Small Towns West and North of Richmond VA

 

When most travelers think of Virginia, the places that first pop to mind are suburban Washington, DC, the Chesapeake Bay, and Virginia Beach. Devotees might pay visits to  Civil War battlefields,* presidential homes (Monticello and Mt. Vernon top the list),  and specialty whiskey tours in the Appalachians. But how many think of Goochland County? Where you ask? Exactly!

 

Tuckahoe Plantation Exterior

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interior

Interior

 

 

Mahala Boyd, enslaved at Tuckahoe

Where the enslaved quarters were located

 

Recently we visited some friends living near Richmond. Virginia’s capital has the usual sprawl and ring roads, but it’s amazing how quickly the pace slows when you leave it. We stayed at a Vrbo in Tuckahoe on Richmond’s western edge booked by our friends. We were shocked when we drove down a one-mile dirt lane to encounter an elegant white mansion. Tuckahoe Plantation was the childhood home of Thomas Jefferson. It was owned by the Randolph family but when William Randolph III died in 1745- one year after his wife- an agreed upon codicil in Randolph’s will made Peter Jackson the caretaker of his three children. (Easily done, as Peter’s wife was a Randolph.) Young Thomas spent ages 2-9 at Tuckahoe and, according to legend, developed distaste for slavery there. (That might be apocryphal given that TJ did precious little to free enslaved people.) For the record, we didn’t stay in the plantation house; we bedded in a farm house a few hundred yards away, but we got a private tour of the house with the James River running within sight of the back door.

 

The town of Tuckahoe was six miles away, near the campus of the University of Richmond. The town is prim and neat and its population of 49,000 is twice as large as all of Goochland County. Our friends lived in Manakin-Sabot, which has 4,634 people–if you can find them. Some maps list them as separate villages and our GPS didn’t recognize either until we put in Richmond in the address for our friends’ road. The county seat is Goochland, but GPS has trouble with it as well unless you ask for Goochland Courthouse (pop. 1,301), which is distinct from Goochland or Goochland Maidens! 

 

 

You are in horse country in Goochland County and many of the others heading north toward Front Royal and Winchester. We’re talking miles and miles of white fences to contain horses. If you had a lumber monopoly, you’d be able to buy New England and lease it to Canada. As for the livestock, we’re not talking heavy Percherons, Clydesdales, or swaybacked nags. These well-groomed beasties are thoroughbreds, riding horses, and polo ponies.

 

Our original homeward plan was to keeping going west, perhaps stop in Charlottesville, and then decide whether to follow the Skyline Drive or proceed to I-81N. Rain changed our decision–the Skyline Drive’s views would be limited and 81 is a high-speed curtain of trucks–so we decided to meander on some backroads. As for the towns of Goochland County, there pretty much aren’t any! Just dots of the map with names like Crozier, Gum Spring, Oilville, Fork Union, and Kent’s Store. 

 

 

 

As we drove west and north of Richmond, we witnessed Virginia’s contrasts. Make no mistake, horse country is beautiful and you’ll see lots of Virginia’s signature architecture, large white homes with second-story front-facing verandahs upon which no foot ever trod. You’ll also see rural life many steps down from McMansions. Local businesses tend to be repair shops, farmstands, antique shops, fabricators, and visitor centers to tell you what you can do in the area. Hint: If you’re enjoying the scenery and tranquil pace of life, you’re already doing what you can do there!

 

Unless you wish to veer east again to Culpepper or forge northward toward Front Royal, there’s not much in the way of a full-services town. Front Royal is generally considered a supply center for the Skyline Drive, the Appalachian Trail, or the Shenandoah Valley, though it’s a fairly sleepy place and many people push northeast to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Since those two towns sort of defined the southwestern edge of our childhood explorations we headed north to Winchester, grabbed some food, connected with Route 81, and joined the trucks trekking northward. But I’ll say it again, Virginia horse country is mighty pretty–even in the rain. 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir

 

* Virginia is littered with Civil War sites, so it scarcely matters which part you visit.

 

 

 

 

 

A Call to Spy: Remarkable Women, Flat Film

 

 

 

A Call to Spy (2020)

Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher

IFC Films, 124 minutes, PG-13 (war violence)

★★★

 

A Call to Spy (incompletely) tells the story of two unsung heroes of World War II: Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) and Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte).

