Recovering from the climb down, we simply sit for a time quietly taking in the river—the rock-bound river. This stretch of the James is a veritable minefield of boulder-size antediluvian rocks that might have been flung there millennia ago by the quick-to-anger God of the Old Testament. Another one of his commandments might have been broken and, in a tantrum, he had rained down rocks instead of his usual fire. Indeed, the Old Fellow can still be heard fulminating those times when the James at floodtide comes roaring downstream in a whitewater chaos of uprooted trees, hurtling rocks, unmoored boats, drowned dogs, cats, cows and even the occasional human.
This morning the river is far from floodtide, and the two of us—ladies well beyond a certain age (I’m in my seventies)—sit taking our ease beside it.
Virginia and I have been friends since I came to live in Richmond over twenty years ago. Our immediate bond was discovering that in our younger days we had both been travelin’ women, who had loved moving around the world. Virginia had lived abroad for years at a time. Her husband, a visual artist, had also been a cultural attaché in various U.S. embassies in the Middle East and Asia—one of few blacks to hold such posts. His tours of duty had seen them living in Egypt, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka for extended periods. All that had been decades ago, though, and my friend was now a widow and former teacher who had retired back to the state for which she had been named.
In my case, a job brought me to Richmond. I was offered a position as writer-in-residence at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a large research university in the capital city. It was a two-year contract, another in a long list of such contracts. Like many a fiction writer, I largely supported my “habit” with temporary teaching stints here and there across the country. For one, two and sometimes three years I would teach graduate level courses on writing the short story and the novel. The emphasis in class discussions had largely to do with the craft and techniques employed in the two forms. The list of universities where I taught were legion, and included Yale, Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California at Berkeley, as well as any number of far less prestigious institutions, such as the present Virginia Commonwealth University. Also, this would be my first time venturing below the Mason-Dixon Line. True, I knew that Virginia was not considered “South” in the same way as Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn; nevertheless I had misgivings. I needed a job, though, at the time. Then, to my surprise, once I completed the two years of my contract at VCU, I was invited to stay on as a permanent member in the graduate creative-writing program. And it would be a tenured position. My first real job and tenured at that! The offer seemed almost predestined, as if it was somehow important that I remain for a time in the former capital of the Confederacy. In fact, I had already settled in during the two years of the contract: had found a modest apartment, started another novel and made a few friends, Virginia being the most simpatico.
We haven’t seen each other in a while—I was away for most of the summer—so we start the Labor Day morning by catching up on the news. I tell her about the African American writers’ conference in Paris in which I participated; then, afterward, staying on in the City of Light. She, in turn, fills me in on events in black Richmond during my absence. We also bring each other up to date on our respective children: Virginia’s three and my one. Their middle-aged lives in scattered places. Books: She’s presently reading a long novel set in India, a country she often visited while living in Sri Lanka. I tell her about a talented young woman writer from Haiti whose work I discovered while away.
The morning passing in leisurely talk. A perfect day unfolding. Soon, as if to underscore the perfection, there comes the sound of laughter from upriver. A rafting party. Off in the distance a flotilla of several large bright-blue rubber rafts can be seen performing a bouncy dance downstream toward us. The rafters, twenty-and-thirty-year-old somethings, all of them white, are making a noisy show of maneuvering their bulbous craft through the moderate whitewater and rocks.
They’re marking the end of summer with an excursion down the James.
To avoid the dangerous currents midstream, they are keeping to the south bank where there’s a safe channel. The rocks on that side also form several swimming holes, so that when the flotilla reaches them, a number of the rafters strip to their bathing suits and take to the water, splashing and frolicking like two-year-olds in a playground pool.
“I wonder if they realize how polluted this river is?” I say.
Having read up on it, I know that the once-pristine James has become over time a dumping ground not only for generations of human and animal waste but, worse, dangerous industrial contaminants as well: PCBs, PCTs, TBT (tributylin), nitrogen, ammonia, fecal coliform, Kepone, toxic mercury, creosote and pathogens of all kinds. Add also tons of sulfuric acid from the now-defunct Civil War arsenals, armories and munitions plants whose ruins still line the riverbank in downtown Richmond. Include as well the over six hundred chemicals associated with tobacco and Philip Morris, the state’s prime industry.
“They’re trying to clean it up, I hear,” says Virginia, speaking of the river. “I still wouldn’t go near it, though. But our young swimmers probably feel they’re immune.”
We raise our bottles of spring water in a toast to youth and its illusion of immunity.
The swim over, the excursionists clamber back aboard the rafts, strap on their life jackets and helmets, take up their paddles, and continue their rollicking ride downriver.
An odd sensation as I watch the flotilla disappear around the final bend that leads to the city: My mind slowly divides in two, half of it attending to the pleasant conversation my friend and I are having, while the other half quietly slips away to accompany the rafters on what’s left of their trip.
