Author: Lisa Provence

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Arts Culture

An embarrassment of riches

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.”

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News

Dems’ dilemma

Attorney Creigh Deeds has represented Charlottesville and Albemarle in the state Senate for more than 20 years. UVA economics professor Sally Hudson, elected to the House of Delegates in 2019, is working hard to make this term his last. Photo by Eze Amos.

When Virginia ended gerrymandering, one of the benefits touted was more competitive elections without the lopsided districts drawn to favor an incumbent. Perhaps not so widely anticipated is that the race for the new 11th District in the state Senate June 20 primary would pit two well-regarded incumbent Democrats vying to represent Charlottesville and Albemarle.

Senator Creigh Deeds, 65, a lawyer, has represented this area since 2001, when he won the 25th District seat previously held by Emily Couric. Delegate Sally Hudson, 34, an economics professor at UVA, has served two terms and was the first woman elected to represent Charlottesville in the 57th District in 2019.

The candidates, who share more Democratic ideals than not, have posed a quandary for some Dems. “I’m so confused,” says one city resident. “They’re both good candidates.”

J. Miles Coleman, associate editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics, casts the race as “seniority for Deeds versus ideology with Hudson.” And he compares it to New York, if “[Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] challenged [Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer for Senate.”

At stake is control of the General Assembly under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and all 140 seats are up for election. Dems narrowly control the state Senate with a 22-18 majority, while the GOP has a 52-48 majority in the House. 

And it’s the first election in Virginia with an un-gerrymandered map after voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2020. That’s resulted in a wave of retirements in both chambers, including longtime Del. Rob Bell. Before, reliably blue Albemarle and Charlottesville were eviscerated into six General Assembly districts. Now the area has three districts, all facing competitive Democratic primaries. 

The former 25th District stretched from Charlottesville to Bath County, from whence Deeds hails, at the West Virginia border. For years he carried bills to end gerrymandering, to no avail until the Democratic sweep of the legislature in 2019 under then-governor Ralph Northam. Like many incumbents, Deeds found himself no longer living in the district he’d represented. He moved to Charlottesville.

“I probably should have moved after my son died,” says Deeds. During a mental health crisis in 2014, Gus Deeds took his own life after attacking his father. “I lived in that house too long.”

“He moved here from almost two hours away,” says Hudson. Charlottesville “is one of the progressive strongholds on the state map, and I think the senator for Charlottesville has to be willing to push the pace of change in Richmond.”

“I’ve got a long record of getting things done,” says Deeds, who spent 10 years in the House of Delegates before winning the Senate seat. “[Virginia Public Access Project] says I get more bills passed than anyone else.”

Creigh Deeds. Supplied photo.

Hudson says she wouldn’t have sought the state Senate seat without redistricting, which was her gateway to politics as a grassroots volunteer for the anti-gerrymandering organization OneVirginia2021. She stresses the significance of this “once-ever” election: “You only end gerrymandering once.”

Hudson has challenged an incumbent before, when she announced her House candidacy before David Toscano, then House minority leader, said he would not seek another term. And as in 2019, she brings cash from mega-donor Sonjia Smith and Smith’s hedge-funder husband Michael Bills’ Clean Virginia, which contributes to candidates who eschew Dominion Energy donations. Hudson also got a $20,000 check from top Berkshire Hathaway strategist Ted Weschler, who co-owns C-VILLE Weekly, according to VPAP.

Deeds also received a donation from Clean Virginia, as well as from best-selling author John Grisham and his wife Renee. He was sitting on more cash in the last filing period, with the largest segment of donations coming from fellow legislators and fellow lawyers, but Deeds pooh-poohs his cash advantage and suggests Hudson will receive more money after the filing deadline. Both candidates are running nonstop television ads.

Of the differences between Hudson and him, Deeds says it’s “probably more style than substance.” For example, they both mention they’ve been commended by abortion rights groups.

Hudson points to marriage equality, the death penalty, and gun safety as issues in which she thinks Deeds is out of step. “I think historically Senator Deeds has come around when the coast is clear, and I think the senator from Charlottesville has to be willing to stick their neck out before it’s safe,” she says.

“Silly” is how Deeds characterizes Hudson’s assessment, while he concedes that some of his positions have evolved over the decades. He supported Virginia’s 2006 constitutional amendment limiting marriage to between a man and a woman, citing his conservative Christian upbringing. “It’s an issue a lot of people evolved on, and I came around before Barack Obama,” he says.

Hudson says Deeds crossed party lines to repeal Virginia’s ban on purchasing more than one handgun a month in 2012, voted against a bill that would hold parents accountable for safely storing firearms, and voted against an assault weapons ban in 2020, “issues that are deeply important to this community.”

