by Matt Weiland
While the Virginia of tourist imagination is crowded with wigged gentry and baronial estates, the state’s plantation aristocracy barely outlasted Benjamin V and his gout. In the early 1800s, Virginia entered a long decline, due to the wasting of its soil by tobacco and the out-migration of its people to better lands. The state’s principal remaining asset was its surplus of slaves, which Virginians turned into an export commodity, selling over 10,000 a year, mostly into the burgeoning cotton fields of the Deep South. By the Civil War, just five percent of white Virginians owned slaves and there were only 114 who owned as many as Benjamin Harrison had seventy years before.
Yet it was antebellum Virginia that spawned by far the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history. It occurred due south of Berkeley, in Southampton County, one of the most rural in Virginia. Of the state’s many haunted places, Southampton is to me the eeriest. There are no monuments to what happened there, but the setting is little changed: low fields fringed by swampy woods, weatherboard houses set far apart, a route still called Jerusalem Plank Road, though the planks laid on top of mud in the nineteenth century have long since given way to asphalt. And then, beside a peanut field, one of only two road markers in Southampton acknowledging the “servile insurrection” that broke out late one August night in 1831.
Nat Turner, a thirty-year-old slave preacher, led six accomplices out of the woods, armed mainly with farm tools, then marched from farmhouse to farmhouse, hacking or bludgeoning to death every white they found. The band swelled to sixty and rampaged for two days before a hastily assembled militia dispersed the rebels, killing or capturing most of them. Whites then went on a revenge spree of their own, murdering, torturing, and dismembering hundreds of blacks—many times the number Turner’s men killed. The heads of some were impaled on stakes along a road still known as Blackhead Signpost.
After a two-month manhunt, “Nat the Contriver”—described in a reward notice as “knock kneed” and scarred “by a blow”—was found hiding in the woods and jailed in Jerusalem, the county seat he’d hoped to seize. In a confession from his cell, Turner spoke of visions and portents he’d seen since boyhood: “white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle,” “drops of blood on the corn,” “hieroglyphic characters and numbers” imprinted on leaves. All of this convinced him the moment had come “when the first should be last and the last should be first,” and that God had commanded him to “arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”
Even more chilling to white Virginians was Turner’s dispassionate account of the “work of death,” beginning with the slaughter of a man “who was to me a kind master,” along with his wife and three children, including an infant killed in his cradle. Most of those slain in the revolt were women and children, including a schoolteacher and her ten students. At his trial, Turner pleaded not guilty, “saying to his counsel that he did not feel so.”
He was hanged six days later. Since he was “late the property of Putnam Moore, an infant,” the child’s estate was recompensed by the state for chattel destroyed, as were the owners of other executed slaves. Turner, literate and skilled, brought $375.
Like Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrel, Nat the Contriver had a long and ghoulish afterlife. His corpse was dismembered, with some of its skin turned into a purse and the head sent to a college for study. Rumors of the body parts’ whereabouts circulated well into the twentieth century. And in the 1930s, when the WPA interviewed elderly ex-slaves in Virginia, some spoke of a ghostly figure known as “Ole Nat” or “Prophet Nat” who had fought to free his people.
Though Turner failed, his revolt emboldened abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote in The Liberator: “The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another, has been made.” In 1859, John Brown set out to arm slaves, as Turner had done, at the other end of Virginia. He, too, went to the gallows, declaring, “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.” John Brown’s body, at least, was carried out of Virginia and lies a’mouldering in peace, in upstate New York.
Harpers Ferry, where Brown staged his famous “raid,” no longer belongs to Virginia. In fact, like so many of the state’s historic figures, Virginia has been cut up and distributed for centuries. The original Elizabethan land of Virginia—which Sir Walter lost upon his conviction for treason, before also losing his head—stretched from Florida to Maine and inland for an indeterminate distance. In those days, the “North Part of Virginia” referred not to Fairfax or the Dulles Corridor, but to the cold, rocky shore of Massachusetts and Maine.
