Looking for Mr. Gilbert

“Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”

The place, as far as I can determine, was Lynchburg, Virginia, the time undocumented, but probably around 1868, a few years after the liberation of the descendants of those citizens of Africa who had been captured and held in bondage by the Americans. The photograph shows six men standing in the courtyard of a brick building in front of a two-wheeled horse cart loaded with long planks. Five of the men are staring directly at the camera, but the sixth, one of two black men in the image, stands apart, near the head of the horse, and is looking at something beyond the frame of the photograph, as if contemplating some distant, imagined world. He has a well-trimmed set of sideburns and a mustache and is wearing a dark jacket and a muffler, and he stands with his hands at his side, relaxed, his deep-set eyes staring off beneath the brim of a cap with a shiny visor.

Another photograph, which I found one autumn afternoon in the archives of the Rockbridge County Historical Society in Lexington, Virginia, is an image of this same man. He has the same confident air, but in this photo he is staring directly at the camera, his right hand curled over the arm of a chair, left hand relaxed, the thumb extended, fingers curled gently at the knuckles. He is wearing a fine pressed wool suit, a dark silk tie, and a flared, high-collared shirt and waistcoat. Judging from his demeanor, he could be the ambassador from some recently liberated African nation, save that there were, in the late 1860s, no recently liberated African nations. In this case, the subject of the portrait is identified. His name is William Gilbert and he is the father of Robert Alexander Gilbert, who was born in 1869 in the valley of Broad Creek in Natural Bridge, Virginia.

William Gilbert, as far as I can tell, was freeborn, and even if he wasn’t it would be difficult to imagine this man bonded to anyone but himself. He has a kingly, proud air. For all I know he is descended from the line of Yoruba nobility who trace their ancestry back to a leopard who mated with the great princess of Dahomey, Adja-Tado. The kings and queens who followed from this union always cut claw marks into their temples in remembrance of their patrimony and commanded fierce companies of female warriors who donned lizard-skin capes and conducted slave raids on the weaker tribes of the interior. At some point between the mid-1600s and 1800, the years of the slave trade, one of their number happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and was captured in a counterraid, chained, marched to the beach at Ouidah, sold as property, and shipped to Charleston, South Carolina. Slave or free, though, I would not wish to joke with the proposed descendant of this powerful family were I transported to his august presence. He is the type whom you would address formally, as an old deposed king.

Along with the photographs, I also found in the archives an 1853 map of Rockbridge County, showing the roads and dwellings of Natural Bridge, which lies just to the south of Lexington. One of the houses on the map was marked with the name Gilbert, the only Gilbert listed in Natural Bridge and presumably the birthplace of Robert. The house was located somewhere in the bottomlands in the valley, on the inside of a curve created by Broad Creek and just east of a straight path on the west, known as the Plank Road. The valley itself lies west of the Lee Highway not far from a farm now owned by a Korean family who specialize in Asian pears. Tourists traveling by car down from Lexington to the famous stone arch at Natural Bridge will pass the orchard, and then, less than a mile beyond, a narrow road that leads down into the valley of Broad Creek, dipping and weaving through a sharp-hilled landscape.

Early photographs of this valley, taken around the time of Gilbert’s birth, show the classic Virginia idyll—rolling hills, peaked haystacks, small, southern vernacular houses with shading front porches, dogs in the front yard, and, in one image I found, a log schoolhouse plastered and much whitewashed, with a scraped, bare-earth yard. This particular structure served as the local school for blacks and the remnants of the Monacan Indian children, the original people of the valley. It is the nearest school to Broad Creek and is probably the place where the education of Robbie Gilbert began.

In our time, the valley is still characterized by the typical hardwood mesic forest of the Blue Ridge, great-boled white oaks and straight-trunked tulip trees soaring skyward, butternuts and sweetgum, a few persimmons, with sycamores in the bottomlands, and all of it interspersed with cutaway meadows, dense green hollows with clear streams gurgling through, and pastured cows lingering in the shade. Curious at first, they edge toward you and then spook easily when you approach, sensing somehow a foreigner.

