Friday, August 25, 2017

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Confederacy

Such an important article. May we all seek that which helps us to see through the eyes and hearts of others. To humanize is the antidote to all that divides rather than connects us. May we individually and collectively cultivate a growing and expanding capacity to listen with our hearts and souls. - Molly


 Memorials to the Lost Cause have always meant something sinister for the descendants of enslaved people.
For most of my life I didn’t know Confederate statues could come down.
Throughout my childhood, those equestrian statues of victory, obelisks, and granite figures of soldiers were as immovable and immutable as the hills and the lakes. Other symbols of the South as it was before 1865 were also part of the fabric of reality. Old battle flags were inevitabilities, waving in the wind. Plantations might as well have been wonders of the world, and old battlefields holy places. Part of living in the South, just as much as eating and breathing were, was partaking in a perpetual reenactment.
In my hometown of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, we have our own little shrine to the Confederacy. The Nash County Confederate Monument is a column with one soldier standing atop its apex, surrounded by four shorter empty columns.The base is engraved with two rifles crossed.
According to the inscription on its base, the monument is dedicated:
To the Confederate soldiers of Nash County who in 1861, in obedience to the summons of their state, freely offered their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on behalf of the cause of Constitutional liberty and self-government, and through four years of war so bore themselves in victory and defeat, as to win the plaudits of the world, and set an example of exalted and unseen patriotism, which will ever be an unfailing inspiration to all future generations of American citizens.
I witnessed that statue just about every day. I ran past it during track practice, down a path that took me between Stonewall Manor, an old plantation, and Rocky Mount Mills, one of the earliest cotton mills in the state of North Carolina—and thus one of the earliest cotton mills operated by enslaved persons in the state of North Carolina. It rarely—but not never—occurred to my younger self that, as a descendant of persons just like those, I built my body in a trinity of places built upon the brokenness of theirs. Again, the monuments to a world past seemed like landmarks, as much a part of my surroundings as the pine trees and the Tar River into which they once bled.
But, as I would learn, obelisks don’t grow from the soil, and stone men and iron horses are never built without purpose. As per my textbooks, the local newspaper, and often teachers, the purpose of Confederate monuments and of the other shrines to the Old South was to remember something lost, recall the days of men who were somehow taller and stood straighter, and honor a common heritage they protected. In my adolescent mind, filled to the brim with the Tolkienesque, the statues in their tellings were analogues to his Argonath, the grand memorials to a time before, when magic was real and something about man was nobler.  
The history of the statue in my hometown, unveiled on May 14, 1917, indicates such myth-making was already prevalent when it was dedicated a century ago. The entry on the day of its unveiling in the local Evening Telegram declares the Nash County monument “one of the handsomest monuments in the State of North Carolina.” Of the Confederate soldier to whom the monument is dedicated, the newspaper wrote: “And when the star of the Confederacy had finally set in agony and in tears behind the bloody horizon at Appomattox, Robert H. Ricks and his brave ‘Manly’s Battery’ were still fighting. For, this man never surrendered.” It seems certain that in Ricks, the white citizenry of Rocky Mount still saw themselves, as fighters continuing in a war and a cause.
Please continue this article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/growing-up-in-the-shadow-of-the-confederacy/537501/

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