Jay began collecting antique brass bugles in every size. He also found some sheet music and practiced at all hours. Once, on vacation in Anguilla, we got a call from the front desk. Apparently, Jay’s attempt at reveille was disturbing the peace.
Jay played the trusty bugler Corporal Monahan, Company H, Fourth Virginia Cavalry. Todd and Mike told us about his last reenactment, four months before he died—the ferociously bloody Battle of Antietam, claiming more than 20,000 casualties in a single day. They spared no details describing Jay’s painstaking preparation, his stoicism, and his bravery in the face of a dire prognosis, so thin and so weak from yet another surgery. Carrie and I cried.
Mike reminisced about coming to Millbrook to help us put up the Christmas tree that year. He remembered Jay having trouble driving, having trouble seeing, having trouble eating a piece of pie at the Millbrook Diner. Which made both Mike and Todd choke up too.
The four of us drove to the Wayside Inn, where Jay and I sometimes went on date nights, famous for the Virginia peanut soup we never ordered. Soon I got an alert on my phone: There’d been a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; 11 killed, six wounded. I shared the horrific news with the group.
Todd and Mike were skeptical about the whole thing, seeming to suggest this might be fake news. That maybe it was part of a larger plot to undercut the Second Amendment and take away people’s guns. And just like that, the mood turned.
Against my better judgment, I asked Todd and Mike what they thought about the debate currently raging over the fate of Confederate statues. To which Todd responded, “It’s cultural Marxism.” He also referred to the Washington Post as “Pravda on the Potomac.” And when I asked about the lionizing of Robert E. Lee, who fought to preserve slavery and owned slaves himself, one of them responded, “He inherited them.” I saw Carrie stiffen.
“Well, that was interesting,” I said as we drove away.
I was conflicted; Todd and Mike had been so good to Jay, but their positions were hard for us to swallow. And yet I felt protective of Jay’s memory, and I wanted Carrie to be proud of him. We rode in silence, with an unanswered question looming like a hitchhiker in the back seat: If Jay were here, what would he think?
In the summer of 2017, while Carrie was digging up so much about our family’s past for her thesis, I was conducting some research of my own for a National Geographic documentary about the Confederate-statues controversy. The mammoth, oxidized likeness of Robert E. Lee astride his trusty steed Traveller in the middle of Charlottesville was ground zero for a debate that would radiate throughout the South. In fact, the entire country.
I interviewed Black Lives Matter activist Don Gathers, who contrasted the majestic scale of the bronze effigy with a small sidewalk plaque that read SLAVE AUCTION BLOCK…ON THIS SITE SLAVES WERE BOUGHT AND SOLD.
“You can’t convince me that’s by accident or happenstance,” Gathers said. “It’s a mindset.”
Gary Gallagher, an American history professor at UVA, stated in no uncertain terms the reason Confederate states left the Union and entered into war: slavery. After their defeat, they tried to recast the effort in a positive light. “So what’s the best thing we can talk about?” Gallagher said. “Robert E. Lee!” Setting forth the Lost Cause narrative, revolving around states’ rights and the preservation of the Southern way of life, with Lee the heroic figurehead.
I started hearing rumblings of a “Unite the Right” rally scheduled for Saturday, August 12th. The night before, I attended a packed service at St. Paul’s, across from the Rotunda. Charlottesville residents and clergy from around the country had gathered to peacefully oppose the hateful ideology of the alt-right marchers amassing on the edge of the Grounds.
As attendees sang and listened to speakers like Cornel West and Missouri pastor Traci Blackmon, a prominent voice after Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, someone said to me, “There’s something going on outside.” People were quickly ushered out the back door while I went to the front steps overlooking the Rotunda across the street.
Throngs of young men, many dressed in white polo shirts and khakis, the “uniform” of the neo-fascist Proud Boys, were carrying torches and marching down the Lawn, where I lived senior year—a fiery gash running through the heart of the university. At the church a woman had approached me and said, “I wish Emily were here. She’d know exactly what to do.”
The next morning, angry young white men gathered at the base of the Lee statue, then began chanting, “F— you, faggots,” “Blood and Soil” （a Nazi slogan）， and “Jews will not replace us.” A phalanx of clergy locked arms and tried to drown them out by singing “This Little Light of Mine.” A thin blond man screamed out menacingly, “The country is ours. Your time is coming,” drawing a symbolic finger across his throat.