The assault weapons bill “was clearly overbroad, broader than federal legislation and would have included rifles,” says Deeds, who carried an assault weapons bill this year. “And I didn’t vote against it. I voted to send it to the crime commission for study.”

Sally Hudson. Photo by Eze Amos.

During her two terms, Hudson says she’s proudest of repealing restrictions on insurance coverage on abortion, fossil fuel subsidies, and the coal tax credit. She puts economic justice at the top of the list.

“I’m an economist by training so my focus is almost always on the financial challenges that are facing Virginia families,” she says, especially in “one of the most deeply unequal districts” in Virginia, where some of the wealthiest live, and Charlottesville, where 23 percent of its residents live below the poverty line.

“She brings a different expertise,” says former Charlottesville vice mayor Dede Smith. “She’s not a lawyer—and there are a lot of lawyers in the House and Senate. She’s a labor economist, and she deeply understands that sector and that need. She’s smart and she immediately grasps issues.” 

Says Smith, “As a baby boomer, it is time to pass the baton to a younger generation that’s so much savvier about how to make change.” She adds, “We do need to recognize that policy and change will be felt more by the younger generation.”

Toscano, a Deeds supporter, sees Deeds’ seniority—if reelected he’ll be the number two Democrat in the Senate—as the way change will be made. Deeds co-chairs the Judiciary Committee, which appoints judges. He’s also on the powerful Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, which determines what gets funded in the budget, including teachers’ salaries, educational funding, and mental health spending, the first person from this area to do so in decades.

“If Sally had run for the House, she would have easily won reelection and come into the body with a lot of seniority,” says Toscano. “If Creigh goes, this region loses all its seniority because Sally comes in at the bottom.”

Hudson maintains that seniority is no longer that big a deal in the House, where the Democratic caucus leader has four years experience like she does. It’s a culture change that’s “really healthy,” she says, and needs to be imported to the Senate.

Toscano calls Deeds a “progressive champion,” and wonders why voters would “throw someone out who has had such a great run and is in a position to do so much more.” Says Toscano, “I look at what Sally has to gain and what we have to lose. The biggest question is, ‘Why?’”

One of the issues Deeds says he’s not willing to walk away from is mental health reform. That’s a task he compares to “eating an elephant. You take a big bite, and feel like you’ve accomplished a lot. Then you look ahead and realize how much more there is to do.”

Both Deeds and Hudson see a dire situation if Republicans gain control of the Senate. “We could be looking at a six-week abortion ban,” says Deeds. 

“I could see both chambers go either way,” says the Center for Politics’ Coleman. 

He mentions a 2020 Massachusetts race in which Joe Kennedy challenged incumbent U.S. Senator Ed Markey—and lost. “There’s not much appetite to get rid of incumbents who didn’t have any obvious apostasies. Deeds hasn’t gone out of his way to antagonize the Democratic base.”

And even if Hudson loses, Coleman would not be surprised if she carries the city of Charlottesville.

Albemarle makes up the majority of the district, which includes Nelson, Amherst, and a slice of Louisa County. Predicts Toscano, “The race is going to be won or lost in Albemarle County.”

Toscano worries more about the money spent in this primary on two safe seats that could be used in other parts of the state to bolster Democrats.

“That’s not how fundraising works,” says Hudson. “The reality is that primaries pull more people into the process. Competitive elections engage people,” and are a healthy thing for communities. Hudson won her primary in 2019 against former city councilor Kathy Galvin.

Deeds and Hudson have themselves a competitive primary. However it plays out in the 11th District, across the state, with dozens of legislators retiring from the capitol and others facing competitive primaries, “It’s a generational election for Virginia,” says Hudson. “It’s tectonic change.”

Categories
Arts Culture

Say his name

Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa document George Floyd’s dreams and the impact of systemic racism on his life in His Name Is George Floyd. Images courtesy of VA Festival of the Book.

As a youth, George Floyd dreamed of being a Supreme Court justice, a professional athlete, a rap star. 

Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa document those dreams and the impact of systemic racism on Floyd’s life in their book, His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. They’ll be in Charlottesville to talk about it at this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book.

The book came out of an October 2020 six-part series in the Post. The picture of Floyd that emerged from the series and Samuels and Olorunnipa’s year of reporting “is that of a man facing extraordinary struggles with hope and optimism, a man who managed to do in death what he so desperately wanted to achieve in life: change the world,” they write.

Much of Floyd’s experience as a Black man in America resonates with Samuels. “The biggest example was the idea that if he encountered a stranger, people would often assume the worst,” says Samuels. “I think that feeling is something that resonates with lots of Black people, particularly Black men.” They exist in a world of constant fear that they might be killed, “more specifically by a police officer,” he says. 

