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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