by Tony Horwitz
Sharpe picked up his placard—“KEEP IT FLYING!”—and headed off to rejoin the other protestors. “I’m here today to stand up for heritage,” he concluded. “That’s what the flag’s all about.”
I sat at the monument for a while. For the past several weeks people had been talking to me about “heritage.” But, like the flag, this obviously meant very different things to different people. For the Sons of Confederate Veterans I’d met in North Carolina, it meant the heritage of their ancestors’ valor and sacrifice. For Bud Sharpe, it was the heritage of segregation and its dismantling over the past forty years. Was it possible to honor one heritage without upholding the other?
I went back to the Capitol Restaurant for a cup of coffee and a look at several copies of the CCC newspaper. The flag debate was right there on the front page, beside a story headlined: MALCOLM X FOLLOWERS RAPE, MURDER WHITE WOMAN.
The waitress came over to refill my coffee. She’d served the CCC at breakfast and formed her own views about the flag dispute. “You know what the state should’a done? Send someone to the capitol in the dead of night to take the flag down without telling anyone. I’d bet a week’s worth of tips that not a single person in South Carolina would’a noticed it was gone.” She sighed. “It’s too late now. As soon as you make an issue of something, everyone feels they got to pick sides, same as they done back in eighteen-whatever.”
This was the most concise analysis of the flag controversy—or of events in eighteen-whatever—I’d yet heard in South Carolina.
I returned to my CCC paper and read about a secret plan to create a black-controlled “Republic of New Afrika” in six Southern states. It was tempting to dismiss the CCC as a dinosaur remnant, an evolutionary dead end of Southern bigotry. But maybe such an offhand dismissal was an exercise in prejudice, too. Right-wing extremism was thriving across America; it behooved me to hear it out. So that evening, I drove to a trailer park outside Columbia to visit Walt, the beret-clad man who’d sat across from me at breakfast and scribbled his address on the CCC paper.
A rebel flag covered one window of Walt’s mobile home. A cardboard sign filled another with the words “Walt’s Nest.” It was an appropriate nickname; the chaotic interior was feathered from floor to ceiling with piles of Time magazine, Playboy and The Wall Street Journal; wall photos of Robert E. Lee and Mr. Spock; ceiling posters of Michael Jackson and swimsuit-clad models.
Walt pointed me to a ratty couch and returned to chopping vegetables in the trailer’s cramped kitchen. “I’m a vegetarian,” he said, slicing a red pepper, “because I don’t trust federally inspected meat.”
There wasn’t much that Walt did trust about the State—or “the Snake,” as he called it. That was why he’d taken a day off work, without pay, to demonstrate for the rebel flag. “I’m not an American, I’m a citizen of the Confederate States of America, which has been under military occupation for the past hundred thirty years.”
Putting down his paring knife, Walt rummaged through a stack of newspapers and handed me a photo of an anti-Communist rally in East Germany, held just before the Berlin Wall came down. Amid the sea of protesters stood a man waving a rebel flag. Walt had circled the grainy AP photo with yellow Magic Marker. “I doubt that German knew a thing about the Confederacy,” he said. “But he knew what that flag stood for. Being a rebel, raising hell.”
This was the anarchic, James Dean-ish side of the South that had once appealed to my own adolescent soul, particularly in rock ’n’ roll. As a teenager in the 1970s, I’d swilled Rebel Yell and thrilled to the music of The Band (“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”), the Allman Brothers (“Ramblin’ Man”), Little Feat (“Dixie Chicken”), and other groups that either came from the South or romanticized its folk culture. To me, these tunes evoked a freethinking defiance that dovetailed nicely with my pubescent alienation from “the System”—a loose-knit cabal linking Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, my parents and most of my teachers.
Walt, who was forty-nine, had once demonstrated against the Vietnam War. He opened a drawer where he kept the beads and McCarthy button he’d worn back then. His fondness for berets, long hair, organic vegetables and Star Trek also were vestiges of a sixties self that he’d otherwise left behind. Somewhere in the intervening quarter century, Walt’s instinctive rebelliousness had turned reactionary. Since graduating from a technical college, he’d bounced from job to job and now found himself living in a beat-up trailer, driving a Toyota with 200,000 miles on it, and working for $5.45 an hour at a small factory that repaired cable-TV converters.
