Richmond Noir (2 page)
I
n The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare
, Henry Miller tosses off a hard-bitten assessment of the City on the James: “I would rather die in Richmond somehow,” he writes, “though God knows Richmond has little enough to offer.” As editors, we like the dying part, and might point out that in its long history, Richmond, Virginia has offered up many of the disparate elements crucial to meaty
noir
. The city was born amid deception, conspiracy, and violence.
In 1607, after Christopher Newport paddled up the river that would one day be the city’s lifeblood, he installed a wooden cross at the future site of Richmond, claiming the area for England. The local Powhatan rightly perceived the symbolism in his act, but Newport, with the aid of flattery and gifts, convinced them that the cross indicated friendship, not conquest. His lie, soon revealed for what it was, led to conflict—not only between settlers and Native Americans, but also among the settlers themselves. Within two years, a second English expedition, excited by skirmishes with the Powhatan, attacked an exploratory party led by John Smith (yes,
that
John Smith). When Smith retreated, the Powhatan besieged the unruly colonists once more and killed some number of them. Smith returned, calmed the natives, arrested the English ringleaders, and put them in the stocks. He then forced the remaining men to take up residence in a Native encampment at the site of Newport’s cross. The men revolted, freeing the conspirators and abandoning the site. At that point, Smith gave up, but famously noted in his journal that he’d found no place so pleasant in all of Virginia as that site of consternation and bloodshed. (Oh, and then he was horribly burned in an accident.)
Four centuries later, as Clay McLeod Chapman makes clear in his Belle Isle story, you can’t wander far in Richmond without being reminded by some cast-iron marker that this is where
history happened
—here’s the church where Patrick Henry declared, “Give me liberty or give me death,” here’s the factory that forged cannonballs and shot during the Civil War, here’s the row of warehouses that churned out America’s tobacco (lately they’ve gone condo), here’s the site of the Negro (read: slave) cemetery, now paved over into a desolate parking lot. Richmond is a city of statues and monuments to the past—Confederate generals mostly. Occasionally you’ll come across something odd, but never anomalous—a statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe, a statue of dancer Bojangles Robinson. Yes, history happened in Richmond, and so did crime, malfeasance, and cruelty. That’s because it’s hard to have the former without the latter. Richmond may be steeped in history, but its residents can seem as ambivalent about that fact—or even ashamed of it—as they are proud.
Sure, Edgar Allan Poe spent a good part of his life in Richmond, and even went so far as to credit it with shaping his identity, as Pir Rothenberg’s story in this volume might remind us. (“I am a Virginian,” Poe wrote, “at least I call myself one, for I have resided all my life, until within the last few years in Richmond.”) Sure, two U.S. presidents lie buried in the hallowed ground of the city’s Hollywood Cemetery. (It’s also home to the grave of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, as Clint McCown’s tale playfully and darkly points out.) Sure, Thomas Jefferson spent a lot of time in Richmond as governor of the Commonwealth; he was even the architect of its beautiful Capitol building. But Jefferson had to run for his life from Richmond when the British came rolling through during the Revolutionary War; later he found himself put on trial for treason and cowardice by none other than Patrick Henry (yes,
that
Patrick Henry.)
During the nineteenth century, the city was a-crawl with slingshot-and shotgun-toting gangs—the 4th Street Horribles, the Bumtowners, the Butchertown Cats, and so on—who preyed on shopkeepers and pedestrians and warred with each other. These groups were forebears of the drug gangs that are very much active in Richmond today, and whose presence here in the 1990s earned the River City the distinction of Murder Capital of the United States—a reputation further buoyed by the presence of the Southside Strangler, the first serial killer ever to be executed following a conviction based on DNA evidence. In Richmond, as in many of America’s great cities, history is a mixed bag.
