Confederates in the Attic (6 page)

Ironically, Alex Haley’s novel
Roots
helped trigger this trend, inspiring blacks and then other Americans to dig through archives and ship records. Tracing pedigree wasn’t new to the South, but it had traditionally been most popular among blue bloods such as the FFVs, or First Families of Virginia. In the past twenty years, Sue said, there’d been a dramatic upsurge of interest in common forebears, including rebel foot soldiers.

Sue’s duties as registrar often took her to the state archives in Raleigh. As a special treat, Ed sometimes drove her to the National Archives in Washington. I asked when they’d last taken a trip unrelated to the Civil War.

Ed looked at Sue. “Have we ever?”

She shrugged and shook her head. “Not that I can think of.”

Rarely a week passed without some meeting, or a ceremony marking one of the anniversaries scattered like saints’ days through the year: Lee’s and Jackson’s birthdays, Confederate Flag Day, Confederate Memorial Day, Jefferson Davis’s birthday. Sue also corresponded with Northern women whose ancestors lay in Salisbury’s cemetery, and had even held a memorial service for a Michigan soldier with a wreath laying and the singing of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “My great-great-grandfather died on his way to prison up North,” she reminded me. “I like to think some Northern lady might have done the same for him.”

The Curtises had no offspring of their own to enroll in the Sons or Daughters of the Confederacy. At least no blood kin. “I started the first chapter of the Cats of the Confederacy,” Sue said, stroking a
diabetic feline named Flurry Belle. “We wear gray ribbons with cat pins and get together and tell stories about cats in the War.” For instance, a Confederate mascot named Tom Cat who became the only casualty during a Federal bombardment of Savannah in 1863.

Given all this, it seemed remarkable that the Curtises managed to hold down day jobs; Ed helped veterans find employment, Sue filled volunteer posts at schools, libraries and hospitals. But their passion for the War had crowded out everything else, including church.

“We were raised Methodists,” Sue said. “But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn’t time for both.”

“War is hell,” Ed deadpanned. “And it just might send us there.”

But Sue didn’t worry about the afterlife. In fact, she looked forward to it. “The neatest thing about living is that I can die and finally track down all those people I couldn’t find in the records.” She pointed at the ceiling and then at the floor. “Either way, it’ll be heaven just to get that information.”

A
T THE
L
EE
-J
ACKSON BIRTHDAY PARTY
, a shopkeeper named Michael Sherman had given me a business card labeled Firearms Etc. When I’d asked what etcetera included, he replied, “C’mon out and see for yourself.” So the next morning, I followed a country road winding out of town until I found a cement-block building with a sign in the shape of a revolver.

Sherman stood behind the counter, demonstrating an assault rifle with a retractable bayonet. A man and a boy of about ten looked on. “The beauty of this one,” Sherman said, thrusting the gun at the wall, “is that if you’re down to just a few rounds, you can poke the guy through instead.”

Across the shop sat two other men I recognized from the meeting: a bloated fellow in overalls and a camouflage jacket, named Doug Tarlton, and an even doughier figure, Walt Fowler, who sat drinking a diet soda and wolfing down Bugles.

“Had to cut down on the sugar,” Fowler said. “Gout’s got me again. ’Course it could be the acid in those tomatoes I ate this morning, or the cheeseburger they came on.”

“Walt’s a restaurant inspector,” Tarlton explained, “so he’s got to
sample everything to make sure it’s safe for humanity. If you can call Walt human.”

Fowler acknowledged this friendly jibe by rummaging in a plastic bag beside his chair and pulling out a crude, photocopied cartoon showing several men aiming pistols into a toilet bowl. “Polacks shooting crap,” Walt said, convulsing with laughter.