And the biggest difference between Floyd and Samuels’ experiences as Black men? “I did not encounter [former Minneapolis police officer] Derek Chauvin on May 25th,” says Samuels.

The writers found surprises in learning about Floyd’s life and getting inside his head when he wasn’t there to be interviewed. He left letters, poems, and raps he’d written. “Obviously he was a creative guy,” says Samuels. Floyd wondered why his life was not better and often blamed himself. “I don’t think people would assume he was so reflective.”

Another surprise was learning Floyd was reading and writing at grade level in the third grade, when he aspired to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court after a lesson on Thurgood Marshall. Educators say third-grade reading levels define how far one goes academically. “That really begs the question,” says Samuels, “‘What happened?’”

The authors were amazed to learn that Floyd’s great-great-grandfather, Hillery Thomas Stewart, born enslaved, was one of the wealthiest Black landowners in the South by 1870, and owned 500 acres in Harnett County, North Carolina—until Jim Crow-era white businessmen and officials stripped the illiterate Stewart of his holdings through complex, fraudulent financial instruments and tax auctions. 

The family lost its land in a single generation, says Samuels. Research proved the story “a lot more terrifying than what the family said.” 

With the January 7 police beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, many wonder whether anything has changed since Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck. Samuels sees a lot of changes stemming from the widest protest movement in the history of this country.

“At least 16 states have banned no-knock raids or chokeholds as a direct line to the movement we saw with George Floyd’s death,” he says. Greater, immediate accountability occurred in Nichols’ death, with the five accused police officers fired even before the videos were released publicly, he adds.

Other changes aren’t so great—or are nonexistent. Federal police reform fizzled on Capitol Hill. When Samuels and Olorunnipa started writing, the books on racism that people said everyone should read are now ones people say should be banned, notes Samuels. 

And in 2020, it seemed many were ready to have robust discussions about the fuller truths of this country’s history and its relationship with systemic racism. Now, “those are really uncomfortable questions for a host of people,” says Samuels. “You can see that with what is going on in Florida. I think there’s a real heightened challenge in this country on how we should handle and present our history and what we should learn from these moments.”

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa will appear at the National Book Foundation Presents: An Afternoon with the National Book Awards at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Saturday, March 25.

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News

Plaintiff balks

Detective Andrew Holmes leaves federal court in 2018 after the racial profiling case against him was dismissed. An appeals court did not agree with that ruling, and the case is ongoing. Staff photo.

The long-running lawsuit accusing an Albemarle police officer of racial profiling was back in federal court—this time for the defendant’s motion to enforce a September settlement agreement, to which seven of the eight plaintiffs mostly agreed. 

The suit against Andrew Holmes, now a detective, was originally filed in February 2016. Plaintiffs Bianca Johnson and Delmar Canada said Holmes showed up at their home around midnight on a Friday in 2014 with a warrant to search for a piece of paper—a DMV license suspension that Canada said he’d never received when Holmes pulled him over earlier that week.

Holmes stopped Rodney Hubbard and his mother Savannah Hubbard on U.S. 29 in 2015, and claimed he smelled marijuana, a police tactic for warrantless searches outlawed in Virginia in 2021. He searched Rodney, including his groin, handcuffed him, and held the Hubbards for several hours while searching their car—finding no drugs, according to the complaint. 

Plaintiffs Leon Polk, former UVA football player Malcolm Cook, Cory Grady, and Sergio Harris were similarly stopped under dubious pretexts and searched by Holmes, according to their complaints.

On the second day of a March 2018 jury trial, Judge Norman Moon dismissed the case, saying there was no evidence Holmes did not treat other races in the same manner, despite evidence that the sector Holmes worked in 2015 was 68 percent white and 18 percent Black, yet 51 percent of the summons he issued were to African Americans. That same year, 22 percent of the tickets county cops wrote were to Black drivers and 74 percent to white.

The U.S Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit remanded the case back to Moon in 2019, and it was scheduled for a jury trial in September. Days before the trial, plaintiffs’ attorney Jeff Fogel and Holmes’ attorney Jim Guynn, aided by federal Magistrate Judge Joel Hoppe, reached a settlement agreement.

Guynn testified he would only agree to a “global settlement,” meaning all the plaintiffs signed on or it didn’t happen. Fogel insisted a non-disparagement clause in the settlement was a deal-breaker and that was removed. And the parties agreed to keep the amount of the settlement confidential. 

Ironically, Fogel filed a suit in April against the City of Charlottesville for not revealing police misconduct settlement amounts.