This is a glacial-free section of North America, no ice-scraped granite outcroppings here as you would find in the Concord region of Mr. Brewster. It’s a warm country, sweet smelling in the spring, wafted with zephyrs from the south, deep soils, and a generally mild climate, matching the slow, soft lilts of the local accents. It used to be said that the rural blacks who left the region during the Great Migration at the end of the nineteenth century—Mr. Gilbert among them—longed for that remembered childhood of southern country mornings, the rich scents, the tapestry of color, birdsong, and the evening lowing of the cattle at the gate. Up north, they may have gained ambition, self-respect, freedom from the yoke, maybe, but never could retrieve that soft spring mothering Southland. Some died with the image behind their eyes and the smell of the woods permeating their bedrooms in their last hours.

There is an old Presbyterian church dating from the eighteenth century at the northeastern end of the valley; not far from the church is a local graveyard, and just to the east, there is a little clearing with an outing club called the Hootyville Blue Grass Club. On certain days here, I’m told, you can hear the banjos ringing even from a mile away, and trucks from all over the hollows pull in and debouch lank-jawed hill people in jeans and work boots who are not averse to a taste of red-eye from an old fruit jar.

On my third visit to this valley in search of Mr. Gilbert, I parked my rented car at the side of the road near the site marked “Gilbert” on the 1853 map, and carried my camera back into the October woodlands to look for a house, or at least a foundation, or perhaps an old burial site. This was typical southern bottomland, moist-soiled, and dense with fox grapes and the cries and whispers of gnatcatchers sounding out against that immense rural silence of the Blue Ridge. I sat down on a fallen branch for a while and waited—half hoping that something would happen to roll back the curtain of time and allow me to glimpse for a second or two a vibrant family of four or five black people with the surname Gilbert. It was nearing dusk by this time, an autumnal stillness was suspended over the valley, with a blue-green sky still apparent above the trees, fading to pearl gray in the east and darkening the woods in the hollows. The whole countryside was putting itself to sleep, lending an air of mystery and possibility to the little hollow.

A jay called, and then a large dark bird swept by, landed somewhere out of sight, and began hammering on a dead tree trunk—a pileated woodpecker, a bird the local blacks used to call the Lord-to-God bird. High above, lit from beneath by the lowering sun, a vulture tilted past a clearing in the butternuts.

More gnatcatchers. The call of titmice, and then a silence.

“Mr. Gilbert?” I said aloud to the nothingness of the woodland. “You there?”

Only the gnatcatchers and a flight of chickadees and titmice, working in the greenwood tangle.

It was getting dark, so I rose to thread my way back to the car. When I got there, I saw a dented yellow van with a hand-painted sign on the body: “Pokey’s Electric.” Nearby was a square-jawed man with a tangle of yellow curls, standing in the road staring at the mud-splattered Dodge I had rented.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I was just back in the woods looking for a house foundation.”

I showed him the 1853 map and then to fill the space, asked if he had ever heard of a family named Gilbert. I didn’t say black or white, just Gilbert, and he thought for a while, and looked up the road, rubbing his elbow and not saying anything, and then he turned and looked down the road. Thinking.

“Gilbert?” he asked.

“Gilbert. Maybe William.”

I explained my mission more fully.

“You go on up the road there and ask Mr. Hugh Morgan, he knows everyone in this valley better’n me. He’s older too.”

“Which is his house?”

“You know the one,” he said. “Just up there a mile or two at the bend. You’ll see it. Everabody knows where it is.”

Armed with these detailed directions I began casting about on the rutted roads of Broad Creek valley with no one to ask for more coordinates other than the cows. The electrician had said that the house lay just beyond the stream and a bend in the road, and although there were many streams and many bends in the road, I took a chance on a likely turning and followed an increasingly rough dirt road to a well-lit house with a big open garage and a lighted door inside, leading to something. Dogs boiling up from everywhere even before I got out of the car—a big one with the look of an Australian cattle hound, little yappy ones, old blueticks lying in the dust, too lazy to even raise their heads, and a snappy mid-sized thing who I judged to be the only biter in the group.

Traditionally, when a stranger pulls up to a remote house in the hollows of the Blue Ridge, a barefoot distiller, coveralls cut off at the shins, comes out on the splintery porch with a shotgun crooked in his elbow and says “Git,” just in case you’re a revenuer. In this case a cherry-lipped woman in her sixties, alerted by the cacophony of barking, came to the door and told me to come on in even before I had time to say why I was there.

More dogs inside, scrambling around my ankles, snuffling. Also many babies, one tiny one being nursed on a couch by a pretty young woman who looked to be about twenty. Another sleeping on the lap of someone who must have been the mother’s older sister. And standing backlit in a doorway in contraposto, a sexy woman with a come-hither look, red lips, heavily made-up blue eyes, and a mane of black hair.

