C is for Charlottesville

I used to like Charlottesville. Then it lost its innocence. 

I heard people say a similar thing after the Virginia city became a byword for racist tensions during the Unite the Right furor in 2017. The reality is more complex.

When I first arrived in places like Charlottesville, Charleston, and Savannah I was wooed over by their charms. You do the tourist thing, You go on the plantation circuit; you sit on sunny porches and drink iced tea. Even the word antebellum seemed quaint, conjuring up the shade under magnolia trees in long southern afternoons.

If there is one lesson from Charlottesville, it's that the past casts a long shadow. The horrors of the events of August 11 and August 12, 2017, somewhat obscure the fact the protests sparked by a proposal to remove a giant statue of Robert E. Lee in the city.

 Virginia has an uneasy relationship with its past. Even the founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson who crafted the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Monticello are tainted. As you dig beneath the surface, you soon realize places like Charlottesville never had much innocence.

The tour of Monticello dwells on Jefferson's books and ideas. It treads carefully over his ownership of other human beings and the nature of his relationship with Sally Hemings.

Monticello is a pleasant enough place to while away an hour or two. However, I was somewhat bemused to pay so much to be bused military style on a tour of a house that must be the size of the latrine at Chatsworth back home. Just saying.