Hubbard, the hold-out plaintiff, refused to sign on, and accused Fogel of misrepresentation. Fogel’s motion to be removed as Hubbard’s counsel was granted October 4. 

Meanwhile, Guynn filed a motion to force the settlement agreement, and that brought the parties to a December 9 Zoom hearing in U.S. District Court, along with Hubbard’s new Norfolk attorney, S.W. Dawson. Not present at the Zoom hearing: defendant Holmes, whom the county named detective of the year in 2021.

Moon instructed the witnesses not to mention the amount of the settlement unless necessary. However, from testimony and court filings, it appears the county wanted to settle for $35,000 for each plaintiff, while in the first go at mediation in January, Hubbard believed the plaintiffs should receive the “extraordinary amount of $45 million,” said Fogel. 

In a motion opposing Fogel withdrawing as his attorney, Hubbard said he would settle for $3.8 million and did not agree to $35,000.

At one point, some plaintiffs agreed to take less so Hubbard and Harris could get $50,000. Cook, now a police officer in Alexandria, testified that he told Fogel that was the lowest they’d take. Both Hubbard and Harris disagreed with that account. And Polk testified that in a Zoom meeting with other plaintiffs, he said he “didn’t think it was fair because everyone was not getting the same.”

Moon did not rule on the motion, and ordered the parties to submit findings of fact and agreements of law by December 16.

The plaintiffs are “frustrated and tired,” says Bianca Johnson. But they’re united in bringing awareness to racial profiling, both here and throughout the country, she says. The suit, now approaching its seventh anniversary, is “for awareness to stop the bad policing that many African Americans, especially men, deal with on a daily basis.”

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News

Murky waters

The Montclair streams that disappeared from county maps are shown in blue, and with Albemarle’s 100-foot buffer on each side, would have made much of the smaller five-acre parcel unbuildable. The red line shows a stream that was undergrounded in the ’90s. Segment 1, shown in green, was piped in summer 2021. Photo: Albemarle County.

Eric Schmitz came back from the holidays last December and found a letter about plans to develop 17.5 acres on two parcels in front of Western Ridge in Crozet. “I know it well,” he says. “The future development was on top of a stream.” But on the Albemarle County map, the stream was no longer there.

He attended a Crozet Community Advisory Committee meeting about Montclair, the proposed 157-unit development off Route 240, where he was told that when county officials went out there, there was no stream, says Schmitz. “My eyes weren’t lying.”

Why a county stream, which has been on maps for 170 years and is presumably protected by Albemarle’s Water Protection Ordinance, was removed—along with its 100-foot buffers on each side—from county GIS maps shortly before the Board of Supervisors approved the Crozet Master Plan in October 2021, and before a developer asked for a rezoning to build on the stream site, is not crystal clear. 

“We don’t have a good sense of why that happened,” says Joe Fore, chair of the Crozet Community Advisory Committee, which had been reviewing the master plan. “The first thing that seemed strange was that it was very late in the process. People felt blindsided. There was no chance to review.”

The plans to rezone the site sans stream, originally reported by Crozet Gazette, drew widespread opposition among Crozetians, who formed Crozet United and filed a citizen suit under the Clean Water Act against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The basis of the complaint, says Schmitz, is that the developer piped a stream under an invalid permit.

On March 20, 2021, county engineer Frank Pohl and the Army Corps’ Vinny Pero found a stream on the property, according to an email from Pohl obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. By August 31, 2021, Pohl says the map will change because the owner of the parcel—Highlands West LP—had piped a section of the stream. 

During summer 2021, Montclair’s engineer, Justin Shimp, buried a 203-foot portion of the stream, says an email from Shimp Engineering. The county did not require a permit because Shimp said he was moving under 10,000 square feet of earth, explains Pohl in a January 21, 2022, email to Schmitz and Albemarle County Supervisor Ann Mallek. 

Shimp received a verbal okay from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under its Non-Reporting Nationwide 18 permit, says the email. Once the stream was underground, the segment no longer required a 100-foot buffer.

Shimp, who has been stalled on other projects involving water, most recently the 0 East High Street 245 apartments in the Rivanna River floodplain, did not return multiple phone calls from C-VILLE.

Through the course of 168 pages of FOIAed emails, county officials began to say the Army Corps had designated the remaining segments of the stream “ephemeral,” making them eligible to be removed from the map as well.

Not true, say three Corps officials, who denied ever reclassifying the stream as ephemeral in a July 22 email. Nor does the group determine whether to remove a stream from the map, says the Corps’ Pero. “We just determine whether it’s a ‘water of the United States.’” And he confirmed that the Montclair stream was, indeed, a “water of the U.S.”

