Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  I got up to go and told Tarlton I might stop by to see him again. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “I told those doctors to quit everything. No more chemo.” He tipped his cap. “Life’s a bitch and then you die. If God wants me, he can take me. I’m ready.”

  Then, as if on cue, he and Fowler pulled revolvers from their coat pockets and held them stiffly across their chests, mimicking young Confederates posing for studio portraits at the start of the War. “Still armed and ready for action!” the two men shouted in unison.

  IN THE CATALOGUE of Confederate organizations to which Sue and Ed Curtis belonged, one in particular had piqued my curiosity: the Children of the Confederacy, or C. of C. for short. An auxiliary of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the C. of C. was designed to prep youngsters for Confederate citizenship in rather the way that Future Farmers of America readied teenagers for agricultural life. “You age out of the C. of C. at eighteen,” Sue explained, “and hopefully then you move right into the UDC or SCV.”

  Sue had “reactivated” a dormant C. of C. chapter in Salisbury and she invited me to attend a state meeting at the Plantation Inn Resort in Raleigh. This turned out to be a faux-plantation motel on a busy suburban road, right across from Kmart. About a hundred kids and their parents crowded inside a climate-controlled annex to recall and honor the suffering of their forebears.

  At the front of the room sat girls in flouncy white dresses and red sashes labeled “page,” beside boys in clip-on ties marked “aide.” Parents popped up from the audience with video cameras, like proud and indulgent parents anywhere—watching a school play, say, or a junior-high debate. This illusion of normality evaporated as soon as the program got under way, first with the salutes to various flags, then with the singing of “Dixie” and the pronouncement of the C. of C.’s “Creed.”

  “We pledge ourselves to preserve pure ideals; to honor the memory of our beloved Veterans; to study and teach the truths of history (one of the most important of which is, that the War Between the States was not a REBELLION nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery); and always to act in a manner that will reflect honor upon our noble and patriotic ancestors.”

  One of the aides handed out copies of the “Catechism,” a sixteen-page pamphlet that served as the Children’s guiding text. It was published in 1954 (the same year that Brown v. Board of Education declared school segregation unconstitutional), and arranged in a question-and-answer format.

  Q. What causes led to the War Between the States, from 1861 to 1865?

  A. The disregard of those in power for the rights of the Southern states.

  Q. Where was the first slave ship built and launched?

  A. In Marble Head, Mass., in 1636.

  Q. What was the feeling of the slaves towards their masters?

  A. They were faithful and devoted and were always ready and willing to serve them.

  The treatment of battlefield history also hewed to traditional notions about Southern valor.

  Q. What is considered by historians as the decisive battle of the war?

  A. Gettysburg.

  Q. Why?

  A. Because it was conclusive evidence to an unbiased mind that the Federal supplies and forces greatly outweighed and outnumbered the Confederate forces.

  Actually, Gettysburg was the rare clash in which the Confederates weren’t badly outmanned. If the battle proved anything, it was that Lee could blunder and that Northerners could fight as doggedly as Southerners. Reading through the rest of the Catechism, I began to hear echoes of defeated peoples I’d encountered overseas: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland. Like them, Southerners had kept fighting their war by other means.

  After a break for milk and Animal Crackers, the children took their seats for what was known as the Catechism Quiz. A teenager posed questions from the text, and a group of twelve-and-unders competed to be the first to answer correctly, often with verbatim recitations of the Catechism. If no one could answer within fifteen seconds, the moderator called out “Books!” and the children riffled through their Catechisms until they located the correct response. The kids were stumped only a few times. It was an impressive display of rote learning and reminded me of my own childhood passion for Civil War trivia, though this was a level of fine print I’d never reached.

  After the quiz, I went with the Curtises and a couple named the Crowders to a Southern-style restaurant chain called Morrison’s. We loaded our trays with un-Confederate heaps of cornbread, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and collard greens. I was about to shovel in the first bite when Violet Crowder loudly cleared her throat. Then she turned to her four-year-old son, Warren. “Lord,” he intoned, “we thank thee for this meal and especially for the great and wonderful Confederacy.”