 

Many Americans assume that World War II began on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Europeans, Russians, and the Chinese know it started two years earlier. By 1940, the situation was dire, with much of Europe and North Africa occupied (or controlled) by fascist Germany or Italy and North Africa indirectly so. In Europe, only Britain stood against fascism and suffered near-constant bombing by the German Luftwaffe.

 

Virginia Hall grew up amidst gentility in Virginia and yearned to be a diplomat. She had three strikes against her; she was a woman, she lost her left leg in a hunting accident in 1933, and she did not suffer fools gladly. After being disqualified for serious work, Hall made her way to Britain and was accepted in Winston Churchill’s SOE (Special Operations Executive). Because of her language skills, she was sent into Vichy, France,* to set up networks, report on German activity, recruit members of the French Resistance, and organize sabotage raids. There was scarcely time to train agents like Hall; as late as 1943, the average lifespan for spies was just six weeks.

 

Noor’s story is woven into Hall’s though the two shared only the fact that they were part of SOE Section F headed by Vera Atkins (Stana Katic). Noor, was born in Moscow to an Indian father and American mother, was a Sufi Muslim pacifist, a poet, a talented musician, and happened to be good with electronics. She was recruited to be a radio operator. If anything, she was in more danger than Hall as she and her 34-pound transmitter had to change locations constantly to keep ahead of Nazi detectors. Unlike Hall, she would be captured, taken to Dachau, and executed.

 

That could have been Hall’s fate as well. Infamous Nazi monster Klaus Barbie (Marc Rissman) considered her the most dangerous spy of the war and obsessed with trying to capture and torture her. Hall (1906-82) operated under code names such as Marie and Diane had an uncanny abilities to organize, recognize potential allies, disguise herself, and avoid capture. She also had a remarkable ability to tolerate pain. Few knew she was missing a leg and, in her one major slip-up of trusting Father Robert Alesch (Joe Doyle), a double agent, got out of Germany ahead of Barbie’s pursuit by walking across the snow-covered Pyrenees into Spain and making her way to Portugal for transport back to England. (Those who knew often heard her joke about “Cuthbert,” her name for the leather-and-steel prosthetic she wore.) She returned to France in 1944, disguised as an old woman after having her teeth ground down and stained. This time she was a radio operator and still avoided capture while collecting vital information in advance of D-Day.

 

U.S. General William Donovan recommended her for a Distinguished Service Cross to go with her Croix du guerre and an MBE. He vouched for her when she sought to join the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency after the war. Alas, her CIA career was marked by extreme sexism and was an unhappy one. To this day, Hall’s name is revered in France and nearly forgotten in the United States.

 

Both Hall and Noor deserve to be known. Alas, A Call to Spy serves only as an  introduction.  Even if you are not a big reader, pick up Sonia Purcell’s ironically named A Woman of No Importance to learn about Hall–even if you merely skim it. The movie leaves out so much, including her family’s disapproval and her marriage to French agent Paul Guillot, though he was 8 years younger and 6 inches shorter than she. The film provides enough to imagine Hall’s gallantry, but not the scope of the prison breaks, sabotage, and smuggling airmen and POW escapees out of France. Overall, the film is flat and lacks sparks.

 

I suspect Hall’s story was conflated with that of Noor to add notes of political correctness to the film. There was no need to do so. Almost no one saw this film, and Noor bloody well deserves a film of her own!

 

Rob Weir

 

*When France fell in 1940, it was divided into two zones, one controlled by the Nazis directly from Paris, and a southern collaborationist government from Vichy. Hall operated as “Marie” in Lyon (Vichy zone).

The Jackal's Mistress: Chris Bohjalian's Novel of the Waning Confederacy

 

 

 

The Jackal’s Mistress (2025)

By Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday, 308 pages.

★★★★

 

The Civil War is the most written about subject in American history, hence it’s hardly surprising to see novelists try their hand. Vermont’s Chris Bohjalian is the latest. That surprised me, but he seldom repeats himself.

 

This review is headed by something I saw at the Valentine Museum in Richmond as I was reading Bohjalian: the remains of a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. It was spray-painted and pulled from its base on Monument Avenue in 2020, a leafy street that used to be lined with “heroes” of the Confederacy before anger over police killings of African Americans led young people to counterattack symbols of the Lost Cause. Romanticism of a noble experiment prevailed throughout the South for a century and a half after the Civil War ended. It was as if slavery had nothing to do with the conflict, which just happens to be the biggest load of horse exhaust in our history. The second is that Confederates were gallant and gentlemanly.