Greater Richmond—which means not only the city itself but also the surrounding suburbanized counties (white flight havens that began to grow in the mid-1950s)—has a population of roughly one million. In other words, Los Angeles it ain’t, and the Philip Marlowes and Jake Gitteses of the world might find its palette a little limited. However, Richmond’s size hasn’t precluded the city from falling victim to its own versions of Chinatown-style political chicanery—like the boardroom schemes and bamboozlements that led to entire sections of Jackson Ward (at the time a poor black neighborhood) and Oregon Hill (at the time a poor white neighborhood) being emptied out and cleaved in two to make way for, respectively, an interstate highway and a commuter bypass. Richmond is well versed in the political buffoonery of the public figure—as Howard Owen reminds us, the city is home not only to a municipal government, but also to the Virginia State Legislature and the governor’s office. It’s a place where a junkie councilman can get pinched buying heroin in a housing project and state legislators can spend whole sessions attempting to define what kind of underwear shall be illegal to wear, where a historic American figure can torpedo his political legacy simply by signing on as mayor and deciding to pick a fight with the school system.
For all the dark marks on Richmond’s past, the darkest and most permanent is its role as hub of the Atlantic slave trade. Richmond was the spot on the James River where traders unloaded their captives to market, and where white Virginians sold enslaved peoples “downriver” to the deeper South. It was the gateway through which the cruel institution was spread into Virginia and much of the country. In present-day Richmond, the monuments to this part of its history are few (the recently erected Reconciliation Triangle statue is a notable exception)—so few that absence, in a way, becomes its own monument. The auction houses of Shockoe Bottom have vanished to time. The extensive slave prison, holding pen, and marketplace in the northwest corner of the Bottom—a site of so much suffering, pain, and heartbreak that captives called it the “Devil’s Half Acre”—lies beneath the empty expanse of that aforementioned parking lot. Also buried beneath that asphalt is Gabriel Prosser, the blacksmith who, as Hermine Pinson’s story stunningly recalls, was leader of one of the few large-scale slave revolts in American history.
Meanwhile, Richmond has benefited immeasurably from 400 years of African American culture, never more so than in the 1920s and ’30s, when the neighborhood of Jackson Ward was home to a cultural zeitgeist that saw it labeled “the Harlem of the South.” Jackson Ward was the place where Maggie L. Walker chartered the first African American-owned bank. It was a place where jazz-era legends came to perform—Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and of course Bojangles Robinson, to name but a few. Like any good scene, it was also home to con men, gamblers, and hustlers, a legacy that is celebrated in Robert Deane Pharr’s
The Book of Numbers
—the first and to date best noir treatment of Richmond, and a scathing indictment of the racial boundaries of the 1930s.
These days, Richmond is a city of winter balls and garden parties on soft summer evenings, a city of private clubs where white-haired old gentlemen, with their martinis or mint juleps in hand, still genuflect in front of portraits of Robert E. Lee. It’s also a city of brutal crime scenes and drug corners and okay-everybody-go-on-home-there’s-nothing-more-to-see. It’s a city of world-class ad agencies and law firms, a city of the FFV (First Families of Virginia) and a city of immigrants—everywhere from India, Vietnam, and Africa to Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. It’s a city of finicky manners (you mustn’t ever sneeze publicly in Richmond) and old-time neighborliness, and it’s a city where you think twice about giving somebody the finger if they cut you off on the Powhite Parkway (that’s pronounced
Pow-hite
, not Po-white, thank you very much) because you might get your head blown off by the shotgun on the rack. Richmond has a world-renowned art school, a ballet, a symphony orchestra, and galleries galore; it also has semi-annual NASCAR meets that clog the city’s arteries for days. Even in its best moments, it’s full of stark and sometimes vast contrasts, a dynamic captured poignantly here in the wonderful story by Dennis Danvers.
Richmond, in its long, complex history, has seen everything America has to offer, and has at times stood for its worst, darkest bits. It is the oldest of those churning urban centers whose simple existence gave birth to America’s particular art form of violence, desolation, and hard knocks. It’s also a hell of a place to live. We, the editors and authors, love this city. Try standing on a rock in the middle of the James River as the evening sun lights up the tinny but somehow magnificent buildings of downtown. You’ll see. It’s quite a sight. When you accept a city not only for its strengths but also for its weaknesses, when you realize that the combination of the two is what gives the place true beauty—when, indeed, you recognize that the combination might also make for some very good storytelling—well, that’s love. We love Richmond, Virginia. We hope you like it too.
Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven
Richmond, Virginia
December 2009
Then
—
in my childhood
—
in the dawn
Of a most stormy life
—
was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still…
—Edgar Allan Poe, from his poem “Alone,”
on childhood in Richmond
W
hen I got inside I called her name. My house was dark and quiet, and although nothing appeared altered I felt that something had happened since I’d left for the museum’s summer gala. There was a note on the kitchen table. I scanned it and it made no sense. I stuffed it into my pocket, took back a shot of whiskey, and walked the narrow hallway into the living room. I thought of the note; the words were going to make sense in a moment. I was sure of it, and felt so much like a balloon steadily expanding that I held my breath and winced at the inevitable explosion.
One month prior, in a storage room below the Virginia Historical Society, I sat before an empty glass cabinet preparing the lamps I would mount on the shelves. There were to be six items of Edgar Allan Poe memorabilia here, among them a lock of dark hair taken off the poet’s head after his death; the key to the trunk that accompanied Poe to Baltimore, where he spent the final few days of his life; and a walking stick, which Poe left here in Richmond ten days before his death. The items were on loan from the Poe Museum across town for the city’s celebration of the poet’s bicentennial, as yet seven months away.
I took a pull from the small metal flask I kept in my utility belt. When I noticed I wasn’t alone, it was too late to hide it. It was the new intern, a dark-haired girl with a small scar across her lower lip.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t,” I said, and took another swig before recapping the flask.
She’d started at the museum on Monday, but I’d seen her the weekend before in my neighbors’ backyard. The Hamlins had installed a six-foot privacy fence years ago, but by the unobstructed view from an upstairs window I’d watched the young woman standing like the very portrait of boredom, hand on the flare of her hip, as Barb Hamlin pointed out the trained wisteria and the touch-me-nots in her garden. She’d had one leg stretched into a band of sunlight when she glanced up and noticed me.
I went back to work on the lamps. “They give you something to do in here?”
“Rebecca,” she said, strolling through the makeshift aisles of cases and boxes. Her dark hair fell in angles around her face and she wore a white summer dress unsuitable for an intern’s duties. “And I wish they
would
. This room is why I’m here.”
“Poe fan, huh?”
“You too,” she said. “Or so Uncle Lou tells me.”
I chuckled softly but did not look up. I was well acquainted with “Uncle Lou,” former captain of the Third Precinct, famous for his supposed paternal brand of policing. Really, he’d never been more than a squat old tyrant. We’d been neighbors for a decade and the only thing that kept our peace was that six-foot fence. Now I was humbled to learn that “Uncle” was not a total misnomer; Lou, who’d sired no offspring, had a pretty young niece from Cincinnati.
“Maybe you could ask them to give me an assignment back here,” Rebecca said.
I told her I was just a lighting technician, contracted, not even staff.
“But you know John,” she said. John was the head curator. “You two are friends.”
I thought she ought to ask Lou, a patron of the museum whose connections had likely procured her the internship in the first place. But I agreed to put in a word, if only to end the conversation: nothing good could come from associating with Hamlin kin—much less from upsetting one with a refusal. Yet it excited me too, the thought of Lou’s scowling displeasure were he to discover Rebecca and I chumming around at the museum.
Displeasure
was a euphemism; he’d put his wife’s garden shears through my skull.
Still, when she asked for a drink, I handed her the flask.
At sunset she was at my front door. I glanced toward Lou and Barb’s house. Rebecca told me not to worry, they’d gone to play bridge with friends.
“So,” she said, wandering into my living room, “do you have any first editions?”
“What?”
“Of Poe,” she said.
“Did your uncle tell you that too?”
Glancing into corners, trailing her fingers along window-sills, she smiled. “I was hoping that a Poe aficionado—who works in a museum, no less—would have an artifact lying around.”
“What,” I said, “just lying around like junk mail?”
“Don’t be nasty,” she said, then picked up a green glass ashtray. “Like this,” she said, holding it to the light. “It’d be great if you could say, ‘And this is Poe’s ashtray, recovered from his writing desk at his last residence at Fordham.'”
“That was my grandfather’s.”
