Confederates in the Attic (56 page)

“Not yet.”

He went to the blackboard and wrote in large block letters,
REDNECKS OF THE SOUTH
. The others laughed and started shouting their own suggestions. “Crackers of the South!” “Bigots!” “Peckerwoods!”

I smiled and ran the eraser across the blackboard. “What’s the Civil War mean to you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” several students sang out in unison.

“It’s
his-tory,”
a teenager named Percy said. “As in
his
story, the white man’s, not mine.”

I pointed out this wasn’t really so. “Blacks fought in the War and slavery ended because of it.”

“No it didn’t!” a girl named Ni’key declared. “We just don’t call it slavery anymore.”

I changed tacks. “When I say the words ‘Abraham Lincoln,’ what’s the first thing that comes into your head?”

“Benevolent racist.”

“Just racist.”

“He had slaves.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“He was probably paying blacks so little that they might as well have been slaves!” Ni’key shouted. Several other students came over and gave her high fives.

“What about the Emancipation Proclamation?” I asked.

“What about it?” Jamal said. “These Southern crackers were farm boys and slave hunters, so of course they were whipping those nerds
from up North. Lincoln had to free the slaves so he could use them as soldiers.”

We went back and forth for half an hour. In essence, the students were saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with race or slavery—much the same argument made by neo-Confederates who saw the War through the prism of states’ rights.

I asked if any of the students attended Selma’s annual Civil War reenactment. Percy laughed. “We got some crazy rednecks here. They could use all that shooting as an excuse to shoot us and say it was an accident.”

“Hypothetical question,” I said. “My great-grandaddy was in the Civil War, fighting for the South. How should I remember him?”

“Forget him. He’s all bad.”

“Those crackers did wrong. Why honor them?”

“Rednecks!”

“Peckerwoods!”

Rose Sanders finally stepped in. “The Vietnam War was evil,” she said, “but we don’t feel everyone who fought in it was evil.”

The students went silent for a moment. “You got a point,” one student said. “My uncle fought over there.”

Then Sanders banged a desk. “But no monuments! We’re trying to change criminal behavior among our young people. You can’t do that and at the same time honor Confederate criminals.”

“Right on!”

“The Civil War is still going on,” Sanders said. “The only difference is that the Union army has betrayed us, too. So we’re fighting a confederacy up North and down South.”

“Tell it!”

“And why should we go watch some reenactment that honors the Southern way of life?” Sanders said. “The money I pay for that just goes into a pot that continues to oppress us. Only a few whites come to our bridge reenactment. They’re signaling that our history isn’t important. So why should we join in theirs?”

I listened silently. Sanders’s message was the same refrain I’d heard across the South. My history and
his-story
. You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine. Both races sealing themselves off from each other. I was relieved when the class finally ended.

“You can see for yourself now,” Sanders said, leading me back to the museum, “that there’s a lot of fear and anger in these kids about that whole Civil War crowd.”

I suggested this might not be so if they had more contact with the “Civil War crowd,” some of whom, like Will Hill Tankersley in Montgomery, regarded themselves as progressives when it came to race.

Sanders frowned. “I prefer to deal with someone who admits their racism than with white liberals who hide it.” Then she launched into a tirade against white civil rights workers, black “sellouts” like Julian Bond, and “Jews who knock down men like Farrakhan.”

“Jews don’t like Farrakhan because he calls them bloodsuckers,” I replied. “If you’re fighting racism, you shouldn’t have a leader who says racist things.”

“Don’t tell us who our leaders should be,” Sanders snapped. “If you give up on a leader because of a few things he says, you can’t follow anyone.”

“A few things?” I snapped back. “He says Hitler’s a great man. As a Jew, I’ve got a problem with that.”

“Oh, here we go again. Jewish suffering. What about our suffering? Our holocaust? What about the holocaust of Indians?”

We argued for half an hour before shouting ourselves out. I glanced around. We were surrounded by photographs of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery March. Looking at these same photos the day before, I’d wished myself there on the Pettus Bridge, or marching behind Martin Luther King. “The good old days,” Reverend Boone had called them. In a way he was right.