  Violet smiled proudly. “You have to set them on the straight and narrow at an early age. Then, even if they stray, they’ll come back to the faith.”

  I wasn’t sure which faith she meant: the Confederacy or Christianity.

  “We all stray, I know I did,” Violet went on, hoeing into black-eyed peas. “I was a liberal once.”

  “No!” Sue Curtis exclaimed.

  “Vi’s even got a jail record,” her husband said. “For a protest in Washington in 1969.”

  Violet blushed. “I grew up in a tiny town where everybody knew my grandmother and her grandmother. You never got wild. So when I went to college I did.” She sipped her iced tea. “I’ve straightened out since.”

  Her son sat quietly completing a connect-the-dot picture of the rebel flag and filling in a coloring-book map of America: gray for the Confederacy, blue for Union, green for border states. “Warren,” his mother said, “tell this nice man from Virginia, is there anything you hate more than Yankees?”

  “No sir! Nothing!” he shouted. Then he dove under the table, yelling, “Someone told me there’s Yankees around here! They hate little children!”

  IN THE AFTERNOON, the C. of C. convened again for a memorial service at Raleigh’s Confederate cemetery. The children read short profiles they’d composed about the dead, then recited sentimental poems about “sleeping Confederates” and laid wreaths at a mausoleum called House of Memory. Sue Curtis explained that the C. of C. spent many weekends this way: raking and fertilizing Confederate plots, decorating graves with flowers, visiting monuments and shrines.

  One girl lingered long after the others, gazing back at the ranks of stones. “You know what I hate?” she said. “When people say that history repeats itself. That’s the scariest thing I can think of.”

  Beth was a tall, intense girl of twelve with braces and a black barrette stuck crookedly in her hair. I told her I wasn’t sure I understood the appeal of all this devotion to crypts and alabaster, which was beginning to strike me as a bit morbid for a children’s group.

  “To tell you the truth, I was kind of embarrassed to come today,” she said. “When I told a friend at school about it, she said, ‘What’s that, some kind of redneck thing?’” Beth frowned. “I’m not prejudiced and I don’t agree with all this ‘South is great’ stuff. I’m sure there were some good things about the North.” She looked around. “I hope nobody hears me say that.”

  Even so, Beth served as president of her C. of C. chapter and reckoned she’d join the UDC when she aged out. But her passion for the Confederacy didn’t spring from the C. of C. Catechism. In school she’d just learned about the Holocaust and become obsessed with Anne Frank and other Jews killed by the Nazis.

  “What gets me is the heart of the Jews. They were underdogs, they knew they were going to die but didn’t give up the faith,” she said. “Just like the Confederates.”

  Beth saw another connection between the Civil War and the Holocaust. “I like the gruesome stuff, like about the prisons,” Beth said. “I like Auschwitz—I mean, I don’t like it, but I like to learn about it. That’s my favorite concentration camp. It makes me wonder how human beings can possibly do that sort of thing to each other, and how you keep yo
ur spirit in that situation. Then I got to thinking about Salisbury’s prison.” Her voice lowered, the way a twelve-year-old’s does when she’s about to say something awful. “You know how some prisoners killed themselves at Salisbury? They drank potty water.” She grimaced. “I guess if you were really sick already, that would do it. But you’d really have to want to die.”

  We caught up with the others at a punch-and-cookies reception at an antebellum mansion, followed by a banquet of fried chicken, potatoes with cheese, green beans, biscuits and peach cobbler. Digging into my third sclerotic meal of the day, I recalled a conversation I’d once had with the Tennessee writer John Egerton over a heart-stopping lunch in Nashville. “This meal’s got all six of the major food groups in the South,” he observed. “Sugar, salt, butter, eggs, cream and bacon grease.”