Schmitz calls the ability to pipe streams without county oversight a huge loophole, and he believes a developer could bury an entire stream by doing it in segments. He worries that the same dodging of the Water Protection Ordinance could happen again. “Everyone understands it’s broken,” he says. 

Even Mallek, whose White Hall District includes Crozet, had a hard time getting a straight answer about the “stream erasure.” In a September 5 memo to her fellow supes, she writes, “Despite repeated requests from me since January and again March 2022, and from residents at CCAC and to County staff by community members, the only documentation presented for erasure of the stream in the last days of adoption of the Crozet Master Plan is a reported word of mouth declaration by the [Corps] of non-stream status. Now we learn that report is not accurate.” 

Despite the Corps’ assurance that the stream existed, Community Development Director Jodie Filardo announced at the September 6 supervisors meeting the hiring of an outside consultant to determine whether the two unpiped segments of the stream were, in fact, intermittent streams that required 100-foot stream buffers under the county’s Water Protection Ordinance. 

Filardo noted a “conflict of interest” with county engineer Pohl, who used to work for developer Vito Cetta. County spokesperson Emily Kilroy clarifies that Filardo used “conflict of interest“ in a “colloquial sense,” not a legal one implying financial interest. “There was a concern there may be the perception of a conflict because over a decade ago he worked for the applicant.”

On October 13, Ecosystem Services determined both stream segments were intermittent, and Pohl agreed, saying in an October 19 letter to the property owner that they would be added back to the county GIS stream buffer mapping.

Highlands West hired its own consultant, Wetland Studies and Solutions, which determined part of Segment 2 and all of Segment 3 are ephemeral. On November 18, Shimp filed a notice of appeal with the county.

With the stream buffers back—at least at the moment, Cetta says he plans to resubmit a smaller, 77-unit project in the next month or so. The revised Montclair will have 20 villas in the $625,000 to $700,000 range, and townhouses for $425K to $475K, with 12 carved out as affordable units for Habitat for Humanity.

Asked if he had any insights about why a stream was removed from the GIS map of a parcel he planned to build on, Cetta says, “That’s a county question.” 

Categories
Arts Culture

Evoking the vision

Eugenio Caballero will discuss his work with Carlos Aguilar following a screening of Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths at Culbreth Theatre on November 5. Image courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.

You don’t forget Eugenio Caballero’s production designs. There’s the otherworldly Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Academy Award. There’s the black-and-white Mexico City in Roma, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. And his most recent efforts in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be screened at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Caballero will also be presented with the film fest’s first Craft Award, which recognizes a distinguished and outstanding practitioner of behind-the-scenes craft.

A production designer is “the artist hired to create everything you see in the environment that the actors inhabit on screen,” explains film critic Carlos Aguilar, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wrap, and who is the festival’s first critic-in-residence.

“I think [Caballero] is an incredible artist with a talent for creating worlds that either existed in the past or that are sort of fantastical,” says Aguilar.

Caballero has worked with Mexico’s three most renowned directors: Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Iñárritu.

Aguilar’s review of Bardo for The Wrap describes Caballero as “a magician dexterous at turning places long frozen in the directors’ unreliable memory tangible once more for the screen.”

Says Aguilar, “In Roma, he basically brought to life the Mexico City of the ’70s and Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood home.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, “he built the magical world Guillermo had envisioned that is really striking.”

Pan’s Labyrinth had “very strict rules with colors and shapes,” says Caballero in a podcast called Decorating Pages. The filmmaker chose a cold palette for the reality of Franco’s Spain, and a warm palette for the fantasy “that’s supposed to be scary, but at the end it’s a refuge or shelter for this girl,” he says. The furniture was built to be a little bigger. “We really wanted to change the scale.”

Aguilar notes Caballero’s “incredible attention to detail in painstakingly bringing to life these worlds. In Roma, making it seem organic and natural, not artificial, is part of the magic he does.”

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Arts Culture

‘Bloody Lowndes’

Sam Pollard will participate in a discussion of his film, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, at the November 6 Vinegar Hill Theatre screening. Images courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.

The first use of a black panther in the Black power movement didn’t start in Oakland, California. The symbol came from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, where 80 percent of the population was Black and none were registered to vote, a place nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes.”

Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, the latest film from noted documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard and co-director Geeta Gandbhir, tells the story of the community’s grassroots organization that, with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, worked to get Black citizens not only the right to vote, but to hold power in a community that had long shut them out.  

“It’s an unknown story that deserves to be told,” says Pollard in a phone interview from his home in Baltimore. “Most people think the high point of the civil rights movement was the march from Selma to Montgomery. They forget what SNCC was doing after that period.” 

The march went through Lowndes County in Alabama’s Black Belt, where SNCC members, including Stokely Carmichael, connected with people there and realized they needed support.