They don’t have much farther to go. The Labor Day junket will end once they reach the heart of downtown Richmond. There, due to what’s said to be an ancient geological rift in the riverbed, the James profoundly changes character. Like my mind at the moment, it divides in two. The city’s downtown marks “the Falls,” meaning the end of the rock-bound James, “where the water falleth so rudely and with such a violence, as not any boat can pass,” and the beginning of the river’s long, smooth tidal basin that is navigable all the way to historic Jamestown and the Atlantic Ocean some sixty miles downstream.
Rough water and smooth. They lie side by side right below the city’s skyscraper office and commercial buildings, banks and brokerage houses. Richmond is the only American city that has whitewater rapids moiling through its business center. Indeed, it was the combination of the whitewater power of the James fueling the new industries, together with the tidewater offering safe passage to the ships up from the Atlantic, with their chattel cargo, that made for the wealth and status the Old Dominion would enjoy for nearly two centuries.
By now the rafting party has reached the dividing line between rough water and smooth. The joyride down the Falls of the James is over. A bus will take the young twenty-thirty-somethings back to their starting point miles upriver, where, over a few beers, they will noisily recap the thrills of the morning.
Youth.
The excursion over, I should also head back to the north bank and my friend. Instead, the truant part of my mind continues along what is now the tidal James, even though it knows what it will encounter there: all those wrenching landmarks—and all of them within the city limits. They begin, those landmarks, with the replacement of the notorious old Mayo’s Bridge that had been the first to link the river’s north and south banks. The original had been nothing more than a crude wooden footbridge that often threatened, it was said, to give way under the weight of the chained and coffled nightly traffic it had been hastily built to accommodate.
Farther ahead: yet another landmark. This one the ruins of the extensive docks that once lined both sides of the James near Richmond, with the largest, busiest and best known of them all—the Big Daddy of them all—the Manchester Docks on the south bank.
/> The condition of the chattel cargo was such after the long weeks, sometimes months, at sea, that to placate the townsfolk who complained about the sight and smell of the shipments, a decree was drawn up declaring that the chattel were to be brought into town only at night. Only then was it permitted to march them, chained together at the neck and legs, along the high, precipitous south riverbank over to the rattletrap Mayo’s Bridge, which, in turn, deposited them in Olde Richmond Towne on the north bank, its sleep undisturbed. Then, at daybreak, in a place apart from the town proper called the Bottom, amid a cohort of traders, agents, suppliers, exporters, commodities brokers, auctioneers, and scores of independent buyers large and small, the shipment would be put up for sale.
Richmond, VA. It was the principal port of entry for Africans brought to the New World in the eighteenth century.
The trade was so brisk, the money to be made so plentiful, that often the buying and selling took place on board the ship the moment it docked, or even on the dock itself. Other times, “scrambles” were held in the small towns and villages along the tidal James before the ships reached Richmond. In a “scrambles,” the chattel cargo was taken from the hold, off the boat, and herded into a fenced-in yard or pen or stockade with a locked gate. Waiting outside would be a crowd of eager buyers, each with a long rope. Then, once the gate was opened, the “scrambles” began, with the buyers dashing about the yard or pen or stockade, desperate to lasso and corral as many chattel as possible never mind their condition: the stench, the running sores, the caked shit. Desperate, the buyers often turned on each other. Many an ugly tug-of-war took place over a choice find in the shipment.
The demand was that great. The Old Dominion —which was brand new back then—needed an endless supply of John Henry muscle, brawn and sweat to produce what became the cash crop of all time. Tobacco. Yes: peanuts, cotton, hogs, and everything else having to do with the land, but above all, in Virginia, it was King Tobacco, “the jovial weed,” to which all of Europe was addicted at the time.
Date: October 6, 1995
Place: Downstate Hospital, Brooklyn, New York
Patient’s Name: Anita Burke Wharton
Time of Death: 3:16 a.m.
Cause of Death: Pulmonary Hypertension
Whenever my sister, an inveterate New Yorker, came to visit me in Richmond, she always brought along a large empty carry-on in addition to her suitcase. The carry-on was for the dozen or more cartons of Virginia Slims she intended to purchase during her stay.
This was Philip Morris country, after all, where her favorite brand was suddenly “a steal” compared to the price in New York. My sister had always been thrifty. Naturally, I was always glad to see her, yet dismayed by what might well have been the principal reason for her visits. And there was no reasoning or pleading with her. “Something’s got to take you,” would be her fatalistic comeback. With each visit, her breathing became more labored. When she could no longer physically make the trip, I was asked, then ordered (I was the kid sister) to purchase the cartons and mail them to her. She would send me a check for the amount. Each time I refused, and each time she slammed down the phone on me, furious that she would be forced to pay New York prices. Which she did until the end.
In addition to everything having to do with cultivating the land, the same muscle, brawn and sweat also figured in the rail system (CSX) that soon reached from Florida to Mississippi, with its hub Olde Richmond Towne. “Cutting cross ties is nasty work to do,” declared Nate Shaw, grandson of chattel, in the story of his life recorded in a volume called All God’s Dangers.
And what of the great neoclassical Jeffersonian state capital buildings in downtown Richmond that are second only to those in Washington? Chattel labor again.
They also worked as hired-out hands (their wages paid to their owners) in the factories, mills, tobacco warehouses and munitions plants that harnessing the Falls of the James had made possible.
