4
Oh I’m a good old rebel, that’s what I am….
I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t give a damn.
—INNES RANDOLPH, “A Good Old Rebel,” 1870
Since my arrival in the Carolinas, hardly a day had passed without some snippet about the Civil War appearing in the newspaper: a school debate on whether to play “Dixie” at ball games; an upcoming Civil War reenactment; a readers’ forum on the rebel flag. But one morning a short feature jumped off the page like a tabloid item about Elvis on Mars.
YANKEE STATUE FOUND IN KINGSTREE
Kingstree, S.C.—Another Civil War soldier—AWOL for nearly a century—has been found deep behind enemy lines. While a Rebel statue stands watch over the cold New England coast, a granite Yankee keeps close watch over this small Southern town.
Switched at birth?
Neither community knows for sure.
The story reported that townsfolk in York, Maine, had discovered that their decades-old Civil War memorial bore “a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders.” Meanwhile, citizens of Kingstree, South Carolina, had long harbored doubts about their Civil War statue, which looked suspiciously like Billy Yank. “The mixed-up monument mystery,” the story concluded, “may never be unraveled, and it is growing weirder by the day.”
Things sounded weird enough already to merit a look. So I drove into the Carolina hinterland to see this AWOL Yankee for myself. Forty-five minutes from Charleston, sluggish streams and piney woods gave way to desolate farmland and derelict crossroads. Weatherboard shacks careened at gravity-defying angles beside fields choked with weeds. I crossed Flea Bite Creek and stopped to pump gas at a hamlet of four buildings, three of them vacant. The gas station attendant lay sprawled inside on a pool table, sound asleep. Back on the road, I passed an occasional brick home, trailers with satellite dishes perched in the yard, and a few weak pulses of economic life: stands selling boiled peanuts, fields of soggy “storm cotton” left unpicked from the year before, and a huge hand-painted sign that read, “Catfish for sale. CHEAP!”
Kingstree announced itself with a sign identifying the town as the birthplace of Joseph Goldstein, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Then came a ragged commercial strip: pool hall, wig shop, car wash, Piggly Wiggly supermarket, pawn and gun shop. Kingstree looked as though it had peaked in about 1930 and gone quietly to seed ever since.
Stopping for lunch, I asked a waitress with a name tag reading “Phyllis!” about the monument mix-up reported in the paper. “Oh sure, everyone here grows up knowing that,” she said. “My dad always called it our ‘Confederate Yankee’ statue.”
Phyllis! poured me sweet tea. “The way I look at it,” she went on, “he’s just one more prisoner of war who never got home. We’re taking good care of him. I hope they’re doing the same with ours. Anyway, there’s lots of people here from somewhere else. I was born in North Carolina.”
A man down the counter piped in, “We got plenty bigger issues to get us bent out of shape. Like the worst unemployment in the state.”
“And the worst corruption,” Phyllis added.
The cashier and cook materialized atop stools on either side of me. The cashier thought the Yankee statue was a Northern trick by post-War carpetbaggers. The cook suspected some Northern town had stiffed its stonemason, who then sold the statue to Kingstree instead. Phyllis wondered if the man on the monument was a Confederate after all. “Lots of rebs had to wear Yankee stuff they picked up on the battlefield,” she said.
Clearly, Kingstree’s cross-dressing Confederate was not just an open secret, but also a welcome distraction in a town known for little but its poverty, its graft, its forgotten Nobel laureate. “You know, Goldfarb, the Jewish guy,” Phyllis said. “He won a big prize—don’t ask me what for—something about blood, I think.”
The luncheonette crowd suggested I go see Frances Ward, who worked at the farm bureau and also ran the local historical society. I found her at her desk, sifting insurance claims. She, too, seemed delighted by a chance to chat about the statue instead. “Off to see the Yank,” she gaily announced to her coworkers.
We stopped first at a pawn shop to borrow a pair of hocked binoculars. When we reached the monument, I saw why we needed them. The soldier stood atop a thirty-two-foot column. Maybe this was why the Yank had evaded detection for so long. “I don’t know what it is,” Ward said, handing me the binoculars. “He just don’t look right.”
The soldier had short hair and a trim mustache. He held his cap by his side. “Most other monuments, there’s a slouch hat,” Ward said. “And he looks too clean, not ragged enough.” The soldier also had a knapsack on his back, as Yankees generally wore them, rather than a haversack slung over one shoulder, in traditional rebel fashion. Ward showed me a photograph of the monument in Maine. Slouch hat, long beard, haversack dangling against his waist. Textbook Confederate. “Odd, isn’t it,” she said.
