weekend goes well, and COVID continues to fade into the background, the Friends of JMRL hope to have a full fall sale in early October. “We’re really hoping it can be as normal as pre-COVID as possible,” Manno says.
Book donations have been suspended until July 15 in preparation for the warehouse sale, but beginning July 15, you can drop books off on the lower level of the Gordon Avenue Library. Once the regional library system is completely up and running again, donations will be accepted at any of the libraries.
“We’re just looking forward to getting back to doing what we do,” says Manno. “See old friends, and some new friends.”
