Confederates in the Attic (38 page)

The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of
the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren’t national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite: leaders of a rebellion against the nation—separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn’t call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn’t think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

I wasn’t alone in harboring such thoughts. We’d arrived in Richmond amidst a fierce debate about the first proposed addition to Monument Avenue in over sixty-five years. Arthur Ashe, the black tennis star and Richmond native, had recently died, and the city planned to honor him with a statue a few blocks from Lee and his fellow Confederates (in statue-studded Richmond, only one monument currently honored a black—Bojangles).

We learned all this from the local papers while sipping iced tea at a sidewalk cafe. “Thought I felt a tick digging into me,” Rob said, groping in his trousers. With his other hand he slapped the back of his neck. “These flies seem to like me now. I must be pretty ripe.” Two women at the next table got up and moved inside.

As Rob hunted parasites, I read that plans to place Ashe’s statue on Monument Avenue had aroused so much opposition from both blacks and whites that city officials had backed off. They now favored several alternatives, such as putting the statue in a black neighborhood, or near a park where the young Ashe had watched whites play tennis on courts from which he was excluded. A public hearing on the issue was scheduled for later in the day.

I glanced at Rob, who was now gouging behind his ears. “Would it be correct, Gasm-wise I mean, to go to the meeting?” I asked.

Rob stroked his beard rabbinically. “I think it’s kosher,” he said. “As long as there’s some Confederate content.” The only question was what to do until the late-afternoon meeting. Rob studied our map of Richmond and circled several spots we hadn’t yet toured. “More dead rebs,” he said.

Hollywood Cemetery, the largest and most illustrious collection of Confederate dead anywhere in the South, was remarkably hard to find. We circled a run-down neighborhood several times before spotting
an oddly juxtaposed sign on the side of a building: an arrow pointing to both “Victory Rug Cleaning” and to the losers’ bone-yard.

The hilly burial ground held over 18,000 Confederates, many of whom had perished at Richmond’s wartime hospitals. The remains of 3,000 men killed at Gettysburg were later disinterred and brought here for reburial. We found George Pickett’s urn-capped grave near a weedy field filled with his men. Their graves were marked by crude stone stumps bearing only numbers and the letters CSA. “That’s how they were regarded in life, too,” Rob said. “‘How many men can you bring up?’ ‘Fifteen thousand.’ Guys like Pickett spoke that way.” The crowded field of anonymous stumps reminded me of a John Berryman poem about a Civil War monument. The dead, he wrote, were “Misled blood-red statistical men.”

We drove past the modest obelisk marking Jeb Stuart’s grave and then to a life-sized bronze of Jefferson Davis overlooking the James River. The monument’s inscription encapsulated the militant victimology that prevailed in the post-War South: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Davis was bizarrely persecuted in death as well; his poorly embalmed body began to deteriorate before the eyes of thousands of mourners while it lay in state. At Hollywood Cemetery, Davis endured one final indignity. The bronze statue above his grave gazed for eternity directly at a memorial emblazoned with the surname of one of his foremost antagonists: GRANT (one Thomas E., not Ulysses S.).

From Hollywood we sped through another “Confederate Rest” with 17,000 graves, then to Shockoe Hill cemetery in a decayed neighborhood tucked beneath a tangle of interstates. At the graveyard’s entrance stood a wrought-iron enclosure with a pattern of entwined muskets, rebel flags, kepis, and sabers. A plaque with a Jewish star stated: “To the Glory of God and In Memory of the Hebrew Confederate Soldiers Resting in this Hallowed Spot. Erected by Hebrew Ladies Memorial Association organized 1866.”

The Hebrew Confederates were listed alphabetically, from M. Aaron to Julius Zark. One carried a curious addendum: “H. Gershberg
should correctly read Henry Gintberger.” Had one of Henry’s Gentile comrades got his surname wrong? Another grave was listed as anonymous. How was the man’s religion known, but not his name? And why were the Hebrew Confederates buried here instead of at Richmond’s other rebel graveyards?

