Confederates in the Attic (7 page)

“No sir! Nothing!” he shouted. Then he dove under the table, yelling, “Someone told me there’s Yankees around here! They hate little children!”

I
N THE AFTERNOON
, the C. of C. convened again for a memorial service at Raleigh’s Confederate cemetery. The children read short profiles they’d composed about the dead, then recited sentimental poems about “sleeping Confederates” and laid wreaths at a mausoleum called House of Memory. Sue Curtis explained that the C. of C. spent many weekends this way: raking and fertilizing Confederate plots, decorating graves with flowers, visiting monuments and shrines.

One girl lingered long after the others, gazing back at the ranks of stones. “You know what I hate?” she said. “When people say that history repeats itself. That’s the scariest thing I can think of.”

Beth was a tall, intense girl of twelve with braces and a black barrette stuck crookedly in her hair. I told her I wasn’t sure I understood the appeal of all this devotion to crypts and alabaster, which was beginning to strike me as a bit morbid for a children’s group.

“To tell you the truth, I was kind of embarrassed to come today,” she said. “When I told a friend at school about it, she said, ‘What’s that, some kind of redneck thing?’” Beth frowned. “I’m not prejudiced and I don’t agree with all this ‘South is great’ stuff. I’m sure there were some good things about the North.” She looked around. “I hope nobody hears me say that.”

Even so, Beth served as president of her C. of C. chapter and reckoned she’d join the UDC when she aged out. But her passion for the Confederacy didn’t spring from the C. of C. Catechism. In school she’d just learned about the Holocaust and become obsessed with Anne Frank and other Jews killed by the Nazis.

“What gets me is the heart of the Jews. They were underdogs, they knew they were going to die but didn’t give up the faith,” she said. “Just like the Confederates.”

Beth saw another connection between the Civil War and the Holocaust. “I like the gruesome stuff, like about the prisons,” Beth said. “I like Auschwitz—I mean, I don’t like it, but I like to learn about it. That’s my favorite concentration camp. It makes me wonder how human beings can possibly do that sort of thing to each other, and how you keep your spirit in that situation. Then I got to thinking about Salisbury’s prison.” Her voice lowered, the way a twelve-year-old’s does when she’s about to say something awful. “You know how some prisoners killed themselves at Salisbury? They drank potty water.” She grimaced. “I guess if you were really sick already, that would do it. But you’d really have to want to die.”

We caught up with the others at a punch-and-cookies reception at an antebellum mansion, followed by a banquet of fried chicken, potatoes with cheese, green beans, biscuits and peach cobbler. Digging into my third sclerotic meal of the day, I recalled a conversation I’d once had with the Tennessee writer John Egerton over a heart-stopping lunch in Nashville. “This meal’s got all six of the major food groups in the South,” he observed. “Sugar, salt, butter, eggs, cream and bacon grease.”

The dinner was followed by speeches and awards: for the Catechism quiz winner, for the chapter “sending in the greatest number of accurate membership papers” (won by Sue Curtis’s group, of course) and for “the youngest child registered in the division,” a five-month-old who would become the C. of C.’s state “mascot” for the following year. This post was so coveted, Sue said, that some parents registered their children at birth, even asking the labor-room doctor to sign the application form.

It was ten-thirty when the meeting finally adjourned. I promised Beth I’d send her some material from the Holocaust Museum and told her about another museum, in Tel Aviv, where I’d dug up details on my forebears in Eastern Europe. Beth’s eyes lit up. She’d recently become interested in genealogy, too, and was now tracing her rebel ancestry.

“My father’s mother’s maiden name is Frank, and they came from
somewhere in central Europe originally,” she said. “Maybe, oh maybe, I’m praying that I’m kin to Anne Frank. That would be the greatest thing in the world.”

I
STAYED A WEEK
in Salisbury, attending several more meetings with the Curtises. By the end, I knew the words to every stanza of “Dixie” and had learned to distinguish the rebel battle flag from the first, second and third national flags of the wartime South. I’d also begun to realize that the Curtises logged more miles for the Confederacy each year than the Army of Northern Virginia.

But my last day in Salisbury, I decided to attend a remembrance of a different sort. The third week of January marked not only the birthdays of Lee and Jackson, but also of Martin Luther King Jr. In the reconstituted world of the 1990s South, the Confederates’ birthdays were now discreet affairs, celebrated in library back rooms, while King’s was a national holiday. Virginia, I later learned, had attempted a bizarre fusion of the Civil War and civil rights, creating “Lee-Jackson-King Day” (all three men were “defenders of causes,” the state legislature proclaimed). But the hybrid didn’t take and most Virginians continued to celebrate their heroes separately.

The same was true in Salisbury. Blacks observed King’s birthday with a parade and a service at a small church a few blocks from the town’s Confederate monument. Ushers handed out paper fans decorated with King’s picture on one side and a funeral home advertisement on the other. A dozen or so whites sat near the front, including the mayor, sheriff and county judge.

The service began, like the other meetings I’d attended, with the pledge of allegiance and with tunes that echoed Southern history, albeit from the opposite shore of racial strife and liberation.

The “birthday message” by a visiting minister also spoke to the legacy of the Civil War. “Frederick Douglass said over a century ago
that America cannot remain half slave and half free,” he began. “He said the sky for blacks was dark but not rayless. I would say the same today. Do you hear me?”

“Yessir!”

