The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 16

  Shuck leads me to a particularly heartbreaking monument in Evergreen. It lies away from the central area the workers have been clearing this morning. Trees and overgrown ivy surround the monument, and it’s difficult to negotiate. We climb over felled trunks and limbs; the final step includes a big jump down over a ledge. Not much is known of the Braxton family, though some of their descendants still live in Richmond. The narrow mausoleum was probably erected in the mid-1920s. Five coffins rest within. At some point, probably in the 1950s, the steel door was ripped off, and the caskets removed and desecrated. Someone ran an illegal still inside the mausoleum, Shuck tells me. You can still see smoke stains on the ceiling.

  The graveyard has a tendency to attract paranormal seekers. Shuck remembers finding odd string structures hung above and among the graves, telltale signs of hoodoo rituals. Vandals intruded for decades. Marijuana was grown on the property. It became, perversely, a destination for prostitution. Condom wrappers were a common find.

  IV.

  The volunteers are mighty busy. Within hours, an area at the center of the graveyard, radiating out from the Walker marker, looks as if it has always been well kept.

  “God called us to help fix it,” Marvin Harris tells me. “If the owners allow us to help fix it, it will get fixed.” The land is privately owned, and work came to a halt three years ago because of a dispute about using volunteers on private land. But that conflict was recently resolved. “For the average person with any type of heart,” Harris says, “I can’t see how they could not get involved.”

  I speak with some of the volunteers. Bud Funk is a seventy-one-year-old trial attorney. He joined in after hearing Harris speak to a local group. “Marvin gets inside your heart,” Funk says. The first time Funk saw the site years ago it was “daunting.” Now he not only volunteers his back and limbs, but also does legal work in partnership with Enrichmond, a nonprofit that supports the effort. Other members of the Maggie L. Walker High School class of 1967 here this day include civil servants, an executive chef, and family members of those buried here. “My grandfather,” one man tells me. “I would come by here before, looking, and all I could see was trash.”

  “No cemetery should fall into this type of landscape,” says John Baliles, a Richmond city councilman representing the First District. When I first spot him, he is doing battle with a long vine snaking its way about a large tombstone. “This will take a strong volunteer effort. But it is easier to preserve if you maintain it.”

  There’s a stark contrast between the acreage cleared this morning and the work yet to be done. Just within a copse of trees a dozen or more gravestones poke up from the grass and undergrowth. Clearing the area will require heavier equipment and skill. Shuck and Harris have been discussing bringing in a herd of goats to help, and inviting a different corporate sponsor each month to pay for them.

  V.

  A Virginia historian and business owner, Veronica Davis literally wrote the book about Richmond’s African American cemeteries, Here I Lay My Burdens Down, in 2003. Davis says the reclamation efforts began with a former National Park Service superintendent, Dwight Storke. Heartsick at these languishing sites of African American history, he spearheaded an attempt in the 1980s to have them cleared and restored. One part elbow grease, another part education, it started with a gathering of volunteers in celebration of Maggie Walker’s birthday. The initial volunteers removed fifteen truckloads of debris.

  Over the decades, a series of Parks officials and local organizations arranged cleanups, and in the late nineties Davis herself created a group, Virginia Roots, to continue the efforts, but it has been slow going. Family members and volunteers move away or die off, and the cemeteries have gone through a number of private owners through the years. Without a system of perpetual care or funding, the work is difficult to maintain. Nor is the situation at Evergreen unique. Migration of families to the North during Jim Crow, scanty records, and a lack of public and private funds for upkeep have all led to the neglect of other historic African American cemeteries across the region.

  “I thank God for this work every day,” Davis says. “We have to show our ancestors respect for what they have done. We’re talking about choices here, and we need to remember that one of the choices that the dead made was to fight for our freedom. Now we have another choice to make.”

  VI.

  Midday: the Tony Award–winning actress L. Scott Caldwell arrives, dressed to work. Caldwell plays a formerly enslaved woman named Belinda on the PBS historical drama Mercy Street, which is shot on location in Richmond and nearby Petersburg. The actress is known for taking her research seriously, and visits not only the local museums and historical societies, but also places and sites central to African American history. She had heard about the project on the morning news. “It was a question of doing what I can to become a part of the community,” she says. “Where we are, there I am.” She was haunted by the story of Julia Hoggett, who was born into slavery. Hoggett’s gravestone is tucked under a mighty oak, and kudzu threatens to overgrow it. Caldwell had read about this marker during her research, and was keen to see it in person. It reads:

  In Memory of my Mammy, Julia Hoggett 1849–1930

  She was born a slave and a slave she chose to remain.

  Slave to duty, a slave to love.

  Few people of any race or condition of life have lived so unselfishly, which is the same as saying so nobly.—LaMotte Blakely

  Who was LaMotte Blakely? Was he a white child Julia Hoggett raised? “This spoke to me in a literal way,” Caldwell says. She is referring partly to her character, who in her freedom chooses to be the good and faithful servant of a well-to-do white family. But it’s more than that—there is a humanity here, a complexity, a dignity. She’s less interested in the big names and monuments, she tells me, than in those workers with unsung lives whose secrets are interred with their bones. “I’m more intrigued by the unknown than the known,” she says. “This is history.”

