Confederates in the Attic (12 page)

Clearly, Kingstree’s cross-dressing Confederate was not just an open secret, but also a welcome distraction in a town known for little but its poverty, its graft, its forgotten Nobel laureate. “You know, Goldfarb, the Jewish guy,” Phyllis said. “He won a big prize—don’t ask me what for—something about blood, I think.”

The luncheonette crowd suggested I go see Frances Ward, who worked at the farm bureau and also ran the local historical society. I found her at her desk, sifting insurance claims. She, too, seemed delighted by a chance to chat about the statue instead. “Off to see the Yank,” she gaily announced to her coworkers.

We stopped first at a pawn shop to borrow a pair of hocked binoculars. When we reached the monument, I saw why we needed them. The soldier stood atop a thirty-two-foot column. Maybe this was why the Yank had evaded detection for so long. “I don’t know what it is,” Ward said, handing me the binoculars. “He just don’t look right.”

The soldier had short hair and a trim mustache. He held his cap by his side. “Most other monuments, there’s a slouch hat,” Ward said. “And he looks too clean, not ragged enough.” The soldier also had a knapsack on his back, as Yankees generally wore them, rather than a haversack slung over one shoulder, in traditional rebel fashion. Ward showed me a photograph of the monument in Maine. Slouch hat, long beard, haversack dangling against his waist. Textbook Confederate. “Odd, isn’t it,” she said.

One thing about the Kingstree monument was right. The soldier faced vigilantly north toward the oncoming enemy, like a stone rebel should, gazing above Kingstree’s abandoned storefronts, its wig shop and pool hall and Hardee’s restaurant, all the way to York, Maine, where his long-lost twin gazed back at him. Ward said she’d learned of the turncoat memorial as a teenager in the 1960s. The news came as a shock. “This is a very Southern town,” she said. “I grew up with this picture of my great-grandfather with a long beard and a sleeve pinned up because he lost an arm in Virginia somewhere. Discovering
that the guy on top of our monument was a Yank was like being told there’s no Santa Claus.”

Over time, though, Ward had warmed to the stranger. “He’s been there a long time. We might as well keep him.” Also, like the folks at the diner, she felt the mystery was a “big joke” that offered relief from the reality of life in Williamsburg County, of which Kingstree was seat. “It’s good to have some positive—or at least not too negative—news about this county. Mostly it’s been about our sheriff being arrested, our chief deputy in jail for selling drugs, or about the county losing its credit rating and the rubber-glove factory closing.”

Neighboring Lee County boasted a new maximum-security prison and a cotton museum. But Kingstree was a long way from the interstate and offered little to visitors. Ward smiled. “’Cept maybe this monument.” She conceded, though, that I was the first person who had to come to Kingstree expressly to see it.

There was another, touchier reason for leaving the monument alone. Williamsburg County was two-thirds black. “If we made a big deal about that Yank and took him down, it would maybe offend people,” Ward said. The year before, two new memorials had gone up beside the statue: plaques to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. “Some whites about died when that happened, right here by the War memorial.” After all, neither man had ever visited the county, much less gone to war for it. “Then again,” Ward observed, “neither did our Yank.”

She walked me to the historical society, a former bank now cluttered with bits of porcelain, an old Polaroid camera, a picture of a local football coach, and an enormous canoe of dubious Indian origin. “Basically junk out of people’s attics,” Ward said. She led me to a creaking microfilm machine and dug out dusty reels of the county newspaper. As I cranked through them, the monument story grew weirder still. The statue had been commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910 at a cost of $2,500, a huge sum for a small, impoverished community. Two thousand people turned out for the statue’s dedication. A Confederate colonel delivered a stem-winder, which was received with “enthusiastic sympathy by the staunch old vets in the audience, no one of whom respect the
molly coddles who feel regret for acting the part of men in obeying their country’s call.”

But this fulsome news dispatch was oddly muted about the statue itself. The reason lay buried in the final paragraph: “It is a matter of regret that the statue to be placed on top of the granite column failed to reach here in time for the unveiling.” The statue’s arrival was held up by “unforeseen delays,” the paper said, assuring its readers: “When it is done it will be the pride of future generations.” A month later, the statue arrived and was hoisted atop its shaft without ceremony.

