Two years ago John Rubino moved his metal sculpture studio from McIntire Plaza to IX Art Park. He pays approximately the same rent for substantially more space. Photo: Eze Amos
“This is just a glorious space,” says the artist, his eyes drinking it all in. Many people would probably balk at that assessment. The place is roughed-in and decidedly unfinished—lots of raw wood with minimal concessions to human occupancy. There are lights and a number of electrical outlets and exposed ductwork for air and heat overhead. A few tables tucked into the corners serve as individual work areas within the otherwise open space, with just a few beams, a few area dividers of exposed sheet rock and empty floor. It’s not much to look at, unless you look at it from a certain perspective, and from a certain set of needs. And that’s exactly the way the artist sees it—as a blank slate for doing creative work.
The artist and the owner of this building were not sure they wanted to be featured in an article on the redevelopment of downtown. So I offered them anonymity because the story of this space is so interesting. The artist knew the owner had unused space in his building. He also knows the value of inexpensive studio space to people doing creative work. So he convinced the owner to do a few small-scale accommodations and rent out semi-private work studios. When the artist hears of a fellow creative looking for studio space, he sends him or her to the owner. There are currently three tenants in the space—each with his or her own work area, littered with tools of the trade and plastered with trials and essays and works-in-progress. And everyone seems happy. The tenants get inexpensive studio space, the artist gets the satisfaction of helping the cause of art, and the owner gets a little extra income from his property at the cost of a few minor renovations. Win–win–win.
Correction: win–win–win–question mark. Because it’s unclear how long it can last.
It’s part of the logic of a booming development cycle and a restless economy that sparsely utilized, post-industrial spaces like this one will inevitably get bought up, redeveloped and upscaled. A space that might have started its life 100 years ago as a warehouse may lie fallow for a while after something in the economy shifts. But eventually it will sprout into apartments or boutiques or restaurants or into the combination of residential and office and retail that city planners call, with angelic choirs and showers of light pouring down from the heavens, “mixed use.” Fly a camera drone straight up over this part of town, and what you’d see is one of the most diverse, nonredeveloped areas remaining in Charlottesville. The city calls it the Strategic Investment Area (or SIA). It constitutes 330 acres roughly bounded by the CSX railroad tracks and by Avon Street on the east and Ridge Street on the west. It’s been on a slow fuse for years, and now it’s about to explode.
As redevelopment proceeds in this transition zone south of the Downtown Mall, property values are going to rise. And that is a situation that the owner knows quite well. He wants to sell, and he has a price in mind. Sooner or later he’s going to get that price. The artist can see the writing on the wall—right alongside the art. “It’s a pretty amazing space,” he shrugs, “and it’s probably going to go away at some point. But until then, let’s do something.”
The artist introduces me to one of the tenants. I ask what he finds appealing about working here: “The great thing about this space,” he says, “is the location, and also the raw quality of it—that you can with a little bit of work turn it into a nice studio/workshop.” He mentions that a group of colleagues have talked about finding a similar collaborative “making” space somewhere: “The idea is to get out in the community a bit more,” he says.
He has just relocated his studio from a town about a half-hour drive away, where space was plentiful and cheap but the commute was “ridiculous.” I ask him what he thinks will happen when the building gets sold. “To me,” he says, “what’s most important is to have a good space that supports the work. I imagine when it goes away, we go away. You start moving further and further away to find the space.”
And therein lies a story—one that hasn’t yet been acknowledged or identified, much less addressed, in all the city’s planning for the SIA. Economic development and speculative reinvestment aren’t the only things happening in this neck of the woods. There is also a healthy amount of grassroots creative activity—artists and nonprofits and cultural provocateurs doing their thing. There is The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative in a nondescript brick box near Spudnuts (itself gloriously, scruffily, endearingly nonredeveloped). Just across Avon Street there is an old service station housing two socially aware nonprofits: the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville and Charlottesville Community Bikes. And then there’s the IX Art Park, which houses the Maker Space and a sculpture studio, not to mention the open space of the park itself, a flexible communitarian plaza—home to Fleaville and music and theater and civic events and festivals. And all of that is on top of whatever other solo-shot studio spaces may be squirreled into the low-rent nooks and crannies of the neighborhood.
Enabled by low overhead and nonredeveloped spaces and the occasional enlightened property owner, cultural pioneers are busy adding verve and vibrancy and economic kick to this part of town right now, not in some utopian mixed-use future. What happens to all of that when the redevelopment freight train starts rolling through?
Jack Fisk is nominated for an Academy Award in production design for his work on The Revenant. The Oscars will be announced on February 28. Photo: Publicity image
The list of the most accomplished art directors working on Hollywood films is not exactly full of household names.
Around Charlottesville, though, Jack Fisk gets more name recognition than most because of his marriage to Oscar-winning actress Sissy Spacek. Once you start to notice and gauge his work—the simplicity, the clarity and the heightened but un-showy realism of it—you understand why he’s been nominated twice for an Academy Award. In 2008, he was nominated for the design of the Paul Thomas Anderson oil-boom psychodrama There Will Be Blood, and this year for his work on the harrowingly primal frontier revenge saga, The Revenant.
Known around Hollywood as a hands-on art director, Fisk is not a make-a-sketch-and-shop-for-swatches-and-direct-your-crew kind of guy. Instead, he’s a builder, and a collaborator, and a problem-solver on location.
It was one of the first things Spacek noticed about him when she met him on the set of Terrence Malick’s Badlands in 1972. She wrote about it in her 2012 memoir: “I knew he was supposed to be art director, but at first he looked to be pretty far down on the food chain, because he was doing all the work. He was always walking back and forth hauling wood and props and furniture and hammering and painting things, while his assistant art director was sitting in the shade smoking cigarettes.”
“I’m not sure that every production designer works that way,” says Fisk.
Fisk migrated to Hollywood when his lifelong friend and art school pal, David Lynch, made the move from studio art to filmmaking, and before long he was dabbling in film production himself.
When he was given his first assignment as art director, he asked a friend, “What does an art director do?” But the friend didn’t know either. That left a little room for interpretation.
“So I got this job,” says Fisk. “I didn’t really know where my responsibilities ended, so I did everything just to cover myself. I got involved in the props, the wardrobe, the set dressing…and it really helped. And I’ve been doing that since then—just doing everything I can for the film.”
The defining relationship of Fisk’s professional life is his career-long collaboration with art cinema giant Malick. Fisk has served as art director on almost all of the director’s films to date. Malick’s achievement in movies such as Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life (both of which won awards at the Cannes Film Festival) has everything to do with the visual aesthetic that he and Fisk and their cinematographers developed.
Fisk turns into an art student again when he talks about that visual style: “I took some guidance from the painter Edward Hopper,” he says. “He could tell a story with just a few objects. You’d see a woman in an office, and there’d be a file cabinet and a desk and that told you the whole story. Terrence Malick and I often talk about, in searching for locations, you look for monocultures. You know, if you’re looking out across a yard or field or something, you look for simplicity in it.”
The iconic image from Days of Heaven, the ornate Victorian mansion standing in an expansive field of grain, is a perfect example of what he’s talking about. Fisk and his crew built that house from scratch in the middle of an Alberta wheat field. It was built as a fully realized environment, complete with decorated rooms where the interior scenes could be filmed, as Malick wanted, with the wheat fields rolling away just outside the windows. “I like building worlds that are complete,” Fisk says.
That total approach to constructing sets on location is something he’s been called on to do repeatedly. In Badlands he built the treehouse encampment where Spacek and Martin Sheen hide out while on the lam. For Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood he designed and built the skeletal derrick and rough-hewn , raw-wood structures of church and offices in a 1915 oil boom town. And The Revenant, whose location sets included a rustic frontier fort and a functioning 19th-century keelboat, was no exception. Given the raw natural environment of many of the scenes in the film, what does an art director find to do when shooting in the landscape?
“If you’re a holistic designer you find so much to do that you’re exhausted each day,” says Fisk. “We had to create a world. Somebody has to put these visual storytelling elements together. You find them, you choose them and you alter them to work for your story. Sometimes that’s simplifying the background, sometimes its building objects on the background.”
Because of his reputation as a builder of real houses and boats on location, it was striking to hear Fisk talk about how much traditional filmmaking illusion he used in designing The Revenant.
The mountain of buffalo skulls that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character encounters in a flashback is a series of foam rubber casts built on a wood and wire scaffolding that was erected in a few hours the day before shooting. The ruined church in the wilderness was constructed out of large foam blocks painted with religious frescos, which had to be secured invisibly on site against the winds that threatened to knock them over.Even seemingly natural elements, like the cave where the trappers stash their furs, had to be constructed.
“On that location, cantilevered off the cliff, I built a cave using these big rocks carved out of foam and given a cement coat and painted,” says Fisk. “For me, it’s real exciting when you put something into a natural environment and it doesn’t look like you put it there. I would say, in order to really succeed at what I do, no one should be aware of it.”
The stealth designer, whose work should be essential to the storytelling but also go unnoticed, is getting a lot of notice in the run-up to the Academy Awards ceremony. As to how the experience of being a nominee on Oscar night would be for Fisk, he points out that he’s only had one prior experience to go on. “I guess secretly when I’m sitting there I’m thinking, well, if I don’t get called up that will be much better,” he says with a self-deprecating laugh.
Daedalus Bookshop owner Sandy McAdams, photographed in the late '70s at C&O, was one of the Downtown Mall's founding fathers. Photo: Courtesy of Subject
Ann Gordon recognized that it was pretty sketchy downtown after hours. Her children later came to call it “wino safari-land.” She walked there with them sometimes during the 1970s. “There were strange derelict people,” she recalls, “and a men-only bar at The Brass Rail. There was a flop house, men living in single rooms renting week to week, and a very bizarre set of shops that were just old school. It wasn’t changing. You could feel that it could stay that way forever. Or it could just be gone the next day.”
One of the things that killed the old ideal of a traditional Main Street was that after hours it tended to become safari-land. When the office buildings emptied out for the day, what need was there for the department stores and appliance stores and clothing stores to stay open? Businesses started moving where the people were, or where they could get to more easily. Out in Barracks Road Shopping Center there was ample space for broad, paved lots for cars. As a result, like downtowns almost everywhere, Main Street was becoming more than a little seedy.