She set it down. “Lou would like that. History buff.”
Yeah, I thought. He had a hard time letting go of it.
“All sorts of Civil War memorabilia everywhere. Ever been inside?”
This was beginning to feel like a game. “What do you think?”
“How should I know where you’ve been?”
I told her she’d better not let Lou see us together.
“Together?” she said, hiding a smile.
“You know what I mean.”
“Why, doesn’t he like you?”
Now I just sat back and looked at her
“Oh, I
know,”
she said, grinning. “He told me to stay away from you.”
Then she asked for a drink, even though, by the way she’d cringed earlier, I could tell she’d hated it. I was disappointed. She was only there with me for a little rebellion against the stuffy uncle and aunt.
So be it. I went to get the whiskey.
I spoke with John. I owed my job at the VHS—my very livelihood in this city—solely to him. By the end of the week Rebecca was putting in shifts assisting me in preparing the illumination of over 1,500 objects for the bicentennial exhibits. John and the staff unpacked items every day and created layout plans. It was my job to determine how best to light those books, paintings, and curios they wanted in cases, mounted upon walls, or perched on podiums. Rebecca was happy the hour or two a day she worked with me—rather, with the objects, to which her full attention was devoted. She was ecstatic watching the items emerge from their boxes, or gazing into the cases once the lighting was complete, all the pieces illuminated perfectly before they went back into their boxes for safekeeping. The lights from the displays would strike her face full on, or under her chin like a flashlight beam, or sidelong as in a Rembrandt painting. I wanted to pose her and arrange the light so as to expose every molecule of her simple beauty.
On my back, my head inside a case, I heard Rebecca gasp.
“Wow,” she called, “have you seen this?”
When I stood up Rebecca was crouched by a case that John and I’d worked on that morning and had yet to finalize. She moved aside and looked at me, leaving one finger pressed to the glass.
“The perfume?” I said.
It was a small red vial, chipped along the lip—like Rebecca, with that nick running the width of her own. The original cork stopper, disintegrated long ago, had been replaced by a plastic facsimile.
Rebecca read from the placard: “The
essence of rose, believed given by Poe to Virginia the year of their marriage
, 1836.” She looked to me again, this time with a lusty sort of gaze. “Can you open the case?”
Although I was technically disallowed, as I was not a member of staff, I did have a key. John gave it to me for the sake of convenience—and because he trusted me. But I couldn’t shake her eyes and thought, What the hell, the museum had better let her touch anything she wanted if they liked her uncle’s money. I opened the case, then cradled the vial in my palms.
“If this breaks,” I told her solemnly, “that’s it. The end of us both.”
I felt her warm fingers coax the vial free from my hold, and noted the light that shone from the case upon her thin nose and lean cheeks, a cool, sterile light that was all wrong. Then, with a move of her thumb, off came the stopper and my heart kicked like a horse.
“Rose,” she said ecstatically, the vial beneath her nose.
I took a whiff. “Yup—now be care—”
She flipped the vial over upon her finger, then dragged the scent across her neck desperately, back and forth. I paled, took the bottle as forcefully as I dared, replaced the stopper, and put it away. She was grinning, her fingers down her dress top.
“Jesus, Rebecca!”
“Emery,” she said softly, almost pityingly, “you knew I was going to do that.”
I heard her call me in the parking lot behind the Historical Society. I didn’t stop, but slowed. We walked together into a long, thin park of magnolia trees that bordered Sheppard Street. The humidity was palpable and a damp wind was gathering strength. I turned into an alley and Rebecca followed, eyeing the flask when I took it from my belt.
“You don’t even like it,” I snapped.
The evening light on her face reminded me of the light that shines upon generals or angels in classic paintings: the exultant yellows and oranges bleeding through churning clouds. I reminded her how quickly I’d be fired if anyone discovered what had happened, then plopped the flask into her hand.
