“[The Confederate flag] is something that has no place in our modern times…no place in this body…no place in our society.”
U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun
After my grandfather’s death years ago, several Davises argued about a chest of drawers, two others squabbled over the silverware. The only thing my father wanted was something of little value, a mirror. Before my grandfather had used it, the mirror had belonged to his father. A private in the Army of the Confederacy, John Wesley Davis had tacked this shaving mirror on trees from his home in Bowling Green, Ky., all the way to the Battle of Gettysburg, through grueling hikes and periods of captivity, from one bloody field to another.
It was in his knapsack when he and a cousin were taken prisoner by the Blues. It was with him when they made a run for the woods, when they hid on a no man’s island in the middle of a big river (Was it the Ohio? The Potomac?), living on moldy bacon and pones of cornbread. The mirror was with the Davis boys when they made their way back to Gen. Robert E. Lee, daring to walk only at night, across one recent battlefield after another. To pass the time, they would kick skulls as far as they could into the night. John Wesley Davis told my father these stories in the 1920s. Dad passed them on to me in the early 1960s, tales that grew into my young bones.
Common stories like these came to life for many Southerners recently when the U.S. Senate put itself through a wrenching debate. The Senate denied the renewal of a century-old patent for the emblem of the United Daughters of the Confederacy-the rebel flag surrounded by a wreath.
Southern writer John Shelton Reed, in a kidding mood, offers a symbol Southerners can rally around–a flying pig from a barbecue sign. But the U.S. Senate engaged a serious task. It defined the meaning of symbols for all uses, for all people. It rejected the emblem’s context, an obvious homage to war dead. Consider Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who likened the Southern tradition to the killing of Indians.
This shows why context is critical. After all, slavery was evil enough. But the coldblooded mass extermination of Indian men, women and children was executed by soldiers in blue under the banner of the United States of America. Under Senator Campbell’s standard, Old Glory would have to be banned as a symbol of genocide.
Just as most U.S. senators missed the mark on the context of symbols, so too did they fail to grasp the Southern attachment to a history rich in contradiction. If you were born in the 1950s in the South, even if you were an urban baby boomer, you probably had grandparents who could tell bitter, second-hand tales of raided farmhouses and Reconstruction ruin. The South still felt, in the new sense of the language as well as an older one, put down.
But by the early ’60s, the Old South had acquired a new confidence with its new skyline. Memories of a heroic, Celtic past were woven into a renewed civic culture historically united by the Confederate flag. I remember my father coming home after a day at the office in a pensive mood. Like thousands of others in Houston, he had turned out to honor the motorcade funeral of Walter Williams, dead at 117, reputed to have been a forager in Hood’s Texas Brigade and the last of 3.5 million who fought in the Civil War.
It was not until much later in life that I learned there are other Southern families with other sets of memories. I worked with a professor, an African-American woman from Alabama who spoke of what it was like for her family to motor in quiet fear across the rural South. I worked with a lawyer in California, also a black woman who fled Alabama, who told me what the battle flag of the Confederacy meant in her town.
That flag was raised at the height of segregationist frenzy over the Alabama state capitol as a battle cry against freedom. Now anew governor refuses to fly it over the dome, though he’s considering an appropriate place–perhaps, Jefferson Davis’s Little White House in Montgomery. A Southerner knows when he has been rhetorically outflanked, morally surrounded and forced to surrender. I’ve come to agree that the Stars and Bars cannot be a fitting official symbol for modern, multiracial states.
Still, a solid majority of Southern whites are not quite ready to let go of that flag. And an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows that while most Southern blacks see it as a symbol of racial conflict, almost a third see it as a symbol of Southern pride. To ask how this could be is to plumb deep waters, to seek an identity that runs even deeper than race. It is to know the essential Southernness of all Southern people.
A sanitized South would erase the memory of two races. Yet the Southern business establishment is backing the campaign to make history politically correct. This South of corporate dreams is as colorful as an airport hotel: a region of plantations without slaves, of battlefields that never felt the thud of a corpse, of the original rebels without a cause.
My great-grandfather had a cause. John Wesley Davis told my father he remembered seeing Lee atop his charger, Traveller, on his way from McLean’s farmhouse. He yelled just as lustily as the rest, begging Lee not to give up. But his general had already negotiated a surrender. Davis, with no home to go back to in Kentucky, followed comrades to Texas, with only that shaving mirror and a powder horn to his name.
The family gave both of these keepsakes to my father. In fact, they thought they would do him a favor. The original mirror could simply have been resilvered. But they took it to a glass shop and had the precious handblown glass (what use was it anyway, spotted and corroded like that?) shattered and taken out. Now when my father shaves, he gazes into a shiny new mirror in that old pine frame. And no one but himself looks back.
