Confederates in the Attic (43 page)

“Home, boys, home!” Rob shouted, waving his slouch hat. “Home is over beyond those hills!”

We reached the stone wall amidst a final hail of snapping shutters, then slumped on the ground, hot and exhausted. The charge had taken us twenty-five minutes, about the same as the original. We’d lost only one man, left behind at the Emmitsburg Road nursing his
blisters. This was a far better ratio than the actual Confederates, almost two-thirds of whom were killed, wounded or captured in the assault. One Mississippi company lost every man. All told, the Confederacy took 28,000 casualties at Gettysburg, including thirty-one of the thirty-two senior officers who led Pickett’s division during the charge.

“What were you guys trying to prove?” asked a man in a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. “The rebels I mean.”

“You boys prisoners now?”

“Did it really happen like in the movie?”

After catching his breath, Rob began patiently answering each question in turn, as I’d seen him do at Manassas. Watching the rapt crowd, I began to feel less resentful of the gawkers we’d attracted all along the charge. From their questions, it was clear that Rob’s interrogators felt deeply drawn to Gettysburg. But visiting the place, on a July day thick with gnats and tour buses, they seemed vaguely disappointed and didn’t know quite what to do with the empty fields, the silent cannons, the mute blocks of marble. By charging across the landscape in our rebel uniforms, we’d given a flesh-and-blood boost to their imagination, a way into the battle that the modern landscape didn’t easily provide. For one of the few times during my brief reenacting career, I felt I’d done something worthwhile by putting on a uniform.

Still, it was hard to avoid feeling like a creature at the zoo. When I wandered inside to use the visitors’ center bathroom, the man at the next urinal looked at me and said, “Do they let you guys piss inside?” Buttoning up my fly, I heard a familiar click behind me and turned to find a boy smiling over his camera. “Gotcha,” he said.

Returning outside, I found Rob and his friends hoisting their gear. They had a date with a photographer who wanted to duplicate the most famous picture of the entire War: three lean Confederate prisoners standing proudly beside a snake-rail fence at Gettysburg. The photographer was also putting together a Civil War calendar and planned to use a portrait of Rob as the accompaniment for one of the months. “Poster boy for the Confederacy,” Rob said with a grin. “Next thing you know I’ll be doing centerfolds.”

Still, Rob confessed to feeling a bit depressed. Tomorrow, his extended escape from the twentieth century would end, and he’d go back to waiting on tables to pay the rent.

“I’ve had this uniform on for ten days straight,” he said, wistfully fingering a sleeve starched with grime. “It’ll feel like farbing out when I finally get in the shower.”

R
etreating south to Virginia, like the ferrets after Pickett’s Charge, I plotted my campaign through the crucial stretch of Civil War real estate I’d so far skirted. In the year following Gettysburg, while Lee locked the Federals in a bloody stalemate in Virginia, the Union army out “West” battled its way into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and Alabama. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his wife in July 1864, after a bloody repulse in north Georgia. Five weeks later, Sherman tersely telegraphed his superiors, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”—a victory that saved Lincoln from defeat in the fall elections and helped seal the doom of the Southern Confederacy.

Reaching Atlanta was far easier now than in Sherman’s day. Fueled by Georgia’s 97-cents-a-gallon gas and unenforced speed limits, I bombed down an interstate that spilled straight into Peachtree Street, the city’s main drag. Unlike Sherman, I approached
Atlanta with trepidation. Though I’d never visited the city proper, it was impossible to travel the South without getting trapped in Atlanta’s tentacled airport, or being blitzed by TV images of the city’s bland skyline, its relentless boosterism, its bloodlessly efficient baseball team. Atlanta loomed in my imagination like a blimp-sized smile button.