“Some of us are still ashamed to be known as African-American. We have tried to assimilate harder than any other. We try to talk like other folk, we are afraid to laugh. When I was coming up, you could hear us laugh a block away. Talk to me, somebody!”

“Tell it, Rev!”

“We’re not cannibals. We don’t stew folks in pots or wear bones through our noses. When I was a child I read about L’il Black Sambo putting tiger butter on pancakes. At school I learned about Robert E. Lee. But nobody told me about the peanut man, Booker T. Washington. I didn’t hear about
our
heroes. We can’t all be superstars. Most of us are just hardworking average folk. But you are somebody special because God didn’t make any junk. I’m going to pick at this bone just a little bit and then leave it alone.”

“Nossir! Go on now!”

“Dr. King said you must be willing to stand for something or you will fall for anything. Jesse Jackson said it doesn’t matter what boat brought you to this country. We’re all in the same boat here. So let’s come together. Let’s hold hands now and smile at each other.”

The choir broke into song and everyone joined in, belting out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I’d heard Julia Ward Howe’s anthem to abolition a hundred times before. But listening to it now, through the prism of the Civil War, I was struck by its explicitly martial tone and its vivid imagery of 1860s army life.

“He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword …

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps … He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat … As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on!”

If “Dixie” was elegiac, a nostalgic evocation of cotton fields, buckwheat cakes and gay deceivers, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was its antithesis: apocalyptic, ironfisted, and almost industrial in its summoning of God’s legions to march forth and crush iniquity. It would be a stretch to suggest that the two songs offered a tuneful
synopsis of what had separated North from South—and what had fueled the North’s triumph. But hearing the songs sung in such close succession, I couldn’t help feeling the emotional distance between the two causes.

When the singing ended, I chatted with others in my pew, including a tall, aristocrat-looking man with pomaded gray hair. I told him about the Lee-Jackson gatherings I’d attended and asked how he felt about people still celebrating the Confederacy.

“I’m happy they have the freedom to celebrate those men, the same way we celebrate King here,” he said. “But you didn’t see nobody black at those meetings, did you? We had white folks here, at least a few. Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something’s wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.” A wry smile creased his lips. “I got one word for those folks—Appomattox. The game’s up, you lost. Get over it.”

The other blacks in our pew didn’t seem to care about whites honoring Lee and Jackson. “Whites have their day, now we’ve got our own,” one woman said. But one man didn’t share this indifference. Michael King was a young preacher with horn-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped beard and mustache. “The Bible says, if eating meat offends your brother, eat meat no more,” he said. “Worship of the Confederacy offends me.”

When I asked why, he walked me to the Confederate monument, which occupied a median strip on Salisbury’s busiest street. The 1909 memorial depicted a bronze angel cradling a dying rebel soldier and holding forth a laurel crown. Chiseled on the granite base was the Confederate motto,
Deo Vindice
. With God As Our Defender.

“What’s the message here?” King said. “God dispatched an angel to ferry this brave rebel to heaven. As a Christian pastor, I got a problem with that. The whole notion that God was involved with one race putting down another, that’s going against the grain of a Christian nation. God ain’t with racism or anything to do with subdividing people.”

The monument bothered King for another, subtler reason. “It’s idol worship. I feel sorry for folks who feel like they have to put up idols to feel good about themselves.”

King had lived in Salisbury his whole life. He knew his was a
minority view. Most blacks were apathetic, he said, or didn’t want to ruffle Salisbury’s racial calm by talking about old monuments. He had done so publicly once, questioning at a public meeting why the monument—owned by Sue Curtis’s UDC chapter—should stand in the middle of a busy street where “I got to worship it every time I’m stuck at a red light,” King said.

In reply, King had received hate mail. His protest also prompted an avalanche of letters to the local paper stating that the monument wasn’t racial, it was just a symbol of great-grandfathers who fought and died for their beliefs. “The way I see it,” King said, “your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I’m supposed to feel all warm inside about that?”

I asked King if there was any way for white Southerners to honor their forebears without insulting his. He pondered this for a moment. “Remember your ancestors,” he said, “but remember what they fought for too, and recognize it was wrong. Then maybe you can invite me to your Lee and Jackson birthday party. That’s the deal.”

T
he
General Beauregard
eased out from the pier and steamed slowly into Charleston harbor. Trapped mid-deck in a coffle of schoolkids, camera straps and windblown maps, I could barely see the fort or hear the ferry’s crackly soundtrack.
“With the first shot on Fort Sumter, America’s greatest moment of conflict, the War Between the States, had begun.”

Wriggling free, I joined a few stoic passengers gazing into the wintery breeze from the
Beauregard
’s bow. Sumter lay three miles offshore. Other Civil War ramparts occupied fingers of land poking into the water. “The Forts, faintly blue on the twinkling sea, looked like vague marine flowers,” Henry James wrote of his visit to Charleston in 1905. From the bow of the
Beauregard
, Sumter looked more like a manhole cover bobbing atop Charleston harbor.

A man to my left stared at his tour book. “They fired three thousand rounds at that thing,” he said. His wife nodded with the trancelike glaze of a teenager in first-period history class. To my right stood a heavyset man about my own age. He had a shaved head, sunglasses
and a camouflage jacket with safety pins where the buttons should have been.

“It’s heart-breaking, huh?” he said, staring out to sea. I wasn’t sure if he meant the Civil War or the scene on the
Beauregard
.