But seediness can be a seed-bed. By the early 1970s the city had seen the writing on the wall. It decided to roll the dice and develop a desperation plan to revitalize downtown by closing a portion of Main Street to traffic and creating a pedestrian mall.
Just as those plans were developing, almost as if an alarm clock had rung, a wave of young entrepreneurs was finding opportunity in low real estate values and fringe properties to open businesses downtown. They were not typical business owners. Some of them were hippies, activists and protest veterans. One was a Greenwich Village bohemian who had moved to Canada to dodge the draft. A few were disaffected young lawyers leaning toward a life less ordinary by indulging their interests in the arts, music, food and drink.
They were the Not Ready for Chamber of Commerce Players. They were about to bring something new and something radical downtown, something that would chart a path toward what it would become. And Ann Gordon was one of them.
Tumbleweeds
The construction of the pedestrian mall in 1976 caused disruption for Main Street, but its ultimate success rested on the strategy of stimulating small businesses and cultural offerings. Photo: Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society
When I first came to Charlottesville in 1981 there were tumbleweeds rolling down the mall. Or at least it seemed that way, and not only to me. The experience of walking downtown in search of nightlife was like a desert march from one oasis to another. There were pools of light and life and noise at Vinegar Hill Theater, at Fellini’s, at Miller’s, and way down on the east end of a long desolate expanse, at the C&O. If you were there before 8, when Williams Corner Bookstore closed, you might link up with a small crowd as a poetry or fiction reading was breaking up. But otherwise, nothing. Turn up your collar and hustle through the dark and hope you make it to the next watering hole.
Six years earlier, not a single one of those oases had yet opened, and it wasn’t at all clear where a downtown night life, even a rudimentary one, might come from. A 1968 study of the Central Business District had confirmed that what was happening to Main Streets all over the country was happening here as well. Declining business revenues and declining property assessments spelled doom for traditional shopping districts.
Things were not yet dire downtown in 1968, but more businesses were leaving for Route 29 all the time, with few new businesses coming in. And there was only one way for that to end.
The folks sitting on Charlottesville’s City Council decided to answer the challenge with an ambitious, and contentious, plan to revitalize downtown—building a municipal parking garage, turning Main Street into a pedestrian mall, and developing a master plan that emphasized small-scale retail and restaurants mixed with residential and office space.
There were voices who argued that downtown should just be allowed to fail—that when it all crashed, developers would move in to pick over the bones and re-build and re-develop on a larger scale without tax dollars being wasted. Mitch Van Yahres, who as a young council member thought long and hard before finally casting one of the deciding votes in favor of the mall in 1974, told a story years later that encapsulates the resistance. When he came on council in 1968, he “asked for a study of downtown housing and transit. The previous city manager laughed. Who would want to live downtown?”
That was a question that needed answering if the mall was to succeed. The Democratic city council was unanimously for the revitalization plan. And a new cadre of city employees, Cole Hendrix the new city manager, and Satyendra Huja, the new planning director, had the vision, and the political support, to see the vision through.
But that vision needed to be something that would change people’s hearts and minds about what downtown was, and what it could become. As Huja put it in a magazine interview in 1977: “People tend to go where things are going on, and we want this to be such a place. Very diverse, urban. Its success depends on community attitudes, as well as numbers of shoppers.” But how do you change community attitudes? And once you create a place that people might want to live and to play, what’s the driver, what’s the engine that’s actually going to get them to start coming?
Artists and anarchists
Michael Williams returned to Charlottesville to help his family open and run their downtown bookstore. “It was a tremendous opportunity,” he says. “I met some of the best people I will ever meet, being part of this downtown community.” Photo: Amy Jackson
One of the first indications of changing attitudes actually happened before a single brick was laid on the mall. The first lurch of the train as the engine kicked in came when Ann Gordon and her husband Chief bought the former Jarman motorcycle showroom on Market Street and converted it for use as an art house cinema.
“One day in 1973,” she says, “Chief found this building for sale for $30,000, and said ‘Let’s buy it.’ I was basically a UVA graduate student who had never finished her masters, and Chief wanted to act. He was dedicated to bringing the arts to Charlottesville. We knew almost nothing about what we were doing, except that we thought we had good taste in movies.”
They started with the idea of creating an arts complex. The 200-seat cinema, to be named Vinegar Hill Theatre, would reside in the Market Street frontage. The back of the building, the vintage part fronting on Old Preston (Vibethink is located there now), had been a working garage and office and was in much rougher shape. They decided to limit themselves to opening the cinema first, and sell remaining part of the building. That was when they met the anarchists.
John Conover and Virginia Daugherty had drifted into town in 1971 at the end of a year of driving the country and living out of an old converted bread truck. The truck had been fitted out with a bed and an ice box by a sailor in Norfolk, where the couple had met. “We wanted to see America,” Conover says. “We went from hippie farm to hippie farm. We just wanted to be free. Of course we thought the world was going to come unglued. That was spring of 1970. The war was at its peak. Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King was dead. Bobby Kennedy was dead. People had been to the moon. Some people didn’t believe they had been to the moon. Something was going to happen. Good or bad. There was going to be an apocalypse.”
Waiting for the apocalypse in a bread truck got a little stale, however, and they decided to settle in Charlottesville where John had done his undergraduate work, and where they knew a few people. Their activist sensibilities had been sharpened by the tumult of the ’60s, and they dove right into the local political scene. They volunteered and canvassed for the local Democratic Party. And they started hanging with the revolutionaries manquées of the Black Flag Press.
Black Flag was a collective that had started when UVA student activists went looking for a place to print up protest material and found that local print houses would have none of it. They managed to raise enough money to buy some printing equipment and set it up above the Studio Art Shop on West Main Street. The group took their name from the emblem of the anarchist movement, and they set out to stir up a radical economic upheaval in Charlottesville. By the time Daugherty and Conover joined up, however, they were also taking on some commercial print jobs.
“Nobody else could do that work, and we got into it fairly cheaply and ended up doing a lot of university work,” says Conover. “Then it started to be economically viable. Then we fell in with Chief and Ann Gordon, and we realized it was a business and not a terrorist operation or an idealist operation.”
By the time of that realization, most of the original anarchists had melted away. Daugherty and Conover bought the back half of the old automotive building from the Gordons for $18,000, moved the operation downtown, and renamed it Papercraft Printing.
Vinegar Hill Theater opened in 1976, just as the pedestrian mall was about to be completed. You could see the films of Billy Wilder, Howard Hawkes, Bergman, Huston, the French and Italian New Wave, Altman. It brought a dollop of urban sophistication to the newly-opened mall, a bright red cosmopolitan cherry on top of what was still the plain vanilla of an old Virginia Main Street. “Charlottesville itself didn’t have that sparkle, that edge that said ‘Let’s have new, let’s have different’,” says Ann.
But the Gordons were dedicated to supplying new and different. A few years later, they bought the old flop house just up the street and opened Fellini’s restaurant. By that time, their marriage was dissolving. After the split, Ann reverted to her maiden name, Porotti, and continued to run the theater. Chief presided over the restaurant in his white dinner jacket. A scene was starting to develop in downtown Charlottesville, but would take a while to mature.
“I think sometimes we were buoyed by our own narcissism,” Porotti says. “We wanted to start a movie theater like The Circle in D.C., or the New Yorker in New York, or The Brattle in Boston. I guess we thought that people would come because they had come in other places. By the early ’80s it was good days for us, but not so much for downtown. I used to ask my employees when they came in, ‘How’s it going out there?’ They’d say, ‘Tumbleweeds’.”
Paris, 1914
Ann Porotti, co-founder with her then-husband Chief Gordon of Vinegar Hill Theater, in 2003. The art house cinema was the first explosion of cosmopolitan culture in downtown Charlottesville. Photo: Jim Hall
In 1974, as Gordon and Porotti were moving their theater toward launch, and Black Flag Press was starting the transition to legitimate business, Sandy McAdams arrived in Charlottesville with 20,000 books in a railroad car. He had been through town briefly some years before, though he had no real connection to or feeling for it. But when he started looking for a permanent home for the book collection he had been amassing and selling out of a barn in the Hamptons, a friend of a friend showed him a photograph of a building for sale at the corner of Market Street and Fourth Street, NE in Charlottesville. He took one look and said: “That’s it.”
There’s a great Yiddish word that describes people like him. Edward “Sandy” McAdams is a macher. It means “someone who gets things done, makes things happen.” But it can also carry a suggestion of being overbearing, a bit too much. I’ll leave it to those who know McAdams to decide whether that shoe fit him back in the ’70s. For certain he was a big, bristly personality in a heavily bearded, well-knit, if undersized, package.
In the early ’60s he attended Vanderbilt, where he ran for a student senate office with, he reports, no political platform whatsoever. “That’s my wild expectations,” he says. “I thought I can do this. I ran for it. Did nothing, except I visited every single room and talked to people. A day or two before the vote, my friends and I broke into the administration building and hung a huge sign on the clock tower saying ‘It’s Time to Vote for Ed.’ I won by the largest plurality in the history of the school.” But by the end of the year, Vanderbilt had kicked him out of school. Why? “It’s hard to say,” he says with a sly grin.
McAdams finished his undergrad degree at NYU, and he went on to finish all of a masters degree but the language requirement. He lived in the mid-’60s Greenwich Village of Dylan and Ginsberg, worked as a building super, and was introduced to the book trade by befriending some booksellers over on Fourth Street. He worked for a summer on Cape Cod unloading fish off the trawlers, an experience he wrote about for a State Department publication touting life in the United States-type slices of Americana. After NYU, he taught school for a few years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to stay out of the way of the draft. He and his first wife were tempted back to the States when his in-laws offered them a farm in the Hamptons, Long Island but that came to an end when his wife left for the West Coast with some guy on a motorcycle, and McAdams started looking for a place to move his bookstore.
McAdams opened Daedelus Books in 1975. With his personality as a magnet, it quickly became a hub for some of the edgier more interesting people in town, many of whom were looking to make things happen. One of those was Philip Stafford. Stafford was born in Georgia but had done most of his growing up in Richmond. He attended UVA as an undergrad, but after a couple of years of the drinking and road trip social life, he tired of the frat-centric scene and wanted to get away. He went to Ann Arbor for law school partly because he’d heard that the student progressivism was more well-established there. He had some eye-opening experiences, one of which had to do with the new politics of food.
