Author: gilesmorris

It’s easy to think you know someone’s story when you see him every day. Working on the Downtown Mall, I play that trick on myself all the time. I see people going to and from work, watch the expressions on their faces change through the week, mark how they sneak away from the job to catch a break, make a phone call, or size up the passers by.

Without noticing, I slip them into one of the slots in my card catalogue marked familiar, maybe one that was made for somebody in someplace I left behind a long time ago, and I think I know a little bit about what makes them tick without ever having heard their story.

I visited Charlottesville only three times before I moved here, despite the fact that I’d grown up only a few hours away. The first was a college visit that included watching a UVA soccer game and a trip to Monticello and Grounds. The last two were while my sister was at UVA law school, once for a fun weekend and the famous football win over FSU, and the last time for her graduation. She had a little apartment on First Street NE, right above where Hamiltons’ is.

This was 1996, around the time the subjects of this week’s feature, Bashir and Kathy Khelafa, moved to town to start their lives over again. I remember thinking how empty the Mall looked in the morning, that it seemed sort of like an abandoned movie set.  When you first encounter a place, it’s like meeting a stranger. I hear tourists who come Downtown for the first time say things like, “See, it’s just like a European square,” or “It’s like an old-fashioned Main Street, only nicer.” The Mall is our city’s face, a package people can contextualize without living here, a first impression. Bashir and Kathy’s story shows that you only have to break the surface to find that the people who make up the facade had to have deep moorings to turn the movie set into an intersection of culture, commerce, and community.

Whoo whee. My wife delivered a healthy baby boy on Saturday. Talk about an experience that goes beyond where words can follow. You spend all that time waiting and preparing and in the final days before the birth, a hush comes over your life and then everything is distilled down to this one room. Life drips out second by second for half a day as your wife tries to push a tiny human into being against what seem like impossible odds, even though it’s the oldest trick in the book.

The team at Martha Jefferson was so good, in love with their jobs and their new facility and all the little babies, that I’ll never think of hospitals or doctors or nurses the same way again. I’m writing this as a new parent, sleep deprived in a lobby, scared and excited at the prospect of going home, but really grateful for my family, my neighbors, the hospital, the town we live in, even this old newspaper.

Some way down the Blue Ridge in North Carolina is Whiteside Mountain. To get to the top you hike up gradually from the west side to a ridge covered in laurel thicket, and then work your way through one of the many well-worn tunnels that dump you out, often all alone, onto the bald face of the highest cliffs on the Eastern Continental Divide.

There are just a few times in your life when the path takes you somewhere so high that you can look back at your past and forward at your future likes it’s all laid out beneath you, from a place that is itself so solitary and so beautiful that it gives you eyes to see all of what is good in the world and none of what isn’t. That’s what this weekend felt like for me, like coming out of the close laurel and looking up and down the spine of mountains that runs nearly the length of the continent my people have lived in for the past couple hundred years.

This week’s cover story on how Charlottesville turned into Weddingville, USA, touches on another one of those moments. I can look back and see my own wedding really clear from here. I even remember all the heartache about invitations and what food to serve and who would stay where. But mostly what I remember is singing a duet with my wife after dinner, because after the party is over, that’s what you’re doing for the rest of your life.

Our country was born proud with a guilty conscience. Its patriotism flowed not from the blood, the land, or a shared ancestry, but instead from a common commitment to a set of abstract principles: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even as the words were written down, though, our government and citizenry were perpetrating a breathtaking genocide on America’s first peoples and enforcing a system of slavery that violated every principle of human goodness.

Our town’s patron saint, Thomas Jefferson, the author of our scripted virtues, was a slave master whose second marriage was unconsecrated, because it was to a slave woman named Sally Hemings. Their children and children’s children helped build the city we live in. That’s all just to say that our origin story, nationally and locally, contains a paradox: Our pride and shame come from the same place, because through the course of our history we have treated some people as individuals and others as groups.

In the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, President Obama delivered a kind of State of the Races address, which coming from our first black president, was incredibly brave. If you haven’t read it in its entirety, you should. Responding to the notion that we need to “convene a conversation on race,” he said, “I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.”