“I became an angry man,” Walt said. “I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what. I blamed myself.” He reached into the fridge for broccoli. “Now I’m not angry anymore. I understand why the world is the way it is.”
Walt walked across the trailer and threw back a madras spread covering a tall bank of pigeonholes. The slots were stuffed with literature and divided into sections, each carefully marked with typed labels: “Hittites,” “Semites,” “Asiatics,” “Freemasons,” “Homosexuals.” There were pamphlets from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, and copies of a rabidly xenophobic newspaper, The Truth at Last: News Suppressed by the Daily Press, which claimed the nation was being overrun by immigrants who ate insects and dogs. Other publications targeted gun-control advocates, blacks, feminists, Catholics.
“Blacks are a primitive race, not as intelligent as we are,” Walt said, pulling a mimeograph from a pigeonhole labeled “Bushmen.” “They look human so you give them the benefit of the doubt, but really they’re savages. They have bigger teeth than we do, for chewing things, but their brains are small. They need supervision to survive.”
Blacks’ natural overseers were whites—descended from Hittites. But Hittites also were a subject race. The world’s true masters were Semites and their descendants among modern-day Jews. “They’re a predatory race with higher intelligence than us,” Walt explained. The superiority of Semites flowed from a single source: racial purity. Jews bred only with their own, while encouraging other races to mix. This ensured that Jews’ own genetic fiber stayed intact while others’ weakened. “That way, Jews stay in control,” Walt explained.
Through this anti-Semitic window, Walt had come to see everything anew. The Christianity of his youth was a Semitic plot to undermine whites; Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek rather than fight back. Walt had also disavowed Star Trek and his beloved Mr. Spock, who was half-human and half-Vulcan—a coded message encouraging miscegenation. Then there was Uhura, the sexy black officer who broke taboos by engaging in TV’s first interracial kiss with Captain Kirk.
“Our government is run by a foreign power—Israel,” Walt concluded. “The only way to escape that is a political dissolution of the United States. And the only hope for that I see is a revival of the Confederacy.”
Walt returned to his vegetables while I pondered how to respond. “Have you ever met a Jew?” I asked him.
“I knew one in high school. He seemed normal. But that was before I knew anything.”
“Well, you’ve just met your second.”
Walt looked up from a pile of oyster mushrooms. “You’re a Jew? You don’t look Jewish.” He studied me, searching for some telltale Semitic clue. “What’s your last name again?”
“Horwitz.”
“I should’a guessed.” He cut another mushroom. “Well, you know exactly what I’m talking about, then. Anyway, it’s the big people I’m against, the ones pulling strings.” He reached for tofu. “Just because a race is bad doesn’t mean everyone who belongs to it is. There’s one black I respect a lot.” Walt riffled through his library again. “This guy,” he said, handing me a picture of Louis Farrakhan speaking at a Nation of Islam rally. “He thinks mixing the races is wrong, that blacks and whites should go their separate ways. And he’s down on Jews, too.”
Walt also made an exception for Michael Jackson—“he’s an android, he’s not really black”—and for the rap group
known as 2 Live Crew. A South Carolina official wanted to ban the group’s latest album because of its raunchy lyrics. Walt had immediately gone out to buy their music. “Anything the state’s against, I’m for,” he explained. This segued, once again, into his defense of the rebel flag. “Until they started criticizing that flag, I’d never given it a thought. But once you attack something, that’s exactly when I’m going to support it.”
Walt took down a wok and slicked it with sesame oil. “Want some dinner?” he asked. “Some other time.”
Walt shrugged and walked me to the door. Then he reached into a pigeonhole and planted a sticker on the cover of my notebook. “Earth’s Most Endangered Species: THE WHITE RACE!” He thrust out his hand, as genial as he’d been that morning at breakfast. “It’s been real nice talking to you,” he said. “Come again, will ya?”