 

The Jackal’s Mistress takes us to the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, where Union generals such as Sheridan and Hunter conducted a scorched earth policy to break the Confederacy. Forgotten is that Confederacy also looted the region, especially General Jubal Early and the brutal John Mosby and his gang-like “rangers.” Early and Mosby commandeered slaves, confiscated farm animals, raided food larders, and summarily hanged “traitors.” By 1864, though, Grant was nearing Richmond and the Confederacy’s only hope was that Lincoln would lose reelection and a favorable peace could be negotiated. That’s not what happened.

 

Bohjalian reminds us that people die and are maimed until the ink is dry on the surrender papers. Maiming is the fate of Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the 11^th Vermont regiment. As his troops regrouped, he was hit so badly that he lost two fingers and a leg. He lost so much blood that it was near-certain he’d die. His comrades left him in an abandoned house near Berryville, Virginia, with minimal supplies because any attempt to move him behind Union lines would kill him.

 

Instead, an elderly freeman named Joseph and his wife Sally discover Weybridge. They  inform Libby Steadman, their white employer who lives with her younger niece Jubilee, and shares work, food, and occasional shelter with Joseph and Sally. Her husband Peter, last she heard, was wounded and in a Union POW camp in Ohio. When Joseph kills Libby’s potential rapist–probably one of Mosby’s Rangers–Libby must dispose of the body. Libby has been lucky in one respect; she runs a mill necessary to the Confederacy, but she must maintain the fiction that Joseph and Sally are her slaves. Libby hates the “blue-bellies” from the North, but decides to nurse Weybridge solely on the hope that some Yankee woman might have done the same for Peter. But Libby has a house full of trouble. If Mosby or Early find out about the dead attacker or that she’s hiding Weybridge, the entire makeshift household will be a postmortem one. 

 

What could go wrong? All Libby needs are guns and ammunition for protection, a doctor to bribe into silence, ways to prevent anyone from discovering Weybridge, unavailable medicines, whiskey to sterilize his wound, protein to help him regain strength, ways to keep neighbors from talking, and more luck than a riverboat gambler.

 

Do you suspect a potential romance? The discovery of shared humanity and mutual understanding? Forgive and forget? Don’t be so sure! Jubilee is so contemptuous of their Union patient that she dubs him “Jackal,” though she’s intrigued that he was a professor at Middlebury College before the war and shares the household contempt for slavery. (Peter Steadman freed Joseph and Sally before the war.) Besides, Weybridge has a wife and two sons back in Vermont. Lots of things happen, but not aways in predictable ways. The Jackal’s Mistress is a veritable page-turner that is touching, thrilling, tragic, and tense.

 

Several final notes. First, Bohjalian based his tale on the true-life tales of Lt. Henry Bedell of Westfield, Vermont, and Bettie Van Metre of Virginia, her imprisoned husband James, and her black friends Ginny and Dick Runner. Second, Berryville is about 20 miles from the Union stronghold of Harper’s Ferry, an indication of how close the Confederacy was to defeat. Finally, the Confederacy raided my Pennsylvania hometown three times and burned it in 1864. Not so gentlemanly!*

 

Rob Weir  

 

* One of Bohjalian’s characters provides a perfect postscript from 1937. Commenting on Richmond’s statue of J.E.B. Stuart on Monument Avenue she says, “… it’s hollow…. I find that telling. A hollow statue for a hollow cause.”

 

 

 

Detective Story a Fine Late Film Noir/Drama

 

 

Detective Story (1951)

Directed by William Weyler

Paramount, 103 minutes, not-rated

★★★★

 

Detective Story can be tagged, “Who is Mary” Mary McLeod isn’t the central character of Detective Story, but she is its pivot. We first meet her (Eleanor Parker) outside of the police precinct in which her husband James (Kirk Douglas) is a detective. The two sit in a car and make out like teenagers before James returns to work.

 

Inside the station house we see a different side of James. First, though, another officer brings in a shoplifter (Lee Grant) who is like a second pair of eyes for viewers. She’s also a sarcastic and funny New Yorker and we suspect her outward naivete might be an act. We see precinct life largely from her POV with all of its noise, confusion, seriousness, and absurdity.

 

James reveals himself as a throw-the-book-at-‘em hard-nose, a product of the fact that his father was a criminal who drove his mother mad. We see James’ zealousness when young Arthur Hill (Craig Hill) is being booked for stealing money from his employer. His was an impulsive act for which he is embarrassed. Although he has a character witness and his employer is willing to drop the charges if he’s paid back, James wants Arthur in handcuffs and prosecuted for his theft. We learn from other detectives that James has a history of being too serious for his own good, but James convinces Arthur’s boss he should not drop the charges. To hear James tell it, the very moral fiber of America is at stake.

