Race, history, and memories of a Virginia girlhood.
We stopped first at the cemetery. My brother had picked me up at the Philadelphia airport, and we had driven south and west from there—to Baltimore and Frederick, then down through the hills of the Blue Ridge, past the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers at Harpers Ferry and into the Valley of Virginia. Civil War country. The route of the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns. The site of John Brown’s incendiary attempt to foment a slave uprising. The place where we grew up.
Apart from one brief drive-through, I hadn’t been back in nearly two decades—not since a visit the year after my father died. Now we could see next to his grave the dirt already unearthed to make a place for my stepmother’s ashes the next day. We had come for her funeral and in my father’s memory.
I had attended many burials here. The family plot houses uncles, aunts, grandparents, and great-grandparents, but no graves nearly as old as those dug soon after the nearby chapel was built in the 1790s. Edmund Randolph, the U.S. secretary of state and the nation’s first attorney general, a Virginia governor and a member of the Constitutional Convention, is a few yards away, surrounded by a crowd of Randolphs, Pages, Burwells, and Carters— members of the First Families of Virginia who had migrated to this northern end of the Shenandoah Valley when the children of the 18th-century Tide water gentry began to seek new lands and new opportunities. Nestled behind what has come to be known as the Old Chapel, in the quiet of an isolated crossroad, the beautiful little cemetery is so small that no one is much more than a stone’s throw from everyone else.
This story is from the August 2019 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the August 2019 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
After the Miracle
Cystic fibrosis once guaranteed an early deathbut a medical breakthrough has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
Her new memoir doubles as a modern-day horror story.
Orwell's Escape
Why the author repaired to the remote Isle of Jura to write his masterpiece, 1984
What's So Bad About Asking Where Humans Came From?
Human origin stories have often been used for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean they are worthless.
CLASH OF THE PATRIARCHS
A hard-line Russian bishop backed by the political might of the Kremlin could split the Orthodox Church in two.
The Great Serengeti Land Grab
How Gulf princes, wealthy tourists, and conservation groups displacing the Maasai people
A Bloody Retelling of Huckleberry Finn
Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’ classic.
THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE
ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT THREATENS TO END AN UNPRECEDENTED PERIOD OF SAFETY AND PROSPERITY FOR JEWISH AMERICANS-AND DEMOLISH THE LIBERAL ORDER THEY HELPED ESTABLISH.
THE GRUMPY ECONOMY
Why Americans trust feelings more than facts when it comes to prosperity
American Cowardice
Scot Peterson, condemned as the "Coward of Broward," stood by as a slaughter unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Does the blame lie with him, his training or a society in denial about what it would take to stop mass shootings?