For all the dark marks on Richmond’s past, the darkest and most permanent is its role as hub of the Atlantic slave trade. Richmond was the spot on the James River where traders unloaded their captives to market, and where white Virginians sold enslaved peoples “downriver” to the deeper South. It was the gateway through which the cruel institution was spread into Virginia and much of the country. In present-day Richmond, the monuments to this part of its history are few (the recently erected Reconciliation Triangle statue is a notable exception) — so few that absence, in a way, becomes its own monument. The auction houses of Shockoe Bottom have vanished to time. The extensive slave prison, holding pen, and marketplace in the northwest corner of the Bottom — a site of so much suffering, pain, and heartbreak that captives called it the “Devil’s Half Acre” — lies beneath the empty expanse of that aforementioned parking lot. Also buried beneath that asphalt is Gabriel Prosser, the blacksmith who, as Hermine Pinson’s story stunningly recalls, was leader of one of the few large-scale slave revolts in American history.
Meanwhile, Richmond has benefited immeasurably from 400 years of African American culture, never more so than in the 1920s and ’30s, when the neighborhood of Jackson Ward was home to a cultural zeitgeist that saw it labeled “the Harlem of the South.” Jackson Ward was the place where Maggie L. Walker chartered the first African American-owned bank. It was a place where jazz-era legends came to perform — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and of course Bojangles Robinson, to name but a few. Like any good scene, it was also home to con men, gamblers, and hustlers, a legacy that is celebrated in Robert Deane Pharr’s The Book of Numbers — the first and to date best noir treatment of Richmond, and a scathing indictment of the racial boundaries of the 1930s.
These days, Richmond is a city of winter balls and garden parties on soft summer evenings, a city of private clubs where white-haired old gentlemen, with their martinis or mint juleps in hand, still genuflect in front of portraits of Robert E. Lee. It’s also a city of brutal crime scenes and drug corners and okay-everybody-go-on-home-there’s-nothing-more-to-see. It’s a city of world-class ad agencies and law firms, a city of the FFV (First Families of Virginia) and a city of immigrants — everywhere from India, Vietnam, and Africa to Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. It’s a city of finicky manners (you mustn’t ever sneeze publicly in Richmond) and old-time neighborliness, and it’s a city where you think twice about giving somebody the finger if they cut you off on the Powhite Parkway (that’s pronounced Pow-hite, not Po-white, thank you very much) because you might get your head blown off by the shotgun on the rack. Richmond has a world-renowned art school, a ballet, a symphony orchestra, and galleries galore; it also has semi-annual NASCAR meets that clog the city’s arteries for days. Even in its best moments, it’s full of stark and sometimes vast contrasts, a dynamic captured poignantly here in the wonderful story by Dennis Danvers.
Richmond, in its long, complex history, has seen everything America has to offer, and has at times stood for its worst, darkest bits. It is the oldest of those churning urban centers whose simple existence gave birth to America’s particular art form of violence, desolation, and hard knocks. It’s also a hell of a place to live. We, the editors and authors, love this city. Try standing on a rock in the middle of the James River as the evening sun lights up the tinny but somehow magnificent buildings of downtown. You’ll see. It’s quite a sight. When you accept a city not only for its strengths but also for its weaknesses, when you realize that the combination of the two is what gives the place true beauty — when, indeed, you recognize that the combination might also make for some very good storytelling — well, that’s love. We love Richmond, Virginia. We hope you like it too.
Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven
Richmond, Virginia
December 2009
Part I
Nevermore
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still...
The Rose Red Vial
by Pir Rothenberg
Museum District
When I got inside I called her name. My house was dark and quiet, and although nothing appeared altered I felt that something had happened since I’d left for the museum’s summer gala. There was a note on the kitchen table. I scanned it and it made no sense. I stuffed it into my pocket, took back a shot of whiskey, and walked the narrow hallway into the living room. I thought of the note; the words were going to make sense in a moment. I was sure of it, and felt so much like a balloon steadily expanding that I held my breath and winced at the inevitable explosion.
One month prior, in a storage room below the Virginia Historical Society, I sat before an empty glass cabinet preparing the lamps I would mount on the shelves. There were to be six items of Edgar Allan Poe memorabilia here, among them a lock of dark hair taken off the poet’s head after his death; the key to the trunk that accompanied Poe to Baltimore, where he spent the final few days of his life; and a walking stick, which Poe left here in Richmond ten days before his death. The items were on loan from the Poe Museum across town for the city’s celebration of the poet’s bicentennial, as yet seven months away.
I took a pull from the small metal flask I kept in my utility belt. When I noticed I wasn’t alone, it was too late to hide it. It was the new intern, a dark-haired girl with a small scar across her lower lip.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t,” I said, and took another swig before recapping the flask.
She’d started at the museum on Monday, but I’d seen her the weekend before in my neighbors’ backyard. The Hamlins had installed a six-foot privacy fence years ago, but by the unobstructed view from an upstairs window I’d watched the young woman standing like the very portrait of boredom, hand on the flare of her hip, as Barb Hamlin pointed out the trained wisteria and the touch-me-nots in her garden. She’d had one leg stretched into a band of sunlight when she glanced up and noticed me.
I went back to work on the lamps. “They give you something to do in here?”
“Rebecca,” she said, strolling through the makeshift aisles of cases and boxes. Her dark hair fell in angles around her face and she wore a white summer dress unsuitable for an intern’s duties. “And I wish they would. This room is why I’m here.”
“Poe fan, huh?”
“You too,” she said. “Or so Uncle Lou tells me.”
I chuckled softly but did not look up. I was well acquainted with “Uncle Lou,” former captain of the Third Precinct, famous for his supposed paternal brand of policing. Really, he’d never been more than a squat old tyrant. We’d been neighbors for a decade and the only thing that kept our peace was that six-foot fence. Now I was humbled to learn that “Uncle” was not a total misnomer; Lou, who’d sired no offspring, had a pretty young niece from Cincinnati.