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The veil: peering into the shadows of Mr. Jefferson's university
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Jefferson's sketch of the university's Rotunda
A note to readers: I think this post on the University of Virginia is appropriate, as today is Thomas Jefferson's birthday.
Rarely do I envision a lynching. I do not drive the roads of my northern Virginia suburb and imagine nooses hanging from streetlamps or mistake a group of milling teenagers for a suspicious mob. Nor do I expect to find the local Harris Teeter supermarket displaying jars of severed knuckles in its windows or selling postcards of yesterday’s “coon cooking.” Only one place lures my mind far beyond the politically correct racial boundaries of today, a place where nihilistic visions swirl about me with no apology, gripping my neurons with scenes of betrayal and hatred. Here, flesh, blood, and death are dragged across dry pavement for the sport of it. This is not Jena, Louisiana or Jasper, Texas. This haunted alcove is the University of Virginia’s Poe Alley.
Edgar Allen Poe studied at the university for one term in 1826—just long enough for the university to preserve his room for historical tours and name the alleyway that runs alongside it after him. Students, faculty, and visitors often walk the slightly uphill fifty-yard path to reach the nexus of campus, the Lawn. A tree-canopied, narrow driveway lined with hostas and winding brick walls, Poe Alley is the reason I have returned to my alma mater on a crisp Saturday afternoon. I want to hear the gravel crunch beneath my feet and see leaves of violet and lime hues swing from quickly-balding fall branches. Yet I also want to know if the wind still whistles “Strange Fruit” through the arms of bowed “Albemarle Pippin” apple trees when I bring my ears to listen:
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees…
I want to know if the maple and ash hold blood at the root and if the freely bouncing squirrels are ever met by sinister, flesh-plucking crows.
Entering this alley is like reciting a desperate prayer. Walking this path was a daily ritual during my last year as an undergraduate student—it was simply a means to get to the library, dining hall, and bus stop. Now I have come back to smell its shadows, to taste a constant, dull knifing that reminds me I may never quite belong. Here.
Standing ten feet from an empty tour bus and the pewter road sign marking Poe’s famous room, I let my foot cross the last line of manicured sidewalk into the chipped stones of the drive. The familiar grist sound of my sneaker rolling over the pebbles is everything I wanted to feel, and if I were to turn and leave after this first step, I could live in blissful deception, surviving on nothing but the breath of façade.
I am quickly brought to my senses. Stumpy, weathered logs lining the alley, one for every ten feet, bring me there. Another place, another time, I might not see these logs as anything more than a barrier for cars driving down the poorly-lit alley at night. Today my memory tosses me into a postcard picturing a human barbeque: A black funnel of smoke shoots upward toward the sky while a crowd of five-hundred white onlookers stands still, and alive, on either side. The smoke hides the corpse of John Lee, a black man accused of wounding a white woman. His body burned atop a pyre on August 13, 1911 until only ashes remained.
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh…
A small group of white, middle-aged visitors passes me on the left while observing the English-inspired pavilion gardens that sit on either side of the alleyway. “Oh, it’s so pretty,” a silver-haired woman, who appears to be an informal tour guide for her friends, says. “And they are beautiful in the spring,” she adds. The others “ooh-ahh” and point in agreement, following her quick steps toward the Lawn.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth…
If I could swallow the veil that Du Bois calls my “double-consciousness,” I would. At least long enough so that I could smile at the dear woman and say, “Isn’t that goldenrain tree just gorgeous?!” and really mean it. It would be the only thought in my head: What a lovely tree.
The tree wouldn’t bring to mind the afternoon my friend Amey walked through this alley to her hunter green Honda Accord and found a racial epithet painted on the hood. I wouldn’t see the tree and think of Amey and recall the letter I wrote to the Cavalier Daily labeling the ombudsman’s decision not to run the story as “racist.” Maybe Amey and I could even visit our old Lawn rooms without thinking. Maybe we could just be.
So far, being has not been an option. “I can recall hating to walk Poe Alley, particularly at night,” Amey recently wrote to me. “I have been back to visit since graduation, and each experience is a strange mix of nostalgia and discomfort.”
If I could swallow my veil, I wouldn’t look at the tree peeking over a serpentine wall and shudder, remembering the night a white man smashed another friend’s head into her steering column in an attempt to knock her out of the race for student council president. “We don’t want a [n-word] for president!” he and his accomplice screamed before speeding away. My friend no longer speaks about that night.
Oh, you should see these gardens after a fresh snowfall, the veil-less me would say. They’ll take your breath away.
The days are shorter now that it’s fall, and by three o’clock, the sun has cast its shadow over the wall of Pavilion V’s garden, creating a jagged contrast in the middle of the gritty pavement. I crunch along the path in my worn Puma sneakers and faded blue jeans, noticing a gothic streetlamp that stands as a last guard before the Lawn corridor. Pointed metal hooks hang from the bottom and jut out from the top of the bulb’s dusty, glass case, a design that clashes with the rounded, white columns and dome-shaped buildings that typify Jefferson’s architectural style. The solitary lamp becomes, for me, a twenty-foot-high lighted telephone pole standing between railroad tracks in Oxford, Georgia, circa 1908. Hanging chin up from the pole is a black man whose name was never printed in local newspapers but whose corpse was left on public display, a morbid exhibition for train passengers.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop…
Walking toward the gray, lopsided stairs at the end of the path, I pass six cramped parking spaces. No defamed Honda Accord, no speeding get away car today. Just an indigo 1990-something Nissan Altima with a stuffed bear in the rear window. The sound of my foot being planted on each cement step still echoes, just like I remember, against the thickly-painted, white walls that form a short corridor to the pride and joy of Jefferson’s blueprints. I curve around a student’s stack of firewood and examine the student activity posters hanging on the slim double doors of 13 West Lawn. My eyes settle on a set of purple letters printed in Courier New font on glossy, white paper that read, “Tradition is among the most distinctive hallmarks of the University experience.”
I smile (or smirk). I can never know this tradition. This tradition is for the un-veiled, for those who can see a silverbell tree for what it is. For the rest of us, its leaves become mangled with the roots of university history that have choked our necks when we’ve needed air the most. And still we sow ourselves into its soil, knowing we will never see the tree without the noose.
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
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