Earl Swift unearths heinous history in his narrative nonfiction book, Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery. Photo by John Robinson.
One of the biggest stories that shocked America 100 years ago—about a farm in Georgia where Black people were essentially enslaved and at least 11 men were murdered—is pretty much forgotten today.
That will change with Earl Swift’s eighth book, Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery, which was published April 2.
Swift was scanning microfilm in the Old Dominion University library, looking for a brief mention of the 1921 passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act—”which is now recognized as the most important piece of highway legislation in American history,” he says—for his book The Big Roads, when he ran across this front-page headline in the March 27, 1921, New York Times: “Find Nine Bodies in Georgia Peonage Murder Inquiry.”
“I had never seen the word ‘peonage’ in print before,” he says. “I knew nothing about this story.”
That was in 2007 and he couldn’t forget it. Over the next 17 years, Swift did research when he could to tell the story of John S. Williams, who owned a cotton farm in remote southeastern Georgia. Williams and his sons would find Black men who’d been arrested for crimes such as loitering, pay their $5 fine, and force them to work to pay off their debts. The men were whipped, hunted down if they fled, and ultimately murdered when federal agents got wind of the operation.
While Jim Crow thrived in the 1920s, America was appalled that more than 50 years after the Civil War, African Americans were still in bondage. Williams wasn’t the only one subscribing to peonage at the time, but the cruelty of the murders of men who could testify against him stood out.
A young boy playing at Allen’s Bridge along the Yellow River made a grisly discovery on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921: Two drowned men were bound together with wire and chain, and weighed down with a 100-pound sack of rocks. Another turned up in a nearby river, then another and another.
Swift recreates the criminal trials that gripped America. Through court transcripts, archival research, and many trips to Georgia, he paints a vivid portrait of the country at that time, and how both the notorious murderers and the heroes of the case are mostly forgotten today.
There’s James Weldon Johnson, who led the NAACP in pursuing the case and seeking anti-peonage and anti-lynching legislation, while at the same time playing a key role in the Harlem Renaissance. “James Weldon Johnson ought to be a household name,” says Swift.
There’s Walter White, not the character from “Breaking Bad,” but a man who identified as Black, but could easily pass as white—and did, traveling to the many sites of racial massacres to report for the NAACP, which he later led. “He had ice water in his veins to go to Tulsa,” says Swift.
And there’s former Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey, whose obituary noted that he had been a prosecutor in the notorious 1913 trial of Leo Frank, who was lynched by a mob outside Marietta. Dorsey seemed to try to redeem himself as governor, quietly supporting the prosecution of Williams. When the NAACP wrote him, says Swift, “Against all custom of the day, he answered.”
Even knowing the basics of the horrific case, there were still aspects that shocked Swift.
“The pervasive and casual use of the N-word by all walks of society, no matter where they were,” he says. “That was a hell of a shock.”
Lynching was part of the landscape of the early 20th century, targeting not just Black individuals, but communities as well. Swift was appalled at “the brazenness of the violence against Black people, at times done with seeming impunity, as if it were a God-given right.”
But the most shocking? “That anybody could be as wantonly cruel as John S. Williams,” says Swift. He believes Williams likely could have gotten away with the murders if he’d killed and buried the men on his land. “These were guys who wouldn’t be missed,” he says.
Instead, “with unnecessary depravity,” Williams told the men he was sending them home—“the nastiest touch of all,” says Swift—drove them to nearby rivers, where he tied them up and threw them into the water.
Today, there’s no trace of the horrors that took place in Jasper and Newton counties. The Williams farm has disappeared into the overgrown landscape, except for a few rose bushes that stood in front of the house. Even the paupers’ graveyard, where the victims were buried, can no longer be found on Jasper County government land.
The word “peonage” also has pretty much disappeared, but it’s still around. “Not all human trafficking is peonage,” says Swift, “but all peonage is a form of human trafficking. It changed form quite a bit and now targets a different kind of victim, often immigrants.”
Turtle Cove is a Georgia subdivision of lakeside homes on land that used to be farmed by Williams’ son Hulon. Swift thinks it’s unlikely current residents are aware of what happened there. Looking down the golf course fairway “is such a jarring contrast to what you know happened a century ago,” he says. “It’s mind boggling.”
Charlottesville resident Sara Stovall says she was stunned in 2017, when she
found out health insurance for her family of four would cost nearly $3,000 a month with Optima. Photo by Eze Amos.
For nearly three years, the Department of Justice has investigated whether Sentara made false claims for $665 million in Affordable Care Act subsidies when it jacked its rates 266 percent in Charlottesville in 2017, making them the highest in the country.
In November, the DOJ took the unusual step of petitioning a federal judge to order Sentara, parent company of the now-renamed Optima Health and Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, to comply with its civil investigative demands. Judge Elizabeth Dillon ruled in favor of the government March 8.
During a December 19 hearing, Sentara lawyer Preston Pugh said the DOJ was attempting to “drum up public scandal” with its petition, according to a transcript of the proceeding. He asked that the courtroom be sealed and documents that had been temporarily sealed be permanently restricted, claiming the company would suffer “reputational damage.”
Laura Day Taylor, chief of the civil division for the Western District of Virginia, said Sentara’s motion “to close the courtroom and litigate this matter in secrecy is extraordinary, and according to the government’s research, it is also unprecedented.”
Judge Dillon agreed and kept the courtroom open, and in her order, unsealed most documents, including the petition itself.
Taylor said the government’s investigation was “under the False Claims Act into whether Sentara illegally took two-thirds of a billion dollars in taxpayer money.”
Sentara says the rates were okayed by state and federal regulators.
In response to the government’s civil investigative demands, Sentara had provided thousands of documents. But the DOJ realized it hadn’t received all relevant documents during a June 28, 2023, meeting, when Sentara put undisclosed documents in a PowerPoint presentation, according to the petition.
Those documents showed more involvement from then-CEO Howard Kern, and the DOJ wanted to interview Kern and previously interviewed execs—former Optima CEO Michael Dudley and chief actuary James Juillerat—in light of the new information. Sentara balked, according to the petition.
Sara Stovall is a Charlottesville resident who was stunned in 2017 when she learned health insurance for her family would cost nearly $3,000 a month with Optima, the only Affordable Care Act insurer available in this area at that time. She co-founded Charlottesville for Reasonable Health Insurance and was in court December 19.
