Rumors of War

Photos CC-BY Michael Peter Edson, 2020

Edit: Back when I wrote this in February, 2020, three years into the Trump presidency and also a thousand years ago, I couldn’t imagine the spark that would finally cause our communities to erupt in violence. The anger and justification were there in our hearts, but what would it take to light the flame? And now, as Ezra Klein wrote, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder: We weren’t there, and then, all of a sudden, we were. –Mike, June 3, 2020

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Something that fascinates me about Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War is the idea that Wiley’s sculpture makes an end-run around established battle lines regarding the preservation or removal of monuments to Confederate Civil War leaders.

On one hand, many argue that such statues should be removed because they celebrate and ennoble racism and slavery (many of the statues were commissioned as part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate African Americans during our Jim Crow era in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries); while others argue that removing the statues is tantamount to erasing history.

In 2017 alone, Baltimore removed its monument to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the dead of night; New Orleans did so in public, for reasons eloquently described by mayor Mitch Landrieu (“Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart…”); Charlottesville, Virginia, which saw violent protests around the issue in 2017, has still not removed its statues of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson though the city council voted to do so over two years ago.

But Rumors of War takes the debate in another direction by changing the way we see the statues in the first place.

Wiley’s monument sits in a place of honor outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: immense, powerful, relevant, and shocking.

“As a lifelong Richmonder, born and raised, I am overwhelmed with what this means. To see somebody with the shoes that look like people of Richmond, the hoodies that look like people of Richmond, to be such a contrast. I’m excited. I’m terrified,” a local radio host told journalist Kriston Capps.

As Capps reported, “Wiley seemed to endorse the approach of building new statues rather than removing old ones. ‘I say don’t tear down the house,’ he said, ‘even though it’s ridiculous, even though all this chest-beating is symptomatic of a broader illness. We can compose poetry of broken bones.’”

A few blocks away from Wiley’s sculpture, on a barren traffic island at the intersection of Arthur Ashe Boulevard (named for the trailblazing African American tennis star) and Monument Avenue (named for its many monuments to Virginia veterans of the Civil War) sits a monument to Stonewall Jackson. Jackson’s memorial was erected in 1915 at the height of Jim Crow.

After I saw Rumors of War, cast in 2019, with its young, powerful rider wearing jeans and a hoodie and straining at the stirrups in Nike high tops, Jackson and his horse looked isolated to me — skinny, tired, and defeated. Left behind as a footnote while the real work of society carries on somewhere else.

I believe in civic discourse. I believe that we need to practice the long and patient process of talking to each other and making shared decisions even when, especially when, we disagree. But I also believe in the deft and unexpected move, the ninja move, the lightning bolt, the stroke of insight that can emerge from anywhere, at any time, to break through the static and force us to see where and who and what we are — and what might be possible if we think and work in new ways.