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.
The city speaks through its signs. Can you hear it? We Went Solar; So Can You. Mutt-urity Matters: Adopt or Foster an Adult Dog. Walking in the city, looping through the neighborhoods in the lemony, early autumn light, my eyes are open to the city’s voice, its remarks on the season, Give Thanks, Happy Fall Y’all, Happy Halloween, the gourds and pumpkins on porches adding their golden commentary, the yard decorations contributing their plastic bones, cobwebs, and gravestones murmuring R. I. P. and Trick or Treat. And in this election season, under the shade of the stirring, still-green leaves, Trump-Vance, Harris-Walz, Ben Cline, Kaine 2024, an anachronistic Trump 2020 sign, Biden-Harris with the Biden covered with duct tape, Javier for City Council, Re-Elect Deanna Reed. Lists of candidates for the school board with check marks beside their names. A chorus of voices, dissonant among pots of brightly-colored mums, in the weeds, propped against the garages, opinions and wishes and confessions, A Spoiled-Rotten Dog Lives Here, Black Lives Matter, Butterfly Crossing, Open for Prayer, Free Palestine, Hate Has No Home Here, Slow Your Roll, Home Sweet Home. There’s the board with three stripes of bold color proclaiming, in three different languages, No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor, a sign created right here in the Friendly City, which has now spread all over the country, and which we used to have in our own yard until it was torn down and ripped to pieces by persons unknown—one of a very few truly unfriendly incidents we’ve experienced here.
Our unfriendliest encounter was provoked by a sign. We had been to a small rally at the courthouse, and were walking home with some family friends, with our kids and their kids, who were in elementary and middle school at the time. My husband carried a homemade sign on his shoulder. As we passed the Capitol Ale House, one of the diners, seeing us through the window, became so enraged at the sight of our sign, he got up from his table and ran out the door to swear at us from across the street. We glanced at him and kept walking. The kids jumped up and down, beside themselves with excitement. “Did he say the f-word?” I remember being amazed at the passion of this man, strong enough to interrupt his dinner and send him hurtling out of the restaurant, undeterred by the presence of children. But he had heard the voice of our sign, and he answered it in his own way. His voice and ours, inextricably entangled, are tones in a larger wave of sound, the voice of the city itself—a motley pattern represented by the new mural on the public school building downtown, embodied in the multicolored leaves of the design created by local students and given the hopeful or maybe just descriptive title, “Intertwined.”
The city doesn’t need words to speak. It speaks in color, in painted buildings, in the flags on porches rippling out their rainbows, their stars and stripes. And doesn’t it speak in the yards themselves—not just their signs but their flowers, their mown or unmown grass, their neat borders or piles of debris? And what about the cars? I don’t speak car, myself—I have only the vaguest understanding of the dialect—but to someone the mere sight of this ancient Mustang parked in front of a house must mean something, and this truck, and this Prius plugged into the wall. The shiny cars, the grimy cars, the cars that limp through the streets bearing the wounds of honorable or dishonorable combat, the ramshackle car in a yard with a neighbor’s legs poking out from under it—all have a voice for those who can hear. And the cars speak, as well, with their vanity plates, so common you can tell this is a Virginia town, our personalized plates being the cheapest in the country, so that a single afternoon’s walk absorbs a cacophony of notes, proud, self-deprecating, funny, religious, mysterious: DUKE GAL, KLUMPY, KAFN8ED, PRVRB 31, LUC1FUR, GAKRAK, MRHOOD, DROP. And then there are the bumper stickers—Shop Local, Save the Bay, My boss is a Jewish carpenter, My kid beat up your honor student, Senior driver—please be patient, Some days you just have to create your own sunshine, and the venerable I Heart Dog Food Smell. Many of these stickers are found in lots of places, but each place, I reflect, watching the cars from the bridge on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, must have its own particular mixture of these ingredients, its unique anthology of bumper philosophy. The cars, whizzing past me, go on talking, adding their words to the voice of the city, succinctly—God Guns Trump—or at greater length: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” – George Orwell.
I once read that style is the outer manifestation of a method. Style is a way of doing. It’s the way you do your hair, your shopping, your chores. Leaving the bridge as evening falls, walking home on the west side of 42, I realize that the voice of the city also includes the personal style of its citizens, that elaborate visual language. All the hats, the tattoos, the yards of flannel. The comfortable shoes. The buzzcuts and dreadlocks. The young girls crossing the street in front of me, their hair pinned and glistening, wearing stiff flounced dresses, perhaps on their way to a quinceañera. The goth kid skipping up a driveway with a glee that contrasts starkly with a melancholy t-shirt reading Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. What would it take to hear the city’s voice in all its myriad reverberations? Outside a small house, some Mennonites in plain clothing stand gazing up at the sky, the women’s heads tilted back in little white caps, and I discover for the first time that plain people live here, something that immediately makes sense, considering the impeccably tidy style of their yard. They glance at me, smile, wave, and go back to watching the sky, on the lookout for some celestial phenomenon I’m not aware of, or waiting for the moon to emerge from the clouds, or reading the book of the stars—a text that strikes me, tonight, as only slightly more complex than the voice of the city.