I’d also absorbed the prejudices of non-Atlantans I’d met in my travels (admittedly, mostly folks of a traditional bent). To Southrons, as true sons and daughters of Dixie liked to call themselves, Atlanta was the anti-South: a crass, brash city built in the image of the Chamber of Commerce and overrun by carpetbaggers, corporate climbers and conventioneers. “Every time I look at Atlanta,” quipped John Shelton Reed, the South’s wittiest observer, “I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.”

Atlanta-bashers had even made a science of the city’s disloyalty to Dixie. Reed, a sociologist by trade, cited surveys showing that Atlanta’s “pace of life”—as measured by walking speed, length of bank transactions, per capita wristwatch-wearing—
exceeded
the national average. Even worse, Atlantans ranked below average in their hospitality to strangers (i.e., making change or helping a blind person across the street). “The only thing remarkable about Atlanta,” Reed opined, “is the number and variety of table-dancing establishments.”

Arriving in Atlanta at dusk, I was mostly struck by the number and blandness of its malls and shops. The interstate deposited me in Buckhead, an upscale district that an Atlantan had recommended as “colorful” and “close in.” Cruising slowly down Peachtree, I passed Lenox Square (America’s first suburban mall), a restaurant with a sign that said “A Buckhead Tradition since February,” and countless “detail salons,” a hardcore breed of car wash where attendants cleaned vehicles with tweezers and Q-Tips. Every ten blocks or so stood a chain restaurant called Mick’s; the road map I’d picked up at a gas station labeled every Mick’s, posted like mileage markers all across town.

It was several Mick’s and six miles from Buckhead to Atlanta’s compact downtown. Whatever peach trees once bloomed here were gone, supplanted by a forest of office towers bearing corporate names: Coca-Cola, Delta, Georgia-Pacific, CNN. Climbing out of my
car, I toured the only visible nineteenth-century survival: Underground Atlanta, a commercial district that remained below street level as the modern city grew up around it. Underground originally served as a railroad-side market where slaves and other “wares” were unloaded and sold. Now, its quaint gaslights illuminated renovated shopfronts: Victoria’s Secret, Sam Goody, Foot Locker, Hooter’s, The Gap.

Like most newcomers, bred on
Gone With the Wind
, I assumed that Sherman and his torch-wielding soldiers bore the principal blame for Atlanta’s arid modernity. This notion was also ingrained in the city’s self-image. Atlanta took the phoenix as its symbol; its motto was
Resurgens
. But the next day, at the Atlanta History Center, I learned that the modern city hadn’t exactly risen from Civil War ashes. “Atlantans leveled much more of Atlanta than Sherman did,” said Franklin Garrett, the city’s leading historian.

At eighty-nine, Garrett’s memory was so encyclopedic that the History Center held an annual trivia contest called “Stump Franklin.” He’d last been stumped several years before, when he failed to recall the name of a doorman at a 1920s department store. But he remembered the building. “Gone. Same as the whole block,” he said, consulting a map and ticking off the structures like so many extinct species.

Evanescence had always come with the territory in Atlanta. While most antebellum Southern cities—Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans—grew up around colonial ports, Atlanta began only twenty-four years before the Civil War as a railroad end point called Terminus. Showing an early talent for reinvention, Terminus quickly shed its funereal name and became a bustling rail and munitions center during the Civil War. Retreating Confederates torched much of the city before Sherman’s men added to the bonfire. Even so, Garrett said, about a quarter of the city, including some 400 homes and buildings, survived the flames.

What old Atlanta couldn’t survive was the city’s ceaseless remaking of itself after the War. The devastation was so complete, Garrett said, that not a single antebellum building now remained. The city’s battlefields had fared just as badly. Peachtree Battle Shopping Center was virtually all that recalled the rebels’ rearguard assault at
Peachtree Creek in July 1864. Even the name Peachtree had lost its historic cachet. Peachtree was such a desirable business address that hustling Atlantans had simply cloned it; there were now thirty-two streets with the fruit tree as part of their name.