The new politics of food that developed in the 1960s led Philip Stafford to co-found the C&O—and to a lifelong interest and career in food and wine. Photo: Amy Jackson
Younger generations may hate it, but it’s just a bald, inescapable fact that baby boomers started everything first. The foodie movement got its earliest start in the late ’60s as back to the land and political activism combined to take on factory farming and convenience foods. In Ann Arbor, Philip Stafford caught the bug. “The book that made a tremendous impression on me was Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe,” he says. “It was published in 1971 and I read it shortly after that. It contributed to my early interest in food, which in turn led to a career in food and wine. This was primarily a book with a political argument, but it was also a cookbook. Lappe argued that meat production wasted environmental resources that led to food scarcity. Her tone of suppressed rage caught the mood of the times, and in the second part of the book she provided dozens of vegetarian recipes. I removed meat from my diet, and started to learn how to cook.”
In 1974, Stafford returned to Charlottesville, interested in trying out small town life. He worked as a lawyer doing legal research for a time, but pretty soon he started talking about his desire to open a restaurant. His counter-cultural leanings had already brought him into contact with McAdams: “I was walking around, and I walked past Daedalus. I had been looking for this Aldous Huxley book for a long time. And I walked into this room—I can picture this pretty well to this day—this sort of eccentric looking guy walked up to me with a beard down to his waist, and sort of put his face up to me and said ‘What do you want?’ I said ‘I’m looking for this book The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley,’ and he said “It’s right over your shoulder.’ And he just reached over and handed it to me.”
Sometime after, a friend mentioned that she had heard that McAdams had some interest in a restaurant as well. So he went back to Daedelus and re-introduced himself. Within a few weeks, they had bought a building and were setting about to bring haute cuisine to the Downtown Mall.
The building was a little shell down by the old railroad station on Water Street. It had housed a greasy spoon for a while, and had formerly served as a bunk house for railroad workers. But it had potential. They found wood from a barn in Crozet to build what became the bar downstairs. Bricks and more wood came from the porch of a house being torn down on West Main. They cannibalized vintage beadboard from the old bunkhouse to create an austere, minimalist space that became the fine dining restaurant upstairs. Stafford was to be the food and wine guy. “What I brought was hard work,” says McAdams. “Sandy had the vision,” says Stafford. “I think instantly when he saw that C&O building and the way it looked he understood that would be a place. If we could do the right thing inside the building, plenty of people would in fact come and find us from anywhere.”
Indispensable training came from Claudine and Walker Cowen. The Cowens were gastrophiles, she a chef from Brittany, he the editor of the University Press of Virginia. “They took us by the hand and helped us into the world of fine dining,” Stafford says. “Walker gave life lessons, and Claudine held small classes in her home for the first chefs at the C&O.”
When they opened the C&O Restaurant in 1976, they had arrived at a formula that coupled ongoing training from the Cowens with exacting standards of quality and service. Jason Bell, who became a waiter and later a maître d’ upstairs at the C&O, remembers that “we all got this incredible Ranger boot camp training in food. You can’t play at this. You absolutely had to be able to understand an entire menu and deliver it every single night. You had to pronounce the French correctly, and understand the cooking principles involved.”
The experience, according to Bell, could be life changing. “Every man goes through at least one experience where they find out what it means to work hard and to be serious and to be ethical about what you were delivering,” says Bell. “That’s what the C&O was to me.”
Lightning struck when New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne came through town to meet the writer Peter Taylor, and Taylor took him down to the C&O. Surprised by the quality that he found there, Claiborne gave the restaurant a glowing column in the Times. And more national recognition followed.
A lawyer by training and a scruffy bohemian had put the Downtown Mall on the nationwide culinary map. But as just as important perhaps as the culinary success upstairs was the bar culture that developed downstairs. “It was a pretty glossy crew down there,” says Bell. “Everyone was really, really smart. It was a Paris, 1914 kind of thing.”
Small ball
In 1970, before they settled in Charlottesville, became stalwarts in the local political scene and started Papercraft Printing, Virginia Daugherty and John Conover traveled America for a year in a converted bread truck. Photo: Courtesy of Subject
I used to make this snide joke when I first moved downtown in the late ’80s. Downtown shops, I would say, consisted of little boutiques run by the spouses of UVA professors with too much time on their hands and with money to burn. Not much of a joke, I know. Just a condescending piece of graduate student snark. I mention it with shame. Not my finest moment as a human being.
I don’t excuse it, but there’s a hint of something true in it. The truth is in that word boutique. There were starting to be a lot of them around—little antique shops, craft and art galleries, specialty shops with a narrow thematic or market focus. The scale was small, the vision was personal and the owner was often the person who greeted you when you walked through the door.
It turns out that was planned for and was the key to the mall’s ultimate success. Bill Lucy, a retired professor of urban planning at UVA, and a downtown resident himself, did a study a few years ago entitled Charlottesville’s Downtown Revitalization. Lucy talks about the approach taken by the city as playing “small ball,” a phrase that refers to the strategy in baseball of winning by focusing on small achievements. As Lucy puts it, you “activate the existing fabric with small investors and small entrepreneurs.” Instead of city block demolition, you get vintage buildings being rehabbed. Instead of chain superstores, you get bohemian creative types and mom and pop doing their thing.
Mom and pop are, quite literally, the folks who brought Williams Corner Bookstore into being. Michael Williams came here with his family in the ’60s, and went to Lane High School just as the school system was first resisting, then badly botching, efforts to fully integrate. Williams describes the demonstrations as he and 400 fellow students staged walkouts and demanded better treatment for their classmates as “one of the most empowering experiences of my life.”
In 1976, Williams’ parents decided to quit their library jobs and follow their dream to open a bookstore. They bought a building on Main Street that they had always been fond of, and Michael helped his family run the business. Besides becoming the best bookstore in town for paperbacks, fiction and poetry, the store’s reading series, which Williams inaugurated when a series at The Prism Coffeehouse closed down, became a signature literary offering downtown. For 20 years, until it closed in 1996 because of competition from the big chain Barnes & Noble, there existed an open conduit between the creative writing program at UVA and Williams Corner. Jason Bell, before he worked at the C&O, was a wunderkind poet, packing the house for readings at the store. Ann Beattie, Rita Mae Brown and a host of writers of national reputation gave readings there when they were in town. And students like Bell, as well as UVA faculty, had a generous local platform to bring exposure to their work. Like Anne Porotti and Chief Gordon, like McAdams and Stafford, the Williams family had “activated the existing fabric” to create a business that seriously upped the cultural texture of downtown life.
By 1981, at the old Miller’s Drug Store building two blocks away, Steve Tharp was busy doing the same thing. He had already started a restaurant on the UVA Corner, but that wasn’t the dream. “I had always fantasized about creating a jazz club kind of scene,” he says. “You know, everyone wants to be Humphrey Bogart in the corner with a dinner jacket. I had a thought that that might work here.” John D’earth, and members of his group Cosmology, became regular performers at the club, and momentum built that established Miller’s as the live music mecca downtown.
Steve Tharp opened Miller’s in 1981, preserving much of the look and feel of the original early 20th century drugstore. With acts ranging from rockabilly to blues to jazz, Miller’s pioneered the music scene on the downtown mall. Photo: Amy Jackson
With music, film, literary events and a few vibrant bars and restaurants, there was now the strong beginning of a scene to draw people to downtown. There is a direct line from Vinegar Hill Theatre to the Virginia Film Festival. There is a direct line from Daedalus Books and the readings at Williams Corner to Charlottesville’s vibrant used book culture and the Festival of the Book. There is a direct line from Papercraft to the Virginia Arts of the Book. There is a direct line from jazz at Miller’s to concerts at the Pavilion. And there is a direct line from the C&O to the explosion of fine dining that has taken place downtown since.
It would be way overstating it to claim that these pioneers saved the Downtown Mall. Every one of the people I interviewed for this piece mentioned numerous other individuals, businesses, organizations and strategic decisions that went into creating the mall’s success. From other early restaurants like the Hardware Store and Court Square Tavern, to imaginative developers who fostered creativity like Gabe Silverman and the Kuttners, to civic events and organizations like McGuffey Arts Center, Live Arts, First Night and Fridays after Five. And it would be wrong to suggest that they changed everything, because there are important remainders of old Main Street still operating and contributing tradition and depth to the fabric of the mall—like Timberlake’s Drug Store, Tuel Jewelers, The Young Men’s Shop and New Dominion Bookshop.
But what they did was definitive. They pioneered downtown as an intellectual and artistic center—as the anti-university, as a place for fringe, disaffected creatives to live, work and play, and thrive. It was their bohemian sensibilities, combined with the vision of Charlottesville planners, and the transitional, underdeveloped nooks of real estate on the mall that combined to make that new version of downtown Charlottesville possible.
When I got the assignment a couple of months ago to write about Jefferson and his protégé William Short and their dialogue about race and slavery, the nine murdered worshipers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston were still alive. We’ve lost far too many people to race-inflected violence and outrage in recent years, but this feels different. It feels impossible now to dive in to telling a story about race from 200 years ago without acknowledging at the outset this most recent stain on our nation.
Some of what’s different this time stems from the truly remarkable spectacle of the relatives of the Charleston victims publicly forgiving and praying for the broken man who slaughtered their loved ones. Their example seems, for the time being at least, to have sparked a new thoughtfulness about race. “What is this extraordinary resource of this otherwise unhappy country that it breeds such dignity in its victims?” That was the journalist Murray Kempton writing in 1956 about the miraculous poise and composure of Autherine Lucy as she ran a gauntlet of violence and hate during the attempted integration of the University of Alabama. It’s a question worth asking again. What resources did these families draw upon to find forgiveness in the face of such hatred?
Well, one such resource is the power of the black church. In its earliest form, it saw its people through the long horrors of slavery. Later, it nurtured them through the privations of reconstruction, and through the almost unbearable injustices of Jim Crow. It has been one of the strongest bastions of moral courage that this country has ever produced. It continues to inspire both black and white with a vision of brotherhood and justice. And even now it carries in its palm the families of Charleston and holds them up above this darkness and pain and into the healing light of faith.
We need a secular faith that is as powerful as that religious faith. We need to have faith that there are still things that we can discover about ourselves. We need to have faith that our highest founding ideals can redeem our lowest impulses. We need to have faith that we can look with compassionate and unblinking eyes at the ugliness that is inside all of us, and we need to believe that we can draw from that encounter the strength to change ourselves and to change the world.