She hadn’t realized Sentara’s top exec Kern was so involved in setting the Optima rates. “It’s disappointing because we were assured the rates were done at arm’s length from the parent company,” she says.
A now-unsealed document reveals Kern briefed Sentara’s board in August 2017 about the 82 percent average rate increase in Virginia, and he warned that “there could be a fair amount of scrutiny about the rate increase in local media coverage.”
“Sentara has provided more than 27,000 documents and approximately 70 hours of interviews from seven former and current employees to date in response to the DOJ’s inquiry,” says Sentara spokesperson Mike Kafka. “This recent ruling on procedural matters will help clarify the process moving forward. As it has for nearly three years, Sentara will continue to operate in good faith and looks forward to a resolution of this matter.”
Dillon ordered Sentara execs Dudley and Juillerat to provide additional testimony within 60 days.
In other Sentara news, the company is seeking a contract worth billions of dollars to manage Florida’s Medicaid program, according to The Capitolist. The state will award the contract by the end of this month.
Ian Dixon (left), Karl Quist, and Sara Stovall formed Charlottesville for Reasonable Health Insurance after Optima Health Plan, now owned by Sentara, raised premiums to nearly $3,000 a month in 2017. Optima was the only health insurance provider in the area. Photo by Eze Amos.
Remember back in 2017, when some here learned their health insurance premiums could jump to $3,000 a month and that Charlottesville’s rates were the highest in the country?
Those eye-popping premiums have drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which is taking a look at how the rates for Optima Health Plan, owned by Sentara, which also owns Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, jumped an average 82 percent in Virginia and up to 266 percent in Charlottesville. The DOJ notified Sentara in May 2021 it was starting an investigation under the False Claims Act.
While the government hasn’t filed a lawsuit, more than two years later, an apparently exasperated DOJ filed a petition November 13 asking a judge to order Sentara executives to provide the documents and testimony it has requested as it investigates whether Sentara bilked the federal government out of $665 million in payments it made under the Affordable Care Act, according to the petition.
On November 22, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Dillon ordered, at Sentara’s request, the petition to be temporarily sealed. And on November 27, she ordered Sentara into court December 19 to show cause why it hasn’t complied with the DOJ’s civil investigative demands.
For Sara Stovall and Ian Dixon, it comes as no surprise that Sentara is under investigation for making false statements in its 2018 and 2019 health insurance rate filings, and false claims under the Affordable Care Act. They were among the people who learned in 2017 that Optima, the only insurance covering the area, would charge nearly $3,000 a month to insure their families.
And the fact the DOJ had to file a petition to force Sentara execs to provide documents and testify to civil investigative demands, well, “That’s the Optima we know,” says Stovall. “That’s their M.O.”
Stovall and Dixon, along with Karl Quist, formed Charlottesville for Reasonable Health Insurance. They met with Sentara execs, the Virginia Bureau of Insurance, and an estimated 30 state and federal officials, seeking help for their premium predicament.
“When we first brought this to the Bureau of Insurance, we gave Optima the benefit of doubt that this was a mistake,” says Stovall. “They had every opportunity to correct it. With their topmost executives refusing to cooperate with the DOJ, that tells us everything. I can’t come up with another explanation but that this was an intentional overcharge.”
“Extraordinary” is how Martin Bienstock, an attorney who specializes in insurance litigation and the False Claims Act, describes the DOJ’s petition, which says Sentara withheld 1,900 documents. “Usually a defendant would want to avoid the appearance that they’ve got something to hide.”
Also striking to Bienstock is that as a not-for-profit corporation, “You would think they’d be operating on behalf of the public and eager to make sure they haven’t engaged in fraud or wrongdoing under the False Claims Act.” He finds it notable that Sentara has hired not one, but two large law firms. “That seems like a lot of out-of-pocket costs for a not-for-profit,” he adds.
Sentara continues to insist its premiums were reasonable and that it has cooperated with the DOJ. “The rates offered by Optima Health Plans in 2018, after Anthem and other carriers exited from the Charlottesville exchange and the Commonwealth requested Optima remain in the market, were reviewed and approved by third party actuarial experts, the Virginia Bureau of Insurance, and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services in accordance with state and federal laws,” says Sentara spokesperson Mike Kafka in an emailed statement.
“We have been transparent and cooperative with DOJ throughout this more than two-year process,” he adds. “The current petition, filed on November 13, seeks answers to questions and information we responded to and provided previously.”
In the course of the investigation, Sentara turned up nearly 7,000 pages that were not previously disclosed. “It strikes me as a pretty egregious failure to identify documents,” says Bienstock.
DOJ officials discovered that not all relevant documents had been turned over during a meeting with Sentara, when some showed up in a PowerPoint presentation. ”Sloppy,” says Dixon.
Tim Jost, an expert on health law and the Affordable Care Act, and professor emeritus at Washington and Lee, explains that cases under the False Claims Act can be filed by the Department of Justice or a whistleblower. If the latter, the case is sealed and if the government recoups its losses, the whistleblower gets a share.
Health care fraud can be criminal, he says, but it appears the DOJ is investigating Sentara under the civil False Claims Act.
“There are many False Claims Act cases in the health care areas,” says Jost, usually with drug companies, hospitals, or physicians. “But this is the first time I’ve seen one with respect to the Affordable Care Act.”
It’s common for defendants to object to government requests for information as being overly burdensome, says Jost. But the undisclosed documents turning up in a PowerPoint? “I think that’s kind of awkward. It looks like the DOJ is kind of irritated that they’re being strung along.”
Stovall is happy that a government agency is finally looking into what her group has been saying for years. “To me, it really speaks to their arrogance that we wouldn’t be savvy enough to know how insurance works and that regulators would look away.”
Most surprising for Stovall is the $665 million Sentara collected from the government “to cover these apparently fraudulent subsidies.”
“If anything shocked me in the past six years,” says Dixon, “it’s the arrogance of thinking you can triple rates and think no one is going to look in and ask questions and that you can get away with it.”
Dixon notes that Sentara made a big deal about its not-for-profit status, and points out that recently retired CEO Howard Kern, who is named in the DOJ petition multiple times for refusing to provide documents, made $33 million, according to Sentara’s 2021 IRS 990 filing, which also lists nearly $5 billion in assets at the end of that year.