While Garrett mourned the loss of so much history, he felt this devastation reflected the city’s essential character. “Atlanta’s always been on the go,” he said. “Never was a moonlight-and-magnolia city like Savannah or Charleston. It always had more of a Rhett Butler attitude than an Ashley Wilkes one.”

This go-go attitude had a progressive side, of course. It was an Atlanta newspaper editor, Henry Grady, who popularized the phrase “New South” in 1886 to describe a region ready to reconcile with the North—and ready for Northern investment. Atlanta was the first Southern city to abolish the poll tax and integrated far more easily than most urban centers. The city also began electing black mayors in the 1970s and had become a Mecca for middle-class blacks from across the nation. The Chamber of Commerce got in on the act, too, once taking as its slogan, “A City Too Busy to Hate.”

Like so much about Atlanta, this hype had a way of clouding reality. Atlanta’s inner city remained among the poorest and most crime-ridden in America, and urban blight was matched by frenzied white flight. Even so, it was impossible to wander downtown Atlanta without being struck by the profusion of black professionals and interracial couples, and by the casual mingling of blacks and whites at bars, lunch counters and offices.

But Atlanta’s comparative racial amity—and ceaseless peddling of its progressive image—abetted the city’s neglect of its past. Whatever history Atlanta couldn’t tear down, it bobbed around, lest any ugly blot from the past mar the city’s reputation. During the run-up to the 1996 Olympics, this sanitizing of the past became downright Orwellian. A suburb called Roswell, under pressure from corporate sponsors, deleted “antebellum” from the title of its annual historical festival (it also tried to bar Confederate reenactors from participating). Roswell’s Historic Preservation Commission also removed a marker pointing out slave quarters beside an antebellum home. “We’ll just put it right back out after the Olympics are over,” a local official said. “This is history.”

A
T DAY’S END
, as glass towers emptied downtown, I saw another side of Atlanta that boosters preferred not to advertise. While blacks headed home to urban neighborhoods or close-in suburbs south of downtown, whites streamed onto freeways toward distant enclaves, mostly north of the city. Atlantans referred to the beltway ringing the city as the “perimeter,” as though it represented a real frontier between the majority-black city and the overwhelmingly white suburbs. There was even a corporate outpost oxymoronically called “Perimeter Center.”

Atlantans also spoke of their beltway-ringed city as a doughnut. There were now two telephone area codes, one for “inside the doughnut,” the other for outside. And while the population of the city proper had dwindled since 1970, dipping below 500,000, the metro area had doubled in size to over three million people, mostly living outside the doughnut.

Joining a twelve-lane highway, I lost myself in the tangle of interstates leading out of the city. Despite its rapid growth, north Georgia remained remarkably pastoral. Greater Atlanta didn’t so much sprawl as metastasize, with exurban nodes appearing suddenly amidst piney woods, rolling hills and red-clay fields. Greater Atlanta had also sprouted an astonishing crop of gated communities. One, called Sweetbottom Plantation, offered upscale homes modeled on those in Charleston’s Battery and New Orlean’s Garden District: a bit of Old South grace transplanted to New South suburbs, with security gates and private roads.

I ended my drive at Stone Mountain, just east of the city. Reputedly the largest hunk of exposed granite in the world, the dome-shaped mountain poked up from Atlanta’s wooded perimeter like a very tall, very bald man in a crowd. Chiseled on its face was the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, a three-acre carving of the Confederate trinity—Lee, Jackson and Davis—riding horses and holding hats over their hearts. Lee alone stood nine stories tall.

Commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915, and begun by the same artist who crafted Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain was intended as the South’s foremost Confederate
shrine. It also became a rallying place for the Ku Klux Klan, which was reborn there in 1915 and later declared Atlanta its Imperial City. But eighty years later, when the park at Stone Mountain’s base was named an Olympic venue, the Invisible Empire became, well, invisible. A museum exhibit on Stone Mountain, opening just before the Games, omitted any mention of the Klan. “I think some chapters are just better left to the historians,” Atlanta’s mayor told the local press.