Sam Pollard.

“It was called ‘Bloody Lowndes,’” says Pollard, “because Black people who tried to vote were either turned away at the polls or murdered.”

Black citizens formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and ran their own candidates. Each political party in Alabama had to have a logo for voters who couldn’t read, and the Lowndes party used the black panther as its symbol on the ballot. 

The film uses a trove of footage unearthed by archivist Lizzy McGlynn, with whom Pollard had worked on his 2020 film MLK/FBI. “She found materials that even surprised me, knowing it was a story that hadn’t been told,” says Pollard. 

Members of SNCC lived there for over a year-and-a-half at a time when it was dangerous to be Black and to be walking on the road at night. The commitment of the community and SNCC impressed Pollard.

Many of those original activists are interviewed in the film. “To have the people who were there on the ground day-to-day, fighting the good fight, is what makes the documentary, in my opinion, stand out, what makes it special,” he says.

Pollard has produced, directed, and edited dozens of films, some with Spike Lee, who was his colleague at New York University and who calls him a “master filmmaker.” He edited Lee’s Jungle Fever, Mo’ Better Blues, and 4 Little Girls, which received an Academy Award nomination in 1998.

The International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award in 2020, and the Virginia Film Festival will bestow its Chronicler Award upon Pollard at the November 6 screening.

Pollard laughs when asked about his favorite films, but lists 4 Little Girls, MLK/FBI, and Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me, as movies that “speak to me about the importance of the African American experience.”

Stokely Carmichael called for Black power after James Meredith was shot in Mississippi in 1966. “Any time I hear those things from films I’ve done, it’s always invigorating and exciting and makes one thoughtful about the process of what it means to be an American, and how complicated America is,” says Pollard. “It has a lot of baggage.”

Categories
Arts Culture

‘Damaged but special’

Justin Black will participate in a discussion of his film, Headwaters Down, which screens on November 6 at Culbreth Theatre. Images courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.

Justin Black grew up on the James River and didn’t realize some people thought it was “disgusting,” including two friends he met at the University of Virginia. Years later, the three paddled 250 miles down the James—and made a documentary.

Black, Will Gemma, and Dietrich Teschner had never made a film before. What they had done was paddle parts of the James with two other friends. The five decided to embark in three camera-laden canoes from the headwaters in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers converge.

In the course of the 13-day journey to Richmond, they were threatened with a gun, lost a boat, and endured soaking rain. And they saw the best—and the worst—of the James River. 

The result is Headwaters Down with three co-directors. Black, a musician, did the soundtrack, Gemma, who studied poetry at UVA, narrates, and Teschner, an actor, is the film’s editor.

“We had no budget,” says Black. “We had our own cameras. We had boats. Everybody paid their own way.”

Justin Black.

Local documentarian Paul Wagner will moderate the November 6 Headwaters screening panel. “What struck me and I found so pleasurable is when you get to the credits and you realize the guys who are in it filmed it, edited it, did the sound,” he says. “I just love this idea of adventuring down the river and into documentary filmmaking.”

“We didn’t know it was going to be a feature film,” says Black. “We did a ton of research, but we didn’t know things were going to happen.”

In hindsight, the encounter with the possibly drug-crazed gun-toting guy who didn’t want to share camping space on an island was a gift, says Black. “We had a climax in Act 1.”

The James River was once considered one of the most polluted waterways in America. Its health has improved, but it still faces peril, from Dominion Energy power plants, excessive damming that makes 25 miles of the river unnavigable, and both industrial and agricultural runoff. As recently as July 2022, the Virginia Department of Health issued a recreational water advisory to refrain from swimming, wading, tubing, and whitewater kayaking after a ruptured pipe allowed 300,000 gallons of raw, undiluted sewage to reach parts of the James.

The crew started in the crystal-clear water of the Cowpasture River—until it converged with the Jackson River and turned black. A paper mill on the Jackson is allowed to discharge certain dyes, says Black. “But it’s really jarring to see the change and 12 miles of blackish-brown water.”

Tires have been tossed into the James apparently for as long as the rubber has hit the road. The James River Association has removed thousands, says Black, but they still litter a section of the upper river.

Yet there’s also the great blue heron, the catch-of-a-lifetime musky, the historic Kanawha Canal and the beauty of floating down a river. “What comes through thematically is their joy in navigating the river and how important it is to preserve it,” says Wagner.

The screening at Culbreth Theatre is a “full circle moment” for the three friends to return to UVA 11 years after their graduation, he says. “We’re guest lecturing on the power of storytelling and the environment.”

And they’re planning a sequel and traveled from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay in June to complete the entire 348 miles of the James. 