It is in that spirit that we tell the following story—about two long-dead white men, about the ways that they struggled with our deepest national shame, even as they both worked to build a country that might possibly one day redress that shame.
It is about how they differed, and about how they failed. And it is about what there is to learn from that failure.
The map
The mysterious map delivered to the offices of the Morven Project in 2008, showing William Short’s name, a few geographical features, and what appear to be plots of land labeled with initials. Photo: Morven
This story starts and ends with a mystery document.
“It’s like a whodunit,” says Stewart Gamage. “We started from the ground up, and with blind eyes.” Gamage, a striking woman with a gentle southern accent and a smart, inquisitive way of talking and listening, runs The Morven Project for the University of Virginia Foundation.
In 2001 the billionaire media mogul John Kluge donated 7,300 acres south of Monticello and Ash Lawn to the University. The core of that donation consisted of the horse farm and estate named Morven (a Scottish word meaning “ridge of hills”), with its land, gardens, dependencies and landmark Georgian manor house.
Gifts sometimes come with burdens, or with challenges. It was not immediately apparent what a major research university needed with a showcase of agrarian gentility. But the University decided to sell some of the land, use the proceeds to endow the operation of 3,000 acres with Morven at its core, and to actively research and explore ways to use the place and its history to focus, and perhaps extend, its mission.
In 2008 Gamage was hired to run the project, and to spearhead the exploration. And she had barely started to work when the mystery walked through the door. “A gentleman with an English accent walked into the office, literally with this photocopy in his hands,” she says, holding up the grey-toned paper with lines and vectors and scrawls. “He said: ‘This could help you with your work. Please don’t tell anyone where you got it’ and walked out.”
The document was a photocopy of a vintage map, with the words “William Short 1334 acres” written prominently near the top. It appeared to contain a number of plots, or subdivisions of the property, which were labeled in a way that was difficult to read on the copy, as well as a road and a few streams. Short’s connection to the Morven property was already known. In 1796, Thomas Jefferson presided over the purchase of the 1,334 acres, a parcel then referred to as “Indian Camp,” as an investment for his former private secretary, Short, who was then serving in Europe as one of America’s first career diplomats. Managing the property for Short in his absence, Jefferson leased portions of the land to farmers in an effort to generate income, but the arrangement was not a success and Short, who looked at the land as an investment that was not paying, authorized its sale. Still acting as agent, Jefferson sold the property in 1813.
The mystery man turned out to be an employee at a nearby estate who had a historical bent. He didn’t want his employers to think that he was wasting his time on esoteric research, hence the secrecy, but he had found the map in a published collection of Jefferson’s architectural drawings, and suspected that it might be useful in the historical research that was about to begin at Morven.
Useful understates its effect.
The diplomat
History refuses to sit still. We have a tendency to think of it as etched in stone, as if we get it right the first time and then immediately turn it into the marble icons and static portraits in our internalized national gallery of the mind. But, in fact, our sense of the past is constantly evolving, as we uncover new evidence, change interpretations, or as our present needs drive us to ask new questions about where we come from. The Indian Camp map spurred exactly that kind of evolution.
For a long time after his death, history knew William Short as a minor figure in Jefferson’s biography, and as a person of modest significance in the diplomatic history of the U.S. Short was born in 1759 in Surrey County, across the river from Jamestown. He came from a landholding, slaveholding family, and was educated at William & Mary from 1778 to 1781. He was a distant relation of Jefferson’s and may have known him before school, but it was at Williamsburg that Short’s abilities first caught Jefferson’s attention. He noticed in the younger man, “a peculiar talent for prying into facts,” as he wrote to James Madison in 1783.
After William & Mary, Jefferson helped foster Short’s career in some small ways. Then, in, 1784, he brought Short to Paris to serve as his private secretary during his term as ambassador to France. When Jefferson returned to the U.S. Short stayed on the continent for the next 17 years, serving in a number of diplomatic posts and only rarely returning to the States. During their work together, Jefferson developed a deep affection for his protégé that did not abate when they were separated. He referred to Short on numerous occasions as his “adoptive son,” and they carried on a long and lively correspondence that lasted until Jefferson’s death in 1826.
That correspondence, it turns out, holds a number of surprises. The historian Annette Gordon-Reed unearthed and presented one of those surprises in 1997 in her book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy. The book is a landmark in Jefferson scholarship. In it Gordon-Reed, who is by training a lawyer, builds a painstaking case for a proposition that had frequently been rumored over the years, but that generations of respectable historians had consistently refused to believe—that Jefferson had fathered children by his slave Sally Hemmings. Gordon-Reed’s argument was so convincing that it tipped the scales within the profession, and even within the Jefferson establishment. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, operator of Monticello, in 2000 announced that it had studied the evidence and it agreed with Gordon-Reed’s conclusions.
Prurient interest in Jefferson’s sex life aside, the really shocking thing about his paternity is the deep hypocrisy that it reveals. As part of her research, Gordon-Reed uncovered a remarkable letter from Short to Jefferson written in 1798 that seems to address that hypocrisy directly. Jefferson’s ideas about slavery and about race were complex and contradictory and in some ways odious, and he never wavered from them. Short knew those opinions well. They are clearly spelled out in Jefferson’s 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia, which Short helped him prepare for publication when they were in Paris together. Slavery was an evil, Jefferson believed, and it had to end. But he also had a strong “suspicion” which never left him of the innate inferiority of the black race. His favored path to end slavery was to train young slaves in farming skills and independence, free them at age 18, separate them from their families, and ship them off to colonies abroad to have them “removed beyond the reach of mixture” that might happen if freed blacks and whites were to share the same continent. To compensate slaveholders and to sustain the economy through the loss of essentially free labor, he recommended a system of importing lower class whites, and setting them up on plantations as a class of tenant farmers on the European model.
The 1798 letter that Gordon-Reed uncovered systematically, though not confrontationally, dismantles and contradicts every one of these ideas about race and slavery. In that letter, Short argues for the innate “perfectability” of blacks, even those long degraded by the dehumanizing institution. He questions the morality of exporting freed blacks, and the practicality of importing free whites to replace them. Surely, it makes more sense to avoid the expense of transportation and settle freed blacks into a gradual process leading from serfdom to tenant farming, and, eventually, to independent ownership. Any racial mixing, he argues, would happen slowly, and would produce people who “would not be of a darker color than the inhabitants of most of the provinces of Spain.” The mixing would even come, Short says, with no loss of “sentiment arising from the contemplation of beauty.”
It’s hard not to read that last as a direct tweak of Jefferson as the father of mixed race children. Short was with Jefferson in Paris, an intimate of the household, when Sally Hemmings, according to her son’s memoir, conceived and gave birth to her first child (who died shortly thereafter). Clearly, there was a lot more to pay attention to in Jefferson and Short’s relationship than scholars had previously guessed. And with the discovery of the map, and the commencement of research at Morven, attention was about to be paid.
Digging
At the core of John Kluge’s 2001 gift to the University was the Morven estate. During the period that Jefferson purchased and managed the land for his “adoptive son” William Short, it was known as “Indian Camp.” Photo: Morven
In 2008, Laura Voisin George, a graduate student in Architectural History, had only recently arrived at the University when she met Stewart Gamage, who had only recently taken over at Morven. Almost immediately, Voisin George was working for Gamage to research the history of the buildings on the estate. When the Indian Camp map came through the door, it became the order of the day. Voisin George was dispatched to the Huntington Library, the location of the original, to secure a hi-res scan of the map that would allow them to decipher all of the writing. It is one of the little serendipities of this story that Voisin George was visiting her family at the time that the call came, right down the road from the Huntington, in Pasadena, CA.
Back at Morven, Gamage had secured three years worth of funding from the University for research into the history of the estate, and she was assembling teams to start the digging. Some of that digging was going to be literal. Frazier Neiman, director of archaeology at Monticello, was brought in, as was Jeffrey Hantman, an anthropologist who had been working for years on Monacan Indian sites in the region. With digital mapping support from the archeology lab at Monticello, they were able to align landmarks on the map with features of the local terrain and lay out the plots on the map directly on the topography of Morven. The tenant farming plots became targets for their archeology. Over the next three years, test plots discovered a deep layer of Indian artifacts establishing a presence going back to 2000 BC. From the colonial era they found artifacts, as well as a house foundation and layers of soil that carried evidence of farming practices.
With the ability to read the initials attached to the smaller plots on the map, Voisin George was able to find records of farmer names that matched the initials in the archive at Monticello and to confirm that these were, in fact, tenant farms on the European model—among the first in Virginia, which did not have an established tenant class. She was also able to research family history of the farmers situated there. The records showed that Jefferson was using the tenant arrangements to experiment with his ideas about crop rotation.
While that was going on, Gamage also assembled a separate team of faculty members to conduct above-ground research in the architecture, ecology, and landscape architecture of the place. She included in that team Scot French, a historian, to pose questions about the extent and nature of Jefferson’s and Short’s involvement in the place. “We had the map,” says French. “We knew that [Jefferson] had a connection, and that was the starting point, the map. We understood that he was using tenant farmers there, but what was the correspondence that would help illuminate that?”
So French set out to gather together Jefferson’s and Short’s letters and see what he could find that illuminated the history at Morven. What he found was beyond what anyone imagined could be there. It might seem that the existing correspondence should have been looked over many times by scholars over the years, and its nuances digested and interpreted and passed into accepted history and mounted as truth in our national gallery of the mind. But history doesn’t actually work like that.
While a lot of the correspondence had been collected and published, and much that wasn’t published was in known collections that were easily accessible, no one had ever looked at it all in light of tenant farming before. No one else before had a map that needed explaining. And no one else had noticed that tenant farming was the theme that tied together their conversations on the practicalities of Indian Camp with Short’s insistent efforts to convince Jefferson that tenancy was a better way to end slavery than colonization.