Tarlton smiled. “Walt’s not prejudiced. He hates all minorities the same.” Tarlton pointed to a chair and offered me a chocolate-colored wafer that I took at first for a Mars bar. “Want some ’backer?” he asked. I tore a small piece from the dense plug of chewing tobacco and stuffed it in my cheek. For a few minutes, I concentrated on my cud and took in the rest of the shop. There were cases filled with Lugers, scopes, holsters, pepper spray, banana clips, Bowie knives, and felt bags labeled “soft cases for your dreaded
ASSAULT RIFLE
!” A sign by the door declared, “Shoplifters will be shot. Survivors will be shot again!”

The only nonlethal item in the shop was a picture called “The Last Meeting,” a popular reprint of the most hallowed of Confederate images: Lee and Jackson parting at Chancellorsville on the day Stonewall was shot while flanking the Federal army. I pointed at the picture and asked Tarlton why he thought memory of the Confederacy was so enduring.

“You’re looking at it, or at least one reason for it,” he said, gesturing around the crowded shop. “Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are today. Every man in here has carried a gun for his country and probably a few of the women, too.”

Tarlton had served in Vietnam and taken so much shrapnel in his leg that he’d had seven operations and now wore a prosthetic knee. “Up close, war’s kind of a stomach-turner,” he said, tapping the leg of his overalls. “I like it better in books.”

After Vietnam, Tarlton worked as a police detective before turning to farming. He was also licensed as a lay minister.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“Die for a living.” He lifted his hunting cap to reveal an entirely bald scalp. “Advanced leukemia.”

I realized now that the puffiness around his eyes was watery and
unnatural, due to chemotherapy or cortisone rather than Southern cooking.
“I’m
sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. Doctor told me I’d be dead by Christmas. I’m enjoying the borrowed time.”

Tarlton spent much of it studying the Civil War. “The present—I live it, it holds no mystery,” he said. “The past does.” He paused. “Plus the present to me is not all that attractive right now. When you’re puking in the commode, the past looks a whole lot better.”

The Civil War also kept his detective skills sharp. Tarlton helped friends track down proof of rebel ancestry. As a detective, he’d spent much of his time busting drug dealers and blowing up backwoods liquor stills. “Basically I was a narc,” he said. “So I had a close-up view of all the sickness out there. Junkies. Thugs. Guys who’d pimp their daughters for dope. You deal with that all day and you feel kind of soiled.” He pointed at the picture of Lee and Jackson. “When I read about them, I feel like man’s a noble creature, like maybe humanity’s just going through a bad patch.”

He chuckled and pointed at Fowler, who was finishing off his box of Bugles. “Take Walt,” he said loudly. “You’d never guess it from looking at him, but when his great-great-uncle, Henry Fowler, got killed in battle, his commanding officer sent a note saying he ‘behaved with great coolness and courage.’”

I asked Tarlton what he knew about his own Civil War forebears. “Bunch of poor dirt farmers, like most folks were around here, and like a lot still are,” he said. “Didn’t own any slaves.”

“Why do you think they fought?”

“The way I see it,” Tarlton said, “they were fighting for their honor as men. They came from stock that was oppressed and they felt oppressed again by the government telling them how to live.”

“Same as today,” another man chimed in. “Government’s letting the niggers run wild.”

“Amen,” said a third, looking up from a case of bayonets. “What they need to do is put all those crackheads on work crews and let them chop the right-of-way for a few years. You can bet your sweet bippy that’ll adjust their attitude.”

I plugged my mouth with a fresh wad of tobacco. Walt Fowler
broke the awkward silence by reaching into his plastic bag again. He extracted a piece of parchment that looked like one of those homilies people put on their living room walls. Fowler solemnly intoned: “Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off.” He hooted and slapped his thigh.

I got up to go and told Tarlton I might stop by to see him again. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “I told those doctors to quit everything. No more chemo.” He tipped his cap. “Life’s a bitch and then you die. If God wants me, he can take me. I’m ready.”

Then, as if on cue, he and Fowler pulled revolvers from their coat pockets and held them stiffly across their chests, mimicking young Confederates posing for studio portraits at the start of the War. “Still armed and ready for action!” the two men shouted in unison.

