Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  With a group of students in his history seminar, Huebner began to work on the text for a new marker. “As we got further into it, it became apparent to me that we needed to do a service at the church and it needed to be a service of remembrance and reconciliation,” he said. “I wanted us to try to remember this history and specifically to remember the lives of the people who were sold there.” The English word remember comes to us from late Latin and old French, “to bring to mind again,” but Huebner offered another way of thinking about the term: “To re-member in the sense that you’re putting that back together. That’s the process of doing the research: you are trying to re-member this story and to re-member the lives of these people. So we wanted to do the research on their names and know who they were so we could use these names in the service in order to make the point that these were human beings who had lives and they had names and they had ages.”

  The ceremony, “A Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation,” took place on April 4, 2018, fifty years to the day since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. just a mile south of Calvary, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Six hundred people filled the pews, crowded in behind the last row, and spilled out into the lobby.

  “I’m glad that this fuller truth will be told for many decades to passersby,” the Reverend Scott Walters, the rector at Calvary, told the crowd. “The uncomfortable tension this story exposes may be more poignantly ours as the people of Calvary church than anyone else’s,” he continued. “And it can change us if we let it.” The racial caste system of the antebellum South, he noted, was a part of the ordinariness of life to most white Memphians of the time, as it was for those parishioners of the church, in those days—just the water in which they swam. “Illusions are invisible to most of us who hold them. That’s what makes them illusions.” But he cautioned that “our temptation today may be to make monsters out of our Christian forebears and imagine that maybe we could never be so blind to such horrors. This is a dangerous illusion as well.”

  Rev. Walters then told the crowd that a series of people would come to the pulpit to read the names of seventy-eight men, women, and children—the names of some who had been bought and sold at Forrest’s slave mart. It was a way, he explained, to honor them, to provide, in a small and simple way, a dignity once denied them. But it was also a way to offer a confession, a way for those gathered to “drop an illusion of innocence and to restore a proper tension to our lives as we wonder together what in Memphis and what in America and what in this world should be unsettling my prayers today.”

  Dr. Charles McKinney, chair of Africana Studies at Rhodes College, rose to the pulpit. “Names of the enslaved sold at Eighty-seven Adams, 1854 to 1862,” he said as the church bell began a steady toll, marking time and tribute. Into its ring, McKinney began to read: “Jerry, age thirty-five. Charles, age forty-five. Dick, age fourteen. Paige, age nine. Washington, age twenty. Catherine, age twenty-three. John Henry, age three. Mary Ann, age three.”

  From the second lectern across the sanctuary, Beverly Bond continued reading. As she recited the next name—“Tom, age sixteen”—a small but remarkable thing happened: someone stood up. A balding man in chinos and sport coat rose, his hands clasped in front of him, his head down. The whole gravity of the room, already trembling, shifted in that moment. Our history, and all its weight, was embodied, re-membered, in the sanctuary. By the time Bond read the name “Solomon, age twenty,” people throughout the church were standing. And when Tami Sawyer’s voice briefly broke between the “twenty” and “one” of a man named Ishmael’s age, everyone in the church was on their feet.

  People choked back sobs, the bell tolled, and Sawyer read on: “Harrison, age sixteen. Wilson, age eight. John, age twenty-five.”

  The service was an American elegy set to the toll of the church bell. It created a space for honesty about America’s past and our present, where those in the church could see and feel what whiteness has wrought in a more urgent, human way. It was not a “Kumbaya” moment but something both smaller and more honest—a simple gesture, profoundly urgent and profoundly basic, redolent of dignity and grief and shame and love and horror and confession and good and evil and the Devil and God—in other words, it was wholly American. And thus befitting a ceremony meant to restore the tension of the country’s original sin. It was a start. It suggested a way to re-understand American history, grounded in the acknowledgment of the names and ages and lives lived and robbed in this space. This campaign to tell the truth about Forrest also revealed the truth about ourselves. Who we’ve been, who we are, who we might yet be. And maybe, at this late hour, even as so many Neo-Confederates were retreating from that knowledge, maybe more of us were arriving there to accept it.

