Tag Archives: Cultural Memory

Painted O’er

Posted on by
Reply

History, despite its wrenching pain,
cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage,
need not be lived again.

—Maya Angelou (1928–2014), “On the Pulse of Morning”

Laughter broke the silence of the subterranean sanctuary just as Gary and I were approaching the garage elevator and saw the sign at the same time.

We couldn’t help ourselves.

The sign was anchored prominently on the wall to the right of the call button. Painted forest green, it was so glossy, even in the shadows, that it made the letters of the hotel’s former name seem more raised than they might have seemed otherwise. And the overlaid white lettering of the hotel’s new name seemed nearly an afterthought.

After our first burst of laughter, Gary and I both gasped:

“Oh. My God. Why’d they do that? Why didn’t they install brand new signage? This is just … painted o’er!”

We kept laughing as we took the elevator up to the spacious historic lobby. I recognized it at a glance. It was exactly the same as it had been when I attended meetings there a decade ago. And a year before that. And a year earlier.

We were in the midst of understated, old-world elegance. Muted olive-green velvet sofas and generous upholstered chairs gathered over richly patterned rugs, and dark-wood nested tables gave the seating areas a slightly clubby intimacy. Overhead, enormous brass chandeliers hung dramatically. The whole place felt gracious, traditional, and faintly grand—comfortable rather than showy, as though it had settled safely into its history.

Nothing had changed. Except the name.

And when it came to the parking garage, the signage hadn’t changed either. Not really. Its historic name—though painted o’er—overpowered the present.

I was still laughing quietly when we found our room and got settled in. I could not help but think about a similar scenario in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.”

After sleeping for twenty years, Rip returns to find the quiet village inn gone, replaced by a shabby “Union Hotel”; the old shade tree has given way to a flagpole flying the unfamiliar stars and stripes. The world he knew has become a new nation.

But then Irving undercuts the transformation.

Rip looks at the tavern sign and recognizes the same ruby face of King George beneath the alterations. The red coat has simply been changed to blue and buff; the sceptre becomes a sword; a cocked hat is added; and “General Washington” is painted on top.

Painted o’er.

Surprisingly, this whole notion of a name change and what it means—or doesn’t—packed itself up and followed me as Gary and I drove back to our Shenandoah Valley home.

I started thinking about name changes outside literary landscapes. I started thinking about name changes in the real world.

I started thinking about Shenandoah County’s Stonewall Jackson High School. In 2020, following nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, the Shenandoah County School Board voted to rename it Mountain View High School, removing a name associated with the Confederacy.

Four years later, a newly elected school board voted to restore the name Stonewall Jackson High School. In August 2026, a federal judge ruled that restoring the Confederate names violated federal law and ordered the School Board to replace them. The board has appealed the ruling and is seeking to keep the names in place while that appeal proceeds.

For now, Stonewall Jackson High School is Stonewall Jackson High School once again.

Painted o’er. But in reverse.

The new name hadn’t been lettered over the old one. The old name had been lettered back over the new.

And that old name carried a history of its own. During the trial, a historian testified that when the school board first chose the name Stonewall Jackson, it did so in part to discourage Black students from seeking transfers into the newly opened high school.

That wasn’t a name chosen for its ring. That was a name chosen to keep a door closed.

And then I thought again about the hotel.

I had known it for decades as the Stonewall Jackson Hotel. Now, I had slept in Hotel 24 South.

I couldn’t help but wonder about its name change. What prompted it? Would it, too, return to what it had been before? Had the hotel simply painted o’er?

I had no idea. But I knew a little research might help me decide whether I had been laughing at or laughing with.

I found the answer, and it, too, took me back to 2020.

In the weeks following the murder of George Floyd, protesters began gathering outside the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, calling for the hotel to change its name and remove the enormous rooftop sign.

On June 16, the owners announced that they would do just that. They said they wanted to respect the history of the Shenandoah Valley while honoring all of its citizens and, with a new name, embrace “a future that enhances our values of equality and inclusiveness for everyone.”

Fine words. But words are easy.

The protesters knew that. They kept coming. They wanted to see the words followed by action.

In July, signs began coming down. In August, the hotel asked Staunton’s Historic Preservation Commission for permission to remove “Stonewall Jackson” from that enormous rooftop sign—the very sign I had seen more times than I can count. On September 1, the new name was announced.

Change took place. Real change.

Hotel 24 South.

The new name intrigued me, too. It wasn’t an attempt to invent a history for the place. Quite the opposite. The hotel stands at 24 South Market Street and opened in 1924. Its new name reached backward even as the hotel’s owners said they were looking forward.

Then I discovered something else.

The enormous rooftop sign itself wasn’t original to the hotel. It had been added decades later, as downtown Staunton businesses worried that bypasses, Interstate 81, and development on the city’s outskirts would carry travelers—and their dollars—right past them.

Even Staunton’s preservation staff concluded that the sign was not historically significant to the architecture of the hotel. Old, yes. Familiar, certainly. But not an essential part of what made the building historic.

That stopped me. I had been thinking about all of this backward.

Changing the name hadn’t changed the hotel’s history. The history was still there. The building was still there. The grand lobby was still there. The olive-green sofas, the rugs, the dark wood, the enormous brass chandeliers—all of it had greeted Gary and me when we stepped off that elevator.

Stonewall Jackson was still there, too. Not on the roof. Not over the entrance. Not as the hotel’s name. But in its history.

And get this. Hotel 24 South doesn’t pretend it was never the Stonewall Jackson Hotel. Its own history still says that it was. What changed was not the past.

What changed was what the hotel chose to call itself in the present.

Maybe that was what I had missed when Gary and I stood in that parking garage laughing at that ridiculous-looking sign.

Those raised letters underneath the glossy forest-green paint suddenly looked different to me.