 

James also has a bee in his bonnet for Dr. Karl Schneider (George Macready), who he thinks is an abortionist responsible for a young woman's death. In 1951, abortion was illegal and, as Schneider’s attorney Endicott Sims (Warner Anderson) asserts, has been roughhoused by James several times in the past. Sims agrees to bring Schneider in for questioning, but comes armed with photos he took of his client an hour earlier and threatens to sue everyone in sight if his client has a mark on him after his interview.

 

To add another level of chaos, police also bring in two men accused of burglary, including career crook Charley Gennini (Joseph Wiseman). “Guilty” is practically etched on Charley’s face, despite his not-so-convincing insistence he’s as pure as a baby. Everyone knows Charley’s rap sheet and rumor has it he’s associated with gangster Tami Giacoppetti (Gerard Mohr).

 

You don’t have to look very hard to find a major logic error in this film. During Schneider’s interview, he drops some information about Mary that drives James into a state of rage. He also slips up enough to warrant a trip to the lockup, but if you’re the duty lieutenant (Horace McMahon) do you send the not-so-good doctor to the hoosegow in the back of a van with McLeod as his guard?

 

James hears things about Mary and comes to suspect he doesn’t know his new bride very well at all. At this point I must remind you that gender relations in 1951 were quite different that they are today, especially for a guy who is strung as tightly as James and is used to taking justice into his own hands. Is he irredeemable? Detective Story will surprise you in several ways.

 

Detective Story is a very good late black and white film noir. It didn’t win any of the four Academy Awards for which it was nominated–hardly surprising in a year it was up against An American in Paris, A Street Car Named Desire, The African Queen, and Quo Vadis–though it arguably stands up better than An American in Paris.

 

I should add that it’s not a typical film noir. I suspect it was labeled as such because of gritty themes, not an interplay of light and shadow. Visually the film’s most notable characteristic is the use of deep focus; that is, shots in which foreground, middle grounds, and background are all in focus. Director Willam Weyler was a legendary Hollywood talent. Today we’d probably label this movie a drama, but in 1951, the Hollywood Code simply didn’t cotton to themes of abortion or shooting cops. Weyler had to alter a few things to get it past Hollywood’s moral guardians and drew upon his considerable reputation to bring it the screen.

 

 

Rob Weir

 

The Bog Wife: Strange and Haunting

 

 

The Bog Wife (2024)

By Kay Chronister

Counterpoint, 307pages.

★★★★

 

The Bog Wife Is one of the most unusual books of last year. It’s set in West Virginia whose license plates proclaim: “Wild, wonderful.” Author Kay Chronister's tale is wild;  you can judge whether it's wonderful. I guarantee, though, that it's unlike anything you've read lately.

 

There remain pockets of Appalachia where time has stood still. In the early 20th century, folklorists combed the hills for ballads, customs, and vernacular speech in such places. Speaking of customs, the Haddesley family takes the cake for uniqueness. As we meet them in the not-so-distant past, the family consists of a dying father, sons Charlie and Percy, and daughters Eda, Wenna, and Nora. It is a patriarchal family that lives in the novel's namesake bog. In family lore, their ramshackle manor house has been owned by the h Haddesleys since a royal ancestor came to America and built it.

 

Lots of people go to Ancestry.com in search of august relatives–much of which is of dubious authenticity–but the Haddesleys are anomalous.  Their origins are supposedly contained in a book written in old French that none can read, though the patriarch is the keeper of oral lore. The bog has allegedly always provided what the family needs except for a few things the patriarch buys in a nearby town. They keep a few scrawny animals but rely on gardens and harvested bog bounty. Rituals are needed for the bog to sustain the Haddesleys.

 

Not weirded out yet? When the patriarch’s death is imminent, it’s the eldest son’s duty to administer a slow poison, place the dying body in the bog and wait for the sphagnum moss and algae to grow over him. From this will emerge a bog wife for the eldest son/new patriarch who digs her from the bog and vitiates her by spitting into her mouth. At least that's what the family believes the big black book says. Only Nora has much world experience, which she acquired by running off to Chicago, but did not acquire any old French! She is skeptical of family legends, though she returns to help the family perform their father's death ritual.

