Confederates in the Attic (11 page)

After visiting the Citadel, I made a point of perusing the indexes of Civil War histories, searching for scraps on the
Star of the West
. I rarely found more than a footnote. In the view of historians who bothered mentioning the incident at all, the cadets’ action proved inconsequential, resulting in nothing more than the ship’s return to New York. So the
Star of the West
remained a lost shard of Civil War history, hermetically sealed inside the Citadel, as if in a pharaoh’s tomb. In a sense this seemed fitting. What better vault than the Citadel, arguably the most mummified institution in America?

Nonetheless, I felt a furtive pleasure at being in on the secret. I doubted even the trivia whizzes back in Salisbury, North Carolina, knew this one. So I stored it away, looking forward to the day when I could slap a dollar on the bar while drinking with a Civil War buff and unleash my hidden weapon from the Citadel’s silo. “Buck says you don’t know who fired the first shots of the Civil War.”

T
HE WAGER WOULD HAVE TO WAIT
for some bar other than Moultrie’s Tavern, the one place I’d be sure to lose. Idling away another lunch hour there one afternoon, I noticed a vivid portrait behind the bar. Titled
The Relic Hunter
, it showed the bar’s proprietor scanning the beach with a metal detector. I was struck by how well the portrait captured its subject and asked the bartender about its creator.

“Manning Williams?” The bartender laughed. “Where to begin? As you can see, he’s a first-class artist. Also a college professor. A reenactor. Charleston’s leading secessionist. Among other things.”

In other words, another Charleston eccentric. I phoned Williams from the bar and was immediately invited to his house. Following his directions to a neighborhood north of town, I wondered if I’d become
lost. The area was predominantly black. This shouldn’t have surprised me; statistically, Southern cities were far better integrated than Northern ones. The second surprise was the figure who greeted me at the door of his bland modern home. Williams was a wiry, muscular man of about fifty, with piercing blue eyes, paint-stained fingers and a pointed beard that reached almost to his breastbone. He looked like a roguish rebel officer—a resemblance that was entirely intentional.

“It seems peaceful out there,” he said, shutting the door behind me, “but don’t be fooled. The War is emotionally still on. I call it the thousand-year war. It’ll go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms.”

Williams led me into a studio littered with half-empty coffee mugs, half-finished beers, half-smoked cigars. Civil War tomes and copies of a super-hero comic book called “Captain Confederacy” lay propped atop chairs and easels. “This is the work I’m finishing now, though the subject’s something I’ll never be finished with,” he said, pausing beside a large canvas. “It’s called
Lincoln in Hell.”

The oil painting brought to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s inferno in
Garden of Earthly Delights
. The sky was a florid orange and streaked with exploding shells. In the foreground, a gaunt figure in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat strode across a mound of skulls, cannonballs, and bits of blue and gray uniform. Behind him loomed other stacks of bones, with blurry figures perched atop each.

“That’s Napoleon,” Williams said, “and over there’s Genghis Khan.” Like Lincoln, these leaders were warmongering tyrants who had therefore earned a place in Williams’s underworld.

“I’ve done some studies for a painting called
Southerners in Hell
, too,” he added. “It shows a bunch of rebels sitting with their hands over their ears as Lincoln recites the Gettysburg Address for the rest of eternity.” Williams broke into a wide, tobacco-stained grin. “I poke holes in icons. I’m suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own.”

For the rest of the afternoon, Williams prowled restlessly around the studio, delivering a monologue that skipped from the Lost Cause to lost souls to Christian evangelists to calculating how long a pair of wool army socks would have lasted in 1863 (“until the stink became too much,” he hypothesized). Often, he spanned two or three
topics in a single sentence. And every fifteen minutes or so, he’d lasso a runaway thought and rope it back toward his central theme: the ineradicable divide between North and South.

“Take driving habits,” he said, detouring from a discourse on regional voting patterns. “Down here, you stop in a line of traffic to wave someone in and a single car pulls in front of you. Up north, you pause five seconds and ten cars butt ahead.”

Williams hated cars, particularly car tires, and railed against Goodyear and Firestone ads. Again, it took me a moment to see where this was leading. “Car tires are the footprint of Northern industrial society,” Williams said. As a subtle protest, he stuck tires into his paintings—a stray radial, say, perched anachronistically in the foreground of an unflattering portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman.

We were back to the Civil War, though Williams didn’t call it that. “A civil war is an internal revolt. But this was a war between two independent nations, one of which was exercising its constitutional right to secede.” Like many Southerners, Williams preferred the phrase War Between the States, or the War of Southern Independence. “Of course, the War to Suppress Yankee Arrogance is also acceptable,” he said.

In a convoluted way, Williams was introducing me to a subject dear to the hearts of latter-day rebels: neo-Confederate thought. This loosely defined ideology drew together strains of Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians (who took the title of their manifesto “I’ll Take My Stand” from a verse of “Dixie”), and other thinkers who idealized Southern planters and yeoman farmers while demonizing the bankers and industrialists of the North. In the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines. White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners—New England abolitionists in particular—came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.

