Tragic story can be retold in the debris left in its wake

Candles and flowers mark a memorial that is expected to grow

Emancipation Park was quiet Sunday morning.

Gone were Saturday’s bitter crowds of white nationalists who came to vent their anger and paranoia about a nation that’s grown too diverse for them.

Gone, too, were the jeering rows of counter-protesters, who came to make a stand in the street for tolerance of that diversity but who also spewed their own invective.

Just a few blocks away, just off Charlottesville’s outdoor pedestrian mall, candles were still lit within a ring of cut flowers at a memorial for the woman killed when a car driven by a white nationalist barreled into the back of another car, setting off a chain reaction that pushed the vehicles into a crowd of pedestrians. It is a memorial that’s surely to grow.

But as the sky lightened on a cloudy Sunday morning, the statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback — ostensibly the reason for the clashes — seemed to be surveying a battlefield still strewn with the debris from Saturday’s conflagration. And what was left behind tells much about Charlottesville’s angriest day.

There was the discarded packaging from a container of Uncle Mike’s Pepper Spray-Maximum Strength. Invisible clouds of pepper engulfed people Saturday, prompting some to leave. Powerful bursts of the stuff — 15 per container, the packaging says — sent others writhing to the ground, grasping desperately for something to douse themselves with.

Here, too, was the discarded evidence of those efforts — quart- sized milk jugs, empty blue bottles of antacid and sheets upon sheets of baby wipes. Also in the detritus were laminated cards explaining how to strap on a gas mask.

There were the messages of hate. Several signs left to soak up the morning dew derided Wes Bellamy, a black Charlottesville city councilman, in the most derogatory of racial terms. Not far from the Lee statue, an Alabama publication whose website is loaded with racist messages proclaimed, “The spirit of the Southern people is alive and well, dear friends...”

Outside the park, more evidence of the disturbances remained. Dried splotches of bright colors — pink, orange and neon blue — stained the pavement. At times Saturday, counter-protesters lobbed vessels of paint at approaching white nationalists.