  The dinner was followed by speeches and awards: for the Catechism quiz winner, for the chapter “sending in the greatest number of accurate membership papers” (won by Sue Curtis’s group, of course) and for “the youngest child registered in the division,” a five-month-old who would become the C. of C.’s state “mascot” for the following year. This post was so coveted, Sue said, that some parents registered their children at birth, even asking the labor-room doctor to sign the application form.

  It was ten-thirty when the meeting finally adjourned. I promised Beth I’d send her some material from the Holocaust Museum and told her about another museum, in Tel Aviv, where I’d dug up details on my forebears in Eastern Europe. Beth’s eyes lit up. She’d recently become interested in genealogy, too, and was now tracing her rebel ancestry.

  “My father’s mother’s maiden name is Frank, and they came from somewhere in central Europe originally,” she said. “Maybe, oh maybe, I’m praying that I’m kin to Anne Frank. That would be the greatest thing in the world.”

  I STAYED A WEEK in Salisbury, attending several more meetings with the Curtises. By the end, I knew the words to every stanza of “Dixie” and had learned to distinguish the rebel battle flag from the first, second and third national flags of the wartime South. I’d also begun to realize that the Curtises logged more miles for the Confederacy each year than the Army of Northern Virginia.

  But my last day in Salisbury, I decided to attend a remembrance of a different sort. The third week of January marked not only the birthdays of Lee and Jackson, but also of Martin Luther King Jr. In the reconstituted world of the 1990s South, the Confederates’ birthdays were now discreet affairs, celebrated in library back rooms, while King’s was a national holiday. Virginia, I later learned, had attempted a bizarre fusion of the Civil War and civil rights, creating “Lee-Jackson-King Day” (all three men were “defenders of causes,” the state legislature proclaimed). But the hybrid didn’t take and most Virginians continued to celebrate their heroes separately.

  The same was true in Salisbury. Blacks observed King’s birthday with a parade and a service at a small church a few blocks from the town’s Confederate monument. Ushers handed out paper fans decorated with King’s picture on one side and a funeral home advertisement on the other. A dozen or so whites sat near the front, including the mayor, sheriff and county judge.

  The service began, like the other meetings I’d attended, with the pledge of allegiance and with tunes that echoed Southern history, albeit from the opposite shore of racial strife and liberation.

  Heaven help the black man if he struggles one more day.

  Heaven help the white man if he turns his back away.

  Heaven help the man who kicks the man who’s had a fall.

  Heaven help us all.

  The “birthday message” by a visiting minister also spoke to the legacy of the Civil War. “Frederick Douglass said over a century ago that America cannot remain half slave and half free,” he began. “He said the sky for blacks was dark but not rayless. I would say the same today. Do you hear me?”

  “Yessir!”

  “Some of us are still ashamed to be known as African-American. We have tried to assimilate harder than any other. We try to talk like other folk, we are afraid to laugh. When I was coming up, you could hear us laugh a block away. Talk to me, somebody!”

  “Tell it, Rev!”

  “We’re not cannibals. We don’t stew folks in pots or wear bones through our noses. When I was a child I read about L’il Black Sambo putting tiger butter on pancakes. At school I learned about Robert E. Lee. But nobody told me about the peanut man, Booker T. Washington. I didn’t hear about our heroes. We can’t all be superstars. Most of us are just hardworking average folk. But you are somebody special because God didn’t make any junk. I’m going to pick at this bone just a little bit and then leave it alone.”

  “Nossir! Go on now!”

  “Dr. King said you must be willing to stand for something or you will fall for anything. Jesse Jackson said it doesn’t matter what boat brought you to this country. We’re all in the same boat here. So let’s come together. Let’s hold hands now and smile at each other.”

  The choir broke into song and everyone joined in, belting out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I’d heard Julia Ward Howe’s anthem to abolition a hundred times before. But listening to it now, through the prism of the Civil War, I was struck by its explicitly martial tone and its vivid imagery of 1860s army life.

