Shortly after we moved to Richmond, I took Cassidy on a lengthy stroll down Monument Avenue towards the newly reimagined statue of Robert E. Lee. The purpose was twofold.
First, I need to lessen her keen puppy interest in her new environment. It is filled with an abundance of people, dogs, and rushing cars so she needs to be desensitized to various temptations. Recently, I had to pry open her mouth and extract the flattened remains of something that was once furry, and it was equally unpleasant for us both.
Second, on this evening, Frank and I were going out for dinner, and I wanted her to be so tired that she would sleep while we were out. When left behind, Cassidy can be quite the barker. Once she gets going, Jack joins the chorus, and the sounds of my lonesome hounds can be heard all the way down the block.
There is some stunning architecture on Monument Avenue. It is impossible to walk pass it without taking in its detail and beauty. Wrap-around porches, leaded and stain glass windows, Corinthian columns, and private gardens secluded by old brick walls abound. It is like a movie set designed to represent the perfect town that was left standing after the filming had ceased.
At one such house, a little boy clad in the bright colors of childhood was seated on grass so precisely manicured it looked like it had been hand-cut with grooming shears. As Cassidy and I passed by, he glanced up at me and said, ‘hello.’
As most children do, I thought he was going to ask if he could pet Cassidy. Instead, he said, “have you seen any ghosts lately?”
Because I am the original cat killed by curiosity, I had to know where he was going so. I answered, ‘well, not lately. Have you seen any ghosts?” It was the cue he wanted, so he stood and wiped his hands on his shorts.
Pointing to the side of the yard close to where he was standing, he said, “Yes. Two of them. They are over there, usually at night with lights around them.”
His voice gave no hint of wild imaginings nor was it raised with the inflection of little-boy attention-getting behavior. He was completely at ease, sharing the facts just as he knew them to be. With this delft flick of his words, he had set the hook and reeled me in, and I was not about to try and free myself.
“Oh really?” I asked. “And why do you think they are here?”
“There was a war here,” he said.
“Yes, yes there was,” I replied.
“And there was a castle that used to be here,” he said as he pointed towards the house behind him. Through a large picture window an older man, most likely the little boy’s grandfather, was standing guard, watching us talk.
“A real castle? I like castles. What do you know about it?”
He ignored my question, but motioned to the house next door and said, “the old lady ghost lives at that house and she is really tall and wears a white dress, and the old man ghost is short and walks like this,” and he began to demonstrate the walk of someone hunched over with kyphosis.
“Well,” I said, “sometimes ghosts stay around because they have to work some things out from when they were alive. Why do you think they are here?”
Looking directly in my eyes without waiver, he repeated himself, “there was a war here.”
Before I could answer or ask another question, the grandfather come out. In an exasperated tone he said, “it is time for our walk,” and took the little boy by the hand, steering him off in the opposite direction from where I was headed. I tried to speak to the man, but he did not acknowledge me. I interpreted his cold shoulder to mean that he had no patience for the ghost story that he had obviously heard and dismissed, nor did he appreciate a strange woman encouraging his grandson to persist with it.
As the grandfather pulled him along, the little boy glanced back and said, “maybe you can come back and see the ghosts.”
I stood and watched the two of them walked off, not a word between them. I wanted to run after the little boy and ask, “when should I come?” but good sense prevailed and I let it be what it was, a chance meeting between a little boy who sees ghosts and a woman who believes him.
Of course, this implies that I believe in ghosts, and I do. I also believe in angels, poltergeists, the Loch Ness Monster, and a bevy of the unexplained including miracles. I believe that UFOs are real and apparently so does the Pentagon. Since their Top Gun pilots have documented what the Top Brass have re-branded as UAPs, or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena,’ they have become obliged to admit that not every odd thing in the sky is an errant weather balloon. By the same token, the government can’t explain what those things are or where they came from, so they remain a mystery or better still, a miracle. Depends on how you look at it.
As Cassidy and I resumed our walk, I remembered a story that illustrates how two people can look at the same thing yet see something different. Years ago, one of my friends shared something she learned while serving in the Peace Corp in Africa. She began by saying stating the obvious; that when you are in any underdeveloped country, you boil the water to make it potable. She added, now imagine that you are boiling the water in the presence of the local people, and they ask you why. You would explain there are tiny things in the water that need to be killed so they will not make you sick.
The locals would look into your boiling water and ask, ‘where are these tiny things? Why can’t we see them?” You would say the harmful things are so tiny that they cannot be seen without a microscope, something else they know nothing of.
