DOWN IN THE BROKEN HEART OF DIXIE

Omni Richmond Hotel, Richmond, Virgina

Dennis Bartel

Dear Charlie,

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

The sky has fallen. Back in L.A., close familial proximity led my dear wife and me into spats which as we traveled overland by rail grew into dark resentments which had something more or less to do with someone’s alleged substance abuse and other crimes. I won’t burden you with unpleasant details except to say that my dear wife got off the train in Chicago and I, unable somehow to take myself home, wound up in Richmond, as the stationery belies, in commodious environs, my thinking being there’s no point being both miserable and uncomfortable. Anyway, so what, I’m at the Omni. The irony that at the very moment of my marital unravelment I should land here – where the South was at long last routed with pitilessness and finality – is not lost on me. Walking distance from the hotel is the Confederate Capitol building, an unimaginative neo-Roman, white-pillared box that speaks of the aggrandizement of one people over another, common to all 19th century Southern cities. I’m sure it was a striking building when Thos. Jeff. designed it, but this is what it grew up to be. Also nearby is the Jefferson Davis home proudly preserved in its original state of austere self-loathing. Isn’t that what the Civil War was about? The South’s self-loathing was so deeply inbred a war was needed to purge it. Damn damn damn. Moments ago my fingers fumbled away a fresh stick – into the bowl. I take it as a sign of soberness that I did not go after it. Richmonders have kept their

Jefferson Davis

sacred places intact, those that were not set ablaze in the great fall. A solitary walk along the bank of the gray James River soon takes me to St. Paul’s Church where, as goes Confederate legend, President Davis received word that Richmond would fall. It is said a gray pallor came upon his face. Ha! Jeff Davis was always gray. Gray as The Cause. This was not grey with a pinch of the British, but brooding and unrepentant American gray. As Davis stood on the steps of St. Paul’s and read the message from the front how could anyone tell he was any grayer now than when he first became Leader of Wretched Dixie? The moment is preserved here in Richmond. They say that Lee’s butternuts started most of the fires while abandoning the city. But the real damage occurred once Union troops swept through. They took vengeance. No building was left untouched by thieves and vandals, blue devils. Richmond was overwhelmed by young victorious men with weapons running madly through the streets to take and ruin. Another shrine solemnly displayed within easy reach of the Omni is the Hollywood Cemetery. J.D. is buried here along with a bunch of reb generals. There surely are meaningful contrasts to be made between this cemetery and the one my dear wife and I visited the day before boarding Amtrak in L.A., Westwood Mortuary, final home to Buddy Rich, Natalie Wood Wagner, Truman Capote, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Marilyn Monroe. The mortuary is a small, shady plot of land slipped out of sight behind a mega-movie-plex. It sems you really have to know where you’re going to find it, or, as we did, find it by lucky accident. The green grounds are well-kept and the graves, dating to the 20s, are mostly unadorned. By contract, here in Richmond where there’s a gothic whiff to everything, the monuments at this haplessly named Hollywood Cemetery look haphazard, as if folks were buried where they fell. The stones are worn and soiled. Even the trees seem to have a pallor. Richmond, the Old Dominion’s House of Mourning. There’s something faintly shameful in the look of it.