As I fill bucket after bucket with ripe Victoria plums I listen to a BBC World Service report from Charlottesville, Virginia.  Eleven years ago we celebrated my 50th birthday with a trip to Washington to attend the bar mitzvah of the grandson of a dear friend.  We spent the Sabbath in the suburbs of Maryland and then a sightseeing day in the capital city where we stood at the feet of the gigantic statue of Abraham Lincoln and later read some of the thousands of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  We blagged our way into the Washington Holocaust Museum (we hadn’t booked tickets but they took pity on us) and ended the day watching a ballet of the story of the Golem before heading back to our hosts.  We then set out on a middle aged road trip which took us along the blue ridge parkway where we sang the song, “the blue ridge mountains of Virginia” at the top of our voices, to Asheville in North Carolina and finally to Charlotte where we caught a flight to Miami to stay with friends Bonnie and Stephen.  The university town of Asheville provided a memorable morning when we sat in a public courthouse watching shackled prisoners in orange jump suits paraded before a southern drawling judge.  He terrified the life outta me so what he did to the chained men I can only imagine.   We had a narrow escape with the law when, on the highway, we were pulled over by an unsmiling traffic cop in a cop car, all lights and sirens blazing.  We had been speeding (but not drinking) and Jeremy had to put his hands on the wheel “sir” and step out of the car.  It was a scene from a movie which ended, luckily, with only a ticket and fine to be paid before we could hope to enter America again.  We paid the money from the UK but have not tried our luck with the US of A since then.  So where does Charlottesville fit into my middle aged road trip?  It was our first stop on the drive from Washington to Charlotte and we had planned to spend the night and two days sightseeing and celebrating the festival of Purim with the Jewish community  – which included a fair number of students studying at the beautiful of University of Virginia.  We took a tour of Monticello, the hilltop home of one of the founding fathers of America, Thomas Jefferson, who was also the author of the Declaration of Independence.   I had not know that the independence was not for his many slaves who worked to build and run his magnificent house and lands nor the beautiful University that he founded in the city of Charlottesville.

Below is part of the campus of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and above is the house partly built and maintained by Jefferson’s slaves.

It was my ignorance and my shock to discover that Jefferson “owned” slaves and I was uncomfortable in his beautiful Monticello where I felt the misery behind the facade of elegance and civility and the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creators, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” from his Declaration of Independence.  I now watch and listen with great sadness to the reports of the Far Right demonstrators  in Charlottesville and the tragic death and injuries of those who oppose them. Charlottesville – a historic and memorable and beautiful place where the rights of man (and woman) are being challenged by men who seek to preserve and adulate a way of life that ignored and rode roughshod over the rights of so many in years gone by.  I wish them peace and reconciliation but, as I peacefully fill my pail with plums, I am not hopeful.