My friend, a cultural anthropologist, finished her story by adding that the locals would shake their heads and walk away. They drink the water all the time and does not make them sick. They would think, ‘she must be crazy because she thinks there is something in the water that is not there. And what is a microscope anyway?’
She posed the question to me, “So, who is right; me, or the locals? Given our vastly different lives and experiences, aren’t we both right?”
My friend made a good point. In this case, everyone’s reality was their own, and each had evidence to back it up. Thus, two opposite viewpoints can be true at the same time. It just depends on your perspective. Even though we cannot always understand or ‘see’ what another person experiences or feels, it is real to them.
Our oft-times inability to accept let alone respect what others feel, think, and believe is one of humanity’s greatest shortcomings. While we are born with the capacity for empathy, it is something that requires nurturing, and can only be developed through close exposure to others. As Atticus Finch famously said to Scout, “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
“Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” What a literary genius piece of writing.
By the time Cassidy and I reached Lee’s statue festooned with spray-painted messages of social justice, I was thinking about the other ghosts of Monument Avenue, the vanquished statues of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and Matthew Maury. I have heard people ask if these men are gone, why does Lee remain. While the Commonwealth has been judged to have the authority to take him down, citizen-based appeals have hiked the case up to the Virginia Supreme Court. For the moment, Lee gets to stay where he is, seated on his horse, Traveller, and he is more of a tourist attraction than ever before.
Essentially, the judicial debate over Mr. Lee’s statue boils down to one version of history versus another, and property rights versus human rights. Like the war that led to his rise to statuary, the effort to save Mr. Lee’s bronze likeness is not only misguided, it hides beneath the equivalent of hooded white robes. The construction of Monument Avenue come after the erection of Lee’s statue in 1890, and shortly thereafter it become known as ‘the sacred road’ of ‘Southern civil religion,’ a sort of Maginot Line intended to keep blacks from moving into the what was developing into a prominent, whites-only area of the Richmond. Just like a classic horror movie, the Avenue’s beautiful houses hid dirty little secrets behind their shining glass doors and garden walls.
Following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, it is little wonder why people of all colors, ages, genders, sexual identities, faiths, and religions chose this particular American street as a place to raise their voices and cans of spray paint.
Today, Monument Avenue is filled with that same diversity and the occasional whiff of marijuana. I suspect this is what is truly bothering some of long-time resident that wish for Mr. Lee to remain. The frighteningly alien ideas of social justice and equality have landed squarely in their backyards and at his feet. Even though Mr. Lee now is surrounded by tall, metal fencing, he stands as the sole reminder to keep their wagons tightly circled lest someone else invade. Chances are, these neighbors are right back where the whole thing started, fighting a losing war.
Two more things that I believe in are omens and signs, and I take it as a sign that the little boy looked up at me and spoke. Since then, my eyes have been opened to ghosts all along Monument Avenue. First, I spied a Ghostbuster flag hanging from a porch, then I started to find the outlines of Pac-man type ghosts ‘tagged’ on buildings and the backs of street signs.
I am not clear on the precise meaning of these outlines other than the accompanying slogan ‘no more ghosts,’ which seems to imply that no more Black men or women should become ghosts. Or maybe they mean that people are tired of being invisible. Either way, there is a message, and we cannot afford to ignore what is right in front of us, even if we cannot personally see or feel it. Just like bacteria in the water. It’s there.
On the day that I stopped to speak to the little boy, I needed to move along. But that is not in my nature. I had to gift him with a sliver of my precious time. As he talked and pointed out where the ghosts stood in the light, I realized he was the one who was doing the giving. Of all the walkers on Monument Avenue, he chose me to listen and be invited back to see his ghosts. I cannot remember when I have felt more special.
Maybe this is all that people want. To feel accepted, valuable, and worthy of time and attention without having to ask for it. While we may never know what it is like to climb into another person’s skin walk and walk around in it, perhaps a good place to start is through the simple act of acknowledging other people’s stories that we have not shared as true; their wounds and pain that we have not feel as valid; their frustrations and fears we cannot sense as legitimate; and their hesitations and uncertainties that do not plague us as genuine.
Before I fell asleep on the night of my ghost walk, I seriously considered getting out of bed and going back to the house where the little boy lives. I wanted to look for his ghosts, the tall woman in white and the little hunched-over man. I want to know why they are still there. What are their stories? What do they want me to know, to learn? Or have I already been taught so aptly by their little messenger? I hope so.
❤️