One thing about the Kingstree monument was right. The soldier faced vigilantly north toward the oncoming enemy, like a stone rebel should, gazing above Kingstree’s abandoned storefronts, its wig shop and pool hall and Hardee’s restaurant, all the way to York, Maine, where his long-lost twin gazed back at him. Ward said she’d learned of the turncoat memorial as a teenager in the 1960s. The news came as a shock. “This is a very Southern town,” she said. “I grew up with this picture of my great-grandfather with a long beard and a sleeve pinned up because he lost an arm in Virginia somewhere. Discovering that the guy on top of our monument was a Yank was like being told there’s no Santa Claus.”
Over time, though, Ward had warmed to the stranger. “He’s been there a long time. We might as well keep him.” Also, like the folks at the diner, she felt the mystery was a “big joke” that offered relief from the reality of life in Williamsburg County, of which Kingstree was seat. “It’s good to have some positive—or at least not too negative—news about this county. Mostly it’s been about our sheriff being arrested, our chief deputy in jail for selling drugs, or about the county losing its credit rating and the rubber-glove factory closing.”
Neighboring Lee County boasted a new maximum-security prison and a cotton museum. But Kingstree was a long way from the interstate and offered little to visitors. Ward smiled. “’Cept maybe this monument.” She conceded, though, that I was the first person who had to come to Kingstree expressly to see it.
There was another, touchier reason for leaving the monument alone. Williamsburg County was two-thirds black. “If we made a big deal about that Yank and took him down, it would maybe offend people,” Ward said. The year before, two new memorials had gone up beside the statue: plaques to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. “Some whites about died when that happened, right here by the War memorial.” After all, neither man had ever visited the county, much less gone to war for it. “Then again,” Ward observed, “neither did our Yank.”
She walked me to the historical society, a former bank now cluttered with bits of porcelain, an old Polaroid camera, a picture of a local football coach, and an enormous canoe of dubious Indian origin. “Basically junk out of people’s attics,” Ward said. She led me to a creaking microfilm machine and dug out dusty reels of the county newspaper. As I cranked through them, the monument story grew weirder still. The statue had been commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910 at a cost of $2,500, a huge sum for a small, impoverished community. Two thousand people turned out for the statue’s dedication. A Confederate colonel delivered a stem-winder, which was received with “enthusiastic sympathy by the staunch old vets in the audience, no one of whom respect the molly coddles who feel regret for acting the part of men in obeying their country’s call.”
But this fulsome news dispatch was oddly muted about the statue itself. The reason lay buried in the final paragraph: “It is a matter of regret that the statue to be placed on top of the granite column failed to reach here in time for the unveiling.” The statue’s arrival was held up by “unforeseen delays,” the paper said, assuring its readers: “When it is done it will be the pride of future generations.” A month later, the statue arrived and was hoisted atop its shaft without ceremony.
The story raised several intriguing possibilities. Had the mason realized his error and delayed shipment in hopes of avoiding discovery? Had he genuinely faced “unforeseen delays” and mixed up his clients in his haste to ship late orders? Or had some wise Daughter of the Confederacy, upon receiving the statue, prudently chosen to keep it under wraps rather than risk a riot by unveiling it before all those “staunch old vets”?
Surely, Ward said, someone must have noticed a problem when they unpacked the crate. “It was probably done the Southern way,” she hypothesized. “Whispered about in homes but kept quiet so that no one would be embarrassed.”
More recent news clips yielded another crop of odd details. When folks in York, Maine, learned of their Confederate and Kingstree’s Yank, a resident wrote a letter proposing a “friendly exchange of our last two prisoners of war.” But a Daughter of the Confederacy in Kingstree politely demurred, writing back, “We are contented with our handsome Yankee friend.” In fact, there was no evidence the two monuments had ever been switched. Kingstree’s was cut in 1910 by a South Carolina company; York’s went up four years earlier and was sculpted by an Englishman living in Massachusetts. “As a former native of England, his knowledge of the Civil War may have been foggy,” a news clip on Maine’s statue speculated. Or, “the figure may have been sculpted for a Southern town that reneged.”