This ethnography even explained how the War was fought. Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy. The North, meanwhile, deployed
its industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best: “Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”

Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny. The North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. Including car tires.

“If you like the way America is today, it’s the fruit of Northern victory,” Williams said. Abandoning a lit cigar for a wad of chewing tobacco, he sent a stream of brown juice into his coffee mug. “The South is a good place to look at what America used to be, and might have become if the South had won. If something’s fucked up, the North did it, not us.”

But the fight was far from over; as Williams had said, this was a thousand-year war. As an artist, Williams chose to take his stand on cultural grounds. “If the South had won the War, we never would have had a movie like
Pulp Fiction,”
he said. I’d recently seen the Quentin Tarantino film and been put off by its gratuitous bloodshed. But what irked Williams was a detail I’d missed.

“Tarantino goes out of his way to turn every stereotype upside down—except one.” The boxer, played by Bruce Willis, was white. The drug dealers were yuppies. The hitman, John Travolta, made jokes in French and read novels on the toilet. “But when two good ol’ boys appear in the film, what do they do?” Williams asked. “They rape a black guy in front of the Confederate flag.” He paused, disgusted. “Rednecks are about the only group it’s still okay to kick around. Not counting Nazis, of course.”

It was sunset. We’d been talking for hours; or rather, Williams had been talking and I’d been trying to sift what sense I could from his torrent of art criticism, car criticism, profanity, political philosophy. Much of what Williams said seemed little more than a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of the
Southern “way of life” made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.

But parts of his diatribe unsettled me. It was certainly true that Northern zeal for righting Southern wrongs had a way of evaporating when similar wrongs surfaced close to home. To a degree I’d succumbed to the same hypocrisy. Born and schooled in Washington, D.C., a city sharply divided along race and class lines, I’d gone to work after college as a union organizer in rural Mississippi, urging impoverished loggers, most of whom were black, to go on strike and confront their white bosses. I’d burned out after eighteen months, but clung nostalgically ever since to this one bright flare of youthful idealism. Williams, I felt sure, would put a different spin on my Mississippi sojourn. He’d say I behaved like sanctimonious abolitionists and 1960s Freedom Riders who swooped down on the South while neglecting injustice in their own backyards.

“Listen closely while you’re down here and take a hard look at your own prejudices,” Williams said, slapping me on the back as he saw me out. “We may just make an honorary cracker out of you yet.”

S
ince my arrival in the Carolinas, hardly a day had passed without some snippet about the Civil War appearing in the newspaper: a school debate on whether to play “Dixie” at ball games; an upcoming Civil War reenactment; a readers’ forum on the rebel flag. But one morning a short feature jumped off the page like a tabloid item about Elvis on Mars.

The story reported that townsfolk in York, Maine, had discovered that their decades-old Civil War memorial bore “a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders.” Meanwhile, citizens of Kingstree, South
Carolina, had long harbored doubts about
their
Civil War statue, which looked suspiciously like Billy Yank. “The mixed-up monument mystery,” the story concluded, “may never be unraveled, and it is growing weirder by the day.”

Things sounded weird enough already to merit a look. So I drove into the Carolina hinterland to see this AWOL Yankee for myself. Forty-five minutes from Charleston, sluggish streams and piney woods gave way to desolate farmland and derelict crossroads. Weatherboard shacks careened at gravity-defying angles beside fields choked with weeds. I crossed Flea Bite Creek and stopped to pump gas at a hamlet of four buildings, three of them vacant. The gas station attendant lay sprawled inside on a pool table, sound asleep. Back on the road, I passed an occasional brick home, trailers with satellite dishes perched in the yard, and a few weak pulses of economic life: stands selling boiled peanuts, fields of soggy “storm cotton” left unpicked from the year before, and a huge hand-painted sign that read, “Catfish for sale. CHEAP!”

Kingstree announced itself with a sign identifying the town as the birthplace of Joseph Goldstein, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Then came a ragged commercial strip: pool hall, wig shop, car wash, Piggly Wiggly supermarket, pawn and gun shop. Kingstree looked as though it had peaked in about 1930 and gone quietly to seed ever since.

Stopping for lunch, I asked a waitress with a name tag reading “Phyllis!” about the monument mix-up reported in the paper. “Oh sure, everyone here grows up knowing that,” she said. “My dad always called it our ‘Confederate Yankee’ statue.”

Phyllis! poured me sweet tea. “The way I look at it,” she went on, “he’s just one more prisoner of war who never got home. We’re taking good care of him. I hope they’re doing the same with ours. Anyway, there’s lots of people here from somewhere else. I was born in North Carolina.”

A man down the counter piped in, “We got plenty bigger issues to get us bent out of shape. Like the worst unemployment in the state.”

“And the worst corruption,” Phyllis added.

The cashier and cook materialized atop stools on either side of me. The cashier thought the Yankee statue was a Northern trick by
post-War carpetbaggers. The cook suspected some Northern town had stiffed its stonemason, who then sold the statue to Kingstree instead. Phyllis wondered if the man on the monument was a Confederate after all. “Lots of rebs had to wear Yankee stuff they picked up on the battlefield,” she said.