  The new marker in Calvary’s parking lot, like the old marker in Calvary’s parking lot, stands just across the street from the county courthouse. The new wrought-iron marker describes the scale and importance of the slave trade to the city of Memphis in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War, highlighting the importance of Forrest’s slave mart in that human trafficking. Van Turner, the county commissioner who now owns the park where the Forrest statue once stood and where his body is still buried, has practiced law in that courthouse for years. He would bristle whenever he saw that previous sign and its word choice, he told me. It was as if they were saying, “We’re going to parade this right before your faces and dare [you] not to do anything about it.”

  So, the new sign is, for him, a welcome change. And it made me wonder: Was it surreal, now, owning the gravesite of the man who became a rich man trafficking humans across the street from where he practices law? It’s a question he’s been asking himself lately, too.

  “The great grandchild of slaves now owns the park where Forrest, who fought to maintain slavery, is buried. Who fought to keep slavery alive. A hundred and fifty years later the very thing you wanted has been flipped upside down,” he reflected. It made him think about a quote from Dr. King, from the speech he delivered on the steps of the Alabama state capitol at the successful completion of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

  So, no, Turner told me, it’s not surreal. “It’s the arc.”

  Like a lot of people over the past couple of years, I’ve careened wildly between hope and despair. Every so often, deep down a rabbit hole in an archive, or in the middle of an interview, or lost in thought on a long drive, I would catch myself compulsively updating a mental ledger of optimism and pessimism, as if I were plotting coordinates on the moral universe as I puttered around the Southeast. Forrest back in Selma: despair. Forrest Hall still Forrest Hall: despair. But an awakened political consciousness on the MTSU campus among students both Black and white: hope. Jack Kershaw cutting a swath of unreconstructed racism through the twentieth century: despair. Tami Sawyer, fist raised on the empty pedestal: hope. Unite the Right, Trump, Huebner . . . you get the idea.

  So when Van Turner—who now owns the park where it was once illegal for his father to walk—says it’s the arc, I was inclined to agree. An informed optimism about the state of the country, the universe. It felt right. Like a good ending.

  At least for a while.

  It was something from the Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation that lingered with me and that would eventually push me to reconsider ending with Turner’s words. I spoke with Rev. Dorothy Wells, the rector at another Episcopal church in Memphis, who had written the prayers recited that day after the reading of the names. I remarked on how much her prayers emphasized the importance of awareness, especially for white people. As if to say: it was one thing to nod in somber recognition of injustices past, it’s another to trace those injustices into the present and ask how they have shaped you. And to do so without the benefit of hindsight, without the moral clarity of 150 years’ distance.

  “I do think that there is a need for folks who are not of African descent but who have in any way, shape, or form
benefitted not only from slavery but from systemic racism that has survived beyond slavery, to be able to acknowledge that,” she explained. But not by taking blame for the actions of an ancestor; it’s not about blame—placing it or taking it. Instead, Wells said, the idea is to see past an individual’s feelings or actions to the systems built to protect the privilege and fortune amassed by some through the deprivation of others. We have to recognize the injury and care about those who have been harmed, she said, then we have to see the systems that produce and perpetuate those injuries. And to do that, we need to use our sense of the past to hone our awareness of the present.

  So, not to undercut commissioner Turner; for him it is the arc, no doubt. But as I reflected on what Wells was saying, as I felt the tension between my life and Forrest’s continue to grow tighter, I was reminded that, for so long, people like Forrest (which is to say people like me) have been the force heaving against that arc’s bend. Our very identity was invented to be a bulwark against that bend. Better, then, to understand what happened in Memphis not as a triumph, an end, but rather as a beginning. To try to divine a cosmic optimism or pessimism out of the campaign is to miss the point.