  SAKI KNAFO

  Waiting on a Whale at the End of the World

  FROM Men’s Journal

  Above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, a half-day’s journey by snowmobile from the nearest paved road or tree, a village called Kivalina sits on a slip of permanently frozen earth bracketed by water—a lagoon on one side and the Chukchi Sea on the other. Every spring, when daylight returns to the village after months of darkness, people stand in the snow outside their storm-battered cabins and look out at the sea, hoping this will be the year.

  Some Alaskan villages catch a whale every year. Kivalina was never that lucky, partly because it occupies a spot on the coast that’s farther from the migratory path of the bowhead whale. Still, there was a time when villagers could reasonably expect to land a whale every three or four years. Those days are gone.

  Last March, as the bowheads were beginning to head north on their spring migration, I flew to the village to accompany a group of villagers on a quest to catch a whale. It had been twenty-one years since the last successful whale hunt, twenty-one years of futility and disappointment, and yet, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, the villagers hadn’t given up. When I asked Reppi Swan why they still did it—why they still risked their lives and spent so much of their time and money pursuing a goal that always eluded them—he was succinct. “It’s who we are,” he said.

  Reppi is one of the village’s nine whaling captains. He’s forty-two. He has a copper tan shaded black on the cheekbones from frostbite, and the kind of ropy physique you get from chopping wood and shoveling snow. His jaw starts just below his ears and narrows sharply, giving him a wolfishly handsome look despite the fact that he has lost all his teeth. If you’re a whaling captain in an Eskimo whaling village, you’re a big deal, something like the coach of a small-town Texas football team. But Reppi doesn’t carry himself like anything special. He never brags. He doesn’t say much more than he has to. When I first spoke to him on the phone from New York, I nervously pressed him for advice on what to
wear. What kind of boots? How many layers? “Bring your warm stuff,” he said.

  A different sort of man might have a hard time coping with life in Kivalina. Outsiders who spend time in the village sometimes feel as though they’ve traveled in time to some not-too-distant future in which the government has finally imploded after years of dysfunction, leaving the people to fend for themselves, like Mad Max but with snowmobiles. In most of the houses, the toilet is a bucket. Kivalina’s 468 residents have no running water, so Reppi drives his Polaris 550 snowmobile to the town pump twice a week to fill a pair of 55-gallon garbage bins for the family. The people of Kivalina have become as reliant as the rest of us on certain perks of modernity—smartphones, stupid TV—even as they lack many of the things we take for granted. There are no restaurants or coffee shops in the village, no libraries or fitness centers, no police officers. The homes are as crowded as the tenement apartments of the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century. In the village store, the Pepsi boxes are stacked halfway to the ceiling, but there is no dentist or doctor within a hundred miles. There are no roads connecting Kivalina to anywhere else.

  If you don’t have a snowmobile or an ATV, the only way to get to and from Kivalina is by boat or on one of the nine-seat planes that touch down on the airstrip most days. The closest neighboring village, Noatak, lies fifty miles inland. To travel there for basketball tournaments, young people from Kivalina ride their snowmobiles or ATVs over the tundra and through the mountains. The island once served only as a staging area for the whale hunt that took place, as it still does today, each spring. In the early 1900s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs came and built a school and told people they would get thrown in jail unless they sent their kids there year-round to learn English. So the people gave up the nomadic ways that had sustained them for generations and moved into a permanent settlement on the island. Punished, sometimes physically, for speaking their native Inupiat in school, children who grew up in that era became parents who hesitated to speak Inupiat to their children. But one Inupiat word everyone still uses is tammaq, to lose or to get lost. People in Kivalina have lost many things, big and small—boats, gloves, much of the Inupiat language itself.

  Someday soon the villagers may lose their homes. Over the last decade, as the oceans have grown warmer, storms have been hurling powerful waves onto the island, causing the land to gradually wash away. The villagers have been trying to relocate for years, but none of the relevant government agencies have agreed to foot the estimated $400 million it would require. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that Kivalina has about ten years before it disappears.

  Many of the villagers seem to think it’s too late to save Kivalina or, for that matter, the world. Spend enough time on the island and you’ll hear about the inugaqalligauraq, a primitive race of superstrong little people said to be hiding in the Alaskan bush, armed with bows and arrows, their bodies and minds uncorrupted by exposure to gasoline, Pepsi, and reality TV. “The elders say when the world ends, when Jesus comes, these little people will come back,” one middle-aged woman told me. “And people have been seeing them around, here and there.”

  Whatever’s coming to Kivalina—whatever’s coming to all of us—the villagers may be better equipped to deal with it than most. The values Eskimo culture advocates and teaches—cooperation, vigilance, an ability to improvise under duress—have allowed its people to withstand some of the harshest conditions on earth. In the old days, a stranded hunter could build a makeshift sled out of only caribou skins, fish, and water, rolling the fish tight in wet skins so that the rolls would freeze solid and could then be used as sled runners. Reppi, for one, seems to long for those days. “I think I would have loved to live back then,” he told me one evening, “but we’re too used to modern conveniences.” As if to illustrate his point, three of his kids were huddled over a phone, ignoring the reality show playing on the TV. “They discovered the movies on my phone,” he said, shaking his head. “Now I never see it.”