French’s research makes it clear that the 1798 letter that Gordon-Reed had called attention to, in which Short challenged Jefferson on slavery and race, was only the tip of the iceberg. It was a single moment in a 40-year-long conversation between the two men that started with the publication of Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785. One thread of that conversation was the tenant practices at Indian Camp, but that single thread was woven with a whole fabric of larger, more ambitious conversations that covered tenant practices in Europe (“In the Milanois it [sharecropping] is less complicated in one respect than in France, and of course better for our negroes.”), new discoveries pointing to the cultural advancement of blacks (“What has already been seen & authentically established by late travelers [in Africa] leaves no doubt of their susceptibility of all the arts of civilization … “), instances of slave revolts and of freed black colonization, race mixing, and the comparative morality of exporting freed blacks versus establishing them as tenants on the lands where they had been born and worked.
Especially later in life, when Jefferson seemed to tire of the conversation, Short was relentless, though never confrontational, in continuing to hammer home his more progressive perspective on slavery. In 1800: “I have never heard from you whether or not you recd a very long letter I wrote you some years ago…. It went on a good deal on a subject to which I think it of importance that our countrymen should pay attention—that of slaves.” In 1825:“I remember well that near half a century ago you treated of this population, but even then were in favor of the expopulating system. If you should have now, like myself, become convinced of the impracticality, or even of the inhumanity of this plan, would it not be worth while to encourage the idea of changing the condition of the slaves into serfs…?” And again in 1826: “I should be very glad to know by one line only whether you approve of the idea of converting our slaves into serfs.” ”
Jefferson’s answer came six months before his death. It makes it plain that his ideas had not evolved much: “The plan of converting the blacks into serfs would certainly be better than keeping them in their present condition, but I consider that of expatriation …as entirely practicable, and greatly preferable to the mixture of colour here, to this I have great aversion.”
Scot French is impressed by the scale of the discussion these two founders of the country participated in: “These are big issues. This is not just a minor conversation about a little piece of land. They are talking about the biggest issues you can imagine.”
Stewart Gamage sums it up this way: “William Short really was, in many ways, Jefferson’s conscience on slavery.”
The archive
The questions asked in researching William Short’s ownership of Indian Camp (Morven) led to a re-evaluation and new discovery of his life-long conversation with Jefferson about agricultural methods, slavery, and race. Photo: Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello
Were Jefferson and Short experimenting with tenant farming at Morven as a way to imagine and start to build a path out of slavery? If so, then the experiment failed. The whole point was that it needed to be something practicable for plantation owners to undertake. And the tenancy arrangements that Jefferson was supervising at Indian Camp were not cutting it. Small plots were not profitable. They degraded the land because they were so difficult to supervise to ensure wholesome land management. At Short’s request, Jefferson shut down the operation and sold the land to a neighbor in 1813.
In a long letter of October 1793, two years before the purchase of Indian Camp, Short discussed tenant farming at length with Jefferson, evaluating the money he would need to earn from his land investments, and making a long digression about his ideas of bringing slavery to an end by freeing slaves and moving them into tenant arrangements: “I think those who have the misfortune to own slaves, should for the sake of humanity make the experiment. When I shall return to America it is my intention to preach this not only by precept but by example.”
He goes on: “Let any person examine the situation of Russia and Poland for instance and compare those countries with France or England and he may form some idea of what our southern states would be could our slaves be made free tenants…. This is one of the most pleasing reveries in which I indulge myself…a unity of the purest principles of humanity with the prosperity of one’s country.”
Even if Short never explicitly asked Jefferson to experiment with tenant farming at Morven for the sake of building a path out of slavery, it’s clear that he had every intention to do it himself.
Not long before her position at Morven was slated to end, Laura Voisin George discovered an interesting document in the Library of Congress collection of Short papers. There are 20,000 documents in that collection, and surely it holds more than a few surprises for someone coming at it with the right questions.
The document she found dates from after Short’s return to the U.S., after he had set up in Philadelphia and conducted a thriving career in business and investment. In his later life, Short became a very wealthy man. She didn’t have much time with the document, but it seemed to suggest that Short was following through on his promise to “make the experiment”—purchasing slaves expressly with the purpose of freeing them and settling them as tenants.
“The letter I read,” Voisin George recalls, “sounded like he had acquired slaves, I guess purchased them, because he wanted to conduct the experiment side by side. One farm with white tenants, one farm with black tenants.” The experiment may have been planned for some land Short owned in Upstate New York. But before she could pursue the matter, her job ended.
And so we close our story with another mystery document. And another set of questions waiting to be answered.
Epilogue: Possibilities
Field schools performed experimental archaeological digs from 2009-2011 at sites indicated by the Indian Camp map. Photo: Morven
I once came across a line while reading Henry David Thoreau that I think about often. “This nation is not settled yet.” He’s talking about the vast expanses of wilderness that still existed in his day, but he’s implying much more than that. He’s implying that we are still inventing ourselves, still discovering who we are, still a long way from settling. On anything.
At a conference in 2011 where much of the research into Short and Morven was presented, Annette Gordon-Reed gave a response that talked about Short in terms of the possibilities that he represented. “He is someone who should be spoken about, written about,” she said, “because of the light he sheds on the possibilities during that time period. One of the things that people tend to do is to imagine that the past had to be the way it was, and I think it is important for Americans to understand that there were people during Jefferson’s time who had a different idea about things. Who thought that there was a possibility of doing something about slavery. Who thought that there was a possibility of doing something about race relations.”
How much of that story still remains buried under the soil at Morven, and in boxes of documents in the Library of Congress—waiting to be unearthed and understood? That yet-to-be-exposed history might teach us a lot about how human beings struggle against and within the moral limitations of their age.And how our nation’s highest ideals are complicated and hemmed in by the limits of what we perceive as possible. Some of that understanding could come in handy right about now.
We have much more to know about ourselves. I find a great deal of hope in that.
UVA professor Bruce Holsinger’s The Invention of Fire is his second historical novel about a medieval sleuth facing uncanny parallels to our own modern lives. Publicity photo
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Walking through the University grounds toward a meeting with English department professor and author Bruce Holsinger, I found myself thinking of the ways that a university is like a medieval town. First of all, the place is scaled for walking and almost everyone is on foot—a colorful, surging, bustling crowd. The streetscape is divvied up by fields and disciplines as it was in medieval times—here’s where they do the sciences, over there is commerce and the law. You could almost imagine rounding a corner to find a street full of weavers or a neighborhood of scribes. And then there is the patchwork of administrative divisions and jurisdictions—academic schools and departments, a student-administered honor system, an office of student life, a University police force, a faculty senate, a board and a president. The place is a nesting doll of bailiwicks.
That political jigsaw puzzle was particularly on my mind since reading Holsinger’s two very compelling historical novels: the political/literary thriller A Burnable Book (published last year to strong reviews, and already in paperback), and the political/historical/technology whodunit The Invention of Fire (just released last week and slated to become an Amazon best book of the month). Both books are set in London in the 1380s, and one of their great pleasures is to follow the hero, poet/sleuth/political fixer John Gower, as he prowls and manipulates his way through the welter of petty functionaries, ecclesiastical officers, barons and earls and dukes with their retainers and feudal militias, and the court of the young and increasingly erratic King Richard II with its factions and backstabbers and viper’s nests.
The Middle Ages are (forgive me) enjoying a bit of a Renaissance these days. As a professor of medieval literature, Holsinger is particularly attuned to the ways that the world of 700 years ago is ringing through the zeitgeist. “There’s a great hunger for historical fiction,” he told me. “Especially the medieval stuff is very big right now—Game of Thrones, you could see Wolf Hall as more late-medieval than Renaissance, really, and the elements of medieval fantasy that you see in things like Harry Potter.”
There’s a long tradition, and George R.R. Martin is only the tip of that iceberg, of using medievalism as a shorthand for brutality. But Holsinger sees a good deal more than that operating in our fascination with things medieval. He believes that one of the reasons the Middle Ages rings so compellingly right now is that there are elements in the contemporary world—some of its more jarring and bewildering ones—that echo the shadowy complexity that Holsinger’s hero has to unpack: “There’s a whole branch of international relations theory called ‘neo-medievalism’ that’s about non-state actors and things like large international terrorist organizations, drug cartels, but also multi-national corporations, NGOs, etc…. that are not defined necessarily by the nation,” said Holsinger.
Holsinger’s eye for the political terrain, and his feel for the resonant facts and ideas of 700 years ago, give his novels a very contemporary edge. The Invention of Fire finds Gower investigating a mass killing. Sixteen bodies turn up in a stream that’s used as a public sewer. They have been killed by a strange new hand-held weapon that throws small balls of shot through the bodies of its victims. The “handgonnes,” as they are called, are tools to defend the realm. But they are also instruments of terror.
“This is the historical moment,” Holsinger said, “when gunpowder weapons go from artillery to hand-held. And that, I think, is a really important moment in the history of technology. It’s a scary moment, and people back then were acknowledging that.”
In the passage that gives the book its title, Gower weighs what he has learned about the guns and what he can foresee about the new technology and its disruptive implications—for warfare, for political stability, for the ever-expanding scale on which mayhem can be accomplished: “The garrison’s guns had thrilled me with their terrible potency, their muscular allure. I was both smitten and repulsed, seduced by the simple power of the guns, yet troubled by the new modes of violence they threatened. I thought of Prometheus, stealing the first flaming brand from the gods and bringing it triumphantly to man. The invention of fire gave us warmth, even as it cursed us with myriad new ways to suffer and die.”
Leaving my conversation with Holsinger I found myself thinking that there’s a reason the University is like a medieval village—because it is one. It is the long echo of a way of structuring education that is fully 1,000 years old. The past is very much with us in ways we rarely acknowledge. But it’s not just that some of its structures persist. As Holsinger’s books show, it’s also that the past has already processed and experienced some of what we think of as our characteristically contemporary concerns: the disorientation and disruption of technological change, the feeling of swimming in a sea of shadowy forces that are too big, too obscurely powerful, for the individual to ever grapple with successfully. To paraphrase the satirical cartoonist Walt Kelly (who was himself paraphrasing the naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry) “we have met the past, and it is us.”
Old books and writing at the Rare Book School at Alderman Library on the UVA Campus. Photo: Amanda Maglione
Probably all of us have felt it at one point or another. For some, it comes in the form of an obsession with story—the drive to know what happens next, to revel in character and incident and situation, to follow a plot as it arcs and swoops and blossoms (or crashes and implodes). For some it manifests as a hunger to know (admission: I probably fall most fully in this camp)—a need to filter and absorb the world through language, a compulsion to cram as much as possible of what’s out there into the space in here between the ears. For many people these days it has a technophilic edge—a delight in the slender tile that houses a library, in the riches available at the touch or the swipe of a finger, in the back-lit vibrancy of a photograph and text beautifully laid out on an HD screen. And for some it still carries that same old deep physical satisfaction that Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens would have known—of holding in your hand something that has the heft and the endurance worthy of a block chiseled off the edifice of human culture.