There was no one to answer these questions, at least not in the abandoned environs of Shockoe Hill. I got the distinct sense that Rob and I were the first visitors to pass this way in months. Nor were our various city tourist guides any help. Like Charleston, Richmond seemed ambivalent about its Confederate history. Both cities paid lip service to their most prominent Civil War sites—Fort Sumter, Monument Avenue, the Museum of the Confederacy—but clearly preferred to highlight other, less controversial attractions: the arts, dining, shopping. In Richmond, this New South gloss partly reflected the city’s demographics. After several decades of white flight, the city proper was now mostly black. On many of the streets we’d toured during the day, we hadn’t seen a single white.

This metamorphosis, and the ambivalence I’d sensed, became even more obvious at the public hearing about Monument Avenue. A black protester stood outside City Hall with a sign saying “White Racism Lives” and a red rag tied around his leg representing “blood from centuries of oppression.” Inside, Richmond’s black mayor and majority-black city council sat facing some 400 residents, ranging from blacks in African dashikis to whites in blue jeans and rebel-flag ties.

I’d expected to see an urban version of the angry meeting I’d attended in Todd County, Kentucky, where white parents vented their rage over plans to change the school’s rebel mascot. What I witnessed instead was a thoughtful discourse on public art, the potency of historic symbols, racial healing, and affirmative action—albeit for a deceased black male who had fled Richmond at eighteen to escape what he later called “its segregation, its conservatism, its parochial thinking.”

An elderly white man in a seersucker suit and a red bow tie was one of the first to speak. His appearance and courtly drawl fit my stereotype of a stuffy Richmonder—an image that his words quickly
contradicted. “We have Monument Avenue, not Confederate War Monument Avenue,” he said. “Let’s change it from a fantasy to a true Monument Avenue. If we don’t, we’ll be saying to the world that Arthur Ashe was not good enough to be on that street.”

He was followed by a retired black foreman who expressed a similar view. “We’ve got to do something now to get over that fight back then,” he said, referring obliquely to the Civil War. “That’s the only way we’ll finally sort out this black/white thing.”

Other blacks could barely contain the rage they felt about Monument Avenue and the decades of Confederacy-worship they’d suffered through before the civil rights struggle. For them, putting Ashe on Monument Avenue represented emotional payback, an in-your-face gesture that would salve some of the insult blacks had so long endured. “I want my hero’s statue as tall as Lee’s,” one man shouted. “I want Ashe to be as big as all outdoors. Arthur Ashe is bigger than Lee!”

But other blacks believed Ashe would be diminished rather than exalted on Monument Avenue. “The other guys on that Avenue would have enslaved him if they could,” a college student said. “Why place Ashe among men who in the 1990s would be judged nothing more than criminals?” Another man was blunter still. “Why would I want my hero on a promenade of losers?” he asked.

As the debate went on, I felt my own opinions see-saw, as the city council’s obviously had since the monument was first proposed. I sympathized with those speakers who felt Richmond needed to make a symbolic break with its past by integrating Monument Avenue. But I also found myself applauding an elderly black man who proposed putting the statue in a place that might inspire black youths today, rather than in a mostly white neighborhood, haunted by Confederate ghosts, where Ashe himself would have feared walking as a child. The next speaker, though, made an equally valid point: putting Ashe’s statue in a black district would perpetuate the segregation the tennis star endured in life.

Equally compelling were the arguments of several speakers who opposed the statue’s placement on aesthetic and historic grounds. Ashe’s twenty-four-foot likeness would be dwarfed by the sixty-one-foot-tall Lee. Also, a modern statue of a twentieth-century athlete,
clad in tennis sweats and clutching a racket, would appear informal and incongruous on a boulevard lined with nineteenth-century military men. Whatever one felt about the Confederates, their enshrinement on Monument Avenue was historic in its own right, a unique museum piece of the Lost Cause mentality.

Still others gave this rationale a political twist. “Ashe isn’t a soldier and his statue will barely reach Lee’s saddle,” said Wayne Byrd, who headed a chapter of the Heritage Preservation Association, a pro-rebel flag group I’d encountered elsewhere in the South. “This statue will trivialize Ashe and be disrespectful of Confederate-Americans who hallow the other men on that street.”