Then came the Tara big houses that soon proliferated along the Tidewater. The same brawn and sweat were put to work creating them as well, from the stately columns and grand staircases to the great lawns, where the belles of the new royalty could be seen strolling under the frilly little parasols they used as much for flirting as for shielding them from the sun. . . .
Mid-August, 1983. My first week in Richmond. Classes at the university aren’t scheduled to begin until the second week in September, but I decided to come and settle in beforehand. In need of a few items for the apartment I’ve rented near campus, I find my way downtown. The shopping done, I exit the department store only to be stopped short by the startling sight of a large group of women in great hoopskirts and beribboned bonnets approaching me down the street, all of them holding up the frilly, flirtatious little antebellum parasols.
Accompanying the women are an equal number of men in dress uniform gray, swords at their sides . . .
For a hairbreadth of a second, time reverses itself: It’s no longer the early 1980s, nor am I my present-day self: a writer and an itinerant teacher of writing. Instead, I’m suddenly chattel cargo, merchandise, goods, a commodity to be bought and sold in the Bottom, or on the Manchester Docks or in a Tidewater “scrambles,” where I’m lassoed in the shame of my nakedness and filth.
For a hairbreadth I’m caught in a terrifying time warp until my mind somehow recovers and registers the word “reenactment,” “a Civil War reenactment,” and it’s 1983 again. The Scarlett O’Hara women with the parasols, the armed men in gray, are participating in what I will soon learn is perhaps the South’s most enduring ritual.
I would spend the weeks before classes began in the campus library, taking a self-administered crash course on the Old Dominion, its defining river and its people, free and otherwise. The texts I needed were all there under the call numbers 975.5 and .6, and they offered an unvarnished account of the Commonwealth’s beginnings. It was obvious the books were seldom read or consulted, given the exhumed dust that flew up from their pages once they were opened. Early Southern History was clearly not a popular subject at the university. It proved otherwise for me. Long after the semester began, and with my classes underway, I continued my private crash course in southern history, finally able to redress the truncated, once-over-lightly, deliberately sanitized version of the antebellum South that had been standard in the textbooks of my day in high school and even college.
I had never, for example, come across so much as a word in any of those pages about the “scrambles” held along the tidal James.
At long last making up for having been educationally shortchanged!
One evening, digging in the stacks, I unearthed the despised Edict of 1808:
Be it enacted, by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that from and after the 1st day of January, 1808, it shall not be lawful to import into the United States from any of the kingdoms of Africa any Negro with the intent to be sold or to be held to service or labor . . .
The furor this caused. The trade to be halted when there was still so much work to be done! Work that needed “the strength and the sinews of the African world!” as one English wag at the time put it. And with so much money still to be made buying and selling chattel labor! Where there’s a will, there’s, inevitably, the proverbial way, so that the 1808 Edict notwithstanding, a way was quickly found to maintain the supply and to add to it even. The Tidewater big houses: the Shirley Plantation, the Sherwood Forest Plantation, the Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Swan’s Point Plantation et al. began the purposeful breeding and sale of homegrown chattel. The enterprise proved so successful that, by the mid-1800s, there was a surplus of a quarter million chattel labor and more. This posed yet another problem. Again, it was easily solved. The surplus was simply, periodically, herded by cart into Richmond Towne, where it was quickly sold in the Bottom; then, as quickly, packed into the cattle cars of the CSX Railroad and into the holds of the ships at the Manchester Docks to be rai
lroaded and shipped due south, deep south: New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta.
The river and the railroad provided the final solution.
“Paule! Paule! The plantations! Lee’s taking me to see the plantations! I can’t wait!”
A spring day in the late 1980s. It’s about nine o’clock in the morning and my editor at the time, barefoot and in her nightgown, is at the top of the stairs in the house in Richmond I’ve just entered. There, she’s performing an excited little jig while gleefully clapping her hands. She’s come down from New York to visit me as well as Lee Smith, the white southern writer who’s also one of her authors, and Lee, with whom she is staying, is taking her to visit the Tidewater plantations, a tourist favorite. Unaware of their plans, I had dropped by to leave off a section of the novel I’m presently working on, only to be met by my normally poised, fifty-year-old editor, a quintessential New York type, suddenly behaving like a five-year-old who’s just been promised a trip to Disneyland.
For a moment I stand there nonplussed, taking in her cute little dance; then, it’s all I can do not to vault up the stairs, grab her by the arm and march her, barefoot and in her nightgown, over to the campus library and there, treating her as if she’s even younger than five, force-feed her the history in the dusty texts.
Shortchanged! Although my editor has been impeccably educated (the New England Sister Colleges, the Ivy League graduate schools, etc.), it appears that, like me, she was shortchanged in certain aspects of the country’s history and in need of a crash course similar to mine.
Equally appalling is the fact that my editor is Jewish. How, I wonder, would she have reacted had I announced that I was on my way to visit Dachau or Buchenwald to pay my respects to the millions who had perished there while doing the boogaloo and snapping my fingers?
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