In 1614, Northern Virginia was rechristened New England, by Jamestown’s hero, John Smith. The Carolinas were carved out of Virginia’s underside in 1629; Maryland broke off three years later. In 1784, Virginia ceded most of its vast interior, which extended beyond the Mississippi and north to Canada, to the newly created United States. Kentucky fell away in 1792, and West Virginia completed the vivisection by joining the Union in 1863. Once almost boundless, Virginia now ranks a lowly thirty-fifth among the states in geographic size. If, as some Virginians only half-jokingly suggest, the state were to lop off its head at the Rappahannock, it would shed another five counties and several million people.
Which raises the question: Will Virginia, now entering its fifth century, ever shed the shackles of its dark and divided history? One baby step in that direction seemed to occur in 1997, when the General Assembly in Richmond voted to retire the state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” a nineteenth-century minstrel that waxed nostalgic for “massa and missus” and included the refrain, “There’s where this old darkey’s heart am long’d to go.” A song commission was formed and a contest announced to find a new anthem that had “dignity,” “singability,” and broad appeal to Virginians.
Hundreds of submissions flowed in, and with them came lawsuits, charges of pork-peddling (Jimmy Dean, a songwriter and sausage magnate, contributed to the campaign of one judge), and wrangling over lyrics. “That thing has been a nightmare,” one frustrated legislator declared of the sniping. “‘Well, your song didn’t have anything about Northern Virginia. Well, your song didn’t have anything about Southern Virginia.’”
In 2006, after almost a decade of debate over ditties, the state senate proposed “Shenandoah” as an interim song. Then complaints arose that the lyrics don’t mention Virginia; instead, they’re about leaving the state and crossing “the wide Missouri.” Arguing in the song’s defense, a legislator noted, “At one time, Virginia did stretch to Missouri. All the way!”
But those days are long past, and “Shenandoah” was voted down. Virginia retains a state shell (oyster), state insect (tiger swallowtail butterfly), state bat (Virginia Big-Eared Bat), and state fossil (Chesapecten jeffersonius). But it is the only state in the nation without a song.
Like the balladeer of “Shenandoah,” I’ve now left Virginia and often long for the state’s mountains and rivers. I even miss its gloomy fetish for the past—refreshing, almost, in a country that’s relentlessly optimistic and forward-looking. Instead of trying to forget or sanitize Virginia history, the legislature could take a cue from my son’s fourth-grade class, and adapt the famous song by the Eagles:
On a dark Southern highway, hot wind in my hair
Warm smell of magnolia rising up through the air …
I heard a distant death knell and was thinking to myself,
This could be Heaven or this could be Hell …
Blood on the ceiling and bloody limbs on ice
We are all just prisoners here of our own device …
Welcome to the Hotel Virginia.
WASHINGTON
CAPITAL Olympia
ENTERED UNION 1889 (42nd)
ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of George Washington
NICKNAME Evergreen State
MOTTO Al-Ki (an Indian word meaning “by and by”)
RESIDENTS Washingtonian
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U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 9
STATE BIRD willow goldfinch
STATE FLOWER coast rhododendron
STATE TREE western hemlock
STATE SONG “Washington, My Home”
LAND AREA 66,544 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Chelan Co., 10 mi. WSW of Wenatchee
POPULATION 6,287,759
WHITE 81.8%
BLACK 3.2%
AMERICAN INDIAN 1.6%
ASIAN 5.5%
HISPANIC/LATINO 7.5%
UNDER 18 25.7%
65 AND OVER 11.2
MEDIAN AGE 35.3
WASHINGTON
Carrie Brownstein
Certain 1980s models of the Chrysler LeBaron sedan had pinstriped seats—pencil-thin, black-and-gray lines, so that you and your business attire merged into a single professional unit, at least during the drives to and from work. In a LeBaron such as this, cushioned in the dizzying pattern, I learned how to drive. It was 1989, and my father and I were in a decade-old business park. The business park was a mock city within the real town of Redmond, Washington, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Everything was wider than it should have been: pudgy roads, bright white lines, and broad sidewalks, as though the plans had been drawn in chalk. And it was all pristine. Alongside the grass strips were spindly trees, young saplings spread apart, the space between them bearing the hope of the shade they would cast, of the void they would one day fill.