Its current CEO, Dennis Matheis, was president of Optima in 2018. Now the Optima name is vanishing in a multi-million dollar rebranding to Sentara Health Plans. Speculates Stovall, “That suggests something you might do if investigated by the DOJ.”
Even if the government reclaims the $665 million it alleges it’s out, that’s not going to make whole the people who are still out the premiums they paid to Sentara, says Dixon. “Some people really got harmed.”
Emily Bardeen is one of those people. She says she got “a paltry check from the insurance company that was supposed to make up for the outrageous rates but was a drop in the bucket.”
She had just retired when Optima became the sole insurance option in Charlottesville, and she and her husband made $200 too much in income to qualify for Affordable Care Act subsidies, she told C-VILLE in 2018. They ended up paying $30,000 a year in health insurance premiums, more than their mortgage, she said.
“What I couldn’t get over was that the State Corporation Commission [which oversees the Bureau of Insurance] approved the rates,” she says. “They somehow agreed this was reasonable. That was what was so shocking to me.”
She believes Optima took advantage of its monopoly in Charlottesville. “It was a terrible example of price gouging, and approved by the state,” she says. “Shameful.”
The statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that has roiled Charlottesville since 2016—and led to 2017’s deadly influx of white supremacists—has ceased to exist, at least as a Lost Cause icon. When parts of the bronze monument hit the crucible in a 2,200-degree furnace recently, it was a solemn and emotional experience for the two women who orchestrated the melting.
For Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, there was a sense of relief that what she set out to accomplish two years ago was finally happening. And there was a visceral feeling. When the light of the torch hit Lee’s face, “in some ways it was beautiful,” she says. “There was a quality to it that was moving.”
For Jalane Schmidt, religious studies professor at UVA and director of the Memory Project, there was “satisfaction that we’re finally moving forward.”
Most meaningful for her was when Lee’s sword went into the crucible. “This was a war fought to keep Black people enslaved,” she says. “To see it going down, down, down…”
Douglas and Schmidt are the originators of Swords into Plowshares, a project to melt down the statue of Lee, which stood in what is now Market Street Park for nearly a century, and to create a new work of public art. “After what the city has gone through, what we have gone through,” says Douglas, “some would see it as a finality but it’s just another step toward a better future.”
The idea harkens to the Isaiah verse in the Bible: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Schmidt credits two Methodist ministers, Isaac Collins of Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church and Phil Woodson of First United Methodist Church, who held 7am Sunday Bible study classes in 2019 at Confederate monuments. The classes were called “Swords into Plowshares: What the Bible says about Injustice, Idolatry, and Repentance.”
“They talked about white supremacy and the statues being worshiped as golden calves,” says Schmidt. “The theological framing—that resonated with me as a religious studies major and scholar, and also as a Christian.”
Photo by Eze Amos.
Also resonating with Schmidt and Douglas was when the Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted to remove the mass-produced Johnny Reb statue from in front of its circuit court in 2020, and turned it over to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, which works “to preserve the hallowed ground of the Valley’s Civil War battlefields,” according to its website.
“It felt morally wrong,” says Douglas. “New people will have to deal with Charlottesville’s toxic waste in another community. It sort of made us decide on a process we could engage around the Lee statue.”
That included a conversation about “our contemporary moment and that reflects the consequences of white supremacy. Can we create something that is democratic and hopeful?”
Since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that 168 Confederate symbols have been removed or renamed. Many of those Lost Cause statues are sitting in storage.
Schmidt wrote an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in October 2020: “Seller beware: The moral risks of hazardous statue disposal.” People suggested the statues go to museums. “They don’t want them,” says Schmidt, who talked to the Smithsonian and Civil War museums. They don’t have the storage, or would have to reinforce floors to support the multi-ton memorials, she adds.
And both scoff at the idea of contextualizing the 21-foot tall statue in then-Lee Park that Paul Goodloe McIntire gave to Charlottesville in 1924, and that was dedicated with the Ku Klux Klan out in force. “Should we be lauding McIntire for creating segregated spaces?” asks Douglas.
“What, with a mealy-mouthed, caveat-filled plaque with small font that doesn’t really interrupt the visual plane?” asks Schmidt.
“In a multiracial democracy, we should not maintain the artistic equivalent of a ‘whites only’ sign in our public parks in the name of teaching history,” she says.
“We are trying to write an alternative narrative,” says Douglas.
In April 2021, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that Charlottesville could remove its Confederate statues, and Swords into Plowshares was ready. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center proposed melting Lee and creating a new work of public art, and City Council passed a resolution giving the center the statue on December 7, 2021. Another lawsuit followed.
Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation in Louisa and Tazewell-based Ratcliffe Foundation, which also proposed taking Richmond’s ousted Confederate statues, alleged that the city violated state procurement laws, the Freedom of Information Act, and state laws prohibiting the removal of war memorials.
“This lawsuit was frivolous,” says attorney Christopher Tate, whose firm Flora Pettit represented the Jefferson School pro bono. “It relied on unsupported legal theories and outright fabrications of fact.”
The Ratcliffe Foundation dropped out of the suit when evidence showed it had not been a legal entity since 2015, and the Trevilian Station Foundation voluntarily dismissed it after a judge tossed two of its three complaints. A judge signed Trevilian’s motion on September 26.
Schmidt contends the plaintiffs had a chance to take part in the city’s open process for bids, and that Trevilian Station never submitted a bid. “If they didn’t like the idea, they should have stepped up,” she says. “There was a time and place for that.”
Photo by Eze Amos.
The case shook Douglas’ belief in the legal system. She’s received personal threats, and the heritage center’s website was attacked twice.
Lee’s path to the furnace has been litigious. The first lawsuit filed against the city in 2017 kept the statues of Lee and Stonewall Jackson in place until 2021, albeit shrouded in black plastic for a few months after a neo-Nazi at the violent Unite the Right rally drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more.
Schmidt was sued by one of those plaintiffs for defamation in 2019, as was this reporter. That case was dismissed. But the lawsuits, the hate mail, the racial epithets, the questioning of the UVA professor’s intelligence—“It takes something out of you, and it’s meant to,” she says.
It also strengthened the women’s resolve to see the melting of Lee through—and to create a template for how other communities might deal with their Confederate castoffs.