  In my conversation with Wells, she pointed to Memphis—a city that is 63 percent African American, where nearly 30 percent of African Americans live below the poverty line. Many of the state’s failing schools are located in the city’s African American communities. That’s not by accident. “But it’s easy not to see that,” said Wells, “because a lot of that poverty is concentrated into certain neighborhoods, so people don’t see it. It’s not something that ever comes near you.” Seeing the wrong in the thirty-foot bronze statue of an infamous man standing in a city park or the slave market in the parking lot—those are layups. The #TakeEmDown901 campaign and “A Service for Remembrance and Reconciliation” showed that plenty of white people were ready to forego the palliative provided by the Forrest statue. But what about the work to tear down the “thought monuments,” the structural forces that create the benefit of the doubt in interactions with police officers and prosecutors and judges? Or campaigns to address segregated schools with uneven funding? Lobbying to combat voter suppression? The opportunity gap? The wealth gap?

  A symbol is gone; the systems remain.

  And we’ve made hard work of the easy part. In the scheme of things, the monument campaigns have cost very little. The upcoming battles will cost much more. If we want to get to the “beyond,” if we want to unknot whiteness from its implied supremacy, if we want to rebuild the country on lines other than those drawn to impose and protect that supremacy, if we want to close a 10-1 racial wealth gap, or create equal access to quality schools and healthcare and the ballot box, if we want to fight for a $15 minimum wage or end mass incarceration, these campaigns will require sacrifices—not the least of them material sacrifices—far beyond what the Confederate monument debate has cost us.

  Even so, to summon the will among enough Americans to address these issues, we must first come to a common understanding of the past—an understanding grounded in the acknowledgement of all that has been taken in the name of whiteness. And, in that way, the campaign and the service are a good beginning.

  On my last reporting trip to Memphis, I paid one more visit to Health Sciences Park and to the empty pedestal. It was high spring, the cars parked along Manassas Street dusted with pollen. The park is just down the street from Sun Studios, the famous record label run by Sam Phillips that recorded the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Cash, and the King himself, Elvis Presley. Before his audition with Sun in 1954, the story goes that Presley anxiously paced the blocks around the studio. I’ve often wondered if he walked past the Forrest statue, compulsively patting down his ducktail haircut before heading into the studio to sing “Without You.” In his essay on Elvis, “Elvis: Presliad,” Greil Marcus writes about the difficulty of pinpointing watershed moments in a person’s life. “You can’t answer such questions, not computer-style,” Marcus writes. “But you have no claim on the story unless you risk a guess.”

  So here’s my guess about Forrest’s life.

  It takes place back before he even came to Memphis, while he was still living in Mississippi, working for his Uncle Jonathan—until the duel with the three Matlocks in the town square that would claim his uncle’s life. Forrest, remember, inherited Jonathan’s debt, which was, as Jonathan had put it, “greater as I apprehend than I will be able to pay.” Everything flows from that moment on the corner in Hernando: Forrest, in the red, soon opts to go full-time into the slave trade, where he makes a fortune. It’s with that fortune that he’s able to equip his own regiment when the war comes. It’s as a cavalry leader that he distinguishes himself as a cunning, instinctive military mind. It’s as a distinguished Confederate general that he’s tapped to head the Klan. It’s as the head of the Klan that he endeavors to “redeem” the South, making it possible for them to reinstitute white supremacist rule, and to set about hoisting statues to their heroes.

  You can drop the needle on all of it right there on the square in Hernando. Of course, it all rests on the unshakable belief that the men and women Forrest bought and sold into enslavement were subhuman. But many in America have held and hold such beliefs. We know about Forrest, specifically, because he was born poor on the frontier and availed himself of the opportunities to advance in a country and an economy built on the backs of others. (You might say he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but those bootstraps were other human beings.) He steps into that role, into history, and onto many a pedestal when he unholsters his six-shooter that afternoon in Hernando.