I
N THE CATALOGUE
of Confederate organizations to which Sue and Ed Curtis belonged, one in particular had piqued my curiosity: the Children of the Confederacy, or C. of C. for short. An auxiliary of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the C. of C. was designed to prep youngsters for Confederate citizenship in rather the way that Future Farmers of America readied teenagers for agricultural life. “You age out of the C. of C. at eighteen,” Sue explained, “and hopefully then you move right into the UDC or SCV.”

Sue had “reactivated” a dormant C. of C. chapter in Salisbury and she invited me to attend a state meeting at the Plantation Inn Resort in Raleigh. This turned out to be a faux-plantation motel on a busy suburban road, right across from Kmart. About a hundred kids and their parents crowded inside a climate-controlled annex to recall and honor the suffering of their forebears.

At the front of the room sat girls in flouncy white dresses and red sashes labeled “page,” beside boys in clip-on ties marked “aide.” Parents popped up from the audience with video cameras, like proud and indulgent parents anywhere—watching a school play, say, or a junior-high debate. This illusion of normality evaporated as soon as the program got under way, first with the salutes to various flags,
then with the singing of “Dixie” and the pronouncement of the C. of C.’s “Creed.”

“We pledge ourselves to preserve pure ideals; to honor the memory of our beloved Veterans; to study and teach the truths of history (one of the most important of which is, that the War Between the States was not a
REBELLION
nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery); and always to act in a manner that will reflect honor upon our noble and patriotic ancestors.”

One of the aides handed out copies of the “Catechism,” a sixteen-page pamphlet that served as the Children’s guiding text. It was published in 1954 (the same year that
Brown
v.
Board of Education
declared school segregation unconstitutional), and arranged in a question-and-answer format.

The treatment of battlefield history also hewed to traditional notions about Southern valor.

Actually, Gettysburg was the rare clash in which the Confederates weren’t badly outmanned. If the battle proved anything, it was that Lee could blunder and that Northerners could fight as doggedly as Southerners. Reading through the rest of the Catechism, I began to
hear echoes of defeated peoples I’d encountered overseas: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland. Like them, Southerners had kept fighting their war by other means.

After a break for milk and Animal Crackers, the children took their seats for what was known as the Catechism Quiz. A teenager posed questions from the text, and a group of twelve-and-unders competed to be the first to answer correctly, often with verbatim recitations of the Catechism. If no one could answer within fifteen seconds, the moderator called out “Books!” and the children riffled through their Catechisms until they located the correct response. The kids were stumped only a few times. It was an impressive display of rote learning and reminded me of my own childhood passion for Civil War trivia, though this was a level of fine print I’d never reached.

After the quiz, I went with the Curtises and a couple named the Crowders to a Southern-style restaurant chain called Morrison’s. We loaded our trays with un-Confederate heaps of cornbread, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and collard greens. I was about to shovel in the first bite when Violet Crowder loudly cleared her throat. Then she turned to her four-year-old son, Warren. “Lord,” he intoned, “we thank thee for this meal and especially for the great and wonderful Confederacy.”

Violet smiled proudly. “You have to set them on the straight and narrow at an early age. Then, even if they stray, they’ll come back to the faith.”

I wasn’t sure which faith she meant: the Confederacy or Christianity.

“We all stray, I know I did,” Violet went on, hoeing into black-eyed peas. “I was a liberal once.”

“No!” Sue Curtis exclaimed.

“Vi’s even got a jail record,” her husband said. “For a protest in Washington in 1969.”

Violet blushed. “I grew up in a tiny town where everybody knew my grandmother and her grandmother. You never got wild. So when I went to college I did.” She sipped her iced tea. “I’ve straightened out since.”

Her son sat quietly completing a connect-the-dot picture of the rebel flag and filling in a coloring-book map of America: gray for the Confederacy, blue for Union, green for border states. “Warren,” his mother said, “tell this nice man from Virginia, is there anything you hate more than Yankees?”