Gerald Harlow, president of the Trevilian foundation, did not respond to a call from C-VILLE Weekly, nor did Jock Yellott, director of the Monument Fund, a plaintiff in the 2017 suit against the city and a legal adviser in the most recent suit.
The removal of Confederate statues is a controversial business from which many contractors shied away. So too with the melting of monuments. The foundry owner who took the Lee job spoke to C-VILLE only on the condition that his name and location were not reported, and that he was referred to as Charles—not his real name.
His small foundry has never taken a job of this magnitude, melting the 6,000-pound bronze monument down into 24- and 79-pound ingots. He had time to think about it, and knew other foundries had rejected the job. “I knew it was something that needed to be done,” he says. It came down to, “How much do I believe in disassembling hate and symbols of hate?”
He had private conversations with his employees, and they were aware that other companies had been shunned or forced to file bankruptcy. “We agreed this was an important task that needed to be done,” he says.
At an October 26 press conference, Douglas said, “I am proud to announce today that we have fulfilled our promise to the city and to our supporters to melt Charlottesville’s statue of Robert E. Lee—the same statue that was at the center of the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017.” There were whoops and applause from Swords into Plowshares supporters in front of the Charlottesville Circuit Court.
The next step is to form a jury and solicit artist proposals, with the goal of announcing a finalist in 2024, the 100-year anniversary of the dedication of the statue, says Douglas. And to raise $4 million for the project. She hopes to have the work installed and donated back to the city by 2027, the 10th anniversary of Unite the Right.
“Our efforts have not been to remove history but bear witness to truths about our racist past and our aspirations for a more equitable future,” says Douglas.
Then-city councilor Kristin Szakos was the first to publicly suggest in 2012 the Confederate monuments should be removed, and she was “castigated,” says Schmidt. In 2016, 15-year-old Charlottesville High student Zyahna Bryant collected 700 signatures on a petition to remove the statues, and faced threats, says Schmidt.
She notes the success of “Jim Crow propaganda” artworks that “tricked generations of Americans into adopting a Lost Cause misinterpretation of the Civil War,” and that, like Lee and Jackson, stood in public parks for nearly a century.
“Swords into Plowshares is born of the conviction that we can transform white supremacist trauma into something beautiful,” she says. “Creativity and art can express democratic, inclusive values. We believe that art has the potential to heal.”
A photographer’s history of Lee
Photo by Eze Amos.
Normally reporters don’t want to become part of the story. But photographer Eze Amos has been shooting the statue of Robert E. Lee since 2016, when then-vice-mayor Wes Bellamy announced Zyahna Bryant’s petition to remove the city’s Confederate statues.
“It was the first time C-VILLE ran my photos,” recalls Amos.
He was there at tumultuous City Council meetings. He was there when the Ku Klux Klan came to town in 2017. He was clocked by a neo-Nazi wearing a Hitler T-shirt at the Unite the Right rally. He photographed Lee and Jackson wrapped in black plastic tarps—and again when they were unwrapped. He traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, when 100 citizens made a civil rights pilgrimage in 2018.
And he was there to photograph Lee one last time, as the dismantled general met a fiery furnace.
“It was a mix of emotions in a lot of ways,” says Amos, “the way a chapter closes is also the beginning of something new.”
He says, “It was an honor and privilege to witness, to be documenting this object of hate and fear, to be able to tell the final story of that statue. Where have you heard of a statue being melted?”
Amos moved here from Nigeria 16 years ago. “I always wanted to play a major role in my community,” he muses. “I had no idea it would be of this magnitude.”
Ricardo Preve reflects on his arrival in Charlottesville in Sometime, Somewhere, which will have its world premiere at the Virginia Film Festival. Image courtesy of VAFF.
Things have changed a lot since Ricardo Preve arrived at the bus station in Charlottesville in 1977 without money or a passport. There weren’t many Latinos in town then, and he found the locals welcoming, if ignorant about Latin America.
“It was so easy to become a citizen in the ’80s,” recalls Preve. When he became eligible for American citizenship, his boss called his congressman, who called a federal judge, and Preve was sworn in the next day. “I think the whole process took 48 hours from beginning to end.”
Now, he says, there’s no path to citizenship, and the current waiting time for a Mexican is 22 years.
“I feel the attitude toward foreigners has changed,” says Preve, who was born in Argentina. He cites September 11, 2001, January 6, 2021, and August 12, 2017, as “moments that exacerbated and brought out things that may have been here, but were hidden.”
His latest film, Sometime, Somewhere, is “a reflection on my past after being in this town for 45 years,” he says. He uses Charlottesville to tell the story, not only of contemporary migrants, but of this country’s history of immigration.
Preve had an advantage many immigrants don’t have. His aunt, Countess Judith Gyurky, also an immigrant who fled Hungary during World War II, established a horse farm in Batesville. “They received me with open arms,” he recalls.
In Preve’s film, the forced migration of African Americans is remembered by Jamaican-born Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, at the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers.
The Irish also play a part in the local immigration story. Fleeing the potato famine, they built the Blue Ridge Tunnel in the 1850s. And on Heather Heyer Way, Preve films where white supremacy took off its mask.
Preve links The Grapes of Wrath’s Joads, who were escaping the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, to the immigrant experience. “Substitute Garcia or Gonzales for Joad, and it’s the same story,” he says. “This is a repeating story in American history. People are exploited and they’re considered less than human.”
Preve didn’t ask about the immigration status of the people he interviews in the film, some of whom he found through Sin Barreras—Without Barriers—an organization that supports the Hispanic community.
“At first, people were worried I was undercover ICE,” he says. Then they heard his Argentinian-accented Spanish. “The rest of Latin America finds it amusing,” he explains. “It’s like a person from Alabama going to New York City. They realized we could not be undercover.”
The migrants and the immigration attorneys he talks to paint a dire picture of how the decisions to come to America are made.
“If you’re facing execution or starvation or rape, your choice is to either accept your fate or cross the border,” he says. “It is a death sentence to be a 15-year-old Salvadoran boy and the MS-13 says ‘either you join or die.’” Same for a young woman tapped to be a gang girlfriend.
He gave all the migrants the option to remain anonymous, and he was a little surprised at the number who gave their names. “I think that reflects a need for people to be humanized,” says Preve.
