inescapable; coverage of Smith was nonexistent. (Eisenberg told me that she tried twenty-eight outlets before finding one that would publish the piece.) Alexis Murphy, a seventeen-year-old black girl who went missing near Charlottesville in 2013, also received a minimum of press coverage. When a white man named Randy Taylor was found guilty of murdering her, his pale, gaunt face was mostly absent from the news. But Matthew—his dark skin, his full lips, his thick locs—was everywhere you looked.
Charlottesville’s history of gendered violence and its history of racial violence, long intertwined, were emerging. A vast undercurrent of trauma and inequity was welling up. Women’s bodies have always been test sites upon which governing hierarchies are broken down and reiterated. In the nineteenth century, black men convicted of rape in Virginia got the death penalty, where white men were imprisoned for ten to twenty years. In the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia citizens became very concerned about the rape of white women—but almost exclusively in cases when the accused were black.
Violence against women is fundamentally connected to other systems of violence. Though Erdely tried, it’s not possible to capture the reality of rape—or even of fraternities—at UVA without writing about race. When I left Charlottesville that January, I kept thinking about a damning fact that a grad student named Maya Hislop had told me, a fact that had not surfaced either in Rolling Stone or in the exhaustive coverage that followed it: UVA’s first reported rape occurred in 1850, when three students took an enslaved girl into a field and gang-raped her.
UVA was founded in 1819, by a seventy-six-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who retired from politics to Monticello, his Virginia plantation, and dedicated himself to what at the time was a radical vision: a secular public university that would be accessible to all white men, regardless of whether they were rich or poor. Today, the Thomas Jefferson cult is intrinsic to the UVA experience. Jefferson is frequently, and creepily, referred to as “TJ,” or as “Mr. Jefferson.” My full ride to UVA came from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. The school enthusiastically celebrates Jefferson’s ingenuity, his integrity, his rebelliousness, his vocabulary. When I was in college, every Valentine’s Day, flyers blanketed the campus with Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings depicted in cameo silhouette, and the cutesy slogan “TJ ♥s Sally” below that.
Sally Hemings was thirty years younger than Jefferson, and she was an infant when she became his property, courtesy of his wife, Martha. Hemings was Martha’s slave, and her half sister; she was three quarters white. When she was fourteen, she was put in charge of one of Jefferson’s daughters on an overseas voyage. Jefferson met them in Paris, and by the time he left, Hemings was sixteen and pregnant. (At the time, the age of consent in Virginia was ten.) Hemings considered staying in Paris, where the French freedom principle had emancipated her by default. But, according to her son Madison, Jefferson persuaded her to return by promising her “extraordinary privileges,” and assuring her that he would free her children once they turned twenty-one.
In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson muses that blacks are “much inferior” to whites in their critical capacities, and that the obvious inferiority of black people is “not the effect merely of their condition of life.” It may have been because of these views, not in spite of them, that Hemings, a light-skinned ladies’ maid, appeared particularly attractive. The relationship was an open secret. In 1818, the Richmond Recorder wrote, “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.” But Jefferson never commented, and so the story was suppressed. (One of his grandchildren wrote in a letter, “I would put it to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable in his domestic character as Mr. Jefferson…would be likely to rear a race of half-breeds….There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.”) He did free Hemings’s children before he died, but not Hemings herself, who was freed by Jefferson’s daughter in 1834. In 1835 she died, and was buried in an unmarked grave that likely lies under a parking lot near the Hampton Inn in downtown Charlottesville. Jefferson, of course, is buried at Monticello, along with his descendants—the white ones.
In 1987, Monticello was designated, along with the UVA campus, as a UNESCO World Heritage