Before these pubescent trees, of course, this had been a forest of adult trees, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather trees, evergreens that sometimes fell under the strain of a Northwest winter storm—maybe a so-called Pineapple Express coming in from the tropics. They were trees that sheltered businesses such as U-Fish, where you could throw in a line and catch a salmon, or at least a slippery creature with a mouth, right there in someone’s backyard. We rode our bikes through makeshift trails on the floor of the woods, skinning knees and catching splinters.
Redmond, like many cities and towns in Washington State, is part wild, part tame. Even the state’s largest city, Seattle, is embedded in trees, with parks and pathways where you can lose your way, or at least your footing. The Washington frontier has been merely subdued. Like a bearskin rug in the living room, or mounted elk antlers above the fireplace, much of the wilderness has been memorialized and moved indoors. But residents of Washington feel the wilderness within them at all times.
When I moved into a development called Country Creek, in second grade, the neighborhood kids told me that there had been a restaurant in the woods behind my house. Not an actual structure, but a clearing in the trees where people ate. This seemed feasible to a child of the Northwest, that people would eat on logs and sweep the dirt. And so I did this, for an entire summer, getting the woods ready to be a restaurant. My friends and I would cook in my parents’ house, but we would eat outside under the branches. In between bites of grilled cheese sandwiches or bagel dogs from Costco we’d make plans for how this could become a money-making venture. Only later, after months of grooming the dirt in the hopes that smoothness was tantamount to hygiene, did I realize my friends had been joking about a restaurant ever having been there.
The concepts of outdoors and indoors in Washington have always been blurry. The ground is damp, and dampness is a cold that creeps in like no other. Rooms, especially basements, are moist, often moldy. Floors are smudged with pine needles, decks are weathered, hands are chapped. To live in Washington is always to be aware that wilderness is just outside the door, partly because it’s just inside the door as well. Few people bother to carry umbrellas. (I find myself suspicious of those who do, thinking of the accessory as a handbag for the head—both unnecessary and conspicuous.) So, with dripping GORE-TEX hoods and soaked woolen hats, we enter the indoors with the rain in our clothes—blurring the journey with our destination.
Although Washington has a reputation for being rainy, it’s not the wetness that’s difficult. Rather, it’s the way the light never quite meets the day—in fall and winter, there is a bluish-gray sky that barely appears in the morning; then a faintly perceptible recession of that same muted color signifies night. The whole day is a half-opened eye, and this heavy-lidded weather can last months.
Washington is two states, west and east. The former, founded by fur traders, is verdant rain forest, and the latter, founded by gold diggers, is arid high desert. East and west are split by a mountain range that contains the state’s tallest peak, Mount Rainier. The Cascade Mountains sit between two distinct worlds. Most of the population resides in the western half of the state. It has the mountains, the forests, the ocean, as if it were a contest of weight, tilting everything to the left—and incidentally it’s one of the most liberal parts of the United States. We western Washingtonians often forget there is an eastern half. We might go tubing along the Yakima or Wenatchee rivers in the summer, head east to Whitman or Gonzaga or the state university in Pullman for a few years, go to the rodeo in Ellensburg, but most of us return to the urban density of the west. Maybe this is why the mountain range through the middle is known as the Cascade Curtain, we can peek through and glimpse our other half, or we can pretend it’s not there.
Mount St. Helens, located along the line between east and west, is a reminder that human technological and industrial advancement can’t always outpace forces of nature. Take, for instance, a tale of two eruptions: one natural, the other manmade. In May of 1980, the nine-hour eruption of Mount St. Helens changed Washington’s landscape forever. The mountain went from an iconic triangular peak to a collapsed soufflé, a symbol both of nature’s power and its vulnerability. For days after, ash covered our neighborhood, as it did countless others across the state. We kids rode bikes and played outdoors wearing handkerchiefs, looking like bandits. For months, even years after, everyone had Mason jars of ash on their mantels, little urns, as if a loved one had died.