Preve, 66, made a career change in the early 2000s, moving from agroforestry to filmmaking. One of his earliest documentaries, Chagas: A Hidden Affliction, brought attention to a rampant disease that’s pretty much unheard of in the United States. Since then, he’s made almost 30 productions for television and film, most recently, From Sudan to Argentina.
Sometime, Somewhere is a more personal film for Preve. He tells film students at Light House Studio to pick a story they’re uniquely qualified to tell. “Immigrating from Latin America to Charlottesville is something I was uniquely qualified to tell,” he says.
And this story came with a special perk. “I got to sleep at home every night,” he says. “It was wonderful to stay in my hometown and shoot a film here.”
Albemarle County has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by eight African Americans against Andrew Holmes (above). The plaintiffs accused Holmes, then a police officer and now a detective, of racial profiling. Staff photo.
More than seven years after eight African Americans filed a lawsuit accusing an Albemarle police officer of racial profiling, the county has settled the complaint.
“Not with a bang, but with a whimper,” says plaintiffs’ attorney Jeff Fogel, who had prepared to go to trial several times over the course of the case. “It was an exhausting experience to spend seven years litigating a case.”
The lawsuit against then-officer Andrew Holmes, now an Albemarle County Police Department detective, was filed in February 2016.
On the second day of a jury trial in federal court in March 2018, Judge Norman Moon dismissed the case. Fogel appealed and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit remanded the case back to Moon in August 2019.
Plaintiffs Bianca Johnson and Delmar Canada said Holmes showed up at their residence at 11pm on a Friday with a search warrant for a DMV license suspension notice, which Canada said he’d never received. A warrant to search for a piece of paper was an unprecedented tactic, a fellow officer testified, and Holmes tried it in hopes of finding drugs during a time when he wanted to join the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force, according to his lawyer during a 2017 hearing. No drugs were found.
“It seems a jury could say Officer Holmes saw an African American driving a very expensive, nice automobile and assumed he was dealing drugs,” noted Judge Glen Conrad at that same hearing.
Holmes stopped plaintiffs Rodney Hubbard and his mother, Savannah, on U.S. 29 in 2015 and claimed he smelled marijuana, a common probable cause pretext used by cops until it was outlawed by the Virginia General Assembly in 2021. He held the Hubbards for two hours while he searched their car—and Rodney’s groin.
Leon Polk and Malcolm Cook, a former UVA football player, alleged that Holmes pulled them over in the old Kmart parking lot, claimed he smelled pot, ordered them out of the car at gunpoint, and held them for nearly three hours while he searched the car—and found no drugs. Cory Grady and Sergio Harris were similarly stopped and searched by Holmes.
County police records show that 51 percent of the summons Holmes wrote in 2015 were to African Americans, although the population in the sectors he worked was 68 percent white and 18 percent Black. That same year, 22 percent of the tickets Albemarle cops wrote were to Blacks and 78 percent to whites.
“It was striking what a higher rate of stopping Blacks Holmes had over anyone else,” says Fogel.
The case was set to go to trial in September 2022 when Albemarle’s attorney, Jim Guynn, sought mediation. Fogel thought he had a settlement until Rodney Hubbard, who’d earlier said he wanted $45 million, refused to sign off on the county’s offer. Fogel moved to be removed as Hubbard’s attorney, and Hubbard found a new lawyer.
Meanwhile, Guynn filed a motion to enforce the settlement, having made clear that the county would only enter into a “global settlement” to which all the plaintiffs agreed. In January, Judge Moon agreed to rule on the motion, which he granted seven months later on August 29.
The size of the settlement is confidential, but according to court documents and testimony, Albemarle offered $35,000 to each plaintiff. Plaintiff Cook, now a police officer in Alexandria, testified that Hubbard and Harris said that $50,000 was as low as they’d go, and they didn’t want to pay attorney’s fees.
Fogel said he couldn’t confirm the amount of the settlement, but that Hubbard did receive more than his co-plaintiffs. And he acknowledged the irony of the undisclosed amounts because he’s now suing Charlottesville police over secret settlements on claims of police misconduct.
“The settlement should have been four times what we got,” says Hubbard, and he believes Holmes should have been fired. The lengthy legal proceeding was worth it, he says, because of the awareness it brought to racial profiling.
Hubbard, who lives in Lynchburg, says, “I think the case made an impact on Albemarle police and how they police Black people.” He says he hasn’t been pulled over on U.S. 29 since.
But it took a toll on him as well. “It was very stressful, with a lot of sleepless nights,” he says. And he still feels anxious when a squad car pulls in behind him.
Holmes, who was named Albemarle detective of the year in 2021, did not respond to phone calls from C-VILLE, and police spokesperson Abbey Stumpf said he was not available to speak at this time.
Fogel isn’t sure that the lawsuit made any impact on racial profiling.
Holmes received 11 complaints in 2014 and seven in 2015—after three, supervisors were supposed to use “early intervention,” says Fogel. Holmes testified that he’d never been counseled by superiors. “It’s disturbing because if the county knew about it, they should have done something,” Fogel says.
He notes that in the most recent report from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, Albemarle County remains high in the number of minorities stopped and searched. “Obviously it’s still a problem there,” observes Fogel.
C-VILLE reached out to Albemarle Chief Sean Reeves, who also was unavailable to speak at this time, according to Stumpf.
If you’ve never heard of Martin Clark, you haven’t read The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, a cult classic, at least in this reporter’s book group. And you probably aren’t aware that Clark, a former circuit court judge, was the first judge in Virginia to remove from his courtroom a portrait of a Confederate general—J.E.B. Stuart—in namesake Stuart, Virginia.
Now retired, Clark, 64, has more time to write, and to speak freely, with anecdotes about Rita Mae Brown, Jay McInerney, and of course, fellow legal thriller writer John Grisham. When The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living came out in 2000, The New York Times called Clark “the thinking man’s John Grisham, but, maybe better, the drinking man’s John Grisham.”
“I’ve never asked him about ‘the thinking man’s John Grisham,’ which I’ve dined out on for years,” says Clark in a phone interview from Stuart. He’s a big fan of Grisham, and says that people tend to discount how talented he is, and how hard it is to write a “strong, compelling muscular story” every year.