“Aren’t there any men ’round here?” I wanted to ask but of course didn’t.

From the darkened room in back there came then a full cavalry charge of more dogs and young children, some in droopy diapers even though they were clearly too old for diapers. Cats were poised on every available empty space, wet newspapers on the floor, a sad canary, and the old lady asking everybody where on earth has Hugh got hisself to.

In time, down a narrow hallway came a rangy man in his stocking feet, adjusting his crotch and wearing a billed tractor cap and a blue flannel plaid shirt. I think he had been asleep. This, I gathered, although no one introduced him, was Mr. Hugh Morgan, and after elaborate explanations on my part, he said he did know a family named Gilbert, but as far as he knew they had all died. Died or gone away.

“Why you looking for them again?” he asked, indifferently.

I explained once more, adding this time that the Gilbert family that I was after was African American.

He smiled apologetically. “Gilberts I knew was white,” he said.

He didn’t say this as if to indicate that this was a good thing or a bad thing, just a fact of history. I might have even caught a tinge of regret, but maybe that was just his normal delivery, a lament for times gone by. He tipped his head to the side and clucked his tongue.

“Up on Diamond Hill is where most the old freeborn families live now,” the woman I presumed to be Mrs. Morgan said. “Even since before the War, you got your black families living in the big houses up behind the graveyard.”

I had heard this in town. One family of free blacks in particular had made money in the local restaurant business in the nineteenth century and even before Emancipation had purchased a large white house with a clerestory, from a white family down on their luck. I had learned this at the visitor’s center in town. The local guide there, a retired gentleman with neatly trimmed gray hair, who should have known better, referred to the Diamond Hill area as “colored town.”

“Weren’t Johnnie’s mother named Gilbert before she married?” one of the younger women asked.

Johnnie, I learned, was a sometime black handyman who used to work on farms in the valley and had a taste for drink. He would disappear for weeks on end and then show up again. But he was a popular character, a good worker, they said, when he chose to work. Sometimes he didn’t even bother to collect his pay before disappearing, and was almost guaranteed to disappear once he was paid. Or so they said.

It was a good lead. I asked who would know such a thing.

“Go on up the church on Sunday and talk to the preacher,” Hugh Morgan said. “Might be some church records maybe. Church’s been there since the old days.”

The children began squalling at this point, and then the dogs rose up again, barking, and went scrambling out through a torn screen door, sounding off, and a second or two later I heard a truck pull up, a door slammed, and in came a wiry little rooster with tattoos on his forearm who smiled at me, showing a row of broken teeth, and walked on by to a back room. The high staccato of a wild mountain banjo spilled down the hallway, and then another man ambled in, a fat one, dressed in faded dungaree overalls. He waddled through, nodded politely, touched the bill of his cap, and disappeared down the hall.

Lewis was his name.

Except for the odd mission that I was engaged in, no one seemed to care that I was in their kitchen on a Saturday evening, a stranger from a distant country where, in order to enter a house in this manner, one must, to be polite at least, arrange appointments by telephone in advance and check calendars and arrive at the proper time, or slightly late. Introductions would proceed accordingly, there would be small talk, some of it perhaps pertaining to lineage, before getting down to the business of finding out more about Mr. Gilbert and his company. Tea would likely be served, and any reference to the color of the main player in this little drama would be met with liberal-minded approval.

No tea here. No beer. Not even a snort of white lightning. But Mr. Morgan and his wife finally expressed some passing interest in my mission and turned the tables on me, in a friendly manner, and asked again why, exactly, I was sniffing out some black family what lived back in the valley just after the War, the war being, of course, the only war in these parts, the so-called War of the Northern Aggression, or in some quarters, “the recent unpleasantness.”

“Was he some kind a relative of yourn?” Mr. Morgan asked.

Lexington, Virginia, lies in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley near the northern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Local legend, no doubt the invention of some local white settlers and not the Monacan Indians, has it that the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley so awed the heavens that each star cast the brightest jewel from its own crown into the valley’s limpid waters. Thus arose the valley’s name: Shenandoah—Clear-Eyed Daughter of the Stars. In 1716, Virginia’s Governor Spotswood and a company of explorers first noticed the valley from the peaks of the Blue Ridge, and by midcentury Scotch-Irish and German immigrants from Pennsylvania began to settle along a well-worn Indian path known as the Great Wagon Road that ran down the center of the valley.