Sandy McAdams, proprietor of Daedalus Books, has a name for it: “the mysterious attraction of books.” And in this Festival of the Book edition of C-VILLE, we’re taking some time to explore what that means to folks in various corners of our decidedly biblio-centric little town.
You can still find purists in this world (another admission: hand up, head hung—guilty as charged) who will say that the electronic flicker can never be a satisfying substitute for that stack of paper and boards. But take a step back and broaden the focus a bit, and even I can see how narrow that idea is.
This thing we know as the printed book has been around for 500-some years. Before that, and of course since then, the marriage of word and image has been available in a dizzying variety of forms: from papyrus scrolls to illuminated manuscripts to block-printed sheets of rice paper. The earliest writingis preserved on clay tablets that are 5,000 years old. And lately there’s been some indication that lines and symbols in cave paintings dating to 35,000 years ago are actually early efforts at symbolic communication. From cave wall to mud slab to papyrus to vellum to paper and now on to pixels, “the book” has always been a multi-media affair.
The ways in which we use and encounter and absorb the written word into our lives are just as varied. In the stories that follow, we hear about some of the ways that emotional and intellectual connections to the written word can lead to new possibilities in life, deeper understanding, a hipper way to be, and, yes, even a career path. All that personal alchemy happens because language is a conduit—it’s a communication cable connecting our inner lives with those of our fellow human beings. Books these days can take many forms, but the one thing they all share is this: They are tools for connecting individuals together into a culture across time.
The SIA Plan calls for massive development and a greenway following the Pollocks Branch creek that will stretch for blocks south between Garrett Street and Elliott Avenue. Photo: Jack Looney.
“To me, this is the heart of Charlottesville right here.” I am standing at the intersection of Monticello Avenue and Sixth Street SE with Matthew Slaats, executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. We are talking on this wet, raw December day about community, growth, and the role that the arts can play to shape and develop it. This is not idle or esoteric chatter. Back in July, the Bridge and the Piedmont Council for the Arts, in partnership with the city, received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The grant is the first installment of an ambitious $200,000 city effort to do community building through arts programs. Those programs will focus on the neighborhood where Slaats and I are standing.
“This whole Sixth Street corridor,” he says, looking up and down the street, “it’s really complex and varied. It’s residential” (he gestures up the hill to the single family homes on Sixth and Hinton and Belmont). “It’s industrial” (he gestures down the hill toward the Ix complex, once home to the largest non-academic employer in the area, the textile manufacturer Frank Ix and Sons). “It’s got low-income housing,” (he gestures up Sixth Street to the public apartment complex and down into Friendship Court). “And it’s becoming more and more commercial” (he nods over the rooftops of Friendship Court at the cranes working on the buildout of the Glass Building and at the flat, characterless facades of the new mixed-use buildings on Second Street SE).
He’s got a point. If there is a single spot remaining in Charlottesville and environs with a more layered history, a more complicated story to tell about commerce and class and race and progress, I’d like to know where it is. Development has brought, or is bringing, an upscaled homogeneity to most areas of Charlottesville. But not down here. Not yet at any rate. Here you still find a lot of the character and quirk of life on the other side of the tracks in a small Southern town: tiny corner groceries, backyard auto shops, blue-collar worker housing from early in the last century, re-purposed industrial and warehouse space, a substantial portion of the city’s public housing inventory and a church or two that still (quaint thought) primarily serve the neighborhoods in which they’re located.
Matthew Slaats, executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, is overseeing implementation of a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to do community building. Photo: Rammelkamp Foto.
The clock is now ticking on all of that. With four rapidly aging clusters of subsidized housing, lots of underdeveloped real estate and a close proximity to the Downtown Mall, the whole Avon Street to Ridge Street corridor must look like a large red bull’s eye to developers. In a nod to the inevitable, and in an effort to lay down a guiding vision to shape the coming development, the city established what it called a Strategic Investment Area (SIA) in this section of town. The core of the SIA is a rectangle defined on the north by the CSX railroad tracks, on the east by Rialto Street in Belmont, and on the west by Ridge Street. It consists of about 330 acres—approximately one half square mile. Ground zero for the future of downtown Charlottesville.
At the end of 2013 the city published a long-range plan for the area. It is an audacious, eye-popping proposal. The SIA Plan suggests daylighting a stream called Pollocks Branch, which currently runs underneath the green space on the east side of Friendship Court and wends its way underground through the Ix property along the back of the public housing on Sixth Street. The stream then runs beneath some of the single family homes on Elliott Avenue before it surfaces behind the public housing on First Street. The plan envisions a new public greenway and ecological corridor along the banks of the daylighted stream. It also proposes an extension of Fourth Street SE along a path next to the greenway, which would take it straight through the back rank of housing units in Friendship Court. The plan suggests replacing aging subsidized housing in the area with an ambitious new program of mixed-income housing, in the form of apartment buildings and row-houses, arranged all along the greenway. To bring jobs to support the local economy, the plan proposes the development of Second Street SE as a commercial corridor running from the Downtown Mall to a new civic square in the place where the Ix Art Park now stands.
The city is quick to point out that all of this is tentative, provisional, and that there will be ample opportunity for public input. “This is a concept plan of the kind of thing that could happen over the very long term,” said Missy Creasy, Charlottesville’s assistant planning manager. “A good amount of decision making will go into anything that happens. It’s not going to be fast. It’s not going to be sudden, and it’s definitely not going to be easy. There will be many opportunities for folks to come to the table to talk about this.”
Which brings us back to my conversation with Matthew Slaats of the Bridge. Is there a role that the arts can play in getting people to the table and making sure that their voices are heard?
The ghost in the plan
The SIA Plan was developed with substantial input from the community—not just from developers, property owners, city staff and urban planners, but also from organizations that are active in the SIA and from residents of subsidized housing. And the Plan calls for much more of that input as the project develops.
It wasn’t always thus. There’s a ghost that haunts the SIA. It is a shadow that falls on every one of the 270-odd pages of the Plan. It is the ghost of the Vinegar Hill neighborhood redevelopment, one of the more spectacular tragedies of ’60s-era urban renewal in Charlottesville (or anywhere). It is the unspoken consideration that drives all of the outreach efforts built into the Plan.
In case you’re not familiar with the details, a refresher: Vinegar Hill was an African-American neighborhood that sat on the slope between Main Street and Preston Avenue. It ran from where the Omni hotel now stands at the west end of the Downtown Mall to the location of the Jefferson School City Center on Fourth Street. Hundreds of families lived there, many of them in badly dilapidated houses, many of which were rental properties owned and poorly maintained by white landlords. But this had been the heart of black Charlottesville for generations—a center for black social life and family life, and a center for black economic life as well. Miraculously, despite the strictures and injustices of life in the Jim Crow South, a black commercial class developed in and behind the stretch of Main Street that used to run where Ridge/McIntire and the Federal Courthouse now sit. The city made the catastrophic decision to raze the neighborhood to the ground, compensate homeowners and business owners for their property, and to warehouse poor residents in the new housing project at Westhaven, rather than selectively redevelop.
An aerial view of the razed Vinegar Hill neighborhood before construction of the federal courthouse, Omni hotel and the shopping center that houses Staples between McIntire Road and Fourth Street NW. Photo courtesy of Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society.
According to the book Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, by Renae Shackelford and James Saunders: “By the time the demolition part of urban renewal had been completed in 1965, 29 businesses had been disrupted. They consisted of black restaurants and grocery stores, as well as furniture stores, barbershops, antique shops, an insurance agency, a clothing store, a shoe repair shop, a drugstore and a hat-cleaning establishment.”A survey in 1960 found that those businesses generated a total of $1.6 million dollars in gross income in the previous year. Now all that history, all that social and economic clout, was gone. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the black community in Charlottesville never recovered. It had its heart cut out.
Since the pioneering work of urban planners and livability advocates like Jane Jacobs and William Whyte in the 1960s, the whole approach of inflicting top-down “solutions” on disempowered populations has begun to change. Here in Charlottesville that change is made all the more urgent by local memory. Nobody wants a repeat of Vinegar Hill.
You can sense that urgency in the SIA Plan’s focus on listening to the needs of the community. It’s there in the Resident’s Bill of Rights for Redevelopment placed prominently at the head of the report, which states that “meaningful and enforceable resident participation will guide all substantive decisions about process,” and which promises one-for-one replacement of any affordable housing that is redeveloped, with plenty of options for residents to stay on site or move to a better location. You can sense it in the emphasis that the Plan places on public meetings and listening sessions, both those that have already taken place and those that will.
You can also sense that commitment when talking to the institutional players in the area. I spoke to Frank Grosch, executive director of the Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), one of the non-profit, private sector owners of Friendship Court, the subsidized housing development that would see some of the biggest changes if the plan goes through as envisioned. Grosch was emphatic in underscoring PHA’s commitment to its residents: “What emerges there has got to be informed by the people who live there. I don’t presume to know what’s better for the folks who live there. I want to learn from them what they think is better.”
Building bridges
All that sounds great. But will community voices, especially those of low income residents who are most affected by redevelopment, have any real effect on what happens in the SIA? Initial signs seem less than encouraging. I spoke with Brandon Collins, organizer with Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR) of Charlottesville, who said that, while PHAR and its residents were given significant representation on the SIA task force and in public hearings, many residents felt that their issues were “not reflected in the Strategic Area report.” He cited in particular concerns with “forced gentrification” and the failure of the plan to increase the stock of affordable housing options in the area.
In a piece of serendipity, as the SIA Plan was being developed, the Piedmont Council for the Arts was also in the process of developing its own plan to shape the cultural direction of Central Virginia. (Boy can we do plans around here.) Create Charlottesville/Albemarle: A Cultural Plan emphasizes, among other things, the need for “creative placemaking” and the power of the arts as a vehicle for outreach and empowerment in underserved communities. The SIA’s call for engagement and the PCA’s championing of outreach dovetailed nicely, and so, it was natural for the two teams to share ideas. According to Sarah Lawson, executive director of PCA at the time, a lot of the outreach language in the SIA Plan came from conversations between the PCA and SIA planners.
