Listen to Eze & Abby’s Story

“I’m not ignorant to hatred. I'm not ignorant to what's going on in the world and the white supremacy that has always been here. But just to see it unleashed in front of my eyes. How do you really describe that?”

- Abby

Eze 

Hi. My name is Eze Amos. I'm a freelance photojournalist here in Charlottesville. And and I would like to speak to this photo, my good friend Abby hugging another community member, actually crying while she was hugging this community member.

Abby

I was so gutted and angry that day. And I saw Stephanie in the crowd at the vigil for Heather Heyer after she was violently murdered by a f**king white supremacist who who's such a coward. And he used his vehicle to just run her over and to hurt so many of her community members in the process. And this look on my face. I still just want to scream.

Eze

I think I photographed this August 13. But that day was was a very, very hard day for me because I woke up and the first thing I saw in the news was that the driver of the car that killed Heather was, you know, they had his photo on the news and it was all over the Internet. And I remember looking, seeing that photo and saying to myself, “Wait a minute, I know that face.” And and it turned out that I had photographed James Field the morning before that, you know, August 12th, I photographed him standing not, I think, arm's length from me. And he would turn out to be the the driver of the car that that killed Heather. It's hard to think about that day without without thinking what ifs. What if I have done something different? What if I had engaged him in a conversation? What if I had said something mean to him or something fun to him? I don't know. What if I have done something else than just photographing him? Would that have changed the course of his day? And would that have led to Heather not dying? Those are the kind of questions that come into my head every time I think of that day. That was a hard, hard, hard summer. That was a hard day.

Abby

I’m not ignorant to hatred. I'm not ignorant to what's going on in the world and the white supremacy that has always been here. But just to see it unleashed in front of my eyes. How do you how do you really describe that?

Eze 

I walked down to Fourth Street and crowd has started to gather. And that was when I noticed this: Abby hugging another community member and wailing and just crying and crying. And for a while, I stood there without photographing. I just wanted to just observe. And then it hit me like, “Hey, you have to capture this. This is part of the story.” So I started photographing her.

Abby

The only thing that really calmed me down that day when you took that picture was that I got to embrace Stephanie and release the tears that we shared, knowing that both of us were praying. And I could feel her pain.

Eze

This moment right here captured how we all felt as a community. We all felt broken and we're all sad. We were all crying in our own different ways. I mean, I was crying in my own way. Tears weren’t rolling down my face, but I knew I was really, really wailing inside of me.

Abby

It’s our fifth anniversary of hatred. And really, what’s changed? Nothing. All those people finally left, so we thought. But white supremacy lives large and well, and it breeds here in Charlottesville every f**king day. It's in our city government. It's in our neighborhoods, the people that don't really give a sh*t because we're still talking about it five years later. And that's the sickening part.

Eze

But I think one of the great things that came out of that is how the community rallied, how we came together to help each other, to support each other, to to to lift each other up and and just be there together to tell the world that, you know, we are we will not be be be overrun by white nationalists. And that this is a place of love, a community of art, of, you know, fun loving people, a place where we raise our kids. Yeah, this is this is what my community looks like.

Abby

I really just hope and pray for Charlottesville. That there is something better and something bigger coming soon. Not in the future. We need this now. And there's so much more. There's just so much more. I love you.

Music credit: Current Clouds / Oceanic / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com

Music credit: Hannah Lindgren / Shape of Your Breathing / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com