In spite of the fact that Lexington is the spiritual home of Stonewall Jackson, the location of the Virginia Military Institute, which supplied any number of the officers to the war, and also the home of Washington and Lee University, the valleys and towns of western Virginia were not great supporters of the Cause. This was not plantation country, there were not very many large slaveholders in the region, and the industries were based mainly on iron-making and the existence of the North River Barge Canal, which brought iron down the James River to Richmond. Families had slaves, but usually not more than four or five, and they would often live in the house with their white owners and would even be hired out to odd jobs, from which, in certain circumstances, they could earn their own money. In some cases, they would work in the iron forges side by side with their owners. Partly because of this, there were many freeborn blacks in the region. There were even free black families in the valley who were wealthy enough to have had slaves of their own.

Robbie Gilbert spent the first eleven or twelve years of his life in the hill and dale countryside around Broad Creek. He was born in a short period of grace for African Americans, when federal laws and the presence of liberal white reform-minded teachers in the schools of the rural South made things slightly easier for the newly liberated slaves. Things would get worse within a decade, though. Robbie’s mother must have died when he was young—there are scant records of her after the 1870s—and Robbie, his father, his older brother, William, an older girl named Mary, and someone named Jackson Gilbert all lived together at the curve of the creek. Contemporary photographs of the makeshift villages of freeborn blacks, which turned up in the 1990s in a historical society near Boston, show the environment in which Gilbert lived. Unpainted clapboard shacks, loose boards held down with stones as roofing, surrounding ditches to keep the floodwaters at bay during wet periods, as well as barrels, strewn lumber, chickens, and bands of little children in cutoff coveralls and bare feet. They spent their days in summer ranging the nearby woods, fishing in the creek, and on summer afternoons sitting by the doorstoop, where the old men related again and again over a period of ten hot summers the old Yoruba stories—“How the Monkey Saved Lion,” “Why Lion Is Not the Real King,” and “The Elephant and the Bush Dog”—stories later transformed from the collected slave tales by the white storyteller Joel Chandler Harris.

The voices that told these stories to Robbie and his company must have had the same cracked timbre as those recordings of former slaves collected by Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration researchers in the 1930s, the hill and valley lilt of intonation, the West African grammatical constructions, interspersed with words bastardized from Woloof and Ibo, and all bound together in a flow of phrasing that would later work its way into the call and response sermons that Gilbert grew up with, and the jagged, broken rhythms that later would resurface in ragtime and jazz and blues. Accent became a badge, an identification almost as powerful as skin color, but, as Gilbert later learned, it would have to be obscured and obliterated to get by in the world into which he was headed.

Lexington is perhaps best known for the presence of the Virginia Military Institute with its long and illustrious history, and also Washington and Lee University, with its own long and illustrious history. The other famous local source of legend is the presence of one of Lexington’s finest, the Civil War general known as Stonewall Jackson. He’s really only an adopted child, having moved to the area as an adult, but he so loved the place that he indicated in his will that he wished to be buried there, no matter where he died. After he was accidentally shot in the arm at the battle of Chancellorsville, he was brought home and died in bed of pneumonia. The arm, which had to be amputated, is buried in one site; his body is buried in the south end of town in the eponymous Stonewall Jackson Cemetery. Here the proud general still stands, embodied in bronze, gazing off to the hills to the west and south, field glasses in one hand, sword in the other, a flare of autumnal trees surrounding him.

Stonewall was an upright sort—religious, devoted to his family, and as far as I can determine from what I learned of the gentleman, a profoundly boring man. He memorized his lectures on ordnance for his classes at the VMI and spoke in cadenced, uninflected tones, and so believed in the higher laws of his Protestant faith that he was willing to break the current laws of the state of Virginia and teach slaves how to read. Nothing to do with liberation on this earth, mind you; the idea was that they would then be able to read the word of God. He had his eyes on the next life.

Young Robbie Gilbert, who was educated in Lexington between 1876 and 1883, would indirectly benefit from Jackson’s magnanimity. There were colored schools in the town in the late nineteenth century and by the time he left middle school, Robbie Gilbert could read, which put him ahead of most people of his race in the South in those years.