After the creative plan was written, Lawson from PCA and Slaats from the Bridge, with support from the city, looked for a grant opportunity that would allow them to try to implement some of the ideas they’d developed about art and civic engagement. They applied for a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant for a project they called Play the City that would engage “those living in the SIA to deeply understand” their neighborhood, and bring in or develop local artists “to produce artworks that respond to community concerns.” In July of this year, they learned that $50,000 to start the program had come through.
The Strategic Investment Area, also called the Urban Overlay District, covers approximately 330 acres of downtown Charlottesville and is bounded by the CSX Buckingham Rail Line, Rialto Street, Ridge Street, and Palatine Avenue, with an additional small area north of downtown bounded by East High, Eighth NE, and Tenth streets.
The focus of the grant is to do exactly what the PCA Plan and the SIA Plan envision—empower people to define and shape the future of their community. The first installment of the grant has only hit in the last month or so, but in meetings and workshops with members of the community, ideas are starting to emerge: community walks, community photography, the telling of neighborhood stories and regular exhibits of the art that comes out of those activities. Perhaps most significant is an ambitious idea for a Participatory Budgeting program—exploring the possibility of involving neighborhood residents directly in decisions about how government development dollars are spent in their neighborhood.
According to Lawson, the design of the grant program is to get people “engaged in almost an organizing capacity, rather than simply an arts capacity. So there’s this blurring of the lines between what community organizing and activism are and what art and culture are—which I think is really healthy.”
For Slaats, the process seems to be more significant than the direction or the outcome: “So much of what our society does is to work to fix negatives. There’s also value in finding out the positive, and in building on that.”
One way to do that is to find people from the community who know how to connect and get things done. The first time we talked, Slaats mentioned a woman from the neighborhood who had “great energy.” She had been introduced to the Bridge by Todd Niemeier of the Urban Agriculture Collective (known as Farmer Todd around the neighborhood). Three weeks later, she was formally working to do community organizing for the grant.
Miss Push
Toni Eubanks does have great energy, and an infectious smile to go with it. She moved to Friendship Court just over a year ago after her mother, with whom she used to live, passed away. Now Eubanks has a lot less help and support raising her young son, who’s in Pre-K at Clark Elementary. Eubanks works most evenings for a few hours doing child care at ACAC, and she does the same at Sojourners Church down at the end of Elliott Avenue. The rest of her time she spends “pushing”—stirring up action in the neighborhood. The good kind. She connects people to Farmer Todd and the Bridge. She organized a community bike ride for kids in the neighborhood. She talks with people about their needs and their ideas for the neighborhood. Her only pay was the nickname she earned in the community: Miss Push.
Friendship Court resident and community organizer Toni Eubanks is concerned that the ambitious development of the Strategic Investment Area won’t benefit the area’s current residents. Photo: Rammelkamp Foto.
Until the grant, that is. The money she makes working in childcare is now supplemented by another bit she earns organizing for the Bridge. For Eubanks, the most promising artists to pursue for building identity in the neighborhood are musicians. She has already arranged for a gospel singer to appear at an Martin Luther King Day event in January. “I feel like, lyrically, there’s a lot to that, because we are actually hearing the people’s voices being put out there. You can hear it. You can hear the pain or the joy.”
Optimistic and energetic as she is about the Play the City grant, and connected and engaged in the community as she is, Eubanks still doesn’t believe that the SIA Plan addresses the concerns of her community, or has her best interests at heart. I talked with her about the plans—mixed income housing, businesses (and possible jobs) along Second Street. A stream and a green park, I said, are going to run right over there behind the buildings.
“But they shouldn’t,” she said. “I honestly feel that we’re comfortable with this. When I say comfortable, I mean, this is home for us. Though all that’s nice, it’s like, what are we actually getting out of it? To me, that’s just someone else’s idea, and it’s just something that we would have to deal with if they bring it here.”
There is a huge chasm of doubt and mistrust that needs to be bridged. But doubt and mistrust are among the things that Eubanks is pushing against. I spent some time recently picking up trash around Friendship Court with her and a group of residents, friends and neighbors she’d gathered to do a community cleanup. I spun off after about an hour, but the group was just getting started. They headed over to the public housing on Sixth Street to clean up a bit and spread some goodwill. As they walked away, I started thinking of something she had told me.
Eubanks is trying to enroll at PVCC, but she’s having some trouble with financial aid. Her plan is to decide once she’s there what kind of a degree she will pursue—“something to help me with my community organizing.”
It occurred to me that Toni Eubanks had gotten something pretty valuable from her work on the grant already. A little extra paycheck is only part of it. What she has now is a name, besides Miss Push, for what comes naturally: community organizer. And she also has a sense of the direction she wants to go with it.
The wave
On a sunny, quiet Sunday morning recently, I stood at the top of a little dead-end side street off of Elliott Avenue. All the houses here on Rayon Street, and spilling onto Elliott and away south, are modest little bungalows built as homes for workers at the Ix textile plant. Standing there looking north, with the leaves off the trees, I could see through a thin little stand of woods all the way up the neighborhood to the Downtown Mall.
From down here at the bottom of Pollocks Branch, looking a half mile north and uphill, all you can see of the heart of Charlottesville is the tops of the few tallest buildings: 500 Court Square, the SNL building, and the skeletal monstrosity left us by the Halsey Minor fiasco. They look a lot like caps of foam on the crest of a wave looming over this part of the city.
Unfocus your eyes and peer into the future and that’s exactly what you see from down here—a wave of money swelling and preparing to flop down and churn it all up. The tide is already washing through the warehouse district, upscaling it into condos and boutiques and offices. It’s lapping at the edges Friendship Court and the other subsidized housing in the area. It’s likely to wash away a number of the sketchy, fringe buildings that pepper the neighborhood and house grassroots organizations that do good creative work down here—like Fleaville on the Ix property, like Community Bikes and Farmer Todd’s Agriculture Collective in their re-purposed service station on Avon Street. Even the building that houses the Bridge near Spudnuts.
Leaving Rayon Street, I stopped to chat with an older gentleman sitting on the porch of one of the worker’s bungalows on Elliott. Jim Sprouse’s grandfather, who worked at Ix, first bought the place shortly after it was built in 1946 for $4,600. “Forty-six in 46,” he said with a smile. Pollocks Branch runs right under his neighbor’s house.
We talked about the SIA Plan for a while. I asked Mr. Sprouse what he will do if they knock on his door one day with a check and a deed for him to sign. Will he take it? Or will he fight and make them force him out?
“I’ll pick up my phone and call my lawyer and do whatever he tells me to do,” he said. “What would you do?”
His question set me back a bit, and I took a few awkward moments to gather myself before answering. “I guess… if I thought it would make for a better place I would go along with it. If not, I’d fight it,” I replied.
Mr. Sprouse smiled again. “How will it be better if they move people out of their homes that they’ve lived in their whole lives?”
The whole way home, an old adage was swimming through my head: “Change is neither merciful nor just.” It’s probably always been true, and it probably always will be. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to make it otherwise.
What would mercy and justice look like from down here beneath the crest of the wave? Do we even have any idea? Can it come in the form of ecological corridors and mixed-use commercial spaces and mixed-income housing plans? Who knows—maybe one of the Bridge’s arts programs will give a voice and a platform to some young artist who lives in this area and has something to say about what mercy and justice ought to look like.
Like Toni Eubanks and Jim Sprouse, I find that I’m not hopeful that development, no matter how carefully considered, won’t take its toll on the lives of those who live here. I asked Sarah Lawson how she would feel if, in the end, the arts grant didn’t soften any of the disruption of the redevelopment, if it only provided people with a way to express their grief and their rage and their powerlessness.
She answered very carefully. She wanted me to know that she was speaking as a private individual now and not a member of PCA or the Bridge. “I think if that were the outcome, then that would be a success,” she said. “It would be great for people to feel that they had a voice for that, the power to do it.”
Director, writer, and producer Barry Levinson will be onstage at the Paramount for a discussion following The Humbling starring Al Pacino (pictured) on Saturday and The Natural starring Robert Redford on Sunday. Photo courtesy of Virginia Film Festival.
It would be a very short list of film festival guests who have a stronger set of accomplishments and accolades than Barry Levinson. His recognition includes over a dozen Oscar nominations, and Oscar wins for Best Director and Best Picture for Rain Man. But maybe even more impressive than the awards is the sheer number of hats that he’s worn over the years.
Levinson started in the business writing TV comedy, and he has also produced for television (“Homicide: Life on the Streets” and “Oz”) and directed commercials. He has directed and produced both feature films and documentary films. He has published a novel. And a stage musical version of Diner is currently in out of town trials. If Hollywood were a baseball team, Barry Levinson would be its MVP utility infielder.
For somebody who’s done so much at such a high pitch over the years, Levinson seems like a pretty laid back guy. Reached for a phone conversation prior to his festival appearance, C-VILLE asked him what it took to juggle so many projects and avenues of expression. His response was characteristically easygoing. “It’s not really juggling,” said Levinson. “You just go with what interests you. I’ve been very lucky in that regard.”
Levinson’s work is in keeping with his personality. He is not an auteurish director out to wow you with his technique. Instead, he’s a gifted, straight-ahead storyteller whose strengths are the bread-and-butter of classic Hollywood filmmaking: strong character, sharp dialogue, and broad audience appeal. It would be easy to look back on his career and pigeonhole his work. You could think of the early films, for instance (Diner, Tin Men, Avalon, The Natural) as just nostalgia pieces. You could think of the middle films (Good Morning Vietnam, Sleepers, Rain Man) as emotional crowd-pleasers, and you could look at some of his more recent work (Wag the Dog, What Just Happened, and the great little documentary PoliWood) as satires of the politics and entertainment industries. But to categorize them would be to miss what makes them Barry Levinson movies.
What unites all of these films is his comedic sensibility. And the comedy in Levinson’s movies is of a very specific type. It’s not played for the big laugh. It’s subtler than that, more driven by character. If you’re looking for the heart of Levinson’s comedic style you can find it most strongly in the one thing that plays a key role in all of his movies: dialogue at cross purposes. Characters in Levinson’s movies are constantly tripping all over themselves and each other to express what they mean, to make a connection, to get something done. They talk past each other in a way that can be funny, or it can be sad. Often, it turns out to be both.