 

Wenna is also a symbol of how the bog has withdrawn its blessings–weeds have choked it, Wenna’s flight might be a curse, and a tree fell upon the room where slovenly Charlie slept and crushed the family jewels. Before he was placed in the bog, papa Haddesley told Percy that Charlie is a fool incapable of taking over and asked Percy to kill his brother. Everyone has issues that threaten to break the pact between the family and the bog. Oldest daughter Eda is a whiner who thinks she does all the work, Wenna doesn’t want to be there, and Nora, the youngest is naïve and willing to do anything to keep the family together. (Call Nora’s attempts unusual and distressing.) Meek Percy becomes a mystic survivalist, their inheritance money is nearly gone, and they are forced to sell items in the house that are old but don't yield a lot of money.

 

It is easy for us to identify a way of life in decline with five inept people adrift in a world that has passed them by. They are so isolated that many locals assume the manor is empty and consider it haunted. In a way, they are right; a few more crises and the withering House of Vegetation will fall down. The novel turns in ways that could be imaginary or perhaps magical. Stir in a visitation, a few revelations, and it spells change or perish.

 

It's never entirely clear what Chronister wants us to take away from all of this. For me,  the book is a metaphor for the clash between traditionalism and modernity with the Haddesleys representing a decaying pioneer spirit versus the encroaching outside world, the veritable serpent in the bog. Chronister never romanticizes life in the decaying manor house and played out bog, nor does she juxtapose modern life as a new Eden.

 

Disclaimer: My take could be nuts! The Bog Wife could be read as an environmental novel, or just an odd story populated by eccentrics. One blurb mentions “honoring family commitments and the drive to strike out on one's own... a haunting evocation of the arcane power of the habits and habitats that bind us.” That doesn't really help! Whatever you conclude, I suspect this book will stick with you like bog mud.

 

Rob Weir

 

After the Fog: The Donora Story

 

 

After the Fog (2012)

 By Kathleen Shoop

CreateSpace Publishing, 405 pages.

★★★ ½

 

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have long been fascinated by the town of Donora, though it’s 20 miles south of Pittsburgh and I’ve never been there. My interest in this borough of 4,500 comes from strange places. As a kid I knew it as where baseball great Stan Musial was raised–and more recently Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr.–but the bigger draw is related to a historical event that occurred in 1948, a temperature inversion.

 

No, I’m not planning a post-retirement career in meteorology. I was in elementary school when I first heard about what happened in Donora before I was born. Donora’s proximity to Pittsburgh and location along the Monongahela River meant that it was once part of the black smoke “Mon Valley” industrial corridor devoted to zinc, iron, and steel; in its case, Donora had a very large wire factory. A temperature inversion can occur when warm air is trapped by a passing upper atmosphere cold front that “seals” the air people breathe. In essence, the black smoke, particulates, coal fumes, and other types of pollution have nowhere to go. Donora then had a population of over 13,000 and the trapped, filthy air killed 20 and sickened 6,000. I suppose one could say that such numbers aren’t a patch on the inversion in London in 1952 that killed more than 10,000 and sent ten times that many to the hospital, but Donora’s 75 percent population decline is a testament to the long-term impact (along with deindustrialization) of the toxic fog. How many places do you know that try to draw tourists to its Smog Museum?

 

Novelist Kathleen Shoop populates After the Fog with fictionalized characters, but if you read into Donora’s history you will quickly conclude that the book’s cast is a stand-in for real-life personalities. The novel revolves around Rose Pavlesic, a community nurse devoted to helping poor working-class families. She operates as a combination social worker, midwife, free medical care provider, and social statistics collector. She is also mother to two growing children, Magdalena and John(ny), and is the wife of wire worker Henry. Unlike soft-hearted Henry, Rose is as hard as a coil of multi-strand wire. As if she didn’t already have plenty on her plate, Henry’s lazy gambler brother and pampered wife live in the same household.

 

A reader’s first impression, though, is that Rose is an unsympathetic human being. She’s a nag and complainer who henpecks Henry, tries to map out her children’s futures, and stops at nothing in pursuit of things that she thinks should be. She wants Johnny, the high school football quarterback, to win a sports scholarship to college; never mind that he’d much rather be a musician. She insists on maintaining a moral family life to (over) compensate for her childhood as an orphan, and tries to badger the Sebastian family into underwriting community health services rather than the opera.