Nonetheless, the myth of a Kingstree-York connection endured, a sort of proto-urban legend that popped up from time to time, as it had in the newspaper feature I’d read. Whatever the exact truth of the matter, Ward felt the tale carried a redeeming message. “What were they putting up monuments to in the first place? A lot of Southerners dying for nothing. And look at us now, still arguing about the rebel flag. To me that says we’re still a lost cause in a lot of ways.” She dumped an armful of old documents in the canoe and turned off the lights. “Maybe the message of the whole mix-up is that we shouldn’t make such a fuss about these old symbols. Forget it. There’s real things to worry about.”
WARD’S PARTING COMMENT came back to me a few days later, when I opened the morning paper to find a rebel battle flag splashed across the front page. South Carolina’s legislature was about to debate whether the Confederate banner should keep flying above the capitol dome, as it had since 1962. Demonstrations were anticipated for later in the week. So I reluctantly departed the seductive Lowcountry for the state’s rolling midriff, two hours’ drive west.
After Charleston, Columbia seemed a colorless burg with few historic buildings and a drab downtown that died after dark. This wasn’t entirely Columbia’s fault. Sherman brought urban renewal to the city in 1865 during his return march from the sea. Fire finished off what Union shells missed. Even a Northern reporter, touring the South six months after the War, was stunned by the “ruins and silent desolation” he found in Columbia. “In no other city that I have visited,” wrote John Dennett, a correspondent for The Nation, “has hostility seemed to me so bitter.”
Rather than rebuild and forget, in the manner of Atlanta, Columbia had turned its capitol grounds into a memorial to Yankee depredations. “Burned by Sherman’s troops,” said a gravestone marking the site of the bygone wooden statehouse. Brass stars marked where each of Sherman’s shells had scarred the walls of the current capitol, which was under construction in 1865. A nearby bronze of George Washington bore a plaque recording that Sherman’s troops “brick-batted this statue and broke off the lower part of the walking cane.” The damage had been left unrepaired.
Just beside the capitol stood the Confederate Relic Room, a museum whose keepsakes included a torch used by Sherman’s men, a ruglike suitcase of the sort toted by Northern carpetbaggers, and the Confederate Roll of Dead, a handwritten list of South Carolinians killed in the War. The Roll, recently published in book form by the state archives, had become an overnight bestseller in local bookshops.
“We resent playing second fiddle to Charleston when it comes to the Confederacy,” said Dotsy Boineau, the Relic Room’s curator. In fact, secessionists had originally gathered in Columbia to vote themselves out of the nation; they only moved to Charleston because of a smallpox scare in the capital. “I think we’re not yet sure we want to be part of the Union,” Boineau went on. “We still think this little state of ours has the right to decide a lot of the questions that big government is taking over.”
As I spoke with Boineau, her neo-Confederate views were enjoying a degree of vindication at the nearby capitol. A conservative, states-rights governor was taking the oath of office, having pledged to keep the battle flag flying (a promise on which he would later attempt to renege). South Carolina had also elected a Republican majority to its legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln, anathema to earlier generations of Southerners, now spoke to antigovernment tendencies across the region. There was even a striking consonance between the GOP’s “Contract With America” and the Confederate constitution; both called for term limits, budget balancing, curbs on taxation and other restraints on the state.
“Our ancestors were a little off with their timing, but their rebellion against federal government is finally seeing fruition,” a Republican legislator told me as we chatted in his office beneath paintings of Lee and Jackson.
The legislator’s rebel forebears, though, might have been surprised to see the Confederate battle flag flying above the statehouse. It had never done so in the 1860s. The banner most Americans now called the rebel flag—a diagonal blue cross studded with white stars and laid across a field of red—served only as a combat standard during the War. The political flag of the South, as I’d learned in Salisbury, took a different design and changed several times in the course of the War.
But in South Carolina and several other states, the better-known battle flag had been hoisted over capitol domes a century after the War, in the midst of civil rights strife. Flag defenders now maintained that the flag was raised to honor soldiers’ valor and sacrifice on the occasion of the War’s centennial. But for many white Southerners, the flag had also symbolized defiance and segregation at a time when they felt under siege again by the federal government and by Northerners who wanted to change the South’s “way of life.”
