September 20, 2009
UPDATED at the end of the post: PART TWO on 09.22.09
Happy birthday to one of my very most absolutely belovedly adored friends, comrade, compatriot and conspirators in all the universe, Lady A.B., iconic lioness and neighbor, who was a little baby girl all the way around the world in Paris on this day many moons ago. And what a lucky day that was for the world, to have a brand new hellion arrive ready to shake everything up and make it shipshape, just as the Nazis were edging closer. No match for Lady A! No way! She came to save the day. I know she’s saved my day! Hooray!
Bon anniversaire a toi, ma cherie! un joyeux anniversaire!
And as long as we are on the subject of goddesses, I am gazing at the crepe myrtle trees outside my window, which are sacred to Aphrodite and Demeter. Also, although rarely discussed in the South, they are one of the four sacred plants of Sukkot, which is one of my favorite festivals and is right around the corner.
Today I am sitting at my desk looking out at the Blue Ridge Mountains over these pantheontastic pansy-pink and fuschia-colored trees that edge the drive up to the hill – the plantation mansion burned down in the 1980s, but the formal entranceway of boxwood hedges and crepe myrtle remain. The new residence hall is built on the same spot it seems, but there seem to be some hostilities of temperament and sensibility. A changing of the generations, perhaps, with the new generation more graceless, perhaps, but only on the outside.
As I reported last week, I participated in the Lynchburg Old City Cemetery auditions for the local folks seeking roles in the upcoming performances at the Cemetery. At eight gravesites, the life of each occupant will be acted out by candlelight. I am honored to be asked to create the script for a the three-person scene about the life of Mary Gildon, a midwife who is buried in the cemetery, a few blocks from her house. As the facts of her life have unfolded to me, she bears a deeply uncanny resemblance to the character of Maw in my novel Kerosene.
If you click on the letter above (you have to click on the title of the posting, and it will open in a big window), you will see the basic outline of my writing assignment – a scene for Mary Gildon, Robert Cheatham, and Buelah Mae Cheatham, who will be played by three gifted local actors. The man who wrote the letter you see here – Walter Plecker – was one of several powerful Virginians in the Eugenics movement, some of whom earned post-graduate degrees in “The Science of Racial Cleansing” in Germany in the late 1930s. Plecker himself was a regular correspondent with Hitler’s leadership to discuss strategy. Amherst, Augusta and Lynchburg Counties were special targets of his…perhaps because they also had the Epileptic Colony for the Feebleminded, the Western State Lunatic Asylum, and a couple of poorhouses.
After this letter was sent, Mary was forced to retire from midwifery, and was shortly thereafter forcibly committed to the Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton, Virginia (the same place my great-grandfather was sent, actually). She died there. Her body was returned to Lynchburg and buried in the Lynchburg City Cemetery I have come to love. In a few weeks, her life story will be played out by a group of folks standing at her graveside.
(Walter Ashby Plecker, the author of the letter.)
As I am discovering, the Lynchburg State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, the various County Poorhouses, and Western State Asylum in Staunton was at the epicenter of a very powerful Nazi-allied eugenics movement throughout the 1920-1940s, where perhaps as many as 100,000 area inhabitants were committed and then subjected to one or more of the following: sterilization, lobotomization, euthanasia, forced abortions…A lot of time “accidents” happened in these places, and people just vanished. Like so many other ancestors of people I have met here, my great-grandfather was institutionalized in Western State, just like Mary Gildon. To make it all feel that much closer, I have epilepsy, and between the two I’m not sure I could say past is actually the past, sometimes – it comes right smack upside the present, and sure enough the future, too.
Here in the present day, it is remarkably easy to get to those institutions today from the Cemetery – you don’t even need a map. Just head towards the goats in the ravine, and follow the railroad tracks. They go to all (and from) those institutions. Trains are curious that way.
In March of 1924, the Virginia General Assembly passed a series of powerful eugenics laws – both on the same day. The Racial Purity Act made intermarriage between races a crime punishable by extended prison sentences (in actuality, brought forcible psychiatric institutionalizations, sterilizations, and abortions). That’s the law that Plecker’s letters to Mary and to Buelah point out. It also gave a legal reason to hunt down women who were believed to have sexual relationships with men of a different race – threatened with prison sentences, many were manipulated into lifelong institutionalization in psychiatric hospitals.