The story raised several intriguing possibilities. Had the mason realized his error and delayed shipment in hopes of avoiding discovery? Had he genuinely faced “unforeseen delays” and mixed up his clients in his haste to ship late orders? Or had some wise Daughter of the Confederacy, upon receiving the statue, prudently chosen to keep it under wraps rather than risk a riot by unveiling it before all those “staunch old vets”?

Surely, Ward said, someone must have noticed a problem when they unpacked the crate. “It was probably done the Southern way,” she hypothesized. “Whispered about in homes but kept quiet so that no one would be embarrassed.”

More recent news clips yielded another crop of odd details. When folks in York, Maine, learned of their Confederate and Kingstree’s Yank, a resident wrote a letter proposing a “friendly exchange of our last two prisoners of war.” But a Daughter of the Confederacy in Kingstree politely demurred, writing back, “We are contented with our handsome Yankee friend.” In fact, there was no evidence the two monuments had ever been switched. Kingstree’s was cut in 1910 by a South Carolina company; York’s went up four years earlier and was sculpted by an Englishman living in Massachusetts. “As a former native of England, his knowledge of the Civil War may have been foggy,” a news clip on Maine’s statue speculated. Or, “the figure may have been sculpted for a Southern town that reneged.”

Nonetheless, the myth of a Kingstree-York connection endured, a sort of proto-urban legend that popped up from time to time, as it had in the newspaper feature I’d read. Whatever the exact truth of
the matter, Ward felt the tale carried a redeeming message. “What were they putting up monuments to in the first place? A lot of Southerners dying for nothing. And look at us now, still arguing about the rebel flag. To me that says we’re still a lost cause in a lot of ways.” She dumped an armful of old documents in the canoe and turned off the lights. “Maybe the message of the whole mix-up is that we shouldn’t make such a fuss about these old symbols. Forget it. There’s real things to worry about.”

W
ARD’S PARTING COMMENT
came back to me a few days later, when I opened the morning paper to find a rebel battle flag splashed across the front page. South Carolina’s legislature was about to debate whether the Confederate banner should keep flying above the capitol dome, as it had since 1962. Demonstrations were anticipated for later in the week. So I reluctantly departed the seductive Lowcountry for the state’s rolling midriff, two hours’ drive west.

After Charleston, Columbia seemed a colorless burg with few historic buildings and a drab downtown that died after dark. This wasn’t entirely Columbia’s fault. Sherman brought urban renewal to the city in 1865 during his return march from the sea. Fire finished off what Union shells missed. Even a Northern reporter, touring the South six months after the War, was stunned by the “ruins and silent desolation” he found in Columbia. “In no other city that I have visited,” wrote John Dennett, a correspondent for
The Nation
, “has hostility seemed to me so bitter.”

Rather than rebuild and forget, in the manner of Atlanta, Columbia had turned its capitol grounds into a memorial to Yankee depredations. “Burned by Sherman’s troops,” said a gravestone marking the site of the bygone wooden statehouse. Brass stars marked where each of Sherman’s shells had scarred the walls of the current capitol, which was under construction in 1865. A nearby bronze of George Washington bore a plaque recording that Sherman’s troops “brick-batted this statue and broke off the lower part of the walking cane.” The damage had been left unrepaired.

Just beside the capitol stood the Confederate Relic Room, a museum whose keepsakes included a torch used by Sherman’s men, a
ruglike suitcase of the sort toted by Northern carpetbaggers, and the Confederate Roll of Dead, a handwritten list of South Carolinians killed in the War. The Roll, recently published in book form by the state archives, had become an overnight bestseller in local bookshops.

“We resent playing second fiddle to Charleston when it comes to the Confederacy,” said Dotsy Boineau, the Relic Room’s curator. In fact, secessionists had originally gathered in Columbia to vote themselves out of the nation; they only moved to Charleston because of a smallpox scare in the capital. “I think we’re not yet sure we want to be part of the Union,” Boineau went on. “We still think this little state of ours has the right to decide a lot of the questions that big government is taking over.”