On the morning of the legislature’s opening session, I met a pro-flag group called the Council of Conservative Citizens, or CCC for short, over breakfast at the Capitol Restaurant a few yards from the statehouse steps. The group was easy to spot; a small rebel flag waved from an orange-juice glass at the center of their table. But the dozen or so men eating grits and fried eggs looked more like members of the local Rotary Club than a rabid band of battle-flag defenders.
“You found the wild-eyed rednecks, eh?” joked a man in a pinstriped suit. He spoke with a Northern accent and handed me a business card embossed with the name of an export/import firm in Philadelphia. Sitting beside him was a middle manager from New Jersey. There was also an engineer from New Hampshire who wore a Mickey Mouse watch and boasted that his hometown of Peterborough was the setting for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. “Southern heritage is as much a part of American history as Plymouth Rock,” he said with a jarring New England accent. “But for me, the flag’s mainly a symbol of resistance against government control, not a symbol of the South.”
Sitting across from me was a man with long curly hair, a black beret and a plaid shirt. He looked like a Beat poet. “I’m Walt,” he said, amiably thrusting his hand across the clutter of breakfast dishes. “I’m here to defend my race against the government and the Jewish-controlled media.”
Before I could respond, the group’s leader arrived: William Carter, a thirty-eight-year-old chiropractor who wore a charcoal gray suit with a rebel-flag pin. I asked about his plans for the group’s protest at the capitol. “We’ll make a mock presentation of a petition, hold up some banners, shout a few slogans,” he said. “Propaganda, essentially.”
I asked if he had any Civil War ancestors. Carter shrugged. “Yeah, but I don’t know the details. Anyway, that’s not why we’re here. This fight’s about today, about the ethnic cleansing of Southern whites—same thing that’s happening in Bosnia. There’s black history month, there’s a black Miss America pageant, there’s even a black yellow pages in South Carolina. Can you imagine a yellow pages for whites? No way. Anything for whites is PIC—politically incorrect.”
The New Hampshire engineer gestured at his Mickey Mouse watch. Carter leapt up to lead his troops into battle. “Let me slick up,” he said, jerking a comb through his thin, Brylcreemed hair. By now, about forty or so people had gathered, including two men in camouflage pants and plumed slouch hats, several members of a motorcycle gang, and a man in a gray tuxedo carrying a portable phone and a briefcase with a sticker that read “I HAVE A DREAM, TOO”—beneath a picture of the U.S. Capitol with a rebel flag flying from the dome.
Television cameramen waited on the statehouse steps. Though Carter and his lieutenants had reviled the media over breakfast, they now rushed forward to pose for the cameras, waving rebel flags and chanting, “Never take it down!” Carter brandished a pro-flag petition with 40,000 signatures and lambasted companies whose executives in South Carolina had spoken out against the banner. AT&T came in for extra vitriol. “We won’t spend any of our rebel money on a phone company that likes queers!” Carter yelled. What exactly this had to do with the rebel flag wasn’t clear.
The marchers moved inside the capitol, posting themselves by doors and elevators so arriving legislators had to run a gauntlet of protesters waving placards and shouting. The representatives exhibited their best Southern manners; even black legislators smiled and nodded, as if greeting supporters.
I wandered outside and found one of the CCC demonstrators studying a memorial to the Confederate dead, who, the inscription said, “glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives.” Bud Sharpe was a fifty-five-year-old construction foreman. “Once the flag’s gone, they’ll want to go after this,” he said, gesturing at the statue. “We may have lost the War, but at least we should have this to look back on.” It seemed a wistful logic; the Cause was lost but the Lost Cause shouldn’t be.
“I feel like the flag’s the only thing working people like me have left,” he went on. “All my life it’s been one thing after another. First they integrated the schools. Then they integrated everything. Then they say ‘colored’ ain’t right anymore, it’s got to be ‘black,’ then ‘African-American.’ But nothing changes for us. We’re still ‘crackers’ and ‘peckerwoods’ and ‘rednecks.’ I feel like I’ve swallowed enough for one lifetime.”
I asked Sharpe if things would be better if the South were still segregated. “Damn right, they would,” he replied. “In my town, there were no blacks until recently—they knew they wasn’t supposed to live with white people. Now, they’re all around. They even have interracial dating.”
Sharpe paused, trying to contain himself. “Look, I’m a labor foreman. I’ve got blacks working for me. We eat lunch together. But at the end of the day I go to my home and they don’t come along. This isn’t hate, it’s just not wanting to mix your seed with another race.”
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 it;
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.