Our city has been involved in a lengthy Dialogue on Race, and some positive things have come from it. But our generation has a different race problem than our parents’ one did. It is no longer legal to enforce racial inequality, but it will always be legal to be a bigot.  This week’s feature on the way the Episcopal Church has reacted to gay marriage shows how small communities founded on love and fellowship can evolve, from a place of strength, beloved traditions that contain guilty flaws.

Our country’s genius comes from its ability to deliver a free, if arduous, path to self-fulfillment. Our economic strength is built on self-interest. Our social fabric is knit together by a communal commitment to the individual ideal. If the right to a gun is guaranteed to all citizens, then so is the right to marriage.

The other thing the president said that’s worth remembering is that we are better than we have ever been before on the issues of racial and gender equality. We are the parents of our dreams. When our children fall, the world doesn’t end. When they excel, we celebrate.

My wife and I moved to Charlottesville from the mountains west of Asheville, North Carolina, the narrow Tuckasegee River valley tucked between the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountain ranges that was the ancestral home of the Cherokee and one of the last strongholds of Appalachian culture. Apart from overflowing with natural beauty, it’s a land full of the ghosts and memories of how things used to be.

People who read this column regularly know I like to talk about 40-year problems, a reference to the fact that so many of the cultural questions posed in the late ’60s and early ’70s—racism, wars of intervention, tradition vs. progress, urban migration—are still the ones we’re wrestling with today.

My mother’s generation remembers the Foxfire books and the back-to-the-land movement, when people packed up from cities and suburbs and headed for the hills and hollers to get back in touch with a more authentic experience, to wrestle with the earth, and to build communities that hearkened back to the days of self-sufficiency and communal value systems.

A little bit up the road from here in the mountains of Central Virginia that spirit led people to Nelson County, where some of the protagonists of this week’s cover story on the Monticello Artisan Trail found their inspiration to master a craft that could earn them a living, but that, more importantly, would feed their souls.

These days, the pressure to commercialize what we love—to sell our stories, our voices, and our art—is intense. As consumers, it’s important to recognize the difference between the disposable, the extractive and the handmade, the conscientious. But I think it’s even more important to recognize that the people who dedicate their lives to learning timeless skills are sources of wisdom and reference points for who we are when you strip all the crap away.

“We are a nation of laws and the jury has spoken,” President Obama said in his statement responding to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Indeed. The president’s message to the American public was no doubt delivered to tamp down any larger race-based responses (the hypothetical riots that haven’t yet materialized) to the verdict. It reminded me that being a nation of laws requires a particular kind of trust in lawmakers that our country is losing.

Many commentators, including The New York Times, saw the jury’s decision as proof that stances carried forward by the NRA and other pro-gun lobbies, particularly concealed carry and stand your ground laws, are tantamount to deputizing a white majority to enforce its racial prejudices. Jelani Cobb, who blogged the trial for The New Yorker, said, “The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found not guilty: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty.” Trayvon Martin was guilty of being a black teenager with a hoodie, so George Zimmerman wasn’t guilty at all.

Democrats will see the Trayvon Martin case as an example of the end result of Republican madness. Republicans will see it as an example of the way Democrats push their unfounded agendas by manipulating the media. Almost no one will disagree, behind closed doors, that had Martin been white, he’d be alive. So the question posed to us as citizens of a nation of laws is what to do about it. And the answer will likely be—as this week’s feature demonstrates with regard to gun laws—that with race politics, abortion, immigration, health care, and all of the other serious social issues of our day, there is no middle ground remaining from which to start the conversation.

Is it that we have collectively given up our middles for the sake of our wings, or just that class identity is the only common ground left in our culturally confused and increasingly individualistic world?

A week back or so, I had an interesting exchange with a woman who had grown up here. She was adamant that somebody who came from the county couldn’t say he was “a Charlottesville native,” citing, among other things, the Commonwealth’s practice of separating cities from their counties jurisdictionally and the distinct identity separations between the two locales. I grew up in Washington, D.C., born in Georgetown Hospital, swaddled and taken home to a crib on Capitol Hill. In high school, it was great sport for us city kids when someone from Arlington or Rockville said they were “from D.C.” So I understand the sentiment.