The war did not entirely liberate people of African descent from slavery, it simply altered the exterior. In fact for some, on certain plantations, and for those in certain family situations in western Virginia, African Americans may have been better off before the war. The dreaded Black Codes, forerunners of the only slightly looser Jim Crow laws governing segregation, were stricter in some states than local governances controlling slaves. If you were black you could not move through certain counties without a pass, for example, could not rent or keep a house, could not preach, “exhort, or otherwise declaim to congregations of colored people, without special permission in writing,” and you could not sell or even barter merchandise without written permission. The word “owner” as in “slaveowner,” in these codes, was simply replaced with the word “employer.”

In Lexington, the codes were looser, but nonetheless there was no school for black children beyond the sixth grade, and so, at an age of eleven or twelve, Robert Gilbert’s education would have been completed at this point, except that someone in his family, perhaps even the ambitious Robert himself, must have had grander ideas. He was taken down to Lynchburg by his father, where there were schools of higher education for blacks.

Sometime in the autumn of 1880, Robert and the Old King made a journey by mule back, wagon, and then barge boat, from Lexington down to Lynchburg, where, for the first time, he met his grandmother, Fanny, a woman who must have loomed in his imagination as a female equivalent of the Old King himself. She was a former slave, but a “house nigger” (as even the blacks would phrase it), the ruler of a great airy kitchen on a plantation somewhere in the Tidewater, and an Amazonian commander of the bands of children, white and black alike, who moved to and fro, from house to yard, to field and forest, and ruler even, it was rumored in the legends told to Robbie by his father, of the white misses, whom she had nursed and nurtured from their babyhoods. The one outstanding story among the many was that she had, on one occasion by way of revenge for some offense, served the family a stew prepared from the meat of one of the old hounds that hung around the slave quarters, a dish that was pronounced as savory by the mistress. Ol’ Massa himself withheld judgment, which left Fanny wondering for years whether he in fact knew the contents. This same Massa was said to be a kindly, sad-eyed man who would remain sleepless on the night before he required himself to whip a recalcitrant slave and was once seen weeping bitterly, his head buried in his hands, after he had beaten a nameless field hand.

Fanny, who is officially listed in the 1884 census records as Fanny Hardrich, dressed in motley, a huge outflowing combination of multicolored cloth that began high on her neck and swept floor-ward in a vast rounded series of mountains and valleys. She had, the stories say, strong white teeth and curiously elongated canines, which gave her the appearance of a lioness whenever she smiled or yawned. She could read and write, was churchly, and enfolded young Robbie Gilbert entirely in her great riverlike brown arms when he was first introduced to her and held him there an inordinate length of time, rocking him and kissing him on his round cheeks and forehead when she laid him down to bed in the big central room where she, the Old King, and three other children of indeterminate relation to young Robbie slept. There was a big iron cooking stove in the room with a box behind it where Fanny was nursing a sick hen, and there was a mother cat who slept with her litter of kittens near the chicken. Wood floors, unpainted, unvarnished, and splintering, newspapers lining the walls, a portrait of Jesus torn from a church calendar on a wall shelf near the stove.

Robbie slept in the bed with a strange cousin, a boy half his age, and probably slept fitfully that first night. His father left two days later, and when the dark came on and he was put to bed, Robbie grew silent and troubled and Fanny sat with him till he fell asleep, her hand on his shoulder. She sang to him in a low honeysweet contralto:

And when my time has come to die,

Jus’ take me back and let me lie,

Close to where the James goes rolling by …

The room haunted his dreams for years thereafter.

I went up to the Broad Street Presbyterian Church one Sunday, just as the morning service was letting out and all the parishioners were standing around talking to the preacher, who was a thoroughly modern minister, dressed in a casual blue silk shirt, no jacket, his white dog collar shining in the bright autumnal light. There was a tall man there with a lantern jaw, short gray hair that he combed forward in bangs like a Viking warrior, or a character out of a Bergman film, also a younger man of about thirty-five with a wispy blond mustache, wearing wraparound dark glasses, and two women, one short and round-faced, with massed gray curls and rosy apple cheeks. They all glanced over as I climbed the hill toward the church, but attempted to carry on with their conversation, feigning indifference in order to be polite. They were the types with long memories, the sort who settle in a place and then, having found fertile ground and a benign climate, come war and flood and famine and the foibles of the almanac, stay put. Many families in the valley had been there since the eighteenth century.

Before I could even say hello the minister extended his hand and introduced himself enthusiastically. I explained my presence and this brought on an ad hoc assembly of the parishioners. The tall man with the Viking bangs seemed to be their leader; he was the oldest and appeared to know the most about the valley.