As I spoke with Boineau, her neo-Confederate views were enjoying a degree of vindication at the nearby capitol. A conservative, states-rights governor was taking the oath of office, having pledged to keep the battle flag flying (a promise on which he would later attempt to renege). South Carolina had also elected a Republican majority to its legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln, anathema to earlier generations of Southerners, now spoke to antigovernment tendencies across the region. There was even a striking consonance between the GOP’s “Contract With America” and the Confederate constitution; both called for term limits, budget balancing, curbs on taxation and other restraints on the state.

“Our ancestors were a little off with their timing, but their rebellion against federal government is finally seeing fruition,” a Republican legislator told me as we chatted in his office beneath paintings of Lee and Jackson.

The legislator’s rebel forebears, though, might have been surprised to see the Confederate battle flag flying above the statehouse. It had never done so in the 1860s. The banner most Americans now called the rebel flag—a diagonal blue cross studded with white stars and laid across a field of red—served only as a combat standard during the War. The political flag of the South, as I’d learned in Salisbury, took a different design and changed several times in the course of the War.

But in South Carolina and several other states, the better-known
battle flag had been hoisted over capitol domes a century after the War, in the midst of civil rights strife. Flag defenders now maintained that the flag was raised to honor soldiers’ valor and sacrifice on the occasion of the War’s centennial. But for many white Southerners, the flag had also symbolized defiance and segregation at a time when they felt under siege again by the federal government and by Northerners who wanted to change the South’s “way of life.”

On the morning of the legislature’s opening session, I met a pro-flag group called the Council of Conservative Citizens, or CCC for short, over breakfast at the Capitol Restaurant a few yards from the statehouse steps. The group was easy to spot; a small rebel flag waved from an orange-juice glass at the center of their table. But the dozen or so men eating grits and fried eggs looked more like members of the local Rotary Club than a rabid band of battle-flag defenders.

“You found the wild-eyed rednecks, eh?” joked a man in a pinstriped suit. He spoke with a Northern accent and handed me a business card embossed with the name of an export/import firm in Philadelphia. Sitting beside him was a middle manager from New Jersey. There was also an engineer from New Hampshire who wore a Mickey Mouse watch and boasted that his hometown of Peterborough was the setting for Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
. “Southern heritage is as much a part of American history as Plymouth Rock,” he said with a jarring New England accent. “But for me, the flag’s mainly a symbol of resistance against government control, not a symbol of the South.”

Sitting across from me was a man with long curly hair, a black beret and a plaid shirt. He looked like a Beat poet. “I’m Walt,” he said, amiably thrusting his hand across the clutter of breakfast dishes. “I’m here to defend my race against the government and the Jewish-controlled media.”

Before I could respond, the group’s leader arrived: William Carter, a thirty-eight-year-old chiropractor who wore a charcoal gray suit with a rebel-flag pin. I asked about his plans for the group’s protest at the capitol. “We’ll make a mock presentation of a petition, hold up some banners, shout a few slogans,” he said. “Propaganda, essentially.”

I asked if he had any Civil War ancestors. Carter shrugged. “Yeah,
but I don’t know the details. Anyway, that’s not why we’re here. This fight’s about today, about the ethnic cleansing of Southern whites—same thing that’s happening in Bosnia. There’s black history month, there’s a black Miss America pageant, there’s even a black yellow pages in South Carolina. Can you imagine a yellow pages for whites? No way. Anything for whites is PIC—politically incorrect.”

The New Hampshire engineer gestured at his Mickey Mouse watch. Carter leapt up to lead his troops into battle. “Let me slick up,” he said, jerking a comb through his thin, Brylcreemed hair. By now, about forty or so people had gathered, including two men in camouflage pants and plumed slouch hats, several members of a motorcycle gang, and a man in a gray tuxedo carrying a portable phone and a briefcase with a sticker that read “
I HAVE A DREAM, TOO
”—beneath a picture of the U.S. Capitol with a rebel flag flying from the dome.

Television cameramen waited on the statehouse steps. Though Carter and his lieutenants had reviled the media over breakfast, they now rushed forward to pose for the cameras, waving rebel flags and chanting, “Never take it down!” Carter brandished a pro-flag petition with 40,000 signatures and lambasted companies whose executives in South Carolina had spoken out against the banner. AT&T came in for extra vitriol. “We won’t spend any of our rebel money on a phone company that likes queers!” Carter yelled. What exactly this had to do with the rebel flag wasn’t clear.