“I just might.” His words seemed genuine and so were mine. There was a feisty iconoclasm about Walt that I couldn’t help admiring, even if he was on the mailing list of every hate group in America.
THE NEXT MORNING, on my way out of Columbia, I stopped at the airport industrial park where Walt said he worked. Partly, I was curious to test his grasp on reality. He’d told me he worked beside a militant NAACP member and that his employer was “brain-poisoned” because he promoted blacks over whites and made Walt clean the bathrooms.
The plant was a windowless hanger where forty or so workers crouched beneath fluorescent lights, tinkering with cable converters. Walt, wearing his beret, sat across from a young black man with wire-rim glasses, a turtleneck and a gold earring. “Hey guys!” Walt shouted, as soon as he spotted me. “Here’s the Jew I was telling y’all about!”
The young black man rolled his eyes. “Don’t pay him no mind,” he said. “Walt’s a crackpot.”
Walt smiled, as though he’d been paid a compliment. “I’ve given Sam some of the stuff I showed you last night. He disagrees with me.”
“Disagree? Shit,” Sam muttered. “I think that stuff should be burned.” He turned to me again. “Walt thinks black people are being recognized too much. But white folks have been recognized since the day they were born. We’re just getting into this world.”
The plant’s supervisor appeared. “Can I help you?” he asked. This was James Padgett, whom Walt had described as “brain-poisoned.” I told him I’d met Walt at a flag rally the day before and was curious to see where he worked. Padgett took me to his office and shut the door. “You can’t fire someone for their politics,” he said. “Anyway, Walt breaks the monotony here.”
Padgett confirmed the broad outline of what Walt had told me. Sam was indeed an outspoken NAACP member; some blacks earned more than whites; and yes, Walt cleaned the bathrooms. “He’s not a top producer, so if he wants to make more money he has to clean the toilet.”
I asked what he thought of Walt’s views. “Paranoid,” Padgett said. “And silly.” He paused. “Listen, I’m thirty-eight, I grew up in the New South. We’ve all got to get along, black and white. If we do, we can really go somewhere. If we don’t, we’ll keep getting dumped on.”
“Dumped on?”
“Let me show you something.” Padgett walked me to the plant’s shipping dock and pointed at a mountain of crates. “We’re part of a national company that converts cable boxes so folks can watch pay TV Look at the return addresses on these orders. Massachusetts. New York. Oregon. They send all the toughest jobs South because we’re the best.”
Padgett’s face reddened. “I used to go to company meetings in New York and everyone was looking down on me because of my hick accent,” he said. “But then it turned out we’re not so dumb down here. In fact, we’re the toughest unit in the company and we make a ton of money. So now, when I go to the meetings in New York, I’m not some savage anymore—I’m the hero.” Padgett shook his head. “I’m the same person I always was. All that’s changed is their image of me.”
Padgett walked me to the door. He seemed a bit embarrassed by his unprompted outburst. “Enjoy the rest of your trip,” he said. “And keep your eyes and mind open. The South may surprise you.”
The South had surprised me plenty already, as had Padgett’s words. They echoed the same sense of Southern grievance I’d picked up across the Carolinas: from the gunshop crowd in Salisbury, from Manning Williams at his Charleston art studio, from the rebel-flag protestors at the state capitol. In their view, it was the North—or Northern stereotypes—that still shadowed the South and kept the region down.
But something was wrong with this picture. An Arkansan occupied the White House. The vice president came from Tennessee. A Georgian served as Speaker of the House. States’ rights, or “devolution,” was the political fad of the day. And the South had become the nation’s most economically vibrant region.
“The South is a good place to look at what America used to be,” Manning Williams had told me. It was a thought that appealed to my romantic image of the South as a rural backwater, rich with history and character so absent in most of the nation. But viewed from Columbia’s capitol grounds and the industrial park by the airport—as well as from the strip malls and housing tracts and new factories I’d passed all across the Carolinas—the South was exactly the opposite: a good place to see what America was becoming. Suburban and exurban, politically conservative, anti-union, evangelical, a booming part of the global economy.
