CHARLOTTESVILLE: An American Story, by Deborah Baker
Charlottesville always seemed like an odd place for Charlottesville to happen. Tucked away in Virginia’s Blue Ridge foothills, the city long projected an image of gentility, civility and rationality. In 2017, before everything changed, Charlottesville was home not only to Thomas Jefferson’s complicated legacy but also to a Jewish mayor, a substantial Black population and one of the country’s elite public universities.
Now, however, the site of Jefferson’s Monticello and “Academical Village” is so synonymous with the frightful and portentous Unite the Right rally of August 2017 that no explanatory subtitle was needed for Deborah Baker’s searching and personal exploration of her hometown’s violent invasion, “Charlottesville: An American Story.”
Baker’s vividly detailed reconstruction is a worthwhile addition to a growing canon of narrative nonfiction aimed at documenting and interpreting the outburst of race- and hate-driven violence in America between 2015 (the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.) and 2020 (the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis). Charlottesville, with its indelible video of torch-wielding Nazis and a careening Dodge death mobile, fell squarely in the middle of this stretch, an inevitable allegory for the rightward swerve of American politics under Donald Trump.
Baker left Charlottesville for New York after graduating from the University of Virginia in 1981 but was drawn back to examine how such a shockingly regressive act could take place in her seemingly progressive hometown. She is transparent from the get-go about her bewilderment that the storm troopers who gathered in Charlottesville might represent something enduring in American politics. “Were they, like the election of Donald Trump, a harbinger of some future I was too old or ill-equipped to grasp?” she asks in her introduction. Many Americans — perhaps just under half — can likely relate.
Baker is clearheaded, however, about the “direct path” between Charlottesville and the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and, implicitly, the revival of Trumpism in 2024. She is equally clear that there were not “very fine people on both sides,” as President Trump asserted three days after one of those people accelerated his car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring at least three dozen others.
Revisiting Charlottesville’s colonial beginnings and reliance on captive labor, Baker argues that the horror of that weekend was neither as improbable nor as unpredictable as it seemed. She recounts the events surrounding the erection of a monumental statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in a city park in 1924, Klan cross burnings near Monticello that same year, entrenched resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and then a split City Council vote on removing the statue of Lee after the “unusually fraught presidential election year” of 2016.
This is the incitement that first attracted white nationalists to the compact city of 50,000, and that mobilized an ultimately outgunned band of clergy members and activists to oppose them. Baker, the author of acclaimed biographies of the poets Laura Riding and Allen Ginsberg, among other figures, devotes much of this book to portraiture of the combatants — arguably too many — but acknowledges being better able to stomach the counterprotesters.
We meet a spectrum, ranging from the Rev. Dr. Alvin Edwards, a prominent Black pastor who organizes an antiracism clergy collective, to Emily Gorcenski, a mixed-race transgender data scientist who trolls the alt-righters online and livestreams the street fighting. The revolution in Charlottesville was digitized, much of it in dark corners.
I hoped to learn more about the white nationalist bottom feeders and their alliances, rivalries and tactics, perhaps because they no longer operate on the fringe of our politics. By the end of the narrative, the “skilled manipulator” Richard Spencer, a leader of Unite the Right, is podcasting with Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust denier who dined with Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.
Baker characterizes the assemblage of headbangers who descended on Charlottesville as advocates for “old-fashioned white nationalism and white supremacy, with its grab bag of bigotries, wrapped in contrarian, countercultural and hypermasculine cool.” Sourcing their rage to “Bush and Cheney’s lies” about the war on terror, she despairs that these “young men now engineer spectacles of shock and awe, but where they embrace the triumph of the antihero, we reap tragedy.”
Yet Baker’s understanding necessarily goes only so far, as she chose not to interview or delve deeper into the devolutions of Spencer, Jason Kessler or many of their ilk, fearful that they might somehow lead her astray. “As I wasn’t a journalist, I felt no obligation to hear them out in person,” she explains in a curious aside. “I was used to writing about people with only an archive to work from. I also knew I’d be the hapless, tongue-tied sort to get stuck in their sticky web.”
Oddly, we learn little about James Alex Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for plowing into Heather Heyer, other than that he kept a copy of “Mein Kampf” and a photograph of Hitler by his bedside. Heyer also receives glancing attention, going all but unmentioned until Page 333. Instead, Baker makes herself a recurring character, interjections that eventually become a distraction, as she did not witness the chaos in 2017 and her quest is not central enough to justify the slide toward memoir.
In Baker’s telling, there was a long and foreboding escalation in Charlottesville, with white nationalist rallies in May and July before the denouement on Aug. 11 and 12. “Cataclysmic events may at first appear entirely unforeseen,” she writes, “but they don’t come out of the blue.” She builds anticipation toward that weekend, and her depictions of bloody beatings and the car attack can be bone chilling. But the drama is drained by what starts to read like military history in its stenography of troop movements and actions, gleaned from video and photographs (including Ryan Kelly’s gruesome Pulitzer winner).
Baker finds blame to go around for the unfolding tragedy — foremost, of course, with the invading klaverns and their detestable, grudge-settling leaders (Spencer and Kessler, not coincidentally, are University of Virginia alums), but also with state, municipal, police and university officials who failed to anticipate, prevent or quell the violence.
Her real awakening, however, is to the folly of thinking that “fascism won’t eventually arrive at our door in the middle of the night.” She did not fully anticipate the Jan. 6 rebellion, but warns that it should disabuse us of any notion that Charlottesville might be a one-off. “Perhaps,” Baker surrenders in closing, “this is no longer my world to make sense of.”
CHARLOTTESVILLE: An American Story | By Deborah Baker | Graywolf | 442 pp. | $35
Kevin Sack writes investigative and narrative projects on a broad array of topics, including race, politics and faith.
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