They weren’t necessarily evidence of something unsuccessfully hidden. Maybe they were evidence of something remembered.

There is a difference.

We cannot paint o’er the past and make it disappear. Nor should we. George III remains underneath George Washington. Stonewall Jackson remains part of the history of a grand old hotel in Staunton—and part of the history of a high school in Shenandoah County.

But remembering a name and continuing to bear it are not the same thing.

The hotel chose to remember. The school board chose to bear it again.

One lets the past show through. The other asks the past to speak for the present.

Was I laughing at that sign in the parking garage? Laughing with it? With it, I think.

Perhaps that old sign got it right after all. The old name is still there. You can see it if you look.

But over it, another name.

Painted o’er. This time, with good intent.

The Long Way a Voice Comes Home

Posted on by
3

“The meaning of the past is never finished.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). From her Between Past and Future (1961), where she argues that history is not closed or complete, but morally alive, awaiting renewed attention, responsibility, and understanding.

Last week, I found my way to a small library tucked behind a hardware store in Deltaville, Virginia. It was the sort of place you might drive past without ever knowing it was there—a quiet, cream-colored building softened by climbing vines and brightened by a mural where hummingbirds hovered and monarchs drifted above a riot of painted flowers. A sailboat logo and a modest white sign announced Middlesex County Public Library — Deltaville Branch, a name that made the place feel both official and intimate at once. Nothing about it was grand, but everything about it felt intentional. Step through the doors, and you are immediately reminded why libraries endure: they do not shout their importance; they simply keep offering it.

I had been invited to speak about Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, a project that has occupied a surprising amount of my life. But as I stood there, in a room filled with people who had given their afternoon to books, it became clear that what I was really there to talk about was not a colonial essayist at all. It was about the invisible network of librarians, teachers, archivists, and patient institutions that had made that work possible.

Nothing I have written would exist without them. Not the book. Not the essays. Not even the questions that led me to them.

For most of us, research looks solitary. A scholar in a reading room. A book on a desk. A voice speaking from a distant century. But none of that happens without a vast, quiet scaffolding behind it, made up of people who catalog, preserve, teach, fund, and protect the materials that others one day come to use.

Libraries quietly hold information—sometimes for centuries—without knowing who will need it, or when, or why. They preserve voices long after those voices have gone silent, trusting that someday someone will come along prepared to listen carefully.

That afternoon in Deltaville, surrounded by that small but devoted group of Library Friends, I realized I was standing inside the visible tip of something much larger. A chain of care that stretches across generations, linking a colonial newspaper, a Charleston library, a community college system, and a branch library in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay.

My own place in that chain began long before I knew it. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, I stumbled across a series of anonymous essays published in the 1750s in The South-Carolina Gazette. A leading scholar, Leo LeMay, had remarked that they were among the finest essays in all of early American literature and had urged that someone edit them, publish them, and identify their author. The challenge sat there for decades, unanswered.

What allowed me to return to it was not individual brilliance, but institutional grace. I spent twenty-five years at the Library of Congress, learning how archives think and how preservation outlasts any single lifetime. Later, the Virginia Community College System gave me something just as precious when I turned fifty: the chance to become an English professor, a dream I had carried since childhood. And then, when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, it gave me a two-year appointment that provided something more precious than funding. It provided time. Time to think. Time to return to unfinished questions. Time to do the kind of slow, careful work that real discovery requires.

That is why educators and educational institutions matter so deeply in this story. They do not just transmit knowledge; at their best, they grant permission. Permission to linger with a problem. Permission to follow a hunch. Permission to trust that careful thinking is worth the investment.

Being in Deltaville also gave me something I had not realized I was missing: the chance to thank Glenn DuBois in person. Glenn was Chancellor during two important turning points of my professional life. He was Chancellor when the Virginia Community College System first welcomed me into the classroom at age fifty, and he was Chancellor again years later when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, the appointment that made this work possible.

We rarely get to look someone in the eye and say, simply and honestly, “You changed my life.” But that afternoon, in a small library behind a hardware store, I did. It was one of those moments when gratitude stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually feel in the room.

The essays I eventually brought back into the light turned out to belong to Alexander Gordon, a Scottish-born scholar and singer who lived in colonial Charleston. But authorship matters because it allows us to place a voice in a life, a mind in a world, and a text in a tradition.

There is a Jewish folk belief that a person dies twice: once when the body stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. If that is so, then archives are a kind of moral infrastructure, designed to keep names from slipping into that second death. Every catalog entry, every preserved page, every carefully tended collection is an act of faith in the future.

So is education. When the Virginia Community College System opened its doors to me in midlife, it did not just give me a job. It gave me a second beginning. Without that second chance, the first version of my curiosity would have remained unfinished.

All of this came together for me in that small Deltaville library. A place without marble columns or grand staircases, but full of the same quiet dignity that animates every serious library anywhere. People had gathered not to be dazzled, but to listen. To care. To take part in the long human habit of keeping stories alive.

Today, Gordon’s voice is no longer anonymous. His essays are no longer orphans. A lost body of work has been restored to its author, and a chapter of early American literary history has been set right. That restoration belongs not just to a scholar or a book, but to the institutions that made it possible—to libraries that guard knowledge, to educators who foster discovery, and to communities that believe the past is worth preserving.

All proceeds from my book go to the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, which feels exactly right. Libraries and community colleges share the same moral instinct: they exist to hold doors open, not to keep people out.

I left Deltaville with a deeper gratitude for the fact that nothing we do alone ever really is. Behind every footnote stands a librarian. Behind every discovery stands a teacher. Behind every second act stands an institution willing to say yes.

And behind every recovered voice stands a chain of quiet, faithful human hands, passing something forward because they believe someone, someday, will need it.