Editorial: Made more beautiful

Originally on Life in 10 Minutes

It’s hard to put into words, but as you can see, I’m trying.

It’s hard to describe to someone who isn’t from Richmond, but I do want to try.

I grew up seeing those statues on a weekly or even daily basis. People from out of town (Yankees, carpetbaggers) don’t realize just how integral they are to this city.

They are not off in some historical park that you visit only on school field trips. Those statues are on a main thoroughfare, a graceful, sun-dappled avenue where many hundred-year old trees have not survived hurricane season and have had to be replanted. And yet the statues remain.

When I woke up Sunday and saw the images of those statues covered in graffiti, my eyes filled. Not in sadness but in pride, love, and hope.

I had to go see them for myself. I had to take my children.

So many different hands transformed them into their new existence. So many different colors of paint. So many perfectly conflicting messages of love, anger, rage, hope, peace . . . all coexisting in a gorgeous cacophony that was somehow utterly perfect.

My heart swelled to see them in person. There were skateboarders doing tricks using the base of the monument as a launch pad. There was a group of Black students protesting peacefully on the steps. There were kids climbing on them, jumping over the felled wrought-iron fences that protected them for a hundred years.

It felt like those statues were being reclaimed by the city that glorified them for too long.

It felt like visiting the Coliseum in Rome. We were there to see an ancient symbol, now in ruins, made more beautiful somehow by their ruining.

I can summon not even one ounce of sadness for the loss of their original state. They are better like this. They finally make sense.

Photos of these statues in their new form may be in history books in 50 years as a symbol of a change, like the Berlin Wall coming down, like protesters pulling over the statue of Saddam Hussein.

Do I exaggerate? That is how momentous it felt to me, a lifelong Richmonder who was raised to revere those statues both as important public art and as symbols of our history. They are new symbols now. They have finally been contextualized.

I grieve for George Floyd. I grieve for Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Marcus David Peters. Trayvon Martin. Philando Castille. Alton Sterling. Sandra Bland. There are too many to name.

But I do not grieve for the statues. I do not grieve for the Daughters of the Confederacy building. I do not grieve for old ideas. My heart swells with hope; my chest fills with pride.

Sometimes, as in a forest, things have to burn to clear away the old, the dead, the decaying, to make room for new life.