Day 25 – The Old South, Iconic Photos

Saturday, January 25, 2025

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has a photo exhibit that is closed this past weekend. I had been meaning to go and finally I did, on Friday. I tore myself away from whatever and got down there.

Wow. It’s actually two exhibits. One on Hungarian photographers. All of whom changed their names when they emigrated to the U.S. and the other exhibit entitled The Old South which has photos from before the Civil war through the Civil Rights marches in the 1960s and up to today. The newest photos are oftentimes color printed on canvas with what seems to be the equivalent of oil paint. It’s hard to know if it’s a photo or an oil painting.

There’s a lot to see and it’s exhausting, but wow. Many of the photos I easily recognized: Marilyn Monroe sitting on a beach, the dog attacking the Civil Rights marcher, the man at the moment he was shot in the Spanish Civil War … Iconic stuff, and the mundane, the odd, the supernatural.

There was a large photo print painting of a little girl standing on a dock. The dock was almost completely submerged. Only where the girl was standing was it above the dirty brown tan colored water. The rest was a forest of trees or a swamp. It was an overflowing stream. The water was this consistent dirty tan. It reminded me of much of the south.

There were many quotes about the South and how just below its surface lies something mean, sick, or evil. The hypocrisy, known, accepted and ignored. I know. At this point someone will want to defend it. It’s way of life, etc. The “Others do it too.” defense. Yeah, I get it. But the South has a special way of doing it. Let’s call it “We know it’s Bull, but it’s tradition.” 

I went back a second time on Saturday. This time with Shelby. One display had two frames of people. One frame had a young girl and an older woman. The other a young boy and an older man. The man looked familiar, but other than that I didn’t recognize them. I had passed the description by on the first visit. This time I didn’t. 

They were photos about the bombing of the church in Alabama that killed three children. The photos showed a young person at the age they were when they died, and what they would look like now, if they had lived.

Powerful stuff.

I had just turned thirteen when that bombing took place. It was the time of Selma. Our assistant minister Bob Hall went down there to be part of it. When he came back so did this new kid to the community, Prince Chamblis. I thought Rev Hall had brought him back. (Years later when I mentioned this to Prince he said no. He knew of Bob Hall, but he had nothing to do with it.) Prince was black. That, for Ridgefield Connecticut, where I grew up was very unusual. At that time, I knew of three black people: Joan and Janet Baker, and Booker. Booker was the sexton of our church. That a fancy way of saying he took care of the place. Joan and Janet were in my grade school classes. In the six years they were in school with me I never heard them say a word.

Pair this with the fact that Ridgefield had the strongest chapter of The John Birch Society and you’ll draw the conclusion (rightly) that black people weren’t entirely welcome. 

The first time I met Prince was at Great Pond, the local swimming  hole. At the time there were floats held up by 55 gallon drums. They stood three feet off the water and had a diving board on them. There were sturdy ladders to climb up onto the floats. This has now been replaced by low floating no ladder no diving board things – terrible.

The swimming test was to be able to swim out to the float. If you could do that, you were a swimmer, and no longer confined to the shallow water. Now you could go out to the float and then brave the diving board.

My brother and I had swum out to the float. Once you made it you could preen on the edge facing the shore and show off your muscles to the adoring fans. Okay, our mother and maybe Mrs. Thomas as the two of them would be gabbing.

Prince was already out at the float. I noticed three things about him. He was dark, darker than me. His butt stuck out, and he had the huge soft boiled egg eyes. You could see a blood vessel in the white of the eye. It was a darkish purple brown spidery line that ran almost vertically up one eyeball. (If you remember the actor Charles Laughton, that’s what Prince’s eyes reminded me of.)

We were quite the physical specimens, all three of us. Spindly armed, skinny standing in our little elastic suits. Prince stood between Rob and myself. I think we had said hello. Then we all turned to look at the shore. I was trying to think of something to say – anything. I remember reading the headline in The Danbury News Times (published four times a week) about a church bombing in Alabama and three or four girls being killed. 

It’s all I could think of in the solitude of the moment. “Hey,” I said, “Did you know those girls who died in that church bombing.”

I can still remember Prince turning his head slowly to look at me. (That’s probably when I saw the blood vessel.) Quietly, slowly, softly he said, “Yes.” He turned his head back to look at the shore.

What was there left to say?

I noticed our similarly spindly arms, his butt. I looked back to the shore.

This is when the civil rights movement came home for me.