Sanders’s thoughts seemed to travel along a similar plane. She walked me to a window and looked out through the rain as traffic crawled over the Pettus Bridge. “I guess I wanted to have this museum to add some clarity to history, or at least to remember a time when there was some clarity,” she said. “It’s gotten so complicated ever since.”

I
DROVE OUT OF
S
ELMA
through the late-afternoon gloom, past King’s “I Had a Dream” bust, feeling lower than at any time
during my long Southern ramble. If the Civil War infused my boyhood imagination, it was the racial dramas of the 1960s that had molded my political consciousness. I was five when King made his Dream speech a few miles from my home. The March on Washington was my first political memory—mainly, I suspect, because my parents fought over whether my mother should go. My father, a liberal but cautious man, feared trouble. In the end my mother stayed home.

Five years later, I sat on a friend’s rooftop and watched Washington burn during the rioting sparked by King’s murder. It was about this time that I began drifting away from the Civil War. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember why. But perhaps it was my growing awareness of the race-charged city around me; at some point, cool-looking Confederates didn’t seem so cool anymore. And Union soldiers, to me, had always seemed like a bore.

Or maybe my focus just shifted. In college I studied black history, tutored inner-city kids, wrote a turgid senior thesis on Southern black workers. It was my thesis advisor, a civil rights scholar from a black college in Mississippi, who urged me to go South after graduation to work as a union organizer. While in Mississippi, I wrote my first newspaper article, on a maimed black logger, and found I liked writing better than agitating. In a way, my childhood fixation on the Confederacy had mutated into an adult preoccupation with the South and with race—and led, in a roundabout fashion, to my choice of careers.

The past year’s journey had given me ample chance to revisit all this. But the South had changed on me, or I’d changed on it. My passion for Civil War history and the kinship I felt for Southerners who shared it kept bumping into racism and right-wing politics. And here I was in Selma, after holding my temper with countless white supremacists, losing it with a black woman whose passion I’d initially admired. Months before, in Mississippi, I’d learned that the union I’d worked for, once militantly integrationist, was now all-black. It had little use anymore for white sympathizers from up North. Nor, evidently, did black activists like Rose Sanders and Richard Boone. To some degree, this was inevitable and healthy. People had to fight their own battles; outsiders tended to get in the
way, particularly in the South. Still, it saddened me that I sometimes felt like an enemy on the premises, among both whites and blacks.

D
RIVING OUT OF
S
ELMA
, I pondered something else. Rose Sanders’s students had offered me a glimpse of what angry young blacks in Alabama learned about the Civil War. I’d also seen a bit of what conservative whites—namely, the home-schoolers I’d met at the state capitol—taught their kids about slavery and secession. I was curious to know what lay between these extremes.

Through the friend of a friend, I contacted a history teacher in Greenville, a town of 8,000 an hour’s drive south of Montgomery. Billie Faulk was about to teach the Civil War to her high school students, and said I could listen in. But the offer came with a curious caveat: the Civil War wasn’t part of the prescribed high school curriculum.

“Alabama’s course of study is pitiful,” Faulk said, sweeping the blackboard clean between classes. A slim, attractive woman in her early forties, Faulk had the frazzled intensity of a twenty-year classroom veteran. In elementary school, she said, students made a high-speed pass at slavery and secession during survey courses covering all of Alabama and U.S. history. They returned to the War in eighth grade, at the tail end of a class covering U.S. history to 1877. “But most teachers fall behind during the year and end up rushing through the War,” Faulk said.

Officially, that was all they got. Alabama had recently changed its curriculum so that high-schoolers studied U.S. history only from 1877 onward. I later called a state official, who explained, “We wanted to adjust the frame to include time closer to the present that’s more relevant to students.” Texas and several other Southern states had done the same.

Faulk bent the rules as best she could, supplementing the textbooks with material of her own and including a review of slavery and the War. But it was Band-Aid work at best. “Most kids simply don’t have a grasp of the basic facts,” she said, “so it’s hard to really probe the issues.”

