Pirates — that 18th century image of a tricorne hat, eyepatch, and a pistol — may not always have a hold on children, but for my own they have kicked open a door toward history, counting money, writing and current events.
How else do you explain helicopters hauling away another country’s president in the night? What’s a more sensical way of describing the behavior of government officials disappearing people off the street?
The couple that owned Mitchem’s Shoe Repair and Alterations in Carytown were recently forced to “self-deport” to South Korea, leaving behind the storefront as another instant museum to this administration’s cruelty. Walking by that emptiness was a tangible way of explaining a presidency run as piracy.
Over winter break (the first one) my family took a first trip to Colonial Williamsburg. For all of Richmond’s deep history, much of it is hidden in plain sight. The Disneyland feel Williamsburg brings is, of course, by careful design, and maybe a little easier on a parent to present to a 6-year-old.
As we strolled along a carefully manicured path, with signs reading “Historic Area Ahead,” I thought of Bill Martin and a windshield tour of Boulevard he narrated several years ago. The longtime director of the Valentine Museum and Cultural Center, Martin regularly offered walking tours of the city. He peeled back nondescript buildings and empty lots that some had hoped would keep history buried.
Driving with him along Boulevard was not his usual tour method, but we had a lot of ground to cover quickly. Every 10 yards, something connected to something else. Decades, ideologies, everything smashed into one another.
Cruising around with him in July 2019 past places like the Daughters of the Confederacy, he had no definitive thesis for what was about to happen, but the energy he alluded to was palpable. Ten months later a molotov cocktail sailed through it, and Martin was busy collecting history as it happened.
On a daily basis, for more than three decades, Martin made the case that white Richmonders curating history had a deeper duty than just preserving Robert E. Lee’s boots. Among many ways he’d done so, he helped carve out a small corner of 14th and Cary to honor some of Richmond’s own Revolutionary era history as a location for the First Freedom Center, honoring Virginia’s role in establishing the right to religious freedom.
That busy corner attached to a hotel can be a difficult place to imagine tricorne hats and Thomas Jefferson. Martin’s magic was reeling you in regardless of where you were. And it extended to people of all ages – including an ability to explain a complex and evolving history to children.
But here I was in Williamsburg, for the first time since my own childhood, standing with a 6-year-old in a tricorne hat, when the news of what happened to Martin came in just above the tour passes I was swiping for.
Martin’s loss still hits deeply as someone suddenly taken for no reason, and as someone who at 71 was a vital connector across art, community, and anyone practicing history on a block-by-block basis. There was no reason not to imagine him doing that work another 20 years.
Wandering among an exhibit Martin curated at the Valentine at their Feb. 7 open house in his honor, his own curatorial mind is suddenly its own memorial. Richmond’s story told in brief slices — a Chicken Fiesta hat, a Robert E. Lee/Marcus David Peters Circle basketball hoop — all spoke to his general statement of intent, printed on cards by Studio Two Three: “You can’t do history and sit on the sidelines.”
He leaves behind objects and a worldview that have inspired many.
Richmond Public Schools will reportedly roll out this year a history project undertaken with Martin aimed at exploring the district’s history. Studio Two Three, whom he had championed for years, has put forward another idea inspired by Martin:
Hang the Mitchem’s Shoe Repair sign at the Valentine.
Tom Nash is a former Style Weekly reporter and proxy for FOIA nonprofit MuckRock (https://www.muckrock.com/). He shares writing duties for the On Parenting column with his wife, Catherine MacDonald, a gerontologist who studies growing up in modern society as part of her job at Virginia Commonwealth University (though her views do not represent her employer).