Clark describes himself as a “slow pen,” and has just released his sixth novel, The Plinko Bounce. Corruption, fraud, and behind-the-scenes manipulation are common devices in legal thrillers, including his own, says Clark. However, he’s a big believer in the integrity of the legal system, and wanted to tell a story in which there’s no corruption, but because of a legal technicality or constitutional issue, “we get an outcome that doesn’t track.”
In the case of The Plinko Bounce, a confessed murderer and all-round reprobate may walk. “So many people believe the legal system is corrupt,” says the former judge, who spent nearly three decades on the bench and who received the Virginia State Bar’s Henry Carrico Professionalism Award in 2018. “It’s not corrupt when you get a decision that’s controversial. It’s a good system that works 99 percent of the time.”
Clark grew up in Stuart, in Patrick County, where all his novels are set, and after schooling at Woodberry Forest, Davidson, and UVA law school, he returned to practice law, and became the state’s youngest judge when he was appointed at age 32.
But writing was always his first career choice, and he has 20 years of sometimes “hysterical” rejection letters before he got published. His favorite came from Rita Mae Brown. During those long years, he decided it would be “genius” to get a literary sponsor, and one night with a friend, put an early Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living manuscript in Nelson County resident Brown’s mailbox, along with a bottle of scotch.
Three weeks later, she replied: “It occurs to me you’ll either be a half-assed lawyer or a half-assed writer, because writing is a full-time profession.”
“I got good vibes from that rejection letter,” he recalls.
The vibes weren’t so good when he removed Stuart’s portrait in 2015, a year before Charlottesville began to grapple with its own Confederate iconography issue. “It was the right thing to do,” he declares, calling it a “no-brainer,“ both legally and morally.
“That decision remains unpopular where I live and I remain a villain to many people in the community.” He points to other unpopular decisions—women’s and African Americans’ right to vote, gay marriage—that were also the right thing to do.
The day after January 6, 2021, Clark, a self-proclaimed “Barry Goldwater/Bill Buckley conservative,” wrote an open letter to his congressman, Morgan Griffith, also a lawyer, scolding him for supporting Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen: “Your feckless, self-serving actions in Congress have given vitality to a dreadful lie, and in doing so, you have damaged a bedrock institution in our country, the court system… Succinctly put, you have invited people to disregard the rule of law simply because they disagree with it. We got a nice dose of that yesterday in Washington. I am ashamed of you.”
“I could do that now that I’m retired,” says Clark.
Clark was so desperate to get The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living published that he promised God he’d give all the proceeds to his church. Stuart Presbyterian has been the beneficiary of that book’s proceeds, a pledge Clark says he didn’t dare go back on.
The protagonist in Many Aspects is also a judge, albeit a heavy drinking, pot smoking jurist. Clark says many people showed up to his readings expecting the “fun, free-wheeling Judge Evers Wheeling,” not a “buttoned up, boring judge.”
Publisher Alfred Knopf sent Clark on his first book tour with Jay McInerney, author of the cocaine-fueled Bright Lights, Big City, to show him the ropes. Says Clark, McInerney was “a delight to work with,” who was very handsome, had groupies and stalkers, and who offered to let debut novelist Clark be the headliner.
At a reading in Atlanta, a camo-dressed guy informed Clark that he could tell he wasn’t a pot smoker, because “pot didn’t make you hallucinate,” recalls Clark.
“The reason I could write Many Aspects is because I live in such a small town that everybody knows me,” says Clark. “The folks who wiped my nose and tied my mittens are here. If I were a drinker and stoner, everybody would know it. There’s no way you could do my job and be Evers Wheeling.”
Ann Beattie’s book of short stories, Onlookers, features Charlottesville post-A12. Photo by Lincoln Perry.
It’s been a busy publishing year for Ann Beattie, with her 22nd and 23rd books both coming out in 2023. Her most recent, Onlookers, is set in Charlottesville during the pandemic, and it’s chock-full of local references: The Pointe, Timberlake’s, Orzo, and of course, those statues.
Onlookers is a collection of six stories, with some recurring characters. Each story makes a reference to the statues, either General Robert E. Lee and Traveller, who died from tetanus after stepping on a nail, as one character relates a couple of times in “The Bubble,” or the statue of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea on West Main Street, visible below other characters’ condo in the Lewis and Clark building in “Nearby.”
Beattie came to Charlottesville in 1975, her first job out of grad school, before she’d published her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, and before there was an MFA program at UVA. “That was started later, by Gregory Orr, who remains a dear friend and who also came to Charlottesville the same year I did,” recalls Beattie in an email interview from Maine.
She returned to UVA in 2000 as the tenured Edgar Allan Poe professor of English and creative literature and taught until 2013, when she resigned after disagreeing with the direction of the university and after a 2010 sabbatical request was denied, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Earlier this year, More to Say, a collection of essays published between 1982 and 2022, came out.
She was in Maine during the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and followed the violent events that unfolded here through newspapers, radio, and TV. However, she says the massing of white nationalists, fascists, and neo-Nazis six years ago did not inspire Onlookers, whose characters mostly are on the periphery of those dark days in Charlottesville history.
“It was not a preconceived idea,” says Beattie. “None of my books, stories or novels, have ever been that. Having lived in Charlottesville for many years, on and off, I still consider it home, in a way, and of course I was deeply troubled by what happened at the Unite the Right rally.”
Beattie weathered the pandemic in Maine, and most of the stories were written in Staunton, where she also has a home. “It’s interesting to me, though, that when I’m not living in a place and it exists largely in my memories and my imagination, I find it easier to write about that place when I’m in a different geographical location.”
She loves the cover of Onlookers, which pictures the Lee statue being hoisted off its pedestal. “Throughout the book, the statues are a refrain, sometimes employed when they’re still in place, other times when they’re gone,” she says. “I think I do see somewhat different meaning, personally, in the statues I mention, though I don’t superimpose my personal thoughts on this very complex issue.”
Beattie is married to artist Lincoln Perry, who endured his own calls for the removal of panels in his Old Cabell Hall mural, “The Student’s Progress,” because of what some considered salacious content. Did being married to a sculptor influence her thoughts about removing the statues?
“I feel that they had to go,” she says, but agrees with Perry that statues shouldn’t be destroyed. “The statues of Lee and Jackson (1917-1919) were intended to reinforce Jim Crow segregation; rather than admitting Secession was about white supremacy, they framed the Civil War as a noble lost cause,” she writes. “Perhaps they were sometimes ‘seen through,’ not just ‘seen,’ in 2017 by some of those who nevertheless felt insulted and diminished by them, which I understand.