Her students filtered in. Five blacks sat in a clump by the door. Six
white students camped by the window. I sat alone in a row that formed a sort of no-man’s land between the two groups.

“Let’s talk about Southern society,” Faulk began. “What does it mean to be Southern?”

“Country accent,” one boy said. “Country ways.”

“Backwoods, like.”

“We farm more than people up north.”

“We talk different and eat funny foods. Like we have a rattlesnake rodeo and a watermelon jubilee.”

This seemed a rather narrow and self-deprecatory notion of Southern identity. Still, it was refreshingly free of rebel flags. Unfortunately, as Faulk had warned, it was also almost free of facts.

“How long did slavery last?” she asked.

“Until the 1900s?” one boy ventured.

“1940,” another said, with certainty.

Faulk frowned. “Is that what the rest of you think?” The others looked at her blankly. “Well, the answer is 1865.” She paused, then asked, “When did the Civil War start?”

“1812!”

“1840!”

“1816!”

“1861,” Faulk corrected. “How do we know about slavery? What are our sources?”

“Books, like, and movies,” one boy called out. “The Autobiography of Scottie Pippen.”

“Miss Jane Pittman, you dummy!” a friend yelled, thumping him on the back. “Scottie Pippen plays for the Bulls.” The class erupted in laughter.

Faulk asked the students what came to mind when she said the words “Old South.”

“Big Houses.”

“Big dresses, too.”

“Big parties, like in
Gone With the Wind
and
North and South.”

“Hard work, cotton, slaves,” a black student said. He was the only black to speak up during the class.

Faulk explained that the Old South wasn’t very old or very grand in most of Alabama. Less than 1 percent of whites owned 100 or
more slaves, and some of Alabama’s finest plantations grew from log cabins built just forty years before the Civil War.

“You mean the one Lincoln grew up in?”

“When they freed the slaves did they all go and kill their old masters?” another boy asked.

“There’s something I don’t get,” a third boy said. “If slaves were so cruelly treated, why do they always have pretty teeth in the movies?”

Faulk lectured for the remaining twenty minutes until the bell rang. “As you can see,” she said, smiling wearily, “I’m competing with Hollywood. It’s almost a let-down when they learn that the antebellum South wasn’t all Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes.”

The same mythic gauze overlaid their notions about the Civil War. “They think it’s all glory,” she said. Faulk tried to dispel this romance by talking about the horrors of the War. Her own forebears had fought for the South; one went to war at fourteen, another in his sixties. “They were poor men fighting a rich man’s war,” she said. “I don’t think there was much glory in that.”

We headed for the cafeteria and piled our trays with fried steak nuggets, turnip greens, pickled beets and cornbread. Again, the kids separated loosely along racial lines. The same was true of the break period that followed, during which students milled outside in neighboring clumps of white and black.

Faulk’s next class was world history, so I went to the school library to look at the textbooks she’d given me. “Like most people in the South, Alabamans held a strong belief in states’ rights. Alabama joined the secession movement and fought against the Union in the Civil War.” Those two lines were all the ninth-grade primer had to say on the subject.

Still, this was better than the apologias of old, which I’d read at a Montgomery library. “It was only a question of time when the slaveholders would have freed their slaves,” claimed a ninth-grade textbook from the 1940s. A 1961 textbook showed kindly mammies and obedient field hands flashing “bright rows of white teeth.” The pages were also filled with wicked Yankees, vicious scalawags, and venal carpetbaggers.

I poked my head in another classroom and found Ruby Shambray,
a heavyset black woman who had taught history in Greenville for thirty-five years. “When I started here, the Civil War was my favorite subject,” she said. “You just taught what happened and kids were interested.”

Back then, her students were all black. Then, when schools integrated in 1969, many middle-class white parents began sending their kids to new, all-white private schools—known colloquially across the South as “seg academies.” This drained energy and resources from Greenville High, which was now mostly black and working-class, like many other public schools in the region. Shambray said the school’s library was poorly stocked, its computers few, its labs antiquated. Alabama spent less on public education than any other state in the nation.