“I think that’s part of us,” said Levinson. “That’s human behavior. Period. We have these crazy little quirky things. There are these discussions that are endless that are about something but are really not quite about that. That’s always appealed to me. The conversation where what’s being said isn’t what’s really being said. That’s what I’ve been fascinated by.”
You can see it in his two best-known films. In Diner, his break-out movie, there’s a constant verbal do-si-do going on where the subjects are petty but the stakes are unaccountably high. That same irony is the backbone of Rain Man as well—in the comic minuet between Cruise’s and Hoffman’s characters. Meanings are hopelessly tangled, the truth about the past is garbled and obscure, and the human connection that Cruise comes to hunger for in the course of the movie is either fleeting or impossible. You look too closely at these films and you have to come to an inescapable conclusion. Barry Levinson has a dark side.
That dark side is very much on display in the two films he’ll be screening and discussing at this year’s festival. The Natural is a classic fable about baseball, lost opportunities, and second chances. It’s a shining Arthurian myth about a man struggling against time to live up to his expectations for himself. But compare it to that other baseball fairy tale Field of Dreams and what you find is real menace working against the happy ending, the dark edges of the story filled with serial killers and femme fatales and sinister forces willing to murder for profit.
And his newest film The Humbling, adapted from the novel by Philip Roth, might be his darkest yet. It tells the story of an aging actor played by Al Pacino who is lost in the labyrinth of language and his own ego, slowly unraveling as he tries to sort out what happened to his talent and what to make of the incomprehensible relationship he finds himself in with a woman half his age.
The ego bruising visited on Pacino’s character is vicious, but it’s also savagely, darkly funny. “I would say it’s an extremely stripped-down observation of a character in a comedic-tragic form,” said Levinson. “I think that’s where its strength is. Because when we show it to a large audience, you hear the laughs coming all through the movie. So it’s not some somber, dark exploration. It is a tragi-comic exploration. That’s how it works in front of an audience.”
Hal Holbrook has performed onstage as Mark Twain for every one of the last 60 years. He will be live in his role as Twain on Friday at the Paramount, and the documentary Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey screens at PVCC on Saturday. Photo Courtesy of Virginia Film Festival
“I think that this film gains its emotional integrity from the fact that everybody is speaking the truth. It was very moving to watch it. The one thing I was hoping that they would get was for everyone to stop acting like Hollywood people, and just tell the truth—about the mistakes we’ve made, the struggle that it takes to do things in this business.”
That is the actor Hal Holbrook talking about the new documentary Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey, screening Saturday at PVCC. The doc follows Holbrook as he does something that he has done in every one of the last 60 years—travel the country to perform Mark Twain Tonight, the show that he first developed in the 1950s, that brought him success and celebrity, and that he continues to refine and hone and perform to this day. At age 89, he still gives around 25 of those performances a year. Holbrook, the movie makes clear, is either a workaholic, a road warrior, or a true believer. Maybe he’s all three. You will have a chance to see for yourself when he performs live at the Paramount on Friday night. It will be the 2,298th time he’s played Twain on stage.
Scott Teems, the director of the documentary, also directed Holbrook and his wife Dixie Carter (who has since passed away) in the 2009 film That Evening Sun. While they were working on the film, Carter started working on Teems to do a documentary about the Twain show. “I had seen the TV version as a kid and had a vague familiarity with it,” said Teems. “I figured at this point it was like a Vegas act—something he came out and did in his sleep—because why wouldn’t it be after 60 years.” But Carter kept insisting that he wouldn’t really appreciate what was up with the show until he saw it. “So I went, and I was blown away by how much I did not know about the show, about its performance and about Twain. I was stunned at how visceral it was, how alive it was, how relevant it was.”
That relevance is in fact stunning—coming as it does from a 60-year-old theater piece performed by an 89-year-old actor built from 150-year-old material. But Holbrook has labored for that relevance, unstintingly. He is constantly confronting and re-confronting Twain, on the hunt, mining out new material that will point us to truths that can still transfix us today.
An example: A great deal of Twain’s satirical outrage is aimed at religious and political hucksters who flatter our chauvinism and applaud our cultural exceptionalism all the while ignoring the stains on our hands. “If we are the noblest work of God,” he asks in what is often one of the central moments in the show, “where is the ignoblest? In the last 5- or 6,000 years, five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world and then faded away and disappeared, and not one of them until ours ever invented a sweeping and adequate way to kill masses of people…. Before long it will be recognized that the only competent killers are Christians. And then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian…” He lets it sink in for a moment that 1870 is having a little word to say about 9/11. Then he inserts the dagger: “…not to acquire its religion, but its guns.”
“What he wants,” said Teems, “is for his audience to think.”
Holbrook said the same thing. “I traveled this country for over 60 years. Every single year, coast to coast. You can’t do that without becoming very close to your country and without understanding that there are all kinds of people in it and that most of them don’t want to think about what we’re doing to ourselves. The hardest thing in the world is to try to go out there and inspire or incite or force people, cajole people to think.”
I actually disagree with Holbrook about some of that. It’s not just that people don’t want to think about injustice and inhumanity, about the myriad ways that we dehumanize ourselves and each other. The bigger problem is that we don’t know how to think about them. We don’t know how to accept these darker impulses as our own, as part of our shared human nature. And so, we commit the unforgivable, universal sin in Twain’s eyes: We excoriate others but let ourselves off the hook.
Most of what passes for satire these days—from Twain’s current inheritors like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for instance—isn’t in the long run much more sophisticated than a glorified playground taunt. But Twain’s enduring value as a satirist and the reason that Holbrook’s devotion to his cause continues to matter with such urgency is that he forces us to go deeper than that. He teaches us how to think about human evils by making it plain that we are all implicated in them. It’s our own flawed humanity that we are simultaneously laughing at and appalled by.
“Man is the only animal who blushes…” he said, with a cock of that bushy eyebrow, a puff of the cigar, and a hint of the sigh of a weary truth teller, “… or needs to.”
Eduardo Montes-Bradley (right) takes a visually poetic approach to his subject in Rita Dove: An American Poet. The film will premiere at a free event honoring Dove’s myriad of accomplishments.
Poetry might be the least ostentatious of the arts. It’s a private affair conducted between a writer and a blank piece of paper. Michelangelo was said to seek out the hidden shape within the stone when he was creating a sculpture. What reserves of patience and focus do you need to find the hidden words within an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of emptiness? You’d have to be a page whisperer.
Out of her solitary communion with the page, Rita Dove has built a big, public career with an extravagant set of accomplishments and accolades. She arrived in Charlottesville to teach at the University of Virginia in 1989, with a Fulbright Scholarship and three books of poetry already under her belt. One of those books, Thomas and Beulah, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton in 1996, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2011. Her complete list of honors and awards (and the inevitable obligations that accompany them) would easily fill this article. But even in the past 20 years, when the demands of her public role have been at their highest, she’s managed to continue to publish sustained, important, substantial works of poetry: On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), and Sonata Mulattica (2009), along with a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, a novel, a play, a song cycle, and an anthology of poetry.
How can one successfully work both ends of a demanding, high profile career that is built on the quality of one’s most quiet and private moments? In a recent conversation, I had the chance to ask Dove. When we talked, she was in the throes of reading through 200 manuscripts—submissions to the UVA Creative Writing Program and candidates for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, an annual prize for which she serves as a jury member. “I do feel torn,” she said. “A lot of my life is taken up with trying to find the uninterrupted time to just forget all of that and let the world drop away. That means saying no sometimes to things that are absolutely worthy.”
She did not, ultimately, say no to filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley whose film Rita Dove: An American Poet premieres on January 31 at the Paramount in an event honoring her. But she did try. “It took some convincing. At first I said no. But we did meet, and I liked him. I liked what he was doing. I liked his eye. I liked the way he looked at the world. He had a real sensitivity to the artistic.”
Montes-Bradley, who hails from Argentina but has lived in the U.S. for 30 years, has had a long career as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker documenting the life and work of artists and public figures here and in Latin America. He confirmed that Dove set up a high hurdle: “She’s tough,” he said. “But you understand. She has to be cautious. I think what intrigued her was that my line of questioning was different than what she’s probably accustomed to. Not better or worse. Just different.”
The film pays Dove the compliment of exploring her life and her work on her own terms. Much of her poetry operates like a montage, especially the book-length works like Thomas and Beulah, about the lives of her grandparents, and Sonata Mulattica, about a forgotten black musician who was a protégé of Beethoven. These books are made up of what Tennyson called “short swallow-flights of song,” bursts of poetic exploration that build up, layer by layer, into a narrative. The film does something similar. It uses family photos and home movies to give us snapshots of a lived life. It weaves those together with archival footage, interviews with the author, and passages from her poetry, to achieve its own kind of cinematic lyricism—a visual poetry that pays homage to Dove’s own techniques.
Montes-Bradley calls the film a “biographical sketch” and said that, rather than trying to tell the whole history of her life, he tried to tell the story of “the making of the poet.”
“It’s always partial views, right?” said Montes-Bradley. “Glimpses into the inner fabric of a certain individual. You can’t go beyond just glimpses, flashes.”
“What I love about the film,” said Dove, “is that it manages to maintain some mystery. It resists the stamp of ‘this is Rita Dove.’ And his attention to the influence of music in my life—I am just extremely grateful for.”
Dove’s work adroitly plays big themes—race, history, death, art, reputation—against the smaller-scale textures of daily life—food, clothes, books, work, family. She is constantly burrowing, exploring, unraveling, and sussing out the ways in which the big and the small are really one and the same. And music is very often the go-between that mediates them.
In Thomas and Beulah, her grandfather, like her, is musical, and mired in the laborious demands of work. Music is his release.
“To him, work is a narrow grief/and music afterwards/is like a woman/reaching into his chest /to spread it around.”
In the poem “Gospel,” peppered with snatches of lyrics from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the music that came out of slavery and lifted the black church and the civil rights movement is “a humming ship of voices/big with all/the wrongs done/done them.”
“From a fortress/of animal misery/soars the chill/voice of the tenor, enraptured/with sacrifice.”
It’s as good an image of how her poetry works as any. Exploring the narrow griefs of work, home, family, or the broader griefs of history and race. And responding the only way a songbird can. With song.
