Confederates in the Attic (14 page)

But something was wrong with this picture. An Arkansan occupied the White House. The vice president came from Tennessee. A Georgian served as Speaker of the House. States’ rights, or “devolution,” was the political fad of the day. And the South had become the nation’s most economically vibrant region.

“The South is a good place to look at what America used to be,” Manning Williams had told me. It was a thought that appealed to my romantic image of the South as a rural backwater, rich with history and character so absent in most of the nation. But viewed from Columbia’s capitol grounds and the industrial park by the airport—as well as from the strip malls and housing tracts and new factories I’d passed all across the Carolinas—the South was exactly the opposite: a good place to see what America was becoming. Suburban and exurban, politically conservative, anti-union, evangelical, a booming part of the global economy.

I later put this to A. V. Huff, a historian of the South at Furman University in upland South Carolina. He responded by reminding me just how recent and profound the South’s transformation had been. Huff told of picking cotton as a child in the 1940s, when the rhythm of the school year still moved to the cotton crop. Children attended class in midsummer, during lay-by season, and returned to the fields for the autumn harvest.

Yet in Huff’s own lifetime, this most fundamental of Southern rites had all but vanished from the experience of most Southerners. Many of Huff’s students—mostly middle-class kids from the suburbs
of Atlanta and other cities—had never even seen a cotton crop. Huff illustrated his point by inviting me to sit in on one of his classes. Lecturing on Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, he produced a boll from his family’s farm as a teaching prop. The students passed the boll around, gazing at it with wonderment, as if at a mastodon’s tooth.

Fewer than 5 percent of present-day Southerners now worked the land, and Dixie was fast becoming the nation’s new industrial heartland, with car plants sprouting across the former cotton belt. Per capita income in the South—half the national average when Huff was born in 1937—now ranked close to the rest of America. The eleven states of the Old Confederacy comprised the fifth-largest economy in the world.

To Huff, this transformation helped explain the resurgent nostalgia for the Confederacy he sensed across the South, even among his mostly affluent students. “The South—the white South—has always had this powerful sense of loss,” he said, as we chatted in his office between classes. First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth. Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.

“All those things Southerners say they hold dear they’re selling out now for a mess of pottage,” Huff said. “So there’s this feeling, ‘If I wrap myself in the flag, maybe Grandma will forgive me for selling the farm and dealing with the Yankees.’”

Huff pulled a book from his shelf and read me a poem called “The Conquered Banner,” composed by a Confederate chaplain after the Civil War.

Huff closed the book and headed off to teach another class on the Cotton Kingdom. “It’s too bad nobody reads that poem much anymore,” he said.

T
he cinder-block building by the Tennessee line looked more like a bunker than a bar. Wire mesh concealed windows the size of medieval arrow slits. Man-high razor wire ringed an adjoining yard. A military jeep painted in desert camouflage sat parked out front, beside pickup trucks and Harley choppers. Scarlet letters splashed across the building’s facade:
REDBONE’S SALOON
.

Inside, “Confederate Railroad” wailed on the jukebox. Behind the bar stood a man in a polka-dot cap and a T-shirt adorned with a swastika. This was the proprietor, Redbone. He served me a beer and huddled with a man whose shirtfront proclaimed: I’ve Got a Nigger in My Family Tree. The back of the shirt showed a lynching—a cartoonish black man, dangling from a branch.

A week earlier, Redbone’s Saloon had celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with a “Thank God for James Earl Ray Party.”
Flyers posted in the nearby town of Guthrie, Kentucky, proclaimed “Fuck Martin Luther King’s B.Day” and invited folks to play pool and eat “Chicken-Ribs-Fixins” for three bucks a plate.

That same weekend, a nineteen-year-old named Michael Westerman drove through Guthrie with a rebel flag flying from his pickup. Several carloads of black teenagers gave chase; one of the youths shot Michael Westerman dead. Then crosses started burning in Guthrie. The FBI, the KKK, the NAACP, and reporters from Kentucky and Tennessee all hustled to the Stateline town. So did I, startled by a newspaper squib—“Rebel Flag Is Catalyst to Killing”—that appeared in Carolina newspapers. Until then, I hadn’t realized the nineteenth-century conflict I’d set out to explore was still a shooting war.

But arriving late on a Saturday night, I knew little about the place, except what a gas-station attendant told me. The Kentucky side of Guthrie was dry, she said. If I wanted a beer, there were two bars in Tennessee, just across the state line at the southern edge of town. “There’s Billy’s, which is kinda country-and-western,” she said, “and Redbone’s. That’s a biker bar. Real bad news.”

The music at Redbone’s blared too loudly for conversation. So I sipped my Budweiser and studied the walls. Amidst the usual biker-bar decor—pictures of half-naked women splayed across motorcycles, a pistol mounted beside the words “We Don’t Bother Calling 911”—I noticed a curious anthology of hand-scrawled verse. The poems mingled biker and Confederate themes, evoking nihilistic scenes of the ruined South as viewed from the back of a Harley.

Beneath the poetry appeared a cryptic insignia: “F.T.W” Between songs on the jukebox, I turned to a man on the next stool and asked what F.T.W stood for.

“Who’s asking?” he replied. “F-B-I?”

This provoked howls from the bar. “I’m a writer, not a cop,” I said, inanely flashing a spiral pad with “Reporter’s Notebook” stenciled on the cover.