To avoid being seen together, we stuck to the alleys, hopping over streets—Stuart, Patterson, Park—and cutting through the neighborhood diagonally. Below our feet the cobblestones were mashed together like crooked teeth, and on either side crowded slim garages, wooden fences, bushes and woody shrubs, and walls of ancient brick. Green plumes of foliage, heavy with flowers and fruit, alive with the frenetic song of mockingbirds, spilled over everything like lush curtains; and the ivy-draped limbs of mammoth tulip trees wound intricately overhead like the soft arms of giants. It awed me how wild and vivacious the wilderness could be on these nameless roads. It was hard to imagine that a city existed beyond the houses we walked behind.
“Here once, through an alley Titanic,” intoned Rebecca, “Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.”
She watched me for a reaction.
“That’s Poe,” she said, as if to a very slow child.
The trees were loud in the wind and I caught the distinct scent of rose.
“You’ve got to wash it off as soon as you get home.”
“No one’s going to know, Emery.”
I glowered at her. A large, bulbous rain began to fall and rattle the magnolia leaves.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I’ll wash it off tonight.” Then she threw her arm around my neck and pulled me down to her. “But just smell. Isn’t it nice?”
I tensed, restrained for a moment, then drew in the scents—the deep rose, the sticky warm skin of her neck, the rain—and shivered. She leapt away and screamed with delight at the storm, and ran the length of the alley for her house. I didn’t hurry. When I reached my back gate, I saw the blurry shape of Lou in his kitchen window, looking out.
That night I dreamed Rebecca was breaking into my house through a loose window. It was dark but there was a spotlight on her and she was naked. I spent the following morning distracted, preparing for work and wanting to see Rebecca. Wanting to see her in a particular light.
On my way to the museum, I found Lou in the alley breaking fallen tree branches for the trash. He was a stout, wiry man, white-haired and mustachioed, with a thick, soggy cigar between his teeth and sweet blue smoke clinging to his face. He cracked a limb under his knee and I imagined my bones making a similar sound. I felt sure that he’d seen me in the alley the previous night, that he already suspected something. But he said nothing, and did nothing more than nod curtly.
At the museum Rebecca and another intern were sanding walls in an empty exhibit room. When our paths crossed—Rebecca sweaty, covered in white dust, looking unhappy—I smelled the rose perfume. I eyed her, but said nothing. Lou’s lack of reaction had me on guard, probably more so than if he’d clocked me. That, at least, would’ve been in character.
Once alone, I asked if she’d showered, and caught the image of her slick body in steam.
She played indignant, then laughed. “Maybe it’s my natural scent.”
I smelled rose the next day too. It lingered in the replica wood cabin where she’d worked. I followed it through the Story of Virginia exhibit, down thousands of years of history, from the Early Hunters of 14,000 BC to the Powhatan Indians to the Belmont Street Car. Was it a game? Had she bought some cheap spray from the drugstore to irk me? But the odor of an imitation would be like a candy apple compared to the earthy fruit I’d smelled upon her in the rain. I went into the storage room. I found the box where the perfume had been repacked, but it wasn’t inside. Even its placard had vanished. I took a swig from my flask and found that I wasn’t much surprised.
On Saturday evening Rebecca knocked on my door. She’d told her uncle she would be at Trina’s, an intern she ate lunch with sometimes.
“What will you and Trina do?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Paint our nails. Talk about boys.”
“Try on perfume?”
She spun around, swore the stuff simply hadn’t washed off, that she had on a different perfume, that I was imagining things. I hadn’t alerted John about the theft because I needed to get the perfume back myself. As much as I wanted to know how she’d done it, I’d already decided confronting her would get me nowhere. But now she was blinking. Big-eyed, disarming blinks. It infuriated me, this show of innocence while the scent of rose was so potent my eyes were practically watering.
“Perfumed from an unseen censer,” she said, raising a brow.
“Poe,” I said. “I know.” Then I took her arm and pulled her up the stairs. She played nonchalant but I could feel her legs resisting. I moved her into the bathroom and sat her on the edge of the bathtub.
“What the
hell
are you doing?” she said.
I turned on the hot water in the sink and lathered a washcloth with soap. If she was having so much trouble ridding her neck of the scent, I told her, I was going to help. Rebecca’s angry eyes grew challenging, playful. I kneeled, brought the cloth to her skin, and started scrubbing.
“That’s hot,” she said, but she acquiesced, tilting her head.
