Each day I am learning to live in a town built on the bones of the enslaved. I gasp awake in a country birthed from one terrible wound and then another, and I am unable to ignore America’s own red lineage. Here, no tree is ever just a tree. Here, every rolling field has been nursed on stolen sweat, every green acre sprung from blood. For months, I pull at the terrible thread of America’s past, put my ear up to the gutted voices of Charlottesville’s history, trying to hear lost families in the scattering shrill of cicadas.