“The thought of destroying, not just removing, any artwork makes me unhappy, though. I agree that they should not have stayed where they were. It seems to me that the Lewis and Clark, Sacajawea statue was a different matter, because she was their guide and tracker. Should she have been left out? That would have been a travesty.”
As the title suggests, the characters in the book mostly are onlookers to that tumultuous time, not participants.
“I know people who were there when Heather Heyer was killed,” says Beattie. “I know others, who in turn know others. My book doesn’t really address the rawness and horror of that moment and so many other traumatic moments preceding and following the Unite the Right rally, but if I’d been in the crowd, I’m sure it would have.”
She’s just happy to have Onlookers considered literature. “There are a lot of allusions and motifs in the book, and (to me) that raises questions about why they’re there, and how they work,” she writes. “Many things in the book have their counterpart elsewhere, sometimes for ironic effect, sometimes because life is complicated, and there aren’t easy answers.”
As a veteran of many interviews since being called the voice of her Boomer generation in the ’70s, are there any questions she finds tedious?
“I don’t usually get questions I hate, but I find it boring to be asked supercilious ones like, ‘How do you type with those fingernails?’ Though I’ll even take that, rather than seeing an interview in print that misspells my name.”
On July 12, the 125th anniversary of a white lynch mob murdering John Henry James, a packed courtroom in Albemarle Circuit Court applauded when a judge dismissed an indictment for rape that was handed down in 1898, even after the prosecutor and grand jury knew that James was dead.
“A mockery of the justice system,” said Judge Cheryl Higgins.
Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley’s motion to dismiss more than a century later is in itself pretty much unheard of. “It’s an effort to set the record straight 125 years later,” says Hingeley, who was “particularly disturbed” by the complicity of the justice system.
On July 11, 1898, Julia Hotopp, a 20-year-old white woman from a prominent family that owned what is now Pen Park, had been riding her horse and alleged a dark-complexioned, heavy-set man sexually assaulted her, Hingeley told the court.
Photo by Eze Amos.
James, a Black ice cream vendor, whom The Daily Progress said “somewhat fit” the description of the assailant, was arrested that day and moved to jail in Staunton to avoid already angry white citizens.
He was returned to Charlottesville the next morning, and when the train stopped west of town at Wood’s Depot, property now owned by Farmington Country Club, he was greeted by a mob of around 150, pulled from the train despite the presence of the Albemarle sheriff and Charlottesville police chief, and hanged from a locust tree while pleading his innocence, according to the Progress.
His body was then riddled with bullet holes, and people took pieces of clothing, his body, and the locust tree as souvenirs.
While James was being murdered, a grand jury met. Despite knowing James was dead, it proceeded to indict him for the alleged rape, which Hingeley believes was a false accusation.
The Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney at the time, Micajah Woods, acted improperly by indicting a dead man, and did so to create justification for the lynching, says Hingeley. “They still wanted to put a formal accusation in the public record to justify the taking of his life. That bothers me.”
Another thing that bothers Hingeley is that no effort was made to bring the perpetrators of the lynching to justice, and he figuratively indicts then-Albemarle sheriff Lucien Watts and Charlottesville police chief Frank Farish, both of whom were present at the attack, but claimed not to recognize any of the small town’s unmasked assailants. The coroner’s inquest the next day found James’ death was at the hand of “persons unknown.”
Jim Hingeley, Albemarle County commonwealth’s attorney, and Jalane Schmidt, director of the Memory Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. Photo by Eze Amos.
“Of course that’s a lie,” says Hingeley. “The racial terror lynching was more or less officially sanctioned.”
James’ death wasn’t widely known until 2013, when historian Jane Smith was going through old issues of The Daily Progress. Nor was it the last time police stood by while white supremacists attacked, says Jalane Schmidt, director of the Memory Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy.
The violent Unite the Right rally in 2017 brought white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascists to Charlottesville to protest the removal of Confederate statues, left counterprotester Heather Heyer dead, and the city and nation shaken by the outpouring of hate. “We’re standing where white supremacists beat up activists and police stood by,” says Schmidt.
The mood was somber a year later on July 12, 2018, when local residents and officials gathered at the site where James was lynched. They dug up soil to carry on a civil rights pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama, and add it to the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorialization of the racial terror of America’s lynching past. The EJI has documented more than 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950.
Schmidt organized the 2018 civil rights pilgrimage with Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s Executive Director Andrea Douglas. Around 100 locals boarded buses heading south.
Schmidt, who led walking tours with Douglas of Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments before they were removed, testified about what she learned about James’ death from historical records.
Judge Cheryl Higgins dismissed the 1898 indictment of John Henry James exactly 125 years after a local white mob murdered him. Photo by Eze Amos.
She noted that as part of the EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, a marker commemorating the death of James was erected July 12, 2019, outside the Albemarle courthouse where he was indicted.
Black journalist Ida B. Wells reported during the Jim Crow era that many Black men were lynched as revenge for alleged assaults of white women—assaults that were “largely unfounded,” says Schmidt.
And she’s haunted by the Progress account that James “somewhat fit” the description of Hotopp’s alleged assailant: a large, Black man. “That sounds like a boogeyman if I ever heard one,” says Schmidt.
Dismissing James’ indictment for rape acknowledges the legal injustice that was done and declares, “This does not represent our values,” says Schmidt. An EJI staffer told her Hingeley’s motion to right a 125-year-old wrong was “unprecedented,” she adds.
Many of those who made the pilgrimage were in Albemarle Circuit Court July 12.
Former city councilor Wes Bellamy was one. Five years ago at the lynching site outside the exclusive Farmington neighborhood, he imagined the terror James must have felt as the train slowed. After the hearing, he felt relief.
“I think it is important we do the right thing, and I appreciate Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley doing so,” says Bellamy. “Justice delayed is not justice denied. This restored a brother’s good name. There’s a sense of pride when we have these moments. There was a sense in the past that we’d never see these moments.”
Left: Activist Zyahna Bryant and then-mayor Nikuyah Walker gather soil from the Albemarle County site of John Henry James’ lynching. Right: Participants in a 2018 civil rights pilgrimage from Charlottesville to Montgomery, Alabama, ride the bus to their next destination. “This restored a brother’s good name.” Photos by Eze Amos.
