Yes, I wanted to say. He’s mine.
Thirteen
A Flag in War
In late February, 2018, the Tennessee Historical Commission ruled on the university’s petition to change the name of Forrest Hall: waiver denied. Sarah Calise was in South Carolina when she heard the news. She was not surprised by the ruling, “but still very disappointed,” she told me. Crutchfield’s reaction was ambivalent and left him in search of a silver lining. “Of course you don’t want to see something that you worked really, really hard on be unsuccessful, but you have to define success for yourself. Is success the ultimate goal of getting the name down? Is it starting the conversation? Is it mobilizing students who weren’t motivated politically before this? If you look at the entire process, you can definitely see some successes there, but the ultimate goal didn’t happen.” Fighting against racial inequality is a hard, long battle, he explained, and it’s often necessary to reframe a campaign to emphasize the positives. “In any type of social-justice movement for change, you have to redefine success or you will be depressed all the time.”
Calise was more upset. The campaign was “one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to go through as a historian,” she told me. The futility of trying to impress upon people the facts of Forrest’s life, much less the consequences of those facts—it vexed her. “Him being a military strategist means more to you than the fact that for fifty years, students have been offended and scared to walk by a building—that’s what I can’t come to terms with. Why does your love for this dude outweigh your respect for another human being?”
I put that question to Elizabeth Coker. She attributed it to the import she places on military history. Her father fought in World War II, her grandfather in World War I, and “both of them were descendants of Confederate Veterans,” she responded. She draws a straight line from that lineage to the things that are right and good in the country today. And she brooks no dissent from that point of view. Anyone who fails to see the inherent goodness in that legacy demonstrates “their ignorance of what made this country great.”
Competing histories and competing grievances had made the Forrest debate an exercise in prerogative. In other words, the debate turned on collective memory more than history. And this is the rub of collective memory, it’s not always so “collective.” The teller of a story often needs to have a similar background to the listener for the story to land, to resonate across the web of shared experience and beliefs. “A narrative that runs counter to dominant politics or ideology will prove hard to communicate,” writes Erika Apfelbaum, a scholar of collective memory. Memory is self-reinforcing, and thus self-insulating. It creates an adversarial relationship so that protests from outside a given group fall on deaf ears. Southern historian C. Vann Woodward called this gap between living memory and written history a “twilight zone,” that serves as “one of the favorite breeding grounds of mythology.” An intervention into Forrest’s legend would have to come from within.
Dr. Frisby, the chair of the task force, had always been bearish on the possibility of the Historical Commission granting a waiver in the case. The commission is in the business of preserving history, he told me, and these new powers vested in them by the Heritage Preservation Act were outside of their purview. “This is a power they never asked for and aren’t set up to handle,” he said. Permitting the school to change the name would set a precedent, he predicted: “As soon as they approve a waiver, a storm’s going to come.” When I asked Dr. Frisby if he thought anyone had changed their mind about Forrest over the course of the debate, he just chuckled.
The task force had devoted months to the debate, hearing two mutually exclusive versions of Forrest. Then the State Board of Regents and the Tennessee Historical Commission—two different groups of prominent, powerful Tennesseans—each debated the issue and came to two opposite conclusions. At the end, it was hard not to see it as an exercise in futility, a year’s worth of evidence of just how fractured American memory is.
The frustrations of this campaign prompted Joshua Crutchfield to reassess his aims in activism, getting him to focus more on systems of inequity rather than the symbols of that inequity. “I think symbols have power,” he explains. “If there’s ever a time that that’s evident, it’s now. [But] there’s a system that upholds those symbols. I don’t know which one comes first. Maybe you get rid of the system and the symbols come down.” But protests over symbols can sometimes feel reactionary, he reflected. Someone else puts up a monument or names a building and then there you are, channeling all your energy into getting it down, allowing your opponent to set the terms of the debate. “Where do we start to be more strategic about implementing systems within ourselves and our communities?” he asked aloud. One answer, for Crutchfield, has been to shift his attentions to organizing in Nashville, working as a part of the local Black Lives Matter chapter to create a community oversight program for policing in the city. Being proactive, organizing communities, holding systems of power to account for abuse and mistreatment: “That’s the path forward at this point.”
But, he added, as long as those symbols are still up, they are “like a flag in war.”
Part Three
This Is Us
Nashville
Fourteen
At the Foot of the Ugliest Confederate Memorial
Head north on I-65 and you’ll see it on your right, after you’ve coiled through Franklin, Tennessee, past the Nissan North America headquarters, past the Walmart and the Galleria, up through Brentwood’s leafy burbs, just across the Nashville city limits. From peripheral vision at 70 mph, it scans as little more than a shock of silver and gold, like someone slipped a single Civil War image into a film reel of fast-food franchises, firework megastores, and the rest of the visual muddle of highway travel. Still, it’s unmistakable. And if you pull onto the shoulder and get out for closer inspection, you’ll see, beyond the kudzu-threaded barbed-wire fence and inside a half-circle of Confederate battle flags, the horse and rider, Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his steed, twenty-seven feet from horse hoof to saber tip, riding parallel to the roadway. The statue sits on private property, hence the barbed wire. It is highly visible but only from a distance and only for a moment; a flicker of Forrest as you enter the city.