In the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity—both to Ashe’s memory and to “Confederate-Americans,” a heretofore neglected minority—Byrd proposed memorializing still another ignored group: black Confederates. Recent scholarship suggested that some slaves and free blacks fought in the rebel ranks, though their numbers and motivation were unclear. In effect, the Heritage Preservation Association, one of America’s most politically incorrect groups, was trying to claim politically correct motives while making a gesture that was precisely the opposite. By honoring blacks who took up arms in defense of their white masters, the group had found a sly way to disassociate the Cause from slavery.

During a break, I approached Byrd in the hall and asked what he meant by the term Confederate-American. “A Confederate-American—then and now—is simply anyone who’s against big government,” he said. “We as Southern Americans just want to be left alone.”

“Yeah, the South wanted to be left alone—to oppress people!” a long-haired man shouted.

“It was not about slavery!” a man with a rebel-flag T-shirt barked back. “It was states’ rights!”

“Exactly. The right to own slaves. Tear the statues and plantations down!”

“Should we tear down the Pyramids because they were built by slaves? And what about Washington and Jefferson? They owned slaves. Should we tear down memorials to them?”

I noticed a white man in jeans and duckbill cap standing off to the
side, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head as the others shouted. Wallace Faison was a peanut farmer from a small town near the North Carolina line. “For me it’s not political at all,” he said quietly. “The South—we lost. I feel like I lost, too. Monument Avenue is like that last Valhalla, that spiritual place I can go. It’s crazy, I can’t explain it, but that’s how I feel.”

Back in the council chamber, we stayed to hear one more speaker, an accountant in thick glasses and a dark charcoal suit. Jim Slicer was a native of Washington, D.C., where Civil War statues were what he called “just men on horses” that no one cared about. “I’ve been here in Richmond for six years and I still don’t get it,” he said. “To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we’re dedicated to no hope, no future. It’s like having a monument to unrequited love.”

The question for Slicer wasn’t whether Ashe belonged on a pedestal beside Davis, Lee and Jackson, but rather, “Do
they
belong? Does Monument Avenue?”

As Slicer headed out of the chamber, I asked what alternative he’d propose. “I’d do the same thing with Lee and Davis that the Russians did with statues of Stalin and Lenin,” he said. “Take them down or at least don’t add to their ranks. Stop honoring wrong.” As for Ashe, he’d propose a whole new street to celebrate the tennis star and other modern Richmonders. “Make it an avenue of the future, not the past.”

He chuckled, adding, “Of course, it will never happen. This town can’t shake its past. I’ve learned that much from my six years in Richmond.”

Slicer was right. In the end, the city council reversed itself and voted unanimously to put the Ashe statue on Monument Avenue. A councilwoman explained that the gesture was a necessary evil, to exorcise Richmond’s historic demons. “Ghosts still haunt us, and we haven’t resolved that,” she said.

F
ROM
R
ICHMOND
Rob and I headed to another haunted place: Petersburg, twenty-three miles south of the capital and scene of the Civil War’s endgame in 1864 and 1865. It was here, after the debacle
at Cold Harbor, that Grant laid siege for nine months, finally breaking the Confederate defenses a week before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. By then, Lee’s once-proud army had atrophied to a scarecrow band of men and boys beset by hunger, disease and desertion. Photographs of the rebel dead at Petersburg showed smooth-cheeked, shoeless youths of fourteen or fifteen, half-sunk in trench mud, among the last and certainly the most pointless casualties of a cause that would be truly lost a few days later.

At twilight, Petersburg seemed destitute and semi-abandoned. Black families crowded on the rickety porches of once-elegant antebellum homes whose original owners had likely been slaveholding whites. Parking at what we took to be downtown, Rob and I wandered past vacant factories and peanut warehouses until we came to a sign saying “Old Towne” and a few faint stirrings of commercial life. Stepping inside a New Orleans-theme restaurant, we were immediately accosted by six men seated on stools by the bar.

“Hi, I’m Jim!”

“You guys reenactors?”

“Need a beer?”

This was more than the usual Southern hospitality, particularly given our appearance and stench after three days’ hard touring. We settled in beside a young, balding man named Steve. “The social life in Petersburg is so limited that it’s a relief to see a face you don’t recognize,” he said. Steve, the city’s only legal aid attorney, also explained why Petersburg seemed so derelict.