“They was a Gilbert family in this valley, but Leroy, he’s dead,” he says. “And Mary Gilbert, her body lives up in the nursing home but her mind dwells elsewhere.”

I asked about the black families that used to attend this church and sit up in a balcony in the back of the church.

“Sure enough,” one of the older women said. “There were blacks all up and down the Plank Road. Black families, living back I don’t know where. Miss Brown—she lives over there—she says there was a Negra burial ground up the hill behind her farm and she remembers the last funeral. They carried a heavy old pine box up that hill to the woods somewhere, but had to rest on the way up.”

“Who was in the box?” I asked.

“Don’t know who that was. Was it ol’ Johnnie maybe?” She threw this question out to the assembly.

“Johnnie’s dead?” I asked, as if I had known the man.

“Old Johnnie died ages ago,” they said.

I asked if anyone knew Johnnie’s last name. And this induced much discussion, and many tributaries of gossip, and many stories of tenant farmers and sometime workers, and then dogs, and who owned the mule—or was it a horse?—who kicked Johnnie on that Sunday afternoon and he didn’t come back into the valley for the next year and when he did, first thing he wants to know is whether that old mule is still around. But then, no, they in’t anybody left here who knows Johnnie’s last name. Just Johnnie. Later Old Johnnie. Earlier, until it became politically incorrect, Uncle Johnnie.

“Wasn’t Gilbert?” I ask.

“Wasn’t Gilbert. No. They was all white.”

“And gone to boot,” the rosy-cheeked woman said.

The way to the purported burial ground lay beside a stream close by a small neat house, seemingly deserted. By now it was midday and hot, with the cows in the bottomlands sheltering under the sycamores and the sweetgums, the cicadas calling, and somewhere far off a chainsaw at work. Holding my camera close to my chest, I ducked under a rusty barbed wire fence and scrambled down the bank to the stream, crossing on slippery moss-grown rocks, then climbed the steep hill, stepping over blowdowns and stray boulders all the way up.

This did not seem a likely spot for a burial ground, but then I had heard that the Monacan Indians, who lived in this valley, customarily buried their dead on hilltops, and inasmuch as the local Africans, if they got free, tended to mix with the Indians, it was possible that the custom spilled over into the black community. There were no blacks buried up in the Broad Creek Cemetery, I was told at the church, which explained why I couldn’t find Gilberts on any of the headstones. The one exception they told me was a little black boy who died sometime in the 1870s, around the time that Gilbert himself was born. They said that the custom of the grave commission was to bury anyone whose family requested burial there, so they put him there even though he was the wrong color. They buried him outside an iron fence, though, and never marked the site so no one knows where he is now. He could have been Robbie’s brother for all anyone knew.

At the top of the hill I went around kicking over limbs and looking at any stone larger than a football in hopes of finding some sort of an inscription—or even a pattern of stones. I was guided in this search by a seventeenth-century Christian Indian burial ground I knew of on Martha’s Vineyard where the bodies are marked by simple, unchiseled, unmarked stones—no way to know who lies where.

I gave up finally and sat down to think.

Only the shush of the cicadas for company, the drift of vultures in the hot blue sky, lilting over the crossed branches of the hickories. My subsequent photos of the place reveal nothing—the upward sweep of the tree trunks. Smooth sky above. Fallen limbs littering the ground, and the roll of the dark stream below the hill.

You could read a metaphor in the images, I suppose: The solid earth. The heaven seeking plants, soaring upward, and below, the dark, ever-flowing stream of time.

Later in life, at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in Cambridge, after he had successfully established himself, Mr. Gilbert used to sing an old Episcopal hymn: “Time like an ever-flowing stream, bears all our cares away …”

From the Broad Creek valley I drove back through the hills to Lexington. It was Old Alumni Day at Washington and Lee and tweedy parents in good shoes were in the streets and cafés and restaurants. There had been a VMI victory on battlefields of a football game and a pent electricity was in the air, later expressed in the bars and fraternity clubs all across the city. The African thrumming of the slit drums and rap filled the warm night, police cars drifted by, lights flickering, huge rains of beer cans fell, the clash of broken whiskey bottles, night and transfiguration for young America. The war years were over in the Valley of the Shenandoah, the bonded Africans were liberated to make their way in the world, and down on the south side of town old Stonewall, who died resisting the emancipation, stood through it all, staring westward across the hills, his sightless bronze eyes fixed on the Holy Land.