Lucky Girl
August 13, 2023
Route 40, or Kenbridge Road (locally pronounced Kem-bridge), used to be the prettiest approach to Blackstone, Virginia. At least that’s what we thought, but of course we lived on Kenbridge Road. Coming into town from the west, you passed one pleasant farm scene after another, red barns, white fences, well-tended fields, and the last place before hitting the city limits belonged to Frank and Marie Chambers. Frank was a quiet, gentle farmer fellow who always seemed in awe of his fireplug wife Marie who was about 4’11,” had a laugh like Phyllis Diller and very definite opinions. When she was my brother’s sixth-grade teacher, the story goes that she told him one day: “Walker, you know good and well the difference between good and well.” Well. He certainly did after that. Back then when someone asked you how you were, the accepted response was: “I’m well. Thank you,” instead of today’s “I’m good.” But don’t get me started.
Their house, modest enough, sat back off the road at the end of a long tree-lined lane, with a huge expanse of pasture that stretched back to the tobacco barns. That pasture was a beauty. When the grass was tall and the wind blew and the sun danced on it, it looked the ocean, like a living being. As a child, I would look out at it as we passed by in the car, just mesmerized by it. When I was older, I would ride my horse down the road just to gallop her around that gorgeous open field. What a feeling that was.
Down a dirt road past the tobacco barns on the Chambers place, as often was the case in this part of the country, was a decrepit tenant house, where Maggie and her family lived. Maggie did some occasional ironing for Mama, and was missing most of her teeth. Our family, like every family back then with a garden, had too much zucchini which we were always trying to give away and Maggie thought it was hilarious to say “Give me some of that bikini.” (zucchini) Which made Mama laugh every single time. Of course, Mama would giggle until she practically fell down if you just farted. And Maggie seemed to enjoy making Mama laugh. Not too many years later, Maggie died in the fire when her house burned down.
But all that history is gone now. There’s no sign left of the Chambers, of their beautiful field, of the people who worked the tobacco and lived in shacks.
That sea of grass on the Chambers farm is now a sea of concrete, a parking lot for Wal-Mart and every other fast food and chain store that tags along with Wal-Mart, like the kids who want to play with big guys. I’m glad Daddy didn’t live to see that. He used to say, “I don’t know how the earth can breathe, covered up in concrete.”
Of course, Wal-Mart did to my hometown what it did to every other small town in America. I don’t need to tell you what that was. But there’s a whole generation and half at this point who don’t remember an America without Wal-Mart. But I can tell you it was better.
So, I was skeptical when on a cross-country road trip dodging climate cataclysms, a friend suggested I put off returning to the hell that is and ever shall be Texas by taking a side trip to Bentonville, Arkansas to see the Crystal Bridges Museum founded by none other than a Walton, and not the Waltons of “goodnight John Boy” fame— those other ones. You know the ones that live in a compound somewhere in Arkansas that will survive a nuclear blast while the rest of us are atomized after spending our lives buying cheap stuff from Wal-Mart that breaks and can’t be repaired and took jobs from Americans. I know you didn’t ask, but there it is.
With the Crystal Bridges Museum, Alice Walton, only daughter of Sam Walton, has created something amazing, I grudgingly admit, a magnificent museum of American art on 160 acres and five miles of trails. There’s even a Frank Lloyd Wright house that was taken apart piece by piece somewhere in New Jersey and moved here and re-assembled piece by piece. And it’s free. I started out day one at the Frank Lloyd Wright house and then worked my way slowly through the Diego Rivera special exhibit. After that, I was full. But not like you feel after a big meal, but how you feel after a really good movie or theatre piece or book. I realized how very little I know about American art. I was constantly drawing and making art as a child, and I had this dream that I’d grow up to be an animator for Disney. But my favorite art was a grab bag of the Dutch Masters (not the cigars) including Vermeer of course; I loved all that exquisite interior light. Also Pieter Brueghel, Marc Chagall, and Winslow Homer thrown in as the token American.
I was humbled by the immensity of the place and the incredible expression of American artists from colonial times until now, and my massive ignorance of it all. But the magical thing was I was reminded of how much I love art, how much I am energized and provoked by it. Day Two I moved on to Modern Art and that’s where I REALLY realized how clueless I am. But fun, so much fun. And I’d never been to a museum by myself. Honestly, I was good company. But the art was the best company.
Alice Walton gave this museum to America. Or at least the ability to look at the art in it for free. Does this make up for her family destroying small town America? Hell, no. Does it justify her being worth $64 billion as a result of having done that? I don’t think so. ,m Would I rather have that beautiful field of grass at the Chambers place than the Wal-Mart? You bet I would.
But I didn’t think about any of that while I was in the museum. I was too busy discovering things I’d never seen before and being astonished by the range of vision and imagination and daring creativity of American artists through the centuries.
As for the field on the Chambers farm, I can still go there in my mind. I can put myself there on my horse and gallop across that field, hear the sound of her hooves, feel the air rushing by me, and be grateful I was a girl lucky enough to ride in a field not yet covered in concrete, one still covered in grass and dirt and wildflowers, all those things that helped the earth to breathe in the world before Wal-Mart. And I am grateful I can remember that world.
©2023 Joy Cunningham