An American Body Song

I

The Central Virginia Training Center in Lynchburg is guarded, even though the roads running through the 350 acres are public and the land is home to a cemetery, the resting place of more than a thousand past patients and residents.

"We don't like people walking around," a security guard tells me, leaning out his car window. I've been on the property for no more than five minutes, having left my vehicle parked near the entrance. "People live here," he continues, though there is no indication of this. I have seen only a handful of staff members.

He slowly trails me as I walk back to the center's admissions office, and I try not to let my dislike for bureaucracy show on my face. At the office I know I'll be asked my name and business, or be told to leave the premises. I walk up the hill and enter the lobby. The woman at the front desk seems wary of my presence. I have disrupted her routine. "I've been reading about Carrie Buck," I explain weakly, but she is not familiar. She tells me she doubts I will find anything I'm looking for and watches me as I wait for an administrator.

________

I've found several photographs of Carrie Buck online. Books describe her as plain-looking or overweight, but in each decade of her life, in each photograph I find, her appearance varies dramatically. As a child, she wears a white dress with a sailor-style neckline and an uneven bob haircut. In later years, she is thin, poised, and smiling. In one picture, her face looks just as her mother's once did (I've found her photograph, too); they have the same eyes and wrinkles. Beyond these small details, they are unremarkable. The photographs and their subjects are conventional—ubiquitous black-and-white images to be leafed through and passed over in flea markets. I say this not to be unkind, but to say that Carrie was more ordinary than not. What she was made to feel is something else entirely.

________

The superintendent of the Central Virginia Training Center, summoned by the woman at the front desk, appears in the lobby after about fifteen minutes. The superintendent's demeanor is less suspicious. I qualify my presence on the basis that I'm a writer doing research, which he deems a reasonable enough justification, although he struggles with the specifics of my visit. He, too, does not recognize the name, Carrie Buck. So I pivot and simply explain my desire to locate a brick building on his campus—a structure once used as a resident medical facility. The superintendent pauses. Then after checking the time on his wristwatch, he agrees to take me on a quick tour of the center grounds.

The name of these grounds has changed many times: Virginia State Epileptic Colony (1910–1919), State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (1919–1940), Lynchburg State Colony (1940–1954), Lynchburg Training School and Hospital (1954–1983), and Central Virginia Training Center (1983–). At one time it was the largest facility of its kind in the nation, but now defunct buildings cover half the campus. The deserted structures are examples of Neoclassicist, Jeffersonian architecture. I gaze up at them. We walk along a pathway, then take a detour across an open lawn. A fat groundhog watches us from a distance before slinking away. At the far end of the grounds, a greenhouse stands lonely, full of weeds and shattered glass. It would be a perfect, gritty place for children to play games of post-apocalyptic make-believe. Suddenly we stop. Caution tape drips from a banister before us and the superintendent points to the building behind it, which is the oldest on the campus. He had to ask around, couldn't immediately point out the exact location of this brick building, a telling example of institutional amnesia.

He is friendly, which somehow makes the situation more ominous. "This is where patients used to go. This is where procedures took place." I notice its white...