Behold: our nation’s ugliest Confederate statue. It is crudely and cartoonishly rendered in plastic, Forrest in silver, his horse in gold. Forrest brandishes a pistol, an elongated arm protruding from his shoulder at a grotesque angle, his too-large head turned unnaturally to stare at traffic. His face is contorted, his eyebrows raised and his teeth bared, as if in the middle of a rebel yell. It is so absurd and tacky that it must be a joke—the sculpting crude, the likeness farcical, the colors ridiculous—but no: it was carved and erected in sincerity.
The artist responsible for this roadside travesty is Jack Kershaw, a longtime Nashville resident, who sculpted it between 1996 and 1998. Kershaw was an unreconstructed Renaissance man—a painter, sculptor, lawyer, semi-pro quarterback, grassroots organizer, and avowed racist. When Kershaw died in 2010, an obituary submitted to the Nashville Tennessean called him a “gold-plated eccentric,” while the Southern Poverty Law Center went with “one of the most iconic American white segregationists of the 20th century,” noting his role in founding multiple white-supremacist organizations along with his bizarre contribution to the country’s collection of Confederate monuments.
For years, I’ve been both fascinated and repulsed by the statue, gnarled and nightmarish, and the life of its creator. The story of the statue and artist points both forward and backward in time—tracing a line from the Agrarians of the Jim Crow era up to the roiling heart of American madness at present. And so, wanting a better look at the statue of Forrest than the glimpse afforded by the interstate, I got ahold of William Dorris, who owns the land upon which the statue stands, and arranged a visit.
Under a light rain on a winter Monday in 2017, I turned onto Regent Drive, dipped
under a railroad bridge, and swung past an entrance gate secured with six padlocks and several No Trespassing signs. I parked, climbed a gravel path lined with old bath fixtures, and met Dorris at the foot of the statue. Dorris is in his eighties and, as he described himself, “90 percent blind.” He wore a black-and-white-checked shirt and bolo tie under his teal jacket, with thick-framed eyeglasses under wraparound black sunglasses. He leaned on a walking stick as we inspected the statue.
Dorris is retired now, but as the longtime owner of a bathroom outfitter called Aqua Bath, he provided Kershaw, a lifelong friend, with the space to sculpt on-site and the materials necessary to remember Forrest to interstate travelers. He estimated he’d spent about $80,000 on the statue since work began in the mid-nineties.
Up close, it is even more gruesome than it appears from the interstate. The effect approaches what I’d imagine it’s like to be the human in a live-action animated film—like a Space Jam of the Confederacy. The statue is constructed from polystyrene blocks, and you can see both the crude execution—“he carved it with a butcher’s knife,” Dorris told me—and the lingering evidence of the many attempts to deface it. Anticipating that it would be a target for vandalism, Kershaw finished the statue with an anti-graffiti polish. Dorris appreciates Kershaw’s prescience, as trespassers come regularly. There’s a rail line abutting the statue—the Nashville & Decatur. Forrest raided it multiple times during the war, Dorris told me. More recently, someone tried to topple the statue by tying one end of the cable to the horse, the other to a train in the rail yard below. After that, Dorris added a support beam to the horse’s hind legs. So far, it’s held on. It has likewise survived several shootings and numerous calls for the city to build a wall or plant shrubbery to block the view from the highway. When one such protest came in the summer of 2015, Dorris suggested that he could put the statue on stilts to display it above any barrier the city might build.
Standing there at the foot of the statue, I started to pick up on a strange kind of honesty in it—the fever-dream impressionism somehow offers, to my mind, a more accurate view of Confederate history than, say, Forrest’s stately equestrian statue in Memphis or the bust, inconspicuous and modest, further north in the Tennessee Capitol. Forrest should look this ugly, this preposterous, in our remembrances. “Let that one stay up,” more than one activist has told me, as if the statue were the portrait of a Confederate Dorian Gray.
We stayed at the statue’s foot for about fifteen minutes, staring up at it, long enough for me to get, and then get used to, a crick in my neck. Then Dorris took me on a lap of the narrow grounds on which the statue sits. Dorris moved delicately with his cane on the gravel but did so with an intuitive, almost uncanny sense of the grounds. As we started down the hill away from the statue, he pulled up suddenly and said, “We’re probably just at the corner of the old ice house.”
You couldn’t draw a straighter line from his toes to where the stones met at the corner of a mostly collapsed building, about ten feet from the gravel path. There’s an artesian well nearby and, before the war, enslaved people laid the stones for an ice house. What remained was mostly foundation, set below the surface of the sloping land. Most ruins bring to mind what once was there, prompting you to mentally project an overlay of a completed structure, like a visual autocorrect. But not with this. What struck me about it was what was there, still—a carved-out bit of land, forever blocked in stone, the land reshaped, the stones unyielding. The labor of the enslaved people who built this country remained as a kind of negative space. It was the inverse of the statue on the other side of the workshed. Like the forgotten corner near the courthouse square in Murfreesboro that once held the slave market, here is another memorial that holds a story that a monument won’t tell.
