A Spot in the Woods

My Time at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

Hello friends. Can you believe it’s already February?

I’ve spent the last three weeks as a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, near Amherst, VA. VCCA has been an artists’ residency for 50 years. The scene is bucolic, set on a former farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The fellows live and sleep in a separate residence, and they work in the Studio Barns which, as the name implies, were built in an old barn that was on the property. It’s the perfect commute, just about 5 minutes on foot.

The artists here are a mixed group — poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, as well as composers and visual artists working in every medium from sculpture to book arts, quilting to paint. I have never spent this much time with such creative and productive people. Although we are working hard, it doesn’t feel like work because, on some level, we are all speaking the same language about process and vision. You don’t have to explain yourself. You can feel the fellowship.

The Studio Barns at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

VCCA is down the road from Sweet Briar, a women’s college. It’s a gorgeous campus, and I have taken many walks there. The other day, I found the tiny cabin that faces the President’s house. Some maps of Sweet Briar call it the “19th-century cabin,” but other maps and signage make it clear what this is: a cabin that housed a family of enslaved people who helped build Sweet Briar’s campus. The cabin has been in continuous use since it was first built. After the Civil War, it passed to a family who made bricks for the college. Eventually, Sweet Briar used the cabin to house some of its programs; at one point, it functioned as the office of the alumnae association.

Now, however, the cabin houses an exhibition dedicated to the history of enslaved people on campus. I think that was really the only choice. The cabin, with its current purpose, represents something of a reckoning.

The cabin built by and for an enslaved family at Sweet Briar. Originally, it was painted blue.

At the edge of campus, set into a glade surrounded by trees, are the burial grounds for enslaved people who lived and worked at Sweet Briar. You wouldn’t know where you were if it weren’t for the signs at the edge of the field. Grass and graves have folded into one, the graves marked by either hollows or rough stones set at the head. Those stones were likely never inscribed; they were too small. But they are more spiritual and moving than any headstone I have ever seen.

The burial grounds are peaceful yet vaguely haunting — the place defies description, so I won’t even try. A single sign gives just enough to explain what you are seeing, but not so much as to make it a tourist spot. It must have been hard to figure out how much to say.

In addition to the sign, there is a small plaque that reads:

I paused at that word “founders” for a minute, unsure of what to think. I wondered if this plaque wasn’t a kind of cover-up, a way to soften, for fragile minds, what this place was and who these people were. But the other sign makes it clear that enslaved people were buried here — if you read it, there is no way you could misunderstand. “Founders,” then, began to feel like a good-faith attempt to pay tribute to what enslaved people endured at Sweet Briar, to the legacy they left behind, and to what we owe them.

Is it enough? I’m not sure.

It is a beginning.