Marva’s op-ed about the redemptive power of education and travel appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on April 5, 2021. She has always learned a great deal from her students, but Virgil brought her new understandings about resilience and courage. Here is the text of the op-ed:
My former student, Virgil Motley, recently died of respiratory failure. A sad loss of a memorable character, I thought — but I didn’t know the half of it.
I came to know Virgil and Wanda Gunnoe, his “friend since kindergarten,” during my 2018 “Victor Hugo in Paris” course about the French poet and advocate for social justice. Virgil
was pursuing a degree through the University of Virginia’s remarkable Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies (BIS) Program.
Virgil was a pistol! In his 60s in a course filled with 20- to 40-year-olds, walking with difficulty and a long knobby stick, he swore he would keep up, and he was a man of his word. And a curmudgeonly wit. After trudging in Hugo’s footsteps through central Paris, Virgil jokingly wondered, “With Day 3 looming, Phys Ed credit?’”
Virgil struck me as a hard-living man, one I didn’t doubt when he said he’d been rode hard and put up wet. He looked it, with his scruffy gray beard and longish hair. Never mincing words, he titled his final project “The Paris Hillbillies,” referring to his and Wanda’s upbringing in a rural mountain town in Southwest Virginia.
What I never suspected was that Virgil had been incarcerated nearly half his life.
When I learned about Virgil’s growth from prison to Paris, personal progress and recovery, I realized: Here is a man who, like Hugo’s Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, created his path to redemption. Virgil’s way forward came through education and travel, with a bit of inspiration from Hugo himself. Thanks to Wanda and Virgil’s family, I can tell his story, knowing that Virgil would be pleased if his experiences helped others.
“Virgil was labeled a ‘bad boy’ early on,” Wanda told me. “Someone put a cherry bomb in the toilet? Virgil got the blame. When his mother died, Virgil got drunk, passed out in a shed, and was charged with breaking and entering. Again, the ‘bad-boy’ label and repeated incarcerations.”
I’ve discovered something about the barriers faced by ex-convicts from such authors as Shaka Senghor and Bryan Stevenson. Despite having paid their debt to society, felons often are not truly readmitted among us. Yet knowing Virgil and recognizing what he’d overcome brought such challenges home to me in a new way. Virgil had to defy naysayers who believed that a felon could not be admitted to the University of Virginia or legally travel outside the U.S. The multiple obstacles to felons’ regaining their rights made him fear that he couldn’t get a passport.
But committing himself to completing his education was a major step on Virgil’s road to personal redemption, with Paris one stop along the way. In his final essay, Virgil described his aha moment: “Standing beside a tribute to Hugo at the Palais de Justice, near the Conciergerie, I recalled that Hugo found the right to live the most inviolable of human rights. From middle school on, I have vehemently opposed the death penalty. A chill traveled up my spine. Victor Hugo and I have much in common: opposition to the death penalty, belief in social and prison reform, the paramount importance of education, women’s rights.”
Only after his death did I learn of Virgil’s other reaction to touring the Conciergerie, a prison from the Middle Ages until 1914, where Hugo’s sons had been confined, and where Marie Antoinette and other royals awaited the guillotine — that he had been in cells in worse condition in Virginia.
Getting an education is a powerful way to stop recidivism, I heard from Alan Rasmussen, another of Virgil’s teachers. After a long career in the Virginia Department of Corrections helping individuals on probation and parole integrate into the community, Rasmussen applauds Virgil’s resilience, appreciating how he learned from past mistakes and used that knowledge to take charge of his life. Felons are people with potential. Virgil’s example should encourage more of us to give other felons a chance to develop their capacities and redeem themselves.
Virgil’s desire for learning and his educational experiences were key to his moving forward, to his redemption from a past life of lawbreaking and prison — and another connection to Hugo, who argued that better education would reduce criminality. As Hugo put it in his novella about the real-life Valjean: “This ordinary man’s head: cultivate it, weed it, water it, fertilize it, enlighten it, give it moral direction, use it; you won’t need to chop it off.”
Marva Barnett is professor emerita at the University of Virginia and the author of “To Love Is to Act: Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s Vision for Leading Lives of Conscience.”