“Virginia seemed like always night.” David Lynch

by Han VanderHart

“White violence costs; violence has a material legacy. The trauma we enact resides in the buildings and the soil, in our gene markers, our chronic pain.”

I grew up isolated, is how I wanted to begin this. But no—I grew up surrounded by queen anne’s lace and red sumac, wild blackberries and dewberries, flourishing by the fields and roadsides of rural Virginia. I grew up surrounded by my noisy six siblings, all of us homeschooled by my mother under Virginia’s religious exemption law. Still, although I didn’t know the term slow violence, it was in my bones, the soil, the history of the land as one of the original thirteen colonies, its universities thriving on enslaved labor and displaced Native peoples.

Trauma is rarely ever one thing—it touches communities, spreads like a cloud of contaminant in water. Throughout my childhood, my father deployed for months at a time overseas in the military—Korea, Kuwait, Iraq—and I felt this abandonment keenly, particularly when it meant facing and managing my mother’s untreated mental health and emotional, physical abuse, and caring for my younger siblings as a parentified older sibling. I was a child, eight years old, carrying and rocking my colicky, infant sister. I was
ten years old when my other, younger sister was born, in our house, upstairs, as we all were born.

Yet, even though I grew up on a small-scale farm, butchering chickens, deer, hogs, and accustomed to some level of animal violence, I wasn’t prepared for the sublimated violence of suburbia when I attended graduate school in Fairfax, Virginia—the seething expression you find in beltway traffic, the tamed, expressionless lawns and townhouses, as well as the inability to connect with the earth, which I also felt deeply, as I walked among the cement and cul-de-sac apartment complexes.

It was during a cold spring during my PhD, just before trauma therapy, when I began watching David Lynch’s films, and then reading his interviews. I was amazed to realize he had spent his teenage years in Fairfax, Virginia, where I had gone to school, and his observation, “Virginia seemed like always night” resonated with me. As much as I love the fields, the cedars, the creek I grew up beside, the land is death-haunted in Virginia, and that violence is overwhelmingly colonial—from the structure of the family, to the church and school and outward.

The college where I went to school, William and Mary, housed the Brafferton Indian School—and in the 1700s, the college could not get any local tribes to send their children to this school. After much trying and failure, eventually the first four students were purchased from Indian traders, who had acquired these traumatized child prisoners from the Catawba. I walked by the Brafferton building—now known as the Wren building—every day on my way to the English department; the Wren building was a bragworthy place to have a class, the oldest building on campus (completed in 1723). You could go sit where these four Native children sat and learned their grammar and Christianity, the memories of their families and histories gone the way of trauma and fractured narrative.

I never had a class in the Wren building, but all the old buildings on campus had a distinct, deathly smell and ghostly feel (it is a sense impression I recognize now in sundown towns), and I’m not the first person to note this. White violence costs; violence has a material legacy. The trauma we enact resides in the buildings and the soil, in our gene markers, our chronic pain. Acknowledgment of harm is a vital part of how we move forward, and this poem is a small contribution towards that acknowledgment.

Says the man out of whose mind night walks—
night must have climbed on his back in Virginia;
it threads the corn rows, that darkness;
it is in the barn, the animals’ hooves—
we used picks to dig it out, and no amount
of upturned horseshoes helped, the luck
pooled in the dark and we ran into things.
Starless, what’s inside the heart and also
the land: the dirt containing more
than nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur;
the oldest buildings smell of death,
the ghost tours full of spirits. Night is
in the wild carrot’s scarlet, pinpricked heart;
in the blackberry’s thorns, tearing your arms.

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. Their second poetry collection Larks, winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in April 2025 from Ohio University Press. Han is also the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has essays and poetry published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and alongside Amorak Huey co-edits the poetry press River River Books.

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