“A big part of this is to encourage people to take their own adventures in their own backyards,” says Black.

Categories
News

‘Blighted’

Charlottesville Oil sits on a 1.31-acre parcel on Ivy Road. Albemarle County assesses the land at $922,700, and the three structures there at $199,100. An adjacent 1.21 parcel, where empty semi-trailers are often parked, is assessed at $869,700. Photo: Amanda Maglione.

For decades, two of Albemarle’s toniest enclaves—Farmington and Ednam Forest—have lived in proximity to a less desirable neighbor. Charlottesville Oil, built in 1950, has long been known for the junked vehicles and debris outside. And inside, when it rained, it poured.  

Albemarle County finally noticed. On April 22, it sent Charlottesville Oil president James F. “Phil” Dulaney Jr. a preliminary determination that “the property at 2839 Ivy Road is blighted.” Among the 10 violations cited are “overall lack of any or no maintenance to the building and outside property,” holes in the roof and floor, hazardous materials, mold and mildew, “unsanitary conditions” inside the building, and no heat for employees.

That was followed by an April 27 letter from county Assistant Fire Marshal Micaiah Ledford, who noted “continuing violations” of fire codes, as well as local and state statutes. He set out a timeline for hazardous materials cleanup, asbestos abatement, and demolition permits for unsafe structural sections.

On July 13, county Zoning Administrator Bart Svoboda sent Dulaney an official notice of violation. He listed the accumulation of tires and trash, multiple inoperable vehicles, structures, and a roofing contractor whose business was not a permitted use. Svoboda warned Dulaney the violations could be subject to criminal and civil penalties, and to bring the property into compliance by August 15. 

Albemarle’s deadline for compliance has been extended because Charlottesville Oil is “making forward progress,” says county spokesperson Emily Kilroy, who clarifies that the property has not been condemned. The county has taken the owners of blighted properties to court, but “that’s not where we want to be,” she says, noting the cost to taxpayers. “The opportunity to address real safety and health issues is a better outcome.”

The fire marshal was involved, she explains, because “unsafe structures pose huge risks to firefighters.” 

In an emailed statement, Dulaney says, “We have completed the asbestos removal phase and are coordinating with Albemarle County to take down what needs to be taken down and fixing up what needs to be fixed up. We look forward to a completed project in the near future.”

Dulaney owns a large portfolio of properties in prominent locations, the most notorious at Rockfish Gap where the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah national parks meet. The Howard Johnson restaurant and Holiday Inn there were thriving businesses when he took control of the primo real estate 50 years ago. 

The site included a gas station and the Skyline Parkway Motor Court, which became the target of arsonists in the early 2000s and has been partially demolished. Dulaney also faced fire code violations in 2011 and 2012 at the former Holiday Inn, by then known as the Afton Inn.

Today, only the orange HoJo’s roof seems to have survived the half century intact, and a popcorn truck is the only business in operation.

Swannanoa, a 1912 palace on the Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places, is also Dulaney-owned, as are the parcels housing Wayside Chicken and the former Toddsbury in Ivy. 

Bruce Kirtley ran the Ivy convenience store for 25 years, closing it in 2019, he said, because Dulaney refused to do any maintenance. A faulty septic system was the breaking point for Kirtley, who told C-VILLE, “If I owned it, I’d fix it. That’s what rational people do. His properties speak for themselves.”

Anderson’s Seafood and Catering has resided under a canopy in the Charlottesville Oil parking lot for eight years. That use is not within the parameters of the zoning violations, says Kilroy.

“So many customers have been concerned that we’d have to move,” says Ted Anderson. “It’s the best location we’ve ever been in.” He says he has five times the business he’s had in previous locations. Dulaney and his associate, Mike Jones, “have been fantastic to work with,” Anderson says, but he does acknowledge that inside the building, “it wasn’t in very good shape.” 

The closer scrutiny of Charlottesville Oil came about after a complaint earlier this year, Kilroy says. C-VILLE Weekly did a story on Dulaney’s properties in 2015 called “The ruins of Afton Mountain: Eyesores along a scenic byway,” which reported—with photographs—the busted-up vehicles at Charlottesville Oil, and asked the director of zoning about the county’s junked vehicles ordinance.

“It’s a fair question,” concedes Kilroy about the lack of action seven years ago. She says the county was unaware of the mysterious “Crozet hum,” a noise ultimately linked to Yancey Lumber in 2018, until a Crozet Gazette reporter got in touch. “If folks see something that needs addressing, they should reach out to us.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of county Zoning Administrator Bart Svoboda.

Categories
News

Pedestrian unfriendly

Will Davis, right, with his brother Alex Davis, a couple of weeks before his death. Photo: Sarah Peaslee.