Twenty years later, Seattle would demolish St. Helens’s steel and concrete counterpart, the Kingdome. Nicknamed “The Tomb” by visiting sportswriters because of its gray gloom, the stadium was gone in 16.8 seconds. Built in 1976, it had a roof that weighed 25,000 tons, which was meant to keep out the perpetual winter rain, even though it resembled a permanent, impenetrable cloud cover. Despite the fact that people disliked the Kingdome—it was a loud, echoing ogre—it was still the biggest indoor space in Washington. In 2000, people drove from all over to witness the demise of one of the state’s most recognizable structures. The cloud of dust rose 500 feet as onlookers everywhere—from boats on Elliot Bay to the sidewalks below the Jumbotron in New York’s Times Square looked on. After twenty minutes the dust settled and the building was gone. I could not watch the Kingdome fall. I stayed home with the TV off, wondering what heavy, earthbound structure would now counter the spindly upward reach of the Space Needle—the two buildings having represented Seattle on every souvenir shop T-shirt, mug, and shot glass. I was not alone in my uneasiness. One onlooker told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “I look at it as a funeral.”
Both the implosion of the Kingdome and the explosion of St. Helens were treated with similar reverence, the same sense of loss, or that something essential had gone missing.
Growing up in Washington, I was aware that getting lost meant more than reaching for the wrong hand on a department store elevator—that odd sensation of looking up and meeting a face that was not my mother’s. The idea that one could disappear and end up as remains seemed almost natural, like part of the Washington bargain. But nature wasn’t what scared me growing up. It was people who gave the woods their menace, a sound composed of wind and leaves and footsteps.
Ted Bundy and The Green River Killer brought a sense of danger and a sick hunger to the forests of Washington. These men used the wilderness as an accomplice. They haunted landscapes both real and imagined, twisted the notion of discovery, made open roads feel like dead ends, turned the edges of the forest into gaping, eager mouths. At birthday party sleepovers or on multifamily
camping trips, with flashlights held up to our faces for effect, my friends and I constantly calculated the degrees of separation between ourselves and the victims. It might have been a cousin of a girl who was on your soccer team, or the lunch lady’s niece’s friend. It felt far away and up close at the same time—it always felt like a possibility.
Out of lack of skill or tactics or just due to bad luck, plenty of people get lost in the dense woods of the Pacific Northwest. But there are also those who simply vanish. In 1999, a partially mummified body was found about an hour outside of Redmond. The body lay in the Thurston County morgue for nearly a year before being identified. Jeff Sheyphe had disappeared without anyone noticing. His family in Oregon didn’t even know he was gone until a few months after he walked into the woods to kill himself. Neither his boss nor his landlord thought to do anything more than pack up his belongings and put them in a box; no one had bothered to call the police.
It was not callousness on the part of his acquaintances. It was that Washington is still a place of drifters and transients: Friends park their trailers in your front yard for a few months before heading onward, tree houses crop up in the woods, yurts are built on the far edges of property, tents or tarps are staked on river beds, sleeping bags wash up with the sea foam. It is always in the back of one’s mind that there are people living among us in Washington—“off the grid” might be the political term, or even a strangely glamorous one—who simply don’t want to be found.
When Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released, late in 1991, Seattle’s mainstream alternative music station, 107.7 The End, played the song all morning. Even though I listened to the station each day on my way to high school, I don’t remember a single song they played before that moment. They might have been broadcasting late period Clash, or solo Morrissey, or maybe they played the most mainstream examples of the underachieving genre known as college rock. But the DJ that morning knew that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would induce a sonic amnesia—everything before it would feel hazy and misshapen. The song was a nascent state anthem that became a national anthem. It was our state battle cry, distorted like the way some of us felt; and through this carved-out-trunk-turned-megaphone message, Washington was going to be found. This moment was more than a local band making good—this was a local band unearthing the grittiness and changing the weather.