I later put this to A. V. Huff, a historian of the South at Furman University in upland South Carolina. He responded by reminding me just how recent and profound the South’s transformation had been. Huff told of picking cotton as a child in the 1940s, when the rhythm of the school year still moved to the cotton crop. Children attended class in midsummer, during lay-by season, and returned to the fields for the autumn harvest.
Yet in Huff’s own lifetime, this most fundamental of Southern rites had all but vanished from the experience of most Southerners. Many of Huff’s students—mostly middle-class kids from the suburbs of Atlanta and other cities—had never even seen a cotton crop. Huff illustrated his point by inviting me to sit in on one of his classes. Lecturing on Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, he produced a boll from his family’s farm as a teaching prop. The students passed the boll around, gazing at it with wonderment, as if at a mastodon’s tooth.
Fewer than 5 percent of present-day Southerners now worked the land, and Dixie was fast becoming the nation’s new industrial heartland, with car plants sprouting across the former cotton belt. Per capita income in the South—half the national average when Huff was born in 1937—now ranked close to the rest of America. The eleven states of the Old Confederacy comprised the fifth-largest economy in the world.
To Huff, this transformation helped explain the resurgent nostalgia for the Confederacy he sensed across the South, even among his mostly affluent students. “The South—the white South—has always had this powerful sense of loss,” he said, as we chatted in his office between classes. First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth. Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.
“All those things Southerners say they hold dear they’re selling out now for a mess of pottage,” Huff said. “So there’s this feeling, ‘If I wrap myself in the flag, maybe Grandma will forgive me for selling the farm and dealing with the Yankees.’”
Huff pulled a book from his shelf and read me a poem called “The Conquered Banner,” composed by a Confederate chaplain after the Civil War.
Furl that Banner, for ’tis weary;
Round its staff ’tis drooping dreary;
Furl it, fold it, it is best;
For there’s not a man to wave it,
And there’s not a sword to save it,
And there’s not one left to lave it
In the blood which heroes gave i
t;
And its foes now scorn and brave it;
Furl it, hide it—let it rest.
Huff closed the book and headed off to teach another class on the Cotton Kingdom. “It’s too bad nobody reads that poem much anymore,” he said.
5
Kentucky
DYING FOR DIXIE
When I was younger I could remember anything,
whether it happened or not, but I am getting old,
and soon I shall remember only the latter.
—MARK TWAIN
The cinder-block building by the Tennessee line looked more like a bunker than a bar. Wire mesh concealed windows the size of medieval arrow slits. Man-high razor wire ringed an adjoining yard. A military jeep painted in desert camouflage sat parked out front, beside pickup trucks and Harley choppers. Scarlet letters splashed across the building’s facade: REDBONE’S SALOON.
Inside, “Confederate Railroad” wailed on the jukebox. Behind the bar stood a man in a polka-dot cap and a T-shirt adorned with a swastika. This was the proprietor, Redbone. He served me a beer and huddled with a man whose shirtfront proclaimed: I’ve Got a Nigger in My Family Tree. The back of the shirt showed a lynching—a cartoonish black man, dangling from a branch.
A week earlier, Redbone’s Saloon had celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with a “Thank God for James Earl Ray Party.” Flyers posted in the nearby town of Guthrie, Kentucky, proclaimed “Fuck Martin Luther King’s B.Day” and invited folks to play pool and eat “Chicken-Ribs-Fixins” for three bucks a plate.
That same weekend, a nineteen-year-old named Michael Westerman drove through Guthrie with a rebel flag flying from his pickup. Several carloads of black teenagers gave chase; one of the youths shot Michael Westerman dead. Then crosses started burning in Guthrie. The FBI, the KKK, the NAACP, and reporters from Kentucky and Tennessee all hustled to the Stateline town. So did I, startled by a newspaper squib—“Rebel Flag Is Catalyst to Killing”—that appeared in Carolina newspapers. Until then, I hadn’t realized the nineteenth-century conflict I’d set out to explore was still a shooting war.