  To catch a whale, Eskimo hunters hitch their sleds and a small boat to their snowmobiles. Then they travel over the ice that stretches across the sea for miles. They head out in the spring, when the plates of ice begin to break apart, and drive until they come to a crack or a channel—an uiniq. There they set up a big canvas tent and wait—for days, sometimes weeks—ready to jump into the boat, harpoon gun loaded, at the first glimpse of a whale coming up for air.

  There are countless ways to get killed doing this. You could drive over thin ice and fall in. Your harpoon gun could jam and explode in your face. You could get too close to a walrus, a whale, a polar bear. One teenager told me a story about ambushing a sleeping walrus from a boat. As the gun went off, the boat’s motor died, leaving him and his uncles to watch helplessly as the wounded walrus streaked toward them through the water and rammed a hole in the bow, snapping off a tusk. They managed to restart the engine in the nick of time and quickly piled into the stern, driving home with the damaged bow raised just above the waves.

  A whaling captain is responsible for the safety of the men and women in his crew. This calls for the equivalent of an advanced degree in the ancient Eskimo art of survival. Reppi began whaling with his father, a captain, when he was five and inherited the position only five years ago. Before he could prove himself worthy of the job, he had to learn all about the seven types of ice and how the combinations of wind and current affect them. He had to learn that if the crew got stranded on the ice pack, they should always walk east, using the stars as their guide, and that if they encountered a sleeping walrus, they could talk as loud as they wanted but never whisper because it would wake it up. He had to learn how to draw on his knowledge as danger closed in, weighing the pros and cons of each possible course of action before making a last-second decision that could save people’s lives.

  Judging when it’s safe to be on the ice is one of the most difficult decisions a captain has to make. Over the last two decades, the same forces that have been eating away at the island have been causing the sea ice to melt away earlier and earlier in the season, shrinking the window of opportunity for whaling from about two months to a couple of weeks. Last year, Reppi’s crew stayed out too long and had to race back to land at full speed as a powerful wind began to tear the sheet of ice where they’d been camping from the shore. If they hadn’t made it off in time, they might have ended up in Siberia.

  This year, at the start of the season, climate change seemed to be working in Reppi’s favor for once. When I called him in early March, he said a channel had opened in the ice right outside of town, something he couldn’t remember happening so early before. His voice rose with excitement as he told me that someone flying overhead had actually seen a whale. His crew just had to get the gear ready, and then they’d head out on the hunt.

  I made plans to arrive in Kivalina in late March and stay for a little less than a month. I assumed I would spend most of that time out on the ice with the hunters as they tried to land their first whale in more than twenty years. But in Kivalina, as I would soon learn, it is pointless, perhaps even foolish, to make many assumptions about the future. As Reppi put it, “Something always comes up.”

  The first delay came up before I even arrived. Days before my departure, Reppi told me that there had been a death in the village. We’d have to stick around at least until the funeral, he said. Reppi, the whaling captain, is also the village gravedigger.

  Five days after, I watched mourners stream into the church, past the young man lying in an open casket. Friends and family stood before the congregation and spoke of the boy’s passion for traditional Eskimo dancing, his caring nature. No one said anything of how he died until one of his uncles, staring out at the crowd, confessed that he, too, once tried to take his own life. “And for what?” he shouted hoarsely, his raw voice ricocheting against the bare walls of the church. There was a heavy silence as the mourners waited for him to go on. When he spoke again, all he said was, “You have to live.”

&nbs
p; When Eskimos talk about “the whale,” they mean only one kind: the bowhead. Every spring the bowhead’s northward migration heralds the return of life to the Arctic after months of some of the most inhospitable weather on Earth. When hunters kill one, the whole village drags it onto the ice and butchers it. Then everyone feasts and parties for three days straight. The meat, skin, and blubber of a single whale, divided among the hunters and friends and family in accordance with a set of age-old guidelines, can feed a village for more than two months. Almost every part of the sixty-ton animal is used. (The head is returned to the sea so that the animal’s spirit can live on.)

  According to the traditions of some Eskimo groups (Inupiat is a more historically accurate term, but people in Kivalina usually refer to themselves as Eskimo), the whale operates on a higher plane of intelligence and spirituality than most human beings. When you see pictures of the powerful animal, with its deep frown and small, sad-looking eyes, it’s hard not to feel that this is true on some level. Not long ago, biologists examining a dead bowhead found old harpoon fragments buried in its flesh. Research revealed that the harpoon was of a kind last manufactured in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century. The scientists conjectured that bowheads can live for up to 200 years. In other words, some of the whales still undulating through the icy waters off Alaska may have already been fully grown by the time Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick. Today, international law allows Eskimo whaling crews to catch a limited number of bowheads each year.