Nearly a year ago in the early hours of September 13, 2021, Sarah Peaslee got the knock on the door no parent ever wants to hear. A police officer told her that her son, 29-year-old Will Davis, had been struck by a motorcycle crossing Richmond Road—U.S. 250 east—and died instantly.

“Will was coming home from a friend,” she says. Will, the grandson of Charlottesville Observer founder Kay Peaslee, was staying with his mother at Carriage Hill on Pantops, and she acknowledges he jaywalked. “He was jaywalking because it’s frustrating to try to cross.” 

Richmond Road is not the only Albemarle County road built to move cars, not pedestrians, and eight pedestrians have died on county roads since 2016, compared to the five deaths in Charlottesville’s city limits over the past 10 years.

Through the ’80s and ’90s, “the flow of vehicles was considered more important than pedestrians,” says Kevin McDermott, Albemarle’s planning manager. At U.S. 250 on Pantops, “we had eliminated all of the opportunities for pedestrians to cross from the [Rivanna] river to I-64. The sidewalk system is inadequate and that’s why we’ve ended up with a road not safe to walk along or to cross.”

Five-lane Richmond Road is notorious for late-night speeding, says Peaslee. While the speed of the BMW motorcycle that struck Davis has not been determined, after it hit him, it totaled a parked Mercedes at the dealership there and its driver, Robert Nikodem, was hospitalized for weeks, she adds. 

Nikodem has been charged with driving under the influence. Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Lawton Tufts declined to comment on the case, and says the investigation is ongoing. C-VILLE was unable to reach Nikodem.

While Richmond Road has seen two pedestrian fatalities in the past two years, it’s not the deadliest road in the county. The worst, says McDermott, is U.S. 29 from the city limit at Hydraulic to Hollymead. “Currently there are only two designated pedestrian crossings,” he says. “Drive on 29 any day, you’re going to see pedestrians dash across four or five lanes to the median.”

He says, “I consider that our most unsafe corridor for pedestrians.”

One option Albemarle’s Board of Supervisors likes a lot is photo speed cameras, which warns drivers, snaps pictures of speeders, and sends a ticket in the mail, but that may be a long-shot in photo-ticketing-averse Virginia.

“It’s very effective,” says Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley. “To me it seems like a no-brainer. We have to use technology because we don’t have the people to enforce speed limits.” Photo speed cameras are at the top of the board’s legislative agenda, she says.

Delegate Rob Bell carried a photo speed camera bill in this year’s General Assembly, but he says it was geared toward two-lane rural roads where it’s unsafe for police to ticket safely. That bill died in subcommittee. 

Cameras have been used to target redlight-runners and school-bus-passers, notes Bell, but the “idea of the presumption of guilt and mailed tickets is not something generally done in Virginia.”

And when a bill fails 10-0, “I’m not planning to bring it back,” he says.

Albemarle is looking at other ways to make crossing multi-lane thoroughfares safer, says McDermott. Pedestrian crossings are in design for Richmond Road at Route 20/Stony Point Road and at Rolkin Road. 

The 250 Access Management Project would close the center lane used for both right and left turns, which LaPisto-Kirtley dubs the “suicide lane,” and put in a median. The project should be ready for public feedback in spring 2023, with construction two years after that, says McDermott.

The recent federal infrastructure bill offers a Reconnecting Communities grant, dedicated to those areas—often African American—that previously were cut off from economic opportunities by transportation infrastructure. The county is applying for a grant, says McDermott, to “identify places we want to enhance safety.”

Plans for U.S. 29 include a pedestrian bridge north of Hydraulic at Zan Road, and an at-grade crossing south of the Hydraulic intersection, he says.

And unlike in the past, when adding more lanes was often a solution to traffic woes, “We don’t do any major transportation projects without a major pedestrian component,” McDermott says.

Albemarle traditionally has a higher number of traffic fatalities than the city, and county police are using public outreach, public education, and targeted enforcement to address dangerous behaviors by all road users, says county spokesperson Emily Kilroy. 

With the shortage of school bus drivers and more children walking to school, pedestrian safety is an even bigger concern. Police posted a ped safety graphic on social media to lay out the best practices for walking, especially on roads without sidewalks or crosswalks.

Will Davis was “quite adventurous,” a big biker and walker who was interested in community permaculture, mushrooms, and music, says his mother. His family describes him with the phrase, “Where there’s a Will, there’s a way.”

Peaslee may be channeling her son in her efforts to prevent such accidents with safer crossings and attention to speeding and drinking. “I’d like his memory to live on as a safe crossing so that this doesn’t keep happening.”

She sighs. “It’s just so slow to get anything done.”