 

Rose is devoted, but like Donora she is rough around the edges. Donora is a tough town loaded with bars (not “taverns”), Catholic churches, gossipers, children wearing hand-me-downs, ethnic families, and rivalries. Even when Rose is right, her persuasion skills left much to be desired. And, as you might expect, she can’t possibly control all the things she tries to command. It doesn’t help that she holds a deep secret.

 

The weakest part of the novel is the after part of After the Fog. I’m sure the character shifts will please readers who like tidy endings, but I am suspicious of personality turnarounds–even when intervening forces dictate a Plan B. People can and do change, but not quickly. After the Fog ends on notes that seem too upbeat and convenient.

 

This was book one of Shoop’s “Donora Series.” You should definitely read it before moving onto the next installment. For the record, Rose bears some resemblance to famed public health researcher Mary Amdur (1921-98) if you can picture a less educated and less academic version of Amdur. The rich Sebastian family is a composite of the robber barons who founded U.S. Steel. If you know your history, the sort of folks who ran U.S. Steel were more prone to favor their own kind than to care about a place like Donora.

 

Rob Weir

Experience the Art of John Wilson at MFA Boston

 

My Brother

 

 

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson

Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

Through June 22, 2025

 

There is a small portrait at the Smith College Museum of Arts that has long captivated me. It’s titled “My Brother,” a young man named Frederick, whose older sibling was John Wilson (1922-2015). I show it here but if you live in Western Massachusetts and can see it later this summer at Smith, do so. As you can see, the MFA lighting puts a lot of sheen on the painting, a constant problem for museum portraits of black people.

 

 

"Nefertiti"

 

That said, get yourself to Boston in the next month to see Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson. Wilson spent much of his life in the Roxbury section of Boston depicting black street life, social issues, his family, and self-portraits. As is the case with most black artists, he fixated upon racism, prejudice, and injustices, though his primary goal was always to show–as the title of the MFA show suggests–the humanity of African Americans and the dignity of their everyday lives. 

 

"Streetcar Scene." This man is on his way to work at the Navy yard.

 

The MFA show is the largest show yet of Wilson’s work. That’s not to say this is a huge exhibition. Wilson is at long last getting his due as major artist. The MFA spotlights paintings, drawings, book illustrations, and sculptures from his 60 years of making art. Only now is Wilson being considered in the same breath as better known black artists such as Romare Beardon and Jacob Lawrence.

 

John Wilson was born in Roxbury but his parents were from what was then the colony of British Guiana (now Guyana). They lived a middle-class existence there, as two generations of Wilsons managed sugar refineries. They immigrated to Boston shortly before John was born.

 

John Wilson had intriguing influences before finding his own style. He studied with surrealist Fernand Léger in Paris and he also developed a deep admiration for the works of Mexican muralist José Orozco. It’s always interesting to see how artists channeled their influences for a time and then gave nods to them in more subtle ways. 

 

Leger influences

 

 

Wilson, not Leger

"Worker" Note Orozco influences

 

Given the intractable problems of race in the United States, though, it comes as no surprise that Wilson used his brushes, pens, and chisels to comment upon what, in 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal dubbed “an American dilemma.” In the 1940s, Wilson contributed illustrations dealing with racism for the leftist publication New Masses, a communist art and political journal. Please note that, at the time, the Communist Party USA was a legal political party that drew tens of thousands of voters during the Great Depression and World War II when the Soviet Union and the USA were allies. From what we can determine, Wilson’s politics settled into more of a socialist democratic position. 

 

"Study for Lynching, 1946"

 

Black Despair 1946

"The Incident" 1952

 

Racism was all the more personal for Wilson given his marriage to white Bronx College graduate Julie Kowtich in 1951. Suffice it to say that Boston wasn’t the most welcoming city for an interracial couple with biracial children in the 1950s, 60s, and beyond. They often had to drive in separate cars and decamped to Mexico for five years to make art and gain a reprieve from discrimination. Wilson painted his children from time to time and these are some of the more touching works in the show. 

 

Julie and Erica"

 

MLK (maquette)

Wilson lived to the ripe old age of 93. This means he got to see the flowering of the civil rights movement. His statue of Martin Luther King Jr. graces the U.S. Capitol and a maquette of that work is in the exhibit. Perhaps the best way of thinking of Wilson as a black artist is the show’s largest work, a sculpture often jocularly called “Big Head.” Wilson had a better name that bespeaks the fact that African Americans have endured and aren’t going away: “Eternal Presence.”

 

"Eternal Presence"

 

 

Rob Weir