The other law enacted that same day was the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. Like the Racial Purity Act, Virginia leadership was poised and ready to make examples, and start implementing the policies. Virginia Colony officials selected 17 year old Carrie Buck of Charlottesville – Carrie Buck’s foster parents had committed her to the Virginia Epilepsy Colony shortly after she gave birth to an illegitimate child – she was pregnant because she had been raped by a member of the foster family. Carrie herself was in the foster system because her mother, Emma, had already been committed to the asylum on charges of epilepsy and sexual promiscuity.
The photo above is of Carrie and her mother Emma at the Colony, right at the same time that Mary, Buelah and Robert were caught in a similar web of hate, about a half-mile down the road (we found their addresses, and their houses). The chart below was created at the Colony, and shows how cleverly they developed a rationale for why Carrie needed to be punished for being raped by her relatives.
With Emma and Carrie already institutionalized, if it could be demonstrated that Carrie’s daughter, Vivian, was likely to grow up to be an “imbecile” like her mother and grandmother, the case for inheritance of such a quality would be assured.
Mrs. Alice Dobbs, the foster mother of Carrie Buck’s daughter Vivian, holds Vivian while flashing a coin past the baby’s face, in a test to assess her intelligence.
The infant, perhaps distracted by the camera, didn’t follow the coin with her eyes and thus was declared an imbecile. A.H. Estabrook, the person who initiated this test of the infant’s intelligence and the photographer, took this picture the day before the Buck v. Bell trial in Virginia.
I feel very close to Mary and Robert and Buelah, and hope to do right by them with my writing. Much more to do, so off I go to try and conjure up their voices on the page.
[PART ONE. To be continued this evening, after I finish the script.]
PART TWO
9/22/09
Okay, well, I am almost finished with the script, but it’s two days later, and it’s the final draft, and I’m about two hours late. There will actually be three versions of the script at some point – depending upon who is available for casting, and how much time is available, and I’m making a file of primary and secondary source material for the Cemetery file.
I am photographing gravestones as well as any houses that I can find listed on the death records or birth records or whatever. Most of the cemetery research is to celebrate the lives of the people buried there, and in a small town it’s possible to really follow people. And houses are still standing.
It’s important, in my opinion, to underscore the celebration of lives that otherwise would be hidden. And in many senses, this brings an opportunity to provide some healing within the perspectives of the present day, as fallible and awful as we still are, we are getting better.
I’m not sure how I feel about justice. Having worked for three years for an organization with JUSTICE in its name, it only served to complicate my philosophy of whether contemporary judges of men can accurately provide justice.
As I spend my days here at the cemetery, I wonder whether time is justice. We have so many illusions about time, because we only typically get to experience small, discrete, particle-ized slivers of it.
But clearly, the hero that William Plecker was a mere 60 years ago changed dramatically over even this short-term test of time. And Mary Gildon and Robert Cheatham and Beulah Mae Cheatham are exonerated from their supposed “crimes,” and become guideposts for people who followed a course of love rather than hate.
And if we pay attention, we see that our society is doing the same thing now for marriage – just with gay families, rather than interracial families. Same story. Another round of martyrs and victims and survivors. One day, another play in a cemetery, showing that the dead still live, still have much to teach us, much wisdom that can heal us.
Another round of people being sent to psych hospitals – mostly women, mostly women not dissimilar to Mary Gildon. People who have been tormented and mangled, whose dreams have been crushed, and thus their brains – places that should be temples to regeneration, and not instead places of dismembermentwhere drugs are the final solution for society’s discomfort.
Today’s invocation: may we learn the locations of the psychiatric centers in our community, and the locations of our prisons, and our hospitals, and the locations of our courthouses, and the locations of our cemeteries.
When we pass them by, may we pull over our cars, our feet, our bicycles, and pause a moment to wish them well, in all senses of the word.
May we be at all times aware that oftentimes, their inmates are rearranged.
Most have been put in the wrong boxes.
Many of the dead are actually living.
And many of the living are long since dead.
Many of those who live in the shadows are full of light.
Many of those who live in the light are full of shadows.
Many of the judges are criminals.
Many of the criminals are ill.
Many of the doctors are insane.
Many of the insane are healers.
May all who are misunderstood, one day find a true home. Death is not defeat. And may we amongst the living begin to move past our fear of aging, our fear of old people, of people in institutions, of cemeteries, of the dead, realizing that time has much to teach us, and much that can heal us. Pull over to the side of the road, any road, and wish wellness upon us all.
(and fuck housework, go live the dream.)