Ghost Tour
2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2023.a903944
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
ResumoGhost Tour Lesley Wheeler (bio) I like old cemeteries, not just because of the grand trees and twisty paths so pleasant to meander along, but because the headstones say again and again: I will preserve something of this person I loved. Outside the cemetery gates, the town is business as usual; detail erodes. Yet aboveground activity depends on this otherness, the designation of a fixed space for memory, the kind of place Michel Foucault called a heterotopia. I fear cemeteries for related reasons. Sure, I have the usual horror of people I love ceasing to move, getting slotted underground, out of sight, where bacteria and fungus break them down into nutrients those greedy old trees can feed on. But it’s not only that. Death, the great anesthetic, speaks to me. I’ve buried monsters beneath the frenetic surface of my life. I strive to outpace them. When they catch up and drag me down, surrendering might be a relief. ________ I often walk through a place called the Presbyterian Cemetery until 1949, around the time Dixiecrats adopted the Confederate battle flag as a symbol,1 when it was renamed for Stonewall Jackson, three-quarters of whom had been buried there in 1863.2 The larger-than-life Edward Valentine sculpture adorning Jackson’s grave was erected in 1895. Lost Cause nostalgia is undead—it rises, eats brains, then simmers down for a while but can’t be eradicated. In 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, the city council voted to change the cemetery name again, this time to Oak Grove, much to the ire of reenactors and right-wingers, known around here as flaggers. They’re still muttering. [End Page 151] Headstones and footstones, footnotes and disquiet. I’ve built many routines in Lexington, Virginia, a small town I dream of leaving behind. Sometimes, when I cut through Oak Grove Cemetery, tourists ring Jackson’s statue, gazing up mistily. They leave lemons around its fenced base because Jackson, Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man, loved to suck them. Walking, like reading, like history, is recursive: you develop ways of traversing space or memory, wear an automatic groove, and forget where you are until some inner or outer strangeness knocks you off kilter.3 I walk to work, a college campus, each weekday. For the first dozen years I lived here, I favored a certain commute: up Preston Street, left on Lee with its red-brick mansions, then across Washington to reach the university’s neoclassical colonnade. My office is on the third floor, at the undead heart of it all. Once, trudging back home after a dispiriting day—a bully at work was making life miserable—I glimpsed a hunched shape on top of a traffic signal. My first thought, weirdly, was “leprechaun.” Just one of those phantoms, I guess, a distracted brain misinterpreting shadow. Eventually I learned a back way, two minutes shorter, through a fraternity parking lot and the dining services loading area where people in aprons take their smoking breaks. Their presence reminds me I’m another worker, not an especially valued one, and certainly not a member of the university’s dysfunctional extended family, despite the rhetoric some administrators use. Eruptions of gender-based and racial harassment in this workplace are related to its reactionary ideology.4 They’re rooted in the same red clay. The bully is finally retiring, but I always choose the quicker route now. [End Page 152] ________ I travel along pedagogical grooves, too, although I hope I’ll never blow the dust off ancient lecture notes scripting the class period, as my dissertation director did. Sometimes it’s hard to focus when I reread the monumental poems I was hired to teach. I recently discussed W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” with my British and Irish poetry class. On the syllabus, Auden comes after I guide students through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its Boston meander, and Wilfred Owen’s soldiers marching asleep. Later there’s H.D. wandering a London bombed to ruins, Seamus Heaney’s eye probing boglands, Jason Allen-Paisant escaping into his “Maple Grove,” and Warsan Shire at...
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