Nativeness is a poetic notion. It means that the sweat and blood of your forebears has mixed with the dust and seeped into your pores to create some kind of cultural memory in you that shapes the way you see yourself and defines your sense of place. Your accent and the cemetery are your bona fides, but there is no pure claim, unless you’re an enrolled tribal member, to being native. Localness is an even more slippery concept, the relational value of a set of concentric circles. Since the days of Localz Only, the idea has evolved into a marketing principle and a battle cry to resist the great metropolitan magnets that have drained their surrounding landscapes of power, youth, and personality.

Our city is growing fast, has been, and that kind of growth changes people’s ideas about place, identity, and boundary. Let’s say you grew up in Free Union or North Garden and you’re mountain biking in British Columbia and someone asks where you’re from? Or let’s say you grew up on Pantops and attended city schools? Maybe you’re a Double Hoo from Lynchburg who’s been in the city for decades. Or maybe you’ve only been here six years, but your two children were born at Martha Jefferson Hospital.

This week’s feature is a fun change of pace, a kind of photographic scavenger hunt to test your local cred. It’s a reminder, also, that while everybody is born somewhere, being from a place is about choosing where you settle.

My first job out of college was waiting tables at a French bistro near Columbia University in Upper Manhattan. The place was like the U.N. The owner was an Israeli, the head chef a Parisian-Algerian, the dishwasher a Mexican from Guerrero. The bartender was from Dublin, and we had waiters from Delhi, Walbrzych, and Tel Aviv.

It was the perfect scenario for an American boy, wet behind the ears, to learn the way of the city. I often worked double shifts, during which I’d arrive at 10:30am to haul ice, set up chairs, fold napkins, fill ramekins with butter pats, and slice bread, before I got sucked into the vortex of lunch and dinner service. Because I was the youngest, I became a kind of mascot, and it was not unusual for one of the chefs to serve me up a plated special before the first shift in addition to the staff meal between shifts—Kadir’s couscous and vegetable ragout and Jose’s impromptu chili powder beef stew with fresh baguette were favorites.

I worked for tips and I got fed, but more importantly, I was initiated into a weird and chaotic family of strangers that produced a particular kind of theater. Our rag tag band of under the table part-timers managed to prepare and serve a plate of moule frites or hanger steak or lotte au beurre blanc in such a way that a New Yorker would come back for it. A daily miracle, repeated ad nauseum.

Justin Ide’s photo essay in this week’s feature is an unapologetic marketing pitch for the newly reunified Charlottesville Restaurant Week, which C-VILLE Weekly now sponsors and which has just under 30 participating restaurants this time around. But it’s also a love letter to the owners, chefs, servers, and back of the house staff who make the restaurant world go around. Tip ’em well.

Power. Hah. It’s a construct. A misconception. A vision of the world with puppet strings. True power is in God’s hands, or it is the electric-water life force that runs through all things, as evident in the beating of the butterfly’s wings as in the groaning Grand Coulee Dam. Power cannot be a human depth chart.

And yet, the minute we think we can move things, the instant we choose to strive, the depth chart becomes real, and we are vulnerable to its force. At that moment, the man on the top floor in the corner office with the window that looks down on the world can make your livelihood go away by clicking “send.”

At that point, so many eventualities fall into place between him and you that, at times, you feel totally powerless, even to improve the fortunes of your children, much less to pick your own path. Like many other things that are important, the truth about power is paradoxical. It cannot be what it seems to be, but it is.

When I was a naive and hopeful community organizer in training, I underwent a weekend-long boot camp in the desert due east of San Diego. Men and women, some young like me and others at transitional moments in their lives, gathered in bunk houses to learn about collective power as the temporary alignment of individual self-interests grouped around an issue affecting them. No permanent friends, no permanent enemies, the trainers said. Such a cool and calculated resting place for the desire to change things.

This week’s feature obeys the time-honored law that newspapers live in the material world. A clear-eyed (perhaps cynical) place, described as it is, not as it should be. But it also offers a caveat from a powerful player that the hardest thing of all to do is to organize other people to do something good. Collective power lives in crack construction teams, tiny churches, startup companies, community bookstores, and yoga studios, but it’s been a long while since it filled a stadium…or a ballot box.