Lexington, Virginia

   At 4:30 on a Friday afternoon in November, the cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, formed in their companies, emerge from their barracks and march onto the parade ground for the viewing of their superior officers and visiting dignitaries and the handful of families who have driven in for the weekend from one Southern town or another.  The families sit on the small sets of bleachers or stand by the thin rope at the edge of the parade ground, holding their cameras and asking each other, “Do you see him?  Can you see him?  Can you see which one is him?”  They can’t tell which one is him, which is rather the point of this place -- the transformation of the individual into a part of the greater, gray whole.  All you see is the company or the corps, the force that has been assembled before you. 

   Next door to VMI, literally, is the campus of Washington & Lee University, where the young men and women live not in barracks but in grand fraternity and sorority houses and where at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon they are mustering at their BMWs and Volkswagen Jettas and all the other fine cars that will take them up to Washington or down to Charlottesville or wherever else this weekend’s adventure might be.  

   On a Saturday morning in November, a second-year law student at W&L drives me down to the airport in Richmond.  He went to W&L as an undergrad, too, and yet, deep into his sixth year here in Lexington, he has never stopped by to watch the VMI cadets on parade.  Worse, he somehow does not even know that the cadets do this each Friday and Saturday afternoon.  

   “You should do this,” I say.  “At least once.  It is so traditional, so historic, so different from what is going on right next door at your school.” 

   “I don’t know,” he says.  “We don’t go over to VMI.  We wouldn’t feel welcome there.”

   And there you have the South.  Right there.  Two groups of kids, living right next door to each other, not merely not mixing, but not even knowing what each other is doing and sure – nonetheless – that they wouldn’t be welcome to just come see. The South of course is not the only part of the country where you can find this mindset.  But they do seem to have perfected it.  

W&L has no parade ground, and no cadets, but it does have the Lee Chapel, where is buried not only General Lee but also his beloved war-horse, Traveller.   Someone -- who could it be? -- comes to lay apples on his grave.  Perhaps it is the same person who places the small, Confederate flags at the monument to Stonewall Jackson, who is buried in the cemetery just on the other side of downtown Lexington along with other soldiers … both known and not.  

I wonder how many of the W&L students never bother to stroll through this cemetery, never learn that Jackson taught at VMI before, or what he did in the war, or how he died at Chancellorsville in 1863, days after he was shot by his own pickets as he and a group of officers returned to the lines, or his famous last words, which came as he drifted in and out of consciousness, and then as a calm, peaceful expression settled in his face:  "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."