After inspecting the icehouse, I rejoined Dorris and we continued our walk. He had just started to explain something about Forrest and the train line when he stopped short again. We were at the far corner of the icehouse now. It was like out of the movies, what he was doing. He must be messing with me, I thought. Some obtuse joke on the interloping journalist. Maybe he wasn’t as blind as he had let on? I doubted it. More likely, he just knows the land so well, has walked the knowledge of it into his nerve endings. If I lay down, he said, right at the corner of the building and used its edge as a sight line, I should be able to see the farmhouse of the family who lived on this land before the war. I obliged, crouching and aligning, but mostly I just saw the interstate. I got up a few times to reposition, searching for some crack in the Impalas and retaining walls to see what Dorris wanted me to see. But I couldn’t. Whatever Dorris was seeing behind those two pairs of glasses, for the life of me, I couldn’t see it.
After the battles of Franklin and Nashville in December of 1864, this land was a field hospital, Dorris told me. What is now his workshed was then a stable, repurposed to care for wounded soldiers. Over one thousand Confederate soldiers died in the Battle of Franklin just down the road, fifteen hundred more in the battle of Nashville, fought just north of where we were. “I could have trodden on a dead man at every step,” a military chaplain said as he walked the field the morning after the Battle of Franklin. Field nurses laid out officers on the porch of a nearby house—perhaps the one Dorris was trying to get me to see. The losses here in late 1864 had doomed the Confederate effort in the western theater. Forrest would soldier on for another year, but it was, by then, futile.
After a while, I stopped pretending to be able to see the house or whatever it was I was supposed to see beyond the interstate, got up, and walked back to the statue. Dorris invited me into the workshop, and so we slouched for a while in recliners, sipping bottles of water. He sat facing the door, a box of shotgun shells to one side, to the other a bookcase with titles like The Jewish Confederates, Myths and Realities of American Slavery, and binders of Aqua Bath annual reports. Before I could even ask a question, Dorris launched into a defense of Forrest’s record, telling me that even Sherman defended Forrest in his memoir.
I was more interested in hearing about Kershaw, the artist, but Dorris continued on for some time, reciting defense after defense of Forrest’s record. It was like watching someone practice karate alone, parrying invisible challenges.
On the question of Forrest’s slave-trading: The Cherokees did it, too. On the broader question of Forrest’s views on white supremacy: If he was racist, then how did he go to sleep during the war protected by seven Black “bodyguards”? On the frequent accusations that the statue is racist: We had a Black man speak at the unveiling.
The conversation was sometimes as difficult to follow as it was to listen to, though it did suggest that our current strain of political rhetoric—fact-allergic and driven by false equivalency—had its roots in the Lost Cause apologia. The whataboutism, the plausible deniability, the dog-whistles that dip, not infrequently, into the audible range. Donald Trump would be inaugurated as president in less than a week; it all felt so familiar.
About an hour into my visit, Dorris and I were joined by a tall, jovial man who introduced himself as Ross. He gave off a fraternal, isn’t this fun!? vibe while we toured the rest of the workshop. As we inspected Dorris’s impressive collection of old tractors, Ross told me that he had more fun with Kershaw than anyone his own age, even as Kershaw got on into his nineties. The two would drink scotch before a roaring fire in the hearth of Kershaw’s house. To his friends, Kershaw was charismatic, I came to understand—eccentric and endearing. To further underscore this point, Dorris told me the two had met when Kershaw was driving through Dorris’s neighborhood in a convertible Studebaker, a goat in the backseat.
Jack kershaw was born in 1913, grew up in Old Hickory, Tennessee, and attended a military school at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the mountainside Confederate bas-relief sculpture looms and where William J. Simmons had founded the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt in the early thirties, Kershaw studied geology, history, and art, and played on the footb
all team. He fell in with the Vanderbilt Agrarians, twelve of whom had recently published their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. Their essentialist view of Southern identity resonated with Kershaw, an idea he worked to incorporate into his art. Toward the end of his time at Vanderbilt, Kershaw married Mary Noel, a cousin of Andrew Lytle, the Agrarian who wrote so admiringly of Forrest.
Mary Noel came from money; her father was a wealthy real-estate man in Nashville. When the Depression hit and golfers stopped coming to the Glendale Country Club, which he owned, he let the newlyweds live in it. Kershaw got into real estate with his father-in-law, joined a semi-professional football team in Nashville, and turned the locker room of his country club estate into a painting studio, where he set about developing his self-consciously Southern artistic vision.
But before Kershaw became obsessed with Forrest—or rather, before that obsession compelled him to make Forrest part of the daily commute of thousands of Nashville residents—he had a long career of upholding white supremacy in the South. The first white supremacist organization Kershaw founded was known as the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government. He launched it with Donald Davidson, another of the Agrarians. Both Kershaw and Davidson were card-carrying members of the States Rights Party, and together they coordinated statewide resistance to school integration in the state in the 1950s.
Down Along with That Devil's Bones Page 11