  Part of me wishes there were a statue of Forrest that captured that moment. Desperate, violent, bleeding from the arm. The weight of the mortgages suspended above him, a spent revolver in one hand, a bowie knife in the other, surrounded by death and debt, just before he makes the crossroads wager for material wealth at that devilish price. How American. This is a truer American story than most white people tell. And it’s probably why we don’t tell this one very often. There was no rich sailor to teach him the ways of the upper crust, no million-dollar loan from a father. Just the striving young white man, desperate for wealth, taking on the weight and the horror of the slave trade and signing on to the bargain white America plays with capitalism.

  The story is a reminder that the deep inequities in our system, like the ones Rev. Wells had pointed to, didn’t come about by accident. They’re the result of a sustained campaign to use race as a way to extract and hoard resources. That audition Presley was going to when he paced around this block in Memphis? It was to fill a role Sam Phillips had long imagined, and would often fantasize about to his assistant: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars!”

  Like I said, this book begins and ends with an empty pedestal. What started in Selma with a bare granite column where a bust of Forrest was about to be replaced ends three years later with the vacant marble base on the south side of a Memphis park. But in the ending, too, there is another beginning. The empty pedestal should serve as a reminder of all that’s been taken, of all the debts still owed. Revising the city’s landscape to tell the truth about Forrest, to restore the tension between his life and ours, is a start. But it is only a start.

  Epilogue

  The Two-Face God

  Montgomery

  It’s a muggy day in late April, 2018, and I’m standing in the central courtyard of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, overlooking downtown Montgomery, Alabama. From this vantage point (on some of the highest ground in the city), I can see the state capitol building and the bank towers below, the pine banks of the Alabama River a little further on. But I’m standing here to take in the more immediate setting: the 805 steel markers that surround me. The memorial hallows this high ground for the approximately 4400 victims of racial terror lynchings that took place in America between 1877 and 1950. There’s one marker for each county in which a lync
hing took place, each inscribed with the names and dates of those men, women, and children murdered for being Black in America. Some markers include a single name, while others, like Shelby County, Tennessee—Memphis’s county—list twenty. Selma’s county, Dallas, lists nineteen names.

  I’m here for the memorial’s opening weekend, just four days after Confederate Memorial Day (still a state holiday in Alabama; I didn’t have to work). Montgomery is like this: competing histories, held in discomfiting proximity. Monday off in honor of Confederates, Friday afternoon at a lynching memorial. Dr. King’s old church, just around the corner from the First White House of the Confederacy. It’s paradoxes like these that led Jason McCall, a poet from Montgomery, to refer to the city as the “two-face God.” And up here, at the center of this memorial, high on the hillside, you’re closest to the two-face god of Montgomery’s—and America’s—history.

  It’s been just three weeks since Calvary Episcopal dedicated their new Forrest marker in Memphis. Like Calvary, the Memorial for Peace and Justice tells a fuller truth about our past, with plans to revise not just Montgomery’s landscape, but also the country’s.

  The memorial is a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery-based nonprofit founded by attorney Bryan Stevenson. Originally established to guarantee legal representation to the state’s death-row inmates, the EJI has expanded its work in recent years, seeking to address the root causes of the racial bias the lawyers encounter daily in the criminal justice system, from excessive sentencing to overpolicing and abuse. In 2015, as a part of their expanding work, the EJI published “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” Their research identified 800 more lynchings than previous totals. Many took place in the American South, but not all. There were lynchings in Minnesota, Illinois, Maryland. And the EJI argues that this era of violence functioned as a link in an unbroken chain of systemic racism, from slavery to mass incarceration. And furthermore, that for all the monuments, plaques, and statues that lionize the Confederacy, there remained a conspicuous collective silence around these lynchings. The EJI sought to change this, positing that “There is a path to recovery and reconciliation when we tell the truth about our history in the public square.”