  “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword …

  I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps … He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat … As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on!”

  If “Dixie” was elegiac, a nostalgic evocation of cotton fields, buckwheat cakes and gay deceivers, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was its antithesis: apocalyptic, ironfisted, and almost industrial in its summoning of God’s legions to march forth and crush iniquity. It would be a stretch to suggest that the two songs offered a tuneful synopsis of what had separated North from South—and what had fueled the North’s triumph. But hearing the songs sung in such close succession, I couldn’t help feeling the emotional distance between the two causes.

  When the singing ended, I chatted with others in my pew, including a tall, aristocrat-looking man with pomaded gray hair. I told him about the Lee-Jackson gatherings I’d attended and asked how he felt about people still celebrating the Confederacy.

  “I’m happy they have the freedom to celebrate those men, the same way we celebrate King here,” he said. “But you didn’t see nobody black at those meetings, did you? We had white folks here, at least a few. Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something’s wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.” A wry smile creased his lips. “I got one word for those folks—Appomattox. The game’s up, you lost. Get over it.”

  The other blacks in our pew didn’t seem to care about whites honoring Lee and Jackson. “Whites have their day, now we’ve got our own,” one woman said. But one man didn’t share this indifference. Michael King was a young preacher with horn-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped beard and mustache. “The Bible says, if eating meat offends your brother, eat meat no more,” he said. “Worship of the Confederacy offends me.”

  When I asked why, he walked me to the Confederate monument, which occupied a median strip on Salisbury’s busiest street. The 1909 memorial depicted a bronze angel cradling a dying rebel soldier and holding forth a laurel crown. Chiseled on the granite base was the Confederate motto, Deo Vindice. With God As Our Defender.

  “What’s the message here?” King said. “God dispatched an angel to ferry this brave rebel to heaven. As a Christian pastor, I got a problem with that. The whole notion that God was involved with one race putting down another, that’s going against the grain of a Christian nation. God ain’t with racism or anything to do with subdividing people.”

  The monument bothered King for another, subtler reason. “It’s idol worship. I feel sorry for folks who feel like they have to put up idols to feel good about themselves.”
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  King had lived in Salisbury his whole life. He knew his was a minority view. Most blacks were apathetic, he said, or didn’t want to ruffle Salisbury’s racial calm by talking about old monuments. He had done so publicly once, questioning at a public meeting why the monument—owned by Sue Curtis’s UDC chapter—should stand in the middle of a busy street where “I got to worship it every time I’m stuck at a red light,” King said.

  In reply, King had received hate mail. His protest also prompted an avalanche of letters to the local paper stating that the monument wasn’t racial, it was just a symbol of great-grandfathers who fought and died for their beliefs. “The way I see it,” King said, “your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I’m supposed to feel all warm inside about that?”

  I asked King if there was any way for white Southerners to honor their forebears without insulting his. He pondered this for a moment. “Remember your ancestors,” he said, “but remember what they fought for too, and recognize it was wrong. Then maybe you can invite me to your Lee and Jackson birthday party. That’s the deal.”

  3

  South Carolina

  IN THE BETTER HALF OF THE WORLD

  South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.

  —JAMES L. PETIGRU, describing his native state in 1860

  The General Beauregard eased out from the pier and steamed slowly into Charleston harbor. Trapped mid-deck in a coffle of schoolkids, camera straps and windblown maps, I could barely see the fort or hear the ferry’s crackly soundtrack. “With the first shot on Fort Sumter, America’s greatest moment of conflict, the War Between the States, had begun.”

  Wriggling free, I joined a few stoic passengers gazing into the wintery breeze from the Beauregard’s bow. Sumter lay three miles offshore. Other Civil War ramparts occupied fingers of land poking into the water. “The Forts, faintly blue on the twinkling sea, looked like vague marine flowers,” Henry James wrote of his visit to Charleston in 1905. From the bow of the Beauregard, Sumter looked more like a manhole cover bobbing atop Charleston harbor.