By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
She sits on an island between two streams of traffic, where Liberty Street and Main Street converge. Three flags rise above her. Bronze, sad-eyed, she extends her arms in a gentle, open posture, her head slightly bowed, compassionate, contemplative, and resigned. Leaves of palm and laurel rest lightly in her hands. A sword and rifle lean in the crook of her arm, against the flowing folds of her dress. A soldier’s helmet hangs from the scroll that unfurls from her right hand, on which forty-nine names are inscribed. The pedestal beneath her reads: They tasted death in youth that liberty might grow old / 1917 World War 1918. As with many statues, her gaze has something vaguely uncanny about it, sightless, unchanging. She is one hundred years old this month.
Her official title is Liberty, but the Friendly City knows her as Lady Liberty. Dark and graceful, she seems inked against the full summer green of the trees and the pallid, smoky gouache of the sky. The white spire of the Baptist church hangs behind her like a streak of chalk. If you entered our town from the south, you might think this one image summed up the essence of the place: the sober war memorial, the soaring steeple. The conjunction suggests a provincial spot with a somewhat defensive attitude, its focus turned inward toward its own small community concerns, its ventures in the outside world predominantly military.
In his impressive book Picturing Harrisonburg—a monument in itself, richly illustrated with images of the city since 1828, which belongs in the library of anyone obsessed with the Friendly City—the historian David Ehrenpreis discusses the term “sites of memory.” Such sites, which include historical landmarks and public statues like Lady Liberty, are “elements drawn from a community’s past,” he writes, “that take on symbolic importance and come to represent its values.” Sites of memory are important for their ability to preserve a sense of history and develop collective relationships to place, but, Ehrenpreis warns, they never tell the whole story. He and the other contributors to his book seek to explore “this gap between the real, lived experience and an imagined, aspirational ideal.”
As I cross the street to the statue and climb the steps to walk in the garden, a tiny oasis elevated above the asphalt, it’s not the gap between the real and the ideal that preoccupies me but the strange dissonance within the image itself. How odd that the combination of this statue and a church steeple should create a closed and insular impression. You could just as easily see them as representations of the Friendly City’s links to distant places and times. Lady Liberty’s sandals and Greco-Roman drapery, the cross on the steeple—these are visual cues toward the classical and later monotheistic cultures of the Mediterranean. One of the six African-American dead mentioned on her memorial scroll is John Billhimer, who was buried in France. Of African ancestry, he lived an American life until the age of twenty-four; now his grave lies in Europe. By crystallizing a moment of the past, a site of memory can spark thoughts that range far beyond its surface simplicity, taking me from this garden of moss and heat-withered coneflowers to a sweeping historical arc that covers half the globe. And because I am a walker, I think also of other Friendly City walkers, of those who set out from our town a week ago, who are even now marching to the capital on a 135-mile antiwar protest march. A walk is in some ways the opposite of a monument: fluid rather than static, timebound rather than enduring. But this walk also shares certain qualities with a site of memory, as if such a site could be located in time instead of space. Like a physical monument, the walk takes on symbolic importance; it comes to represent the values of a community; it reflects the links between the local setting and the wider world; and it brings to light, painfully, in a meditation prolonged over many miles, the gap between the real and the ideal. Standing under the blank and sorrowful gaze of Lady Liberty, I think of the words of Ben Ridder, treasurer of the Dayton American Legion, the group that raised the statue and recently paid for its restoration—words often spoken, which have lost none of their force. “It was supposed to be the war to end all wars.”
Memory is notoriously mobile and unpredictable at the individual level; it also shifts, David Ehrenpreis reminds us, at the collective level: “we continuously adapt and shape our own imaginings of the essential characteristics of a significant place.” Walking home, I pass several sites of memory, identified by informational markers that gather tangled, iridescent threads of history. There is the pillared municipal building that was once a Confederate General Hospital, overflowing with the sick and wounded from two armies as the city rapidly changed hands. There is the quaint brick visitors center, once the home of the city’s first mayor, where an enslaved woman named Fanny—one of our history’s most intriguing characters—cooked for the Union Army’s General Sheridan in exchange for a share of food which she carried to wounded Confederate soldiers at the hospital, after which she left for freedom in Sheridan’s train. And there is, at the courthouse, the marker of the horrific lynching of Charlotte Harris. Sites of memory, sites of mourning, sites of speculation that send me searching, when I get home, for the biography of Charles Keck, the sculptor of Lady Liberty, discovering threads that link the Friendly City to other places touched by this artist’s hand, such as nearby Charlottesville, where Keck made the statue of Stonewall Jackson removed from the city in 2021, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, home of Keck’s Amicitia or Statue of Friendship, which the U. S. presented to Brazil as a centenary gift, and Brooklyn, New York, where the imposing façade of the Brooklyn Museum honors the wisdom of the world from ancient Greece to China, featuring sculptures representing Hebrew psalms, Persian philosophy, Indian literature, and Roman law, as well as Keck’s contribution, The Genius of Islam.