Don Gathers also made the pilgrimage. “I’m elated we’re here, I’m sad we have to be here,” he says. “I’m extremely happy for the soul of John Henry James, but what about the families of others who were lynched?”
Albemarle County declared July 12, 2023, John Henry James Day “in remembrance of our shared community history and as a demonstration of our commitment that this tragedy will be neither forgotten nor repeated,” says the proclamation.
Board of Supervisors Chair Donna Price was at the courthouse, and she also had mixed emotions. “Justice was never truly provided to John Henry James,” she says. “When I think of the terror he had being ripped out of the train, and the desecration of his body. … What we did today was important because justice must be served, but insufficient because no one was held accountable. On the other hand, I feel great pride in our community’s commonwealth’s attorney.”
So why now? In April Hingeley traveled to Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery with other prosecutors. “It’s a moving experience to go to the Legacy Museum and to see our community’s soil there,” he says. “I came back with an interest in doing something further” with the EJI’s Community Remembrance Project that recognizes the “racial terror lynching in our community.”
Hingeley, who is also prosecuting some of the torch-bearing marchers from 2017’s Unite the Right, says, “It’s important to deal with the legacy of white supremacy.” Outside the courthouse, he points to the spot where a Johnny Reb statue once stood, and says his predecessor, Micajah Woods, who indicted James posthumously, led the effort to install the statue in 1909.
“White supremacy is still out there to harm our community,” says Hingeley. “Knowing the history of this is important, partly to respond to the injustice, partly to keep the community involved with our history.”
Jeanette Walls will be in Charlottesville on July 8 at the Irving Theater for a reading and conversation. Publicity photo.
Jeannette Walls had an embarrassing childhood. For a storyteller, that’s gold.
She parlayed growing up with colorful, irresponsible parents—creative optimists who didn’t always provide for their children’s basic needs, like food or shelter—into The Glass Castle, her 2005 memoir that has been a New York Times bestseller for nine years.
“I had a happy childhood,” insists Walls, who now lives on a 320-acre farm in Orange. “You couldn’t pay me to go through it again.”
The Glass Castle, which sold 7 million copies in North America alone, has been translated into 35 languages and was made into a 2017 movie starring Woody Harrelson, has a devoted fan base and has become so iconic that we have to ask Walls if she ever gets tired of talking about her childhood.
“No,” says Walls. “I think it’s really not about me anymore. People are trying to figure out their own stories. People carry around so much shame or anger.”
Walls was a gossip columnist working for magazines and television in New York, and had never told anyone about living with her three siblings in a three-room house with no running water in West Virginia, about being so poor and hungry that she scrounged through trash cans for food in high school, or about her alcoholic father stealing the piggy bank that held the kids’ escape money.
One day John Taylor, a colleague at New York magazine who later became her husband, said something about Walls didn’t add up, and when he asked her about her childhood, “I always changed the subject,” she says. When she finally told him, he said, “That would make an incredible book.”
“He thought I was exaggerating,” says Walls, “until he met my mother.”
Walls describes her storytelling parents as “fabulists,” and she was thrilled when she discovered journalism and “that I could earn a salary for telling the truth.” After The Glass Castle, people started telling her their experiences, and she couldn’t go back to the snark of gossip writing. She and Taylor moved to Virginia.
While fiction initially didn’t attract Walls, she plunged into it and her latest book, Hang the Moon, tells the story of a young woman trying to manage—and expand—her father’s bootlegging operations in Prohibition-era Virginia.
“I love transitional periods,” says Walls. The 1920s, with cars, electricity, and women’s suffrage, was such a time, moving isolated rural societies into more contact with the outside world.
“I was fascinated with Prohibition,” she says, “and with a father who was a raging alcoholic, I wanted to live through this time when you couldn’t drink.” But such efforts have unintended consequences, and for moonshiners, what had been a cash crop became illegal.
“Outlaw. Rumrunner. Bootlegger. Blockader,” thinks Hang the Moon’s heroine, Sallie Kincaid. “I don’t forget for one second what we are doing is illegal, but legal and illegal and right and wrong don’t always line up. Ask a former slave. Plenty of them still around. Sometimes the so-called law is nothing but the haves telling the have-nots to stay in their place.”
Walls relied on newspapers for much of her research. “These moonshiners weren’t keeping diaries,” she notes. She learned that Franklin County, Virginia, was dubbed the “wettest county in the world,” with an estimated 99 percent of the population involved in the business, including the sheriff.
She wondered, how was this operation run? “I spent way too long researching, but I didn’t want to put anything in the book that couldn’t happen.”
Walls also wanted to explore what it was like to be a woman in a man’s business, and Elizabeth I and her oft-married father, Henry VIII, provided a template.
“My mother and father fought over Elizabeth,” recalls Walls. “My father adored her and called her a ‘tough-ass broad.’”
Walls was reading a biography of Elizabeth with ”cousins marrying each other, people killing each other,” and thought, “They’re kind of like white trash, aren’t they?”
Transporting the powerful, murderous Tudors to 1920s Virginia had Elizabethan experts thinking it was a fabulous idea—and friends with their eyes glazed over, says Walls. Ultimately she had to make the story her own, and she assures readers they don’t need to know about Elizabeth’s rise to power to read Hang the Moon.
The book is also a story about family, and “how we take on these roles that are assigned to us,” says Walls. “It’s the story of a woman underestimated because of the circumstances of her birth.”
Family continues to remain important to Walls, and she moved her artist/hoarder mother—whom she once observed dumpster diving in New York as Walls rode by in a cab—into a cottage on her farm. “I was able to love my mother more as an adult than as a child, when I expected her to take care of me,” she says.
“I still found her maddening,” says Walls, listing the 18 typewriters and 75 cameras she found cleaning out her mother’s cottage after she died in August 2021. “But she found such joy in life.”
Appraising her parents is no longer a matter of forgiveness for Walls. “It’s acceptance.” She and her siblings had their father, Rex Walls, disinterred and reburied alongside Rose Mary Walls on their daughter’s farm.
And she inherited some of her parents’ optimism. “Life is so dang good,” she says. “It’s so ridiculously beautiful.”
