Good grief! Planet Bill's first post of 2011, and we're treated to a cemetery shot? Am I in a dark mood? No, not at all; I've just been roaming Richmond with my camera, and Morris & I found ourselves sticking our noses in a couple of places that were new to us. Let's take a look.The picture at the top was taken in Holy Cross Cemetery, located at the southwestern edge of Chestnut Hill. This district was one of Richmond's original streetcar neighborhoods, and contains many examples of Queen Anne, American Foursquare, Greek Revival, Bungalow, and Colonial Revival homes. The sky was gray, and the wind was cold & brisk on the day that Morris & I rode through the graveyard. We came across a curious plot with multiple iron crosses with no names, simply the abbreviation for Rest In Peace.
Cemeteries have never terrified me. Even as a child, when I found some of them pleasantly creepy, they were assurances of the order of life. I remember visiting the graves of relatives, some known and others gone prior to my birth, and hearing remembrances of these people from my grandmother. Like the books I loved to read, there was a beginning and end, but the stories between the similar covers were colorful, fascinating, and unique. Death is part of the natural order of life. Ashes to ashes, and all that. What is important is what we write on our pages.
After a Saturday breakfast at a place called Yesterday's (appropriately named, since we were fueling up for a day of local history), we drove toward downtown. At the edge of the city limits, we took a detour up a rutted road in search of Woodland Cemetery. It was a forlorn place, barely kept, and made meaner by winter's harsh light. Groundskeeping seemed limited to common areas, for many gravesites were wild with dead weeds & brambles. The cemetery was bordered by untamed thickets on two sides, and industrial buildings on another. The two pictures, above & below, give an idea of the unwelcoming atmosphere.
What better place to bury a local hero! Yessiree, here's where you will find Arthur Ashe, champion of Wimbledon, the Australian Open, and the US Open. After a lifetime of battling racial discrimination, he rests in a place for Richmond's deceased black citizens - desolate Woodland Cemetery.Arthur Ashe grew up in Richmond. His athletic grace was matched by his intelligence. He had to fight to play tennis, growing up in a time when he was not allowed on most courts. Ashe was a fighter on & off the tennis courts, breaking into a traditionally "white only" sport, and then becoming an AIDS activist. Ashe contracted HIV through an unscreened blood transfusion in 1983. Although he wished to keep this information private, when he learned that USA Today was nosing around his business, he pre-empted their news coup by calling a press conference to make his own disclosure of his disease. He established the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, and became a champion of humanitarian causes.
Arthur Ashe attended Maggie Walker High School in Richmond, a school for black students during segregation named for another determined underdog, where teachers urged their pupils to excellence. Our destination, although Morris & I got sidetracked by cemeteries, was the Maggie Walker House in the Jackson Ward District. I highly recommend the tour of Maggie Walker's home, which is now a National Park Service property.
Maggie Walker was the first female president of an American bank, an accomplishment all the more noteworthy because she was African-American during a time of unabashed racial discrimination. Her mother was a former slave who took in laundry to support the family after Maggie's father was murdered. Maggie attended the Armstrong School, and became a teacher there after graduating. At that time, only single women were allowed to teach, so she left her job upon her marriage. She rose to a prominent position in the Independent Order of St. Luke, a benevolent organization that assisted African-Americans with health care & burial services. She chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and became its first president in 1903. Keep in mind that this was even before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in elections. Her bank gave many black citizens an opportunity to have a savings account and buy a house.
The picture above shows one of the double parlors in Maggie Walker House. When touring most historic homes, the tour guide (when pressed) will say something like "These pieces are reproductions. We've furnished the house the way we sorta kinda figure it might have looked originally." Not so with Maggie's house. The house passed directly from the Walker family to the National Park Service in 1979, and still contains most of the original furnishings, including the pictures on the walls. Recently, the Walker descendents donated fifty additional original items to the house. You really get the feeling that you are walking through Maggie's home, and that her boisterous grandchildren may run through the room at any moment.
Another wonderful aspect of the tour is that you get to see nearly the entire house. Parlors, dining rooms, and bedrooms are part of touring most historic homes, but I always want to see how people really lived. What were the back rooms like? Above you see the kitchen, and below is the laundry room. Can you imagine cooking a meal for a large family plus guests in a kitchen with no countertops? Today we have Viking ranges, granite counters, motorized gizmos, and most Americans haven't got a clue about cooking from scratch. If the box doesn't say add water & stir it's time to make restaurant reservations.
A small bedroom for a granddaughter has her collection of dolls on the bed.
Now, I can pretty much assure you that you're not going to take a tour of a gilded-age mansion and hear a tour guide say "Mrs. Vanderbilt repaired to this chamber when she needed to take a slash." Next we see Maggie Walker's bathroom, complete with clean-but-stained toilet, bidet & bedpan. There are no pretenses here; the tour guide will even point out the upstairs window where Maggie's son shot & killed his father, mistaking him for a midnight intruder.
In the next photo we see why there was a bedpan in Maggie's bathroom. She spent her later life as an invalid. She had diabetes, and her cause of death in 1934 was listed as "diabetes gangrene." Her two sons and their families lived with her, and there were up to ten people living in the 28-room house at one point. Upstairs, Maggie had her own little oasis: a large bedroom, her own spacious bathroom, and a kitchenette that had been fashioned from an upper enclosed side porch. The kitchenette had a wall of windows that faced east, and I imagine that she enjoyed this cheerful, sunny room in the mornings.
She also enclosed a porch off her bedroom at the front of the house, which you can see in the first photo of the Maggie Walker House. Here, she liked to sit in her wheelchair to watch the traffic go by, looking down at the Jackson Ward neighborhood that she helped make the "Harlem of the South" and the "Black Wall Street of America."
Alcoholism took its toll on her family. It is said that her husband and both of her sons were alcoholics, and that her husband came home drunk and was trying to sneak into the house via an upper rear porch when his son fatally shot him. There had been a series of neighborhood robberies, but the family had to endure a murder trial before the son was aquitted. He never recovered emotionally from the tragedy, sank deeper into the drink, and died a few years later.
Ending your tour today, we have a few more photographs. These were taken in the very old section known as Union Hill, a district which dates back to around 1805. Thanks for dropping by, and I hope your year has started out smoothly.
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