Downtown Mall

The eight-block stretch of a pedestrian-only street doesn’t just serve as the epi-center of Charlottesville’s urban life. But it has become a place of sanity for me, especially during the pandemic. For those three years, I felt trapped in the confines of my zoom square. In meetings, I was seen as no more than a participant. I didn’t feel seen, not even in public spaces where the thrills of human interaction were reduced to seeing moving masks in conversation. My way of escaping this overwhelming feeling of loneliness was going to the Downtown Mall, whether that be a late-night run to the Soul Food Joint with my friends or a long stroll with my family on a Saturday afternoon. I could go to a lively concert at the Pavilion or disappear into the book stacks of my favorite bookshop.

Included is the sound of what made me feel connected to a community at a time when I felt like I was going through the motions in life—the soulful lived-in voice of a street musician, faint chatter of couples hand in hand, the boisterous laughter of college kids, the determined voice of someone haggling with a street vendor, the pitter-patter of tiny feet outside the ice cream shop.

The mall has long been a gem of quaint, small-town life, but it is also a site of the community’s fears and dark past. We can all think back to 2017 when violence erupted between white nationalists and counter-protestors who were gathered for a rally over plans to remove the Robert E. Lee statue. The news of this happening in the neighborhood hit even closer to home when I saw my friend lying on a stretcher on the cover of a news site. She was one of the ones who was injured when a car rammed into a crowd of peaceful protestors downtown. I will never forget the fear on her face as she desperately looked around for help. At the time, she was 15 years old. I never saw her after again after the traumatic incident.

This was not the first time racial upheaval occurred from exclusion in Charlottesville. As part of an urban renewal initiative in the early 1960s, the city demolished over 150 black-owned businesses and homes in the historically black neighborhood, Vinegar Hall (falling in between the downtown shopping district and UVA campus), in the name of “progress.” Those who were displaced were left to cope with the trauma of losing their communities and homes, resulting in huge financial burdens that followed them for the rest of their lives. Today, it’s so easy to be fascinated by the string lights connecting buildings downtown or the swanky jazz music playing from a high-end restaurant on the strip, while forgetting the community’s original inhabitants who now are mostly pushed into the city’s housing projects.

Although torches held by “Unite the Right” protestors haven’t come back and Vinegar Hill seems to be of the past now, the effects of racial violence and residential segregation are still felt by Charlottesville’s black community. This reminded me of the historical trauma experienced by Indigenous people, who have also been displaced since European contact. Charlottesville’s black community can take a lesson from Nathaniel Vincent Mohatt, who proposes historical trauma as a public narrative. He reframes the discussion of historical trauma from a search for historical explanation toward recognition of contemporary experiences of historical trauma.