The man looked at me dubiously, but muttered, “F.T.W Fuck the World.”

Another man, bulging from a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, lurched over and bellowed, “Write this in your damned notebook. We got a few people standing up for white rights. The rest are pussies who let niggers trample all over them. Like those boys who shot Westerman did t’other day.” He reeled for a moment. “You’ve got your KKK and your BBB—that’s Badass Black Brothers. Two sides of the same coin. If they want war, come on. Let’s get it on.”

He sat down with a thud and gazed blankly at a TV behind the bar. Male ice skaters in tights glided across the screen. As I scribbled down his words, I sensed someone looming behind me. Then a hot, beery breath whispered in my ear: “That shorthand or chicken scratches?”

I looked up to face a leather-clad giant with bloodshot eyes and long, straggly hair. “Shorthand,” I lied, hoping he couldn’t decipher my notes about swastikas and lynchings. He bent down, tore a few pages from my notebook, and stuck the wadded paper in his mouth. “You know,” he said, chewing loudly, “I shit out a turd this morning that was bigger than you.”

Unsure as to the appropriate response, I glanced around the bar for support. The other drinkers had vanished into a cloud of cigarette smoke by the pool table. Only Redbone remained, eyeing us warily from behind the bar. “The question is,” my inquisitor resumed, “should I beat the shit out of you right here and now, or let it slide this time?”

The veins in his neck began throbbing. One of his hands curled into a fist. I weighed whether to take off my glasses, so shards wouldn’t lodge in the back of my head, or keep them on in the faint hope that spectacles might cause the giant to let it slide this time. A snatch of poetry swam on the wall behind his head.

I eased slowly off my stool, nodded toward the door and said, “Maybe I should just—”

The man grabbed my coat and ripped it cleanly from armpit to wrist. Redbone lunged across the bar and seized the man’s arm, shouting “Cool it!” I ducked under the giant and dove through the door, sprawling on the gravel outside. Then I sprinted toward the lights of town. Slowing to a jog, I reached the Kentucky line and a sign that read:

D
URING
R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN’S
childhood at the start of the century, Guthrie was a raw railroad town ringed by fields of dark-leaf tobacco known as “the Black Patch.” Warren, who lived in Guthrie until he was fifteen, later described his hometown as “very un-Southern,” a new community that lacked “a sense of belonging in any particular place or having any particular history.” Eighty years later, Guthrie exhaled the depleted air of a thousand other towns across the back-country South, bypassed by the interstate and drained of vitality by decades of migration to the city. Guthrie’s main street wound past a Piggly Wiggly, a pool hall, The American Cafe (“country cookin’ makes you good lookin’”), a hog-feed elevator, a garment factory, and convenience stores crowded with people scratching lottery tickets (locals drank on the Tennessee side of town but could gamble only in Kentucky).

At the end of the strip, next to the Tinytown Baptist Church, I found a rundown place called the Holiday Motel. The motel’s neon sign flickered
WE ARE REASONABLE
, which sounded comforting after the conversation I’d just had at Redbone’s Saloon. A large woman in a baggy housedress sat smoking behind the reception desk.

“I’d like a single room for the night,” I said.

“Why is that?” She had a German accent and stroked a schnauzer in her lap. A German flag and pictures of the Bavarian Alps adorned the wall behind her.

“Why do you ask?”

She shrugged. “Your car plates are out of state. Your coat is torn. You look pale. There is a Holiday Inn over in Clarksville, much nicer than this.”

I told her I wanted to stay in Guthrie to learn about Michael Westerman’s shooting. Then I mentioned my visit to Redbone’s.

“You crazy?” she exclaimed. “When that bar closes, that’s when I turn on my No Vacancy sign. They stupid to begin with, but once they start drinking and doing drugs, they have no brains left.”

As I filled out a registration form, a police scanner crackled behind the desk. “I’m nosey,” the woman said, twiddling the dial and looking through the motel’s picture window. “Not much ever happens here, until they shoot that Westerman boy.” She chuckled. “You know, I think there’s some pride. Guthrie had its first drive-by.”

I sat up most of the night with Maria Eskridge, sipping peppermint schnapps and sifting the trove of newspaper articles and gossip she’d collected on the Westerman killing—and on everything else in Guthrie. The daughter of a Munich brewmaster, Eskridge had married an American soldier and moved to his native Kentucky. While he worked a small farm, she ran the motel, which she freely conceded was a fleapit. “Holiday Motel—it is a sort of joke,” she said. “Who takes a holiday in Guthrie?” But she loved to gossip, and the motel gave her ample chance for that. She herself had become part of local lore, a strange blend of Bavaria and Kentucky who spouted things like “kiss my grits” with a guttural accent. “People here call me the crazy Kraut of Tinytown,” she said.

But after thirty years in Guthrie, Eskridge still felt like a stranger, never more so than in the days since Michael Westerman’s death. She told me about the crude, scrap-lumber crosses that burned in the night, and about Michael Westerman’s funeral procession; rebel flags flapped from the 120-car caravan trailing the hearse to Guthrie’s all-white graveyard. Now, well-dressed strangers had begun
appearing in town, distributing literature that proclaimed Michael Westerman a Confederate martyr, the first man to die for the rebel flag in 130 years.