I haven’t seen the eyes of Isabella Gibbons, which look out from the exterior wall of the new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. But reviewers say they are haunting, in part they are so lightly etched in the stone that they are only clearly visible at dawn and dusk.
They also are haunting because Gibbons, along with her husband and children, were among some 4,000 enslaved people who worked on the grounds of the university between 1817, when construction began, until the end of the Civil War. To make it even more haunting, the picture is the only known image showing one of those 4,000 people.
Some of those people were owned by the school. Some were owned by local residents who rented them out. And at least one came from Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, who, on January 25, 1819, finally got the Virginia General Assembly to grant a charter to the University of Virginia, a project he had been working on for over two decades.
Over the next several years, Jefferson was involved in in every aspect of the work needed to build the school. He laid out an ambitious academic agenda for an institution that he hoped would train the future leaders of a democracy, albeit one that embraced slavery. He hired faculty members. And he designed a campus in which faculty and students were to live in what Jefferson called the “Academical Village,” an idyllic hilltop settlement that had two rows of residential houses facing a terraced lawn that led not to a church but the library and classrooms.
These uses were located in an iconic building called “The Rotunda” that Jefferson hoped would be a symbol of the “authority of nature and power of reason.” The building, which is based on the Pantheon in Rome, appears on today’s #stampoftheday, a 15-cent stamp issued in July 1979 as part of a block of four stamps picturing iconic examples of early American architecture. The other three are labelled the “Philadelphia Exchange” (officially the Merchant’s Exchange Building), the “Boston State House” (which actually is the Massachusetts State House), and the “Baltimore Cathedral” (officially the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary).
The Rotunda is considered such a masterpiece that along with nearby Monticello, which Jefferson also designed, it is one of only six modern man-made sites in the United States to be internationally protected and preserved as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The other five are the Old City of San Juan, the San Antonio Missions, Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty and the architectural works of Frank Lloyd Wright.
But Jefferson’s design – and until recently the narratives about the site – ignored the important role that slaves played in building and operating the university. As Phillip Kennicott, the Washington Post’s art and architecture critic explained in his August 2020 review of the new memorial, “the campus design…pushed the domestic life of enslaved labor into ground-level spaces not visible from the center of the lawn, and into gardens obscured by eight-foot-high serpentine walls.” Louis Nelson, a professor of architectural history at UVA told Kennicott that such features were “strategies to remove the presence of the Black body and obscure the institution of slavery.”
The new memorial is supposed to reveal that history and appears to do so in very powerful ways. The inner surface of the circular wall that has Gibbons’ eyes has markings for all of the roughly 4,000 slaves who worked at the school. But the list is incomplete because the records of these people are incomplete. The markings include the names of only 578 enslaved people, because they are the only ones whose names appear somewhere in the university’s records (and even then those records usually have just the first name). Another 311 people are nameless but are listed by the work they did (such as stableman, laundress, gardener, cook) or by their relationship to someone else (such as sister, husband, grandchild, or friend).
Each name, job, or relationship is underscored. About halfway around the wall, the words stop but the underscores continue, place-keepers for the more than 3,000 enslaved people who records indicate worked and/or lived at the university but whose names, jobs, and social relationships are unknown. The effect is extraordinary, according to Holland Cotter, who wrote in his New York Times review, “when light rain or mist washes the wall, water gathers in the incisions and runs down like tears.”
He added: “If, from afar, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers doesn’t announce its theme and purpose, even looks somewhat impersonal and unresolved, that’s all right….Power is not its language. Closure is not its goal. Active, additive remembrance is.”
This, he added, is what distinguishes a memorial from a monument. “A monument says: ‘I am truth. I am history.’ Full stop. A memorial says, or can say: ‘I turn grief for the past into change for the present, and I always will.'”
I think that’s what Gibbons, who became a teacher in a Black primary school after the Civil War, might have wanted. Consider the words she wrote that also are part of the monument.
“Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by these horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, or ever will.”
Be well, stay safe, do not forget those horrible cruelties, fight for justice, and work for peace.