Growing up with the Confederate flag.
by Jack Neely
I was always the kid with the rebel flag. It was just a small one, a toy, really. I think I got it at the centennial reenactment of the Battle of Fort Sanders in 1963, which I remember only vaguely, as something about cowboys. I don't remember the flag when it was new. I remember it only as a battle-scarred relic.
I also had a gray Confederate infantry cap. In the year before I started first grade, I wore it nearly everywhere. I wore it even after it split, either from the growth of my cranium or shrinkage from wearing it in the rain. I wore it even after the cardboard in the bill had grown thick with rainwater and then disintegrated and drooped.
I loved my family's trips to Chattanooga, where we had friends. To me, Chattanooga was just another pronunciation of Confederama. It was always the high point of any trip to go to the Confederama and watch thousands of toy soldiers battling each other with flashing cannons on an illuminated landscape of tiny hills and trees in a big dark room. I tried to build one at home, but it was never the same.
I was preoccupied with the Confederacy. I don't really recall why. Maybe it was the Centennial, and all the hoopla that surrounded it. There was an adventure show on TV that was one of my favorites, about a solo rebel veteran named Johnny Yuma. He wore a cap just like mine.
Maybe it was the family stories. Every one of my ancestors who was alive in 1861 was a Confederate sympathizer, and several were in uniform. One died of his wounds; another's arm was permanently crippled. Another had lost part of his skull, but survived with the scalp healed over the hole which, for the rest of his life, throbbed with his pulse in a way that amused children. I never knew any of the veterans, of course, but my grandparents did. They spoke of them casually, as if they had been here just the other day, as if they might show up in the driveway any minute. But I was more passionately Confederate than any of them were.
I remember the day when I discovered that my hero, Abraham Lincoln, was, for some reason, unhappy with the Confederates. In my bedroom I kept a chalky bust of him, something I'd gotten free in school on Lincoln's Birthday, beneath a display of my Confederate flags.
When I was about 7, I formed a club based around the mythology of the Confederacy. We set about the conquer the neighborhood, building elaborate forts and tunnels in the backyards of neighbors whose names we didn't know. We clashed with neighborhood kids we called Yankees, wielding long bamboo sticks we called bayonets, hurling mud grenades and fruit stolen from a neighbor's quince-apple bush.
I carried the flag into each battle until it fell off its stick. It wasn't much bigger than a sheet of paper, but when I realized its time was over I folded it carefully, in the prescribed triangular manner, and placed it in a shiny tin box. We carried the tin box around like the Ark of the Covenant. I still have the box, and the flag is still in it; it has faded, lost much of its color, and has holes in it that look like powder burns.
Someone gave me a much bigger flag, a real one I believed might be CSA surplus. It was almost blanket-thick, and longer than me. It was too nice to carry into battle, but on special occasions we hung it in the clubhouse.
Over the years, I grew less reverent toward my big Confederate flag. When I went to college in Mississippi in 1976, I hung it in my dorm room. Somewhere there's a photograph of me, goofing on a sidewalk in Jackson, Mississippi, wearing it as a cape. After I transferred to UT, I moved into an apartment in an old house on Laurel Avenue; my clothes closet was in the main room where I entertained guests, and it did not have a door. I hung my big, ceremonial Confederate flag over the opening, and it fit perfectly.
A good friend and colleague at the Daily Beacon was a humor columnist from Pennsylvania who was Jewish; he accepted my invitation to come over for a beer. When he stepped into my Laurel Avenue apartment and saw the flag, he stepped backward, just as he might have if I'd had a dead puppy hanging there.
What's the matter, I asked, a sincere question.
"I didn't expect to see that here," he said. I still didn't understand.
"I always thought of it as racist," he said.
I didn't know where he'd gotten that idea. I'd spent my life nodding to the arguments that the Confederacy was admirable. The Confederacy didn't invent slavery. It was- n't the last country in the Western Hemisphere to give it up. If the Confederacy had won, slavery would certainly have died anyway, as it did peacefully in most of the western world before and after the Civil War, and without the shame of losing a war it might have died without the repercussions of the Klan and Jim Crow.
Besides, there are lots of exceptions, especially here in Tennessee: hundreds of Unionists who owned slaves; thousands of Confederates who didn't. There were abolitionists who were abolitionists because they hated black people and hated the slave-traders who brought them here. There were Confederate generals who favored abolition because they believed free blacks would fight for the Confederacy.
It was really about states' rights, I said. And it's true, in various economic disputes, especially the tariff, states' rights had been an issue of contention in the South independent of slavery for 40 years or more.
But if the Confederates really did favor a more general interpretation of states' rights, I wish they'd picked another issue to fight about, like the tariff. They didn't. That much is clear even in the pro-Southern rhetoric and propaganda you see in old newspapers. The cause the South picked to defend was black slavery.
History hasn't made me a Yankee. Northerners, from regions only two generations removed from slavery, proved the basic human verity that you'll never get your enemies to agree with you by calling them evil. You just make them mad, and make them want to conquer your forts, tear down your flag, and say to hell with you. That's the way all human beings react to being called evil. It's like kicking a dog.
If I were to wake up tomorrow in 1861, I really don't know what I would do. I think, like Inman in Cold Mountain, I would light out for the woods.
Today, people in my neighborhood hang out all sorts of flags over their stoops. American flags, dogwood-blossom flags, pineapple flags. If I were to hang one of my old Confederate flags out off the front porch, it would alarm a good many of my friends and neighbors.
Many people are repelled by the Confederate flag. Some of those repelled are looking for a handy way to identify themselves with the righteous. But, as I have understood only as an adult, some genuinely fear it. I can't ever know what that fear is like.
I don't know what it's like to see a flag that represents a country that, whether temporarily or permanently, wanted to keep my people in slavery. For Anglo whites, there is no such flag in the world.
A conservative young neo-Confederate once tried to explain to me that he was every bit as offended by the Gay Pride flag as blacks could possibly be offended by the Confederate flag. The fact that gays are allowed to parade with this gay flag—he had to describe it for me—evened the score. Maybe he's right. You never know what people have been through. Maybe gay aristocrats enslaved his ancestors. Maybe masked gays lynched his grandfather. Maybe gay rednecks holler insults at him from their gay-flag-adorned pickup trucks. You never know.
Unlike him, I don't know what it's like to be a black person and see a white person flourishing a Confederate flag. I don't have any idea.
But I'm not sure they're reacting just to the historical Confederacy, which has been dead for 136 years. They don't even have to have heard of the Civil War to fear that flag. They have their own memories of it.
People waved it when Orval Faubus tried to keep little girls from going to the good school. They still wave it outside the Walls in Texas whenever a black convict is executed. Klansmen wave it in parades and during public rallies when they shout about how superior the white race is. Neo-Nazis wear it tattooed on their arms when they invade bars and beat the hell out of innocent people.
It's the same flag I keep reverently folded in my closet.
The Confederacy was no white separatists' paradise. It was, free and slave, one of the most racially complicated nations in the world. Native Americans fought for the flag; the last Confederate to surrender was a Cherokee chief. Mexicans from Texas died for it. New Orleans mulattos and cajuns fought for it.
But in the 20th century, decades after Lee had furled it on behalf of his beaten soldiers, as the Klan was reborn with a whole new list of enemies the Confederates never contemplated, the Confederate flag came to represent something different. Those who reinvented its image were, for the most part, whites who did not like the idea of living in a place as racially diverse as the South.
Traveling around Britain and France about 20 years ago, I was surprised at how often I saw the Confederate flag. I saw it hanging in pubs, emblazoned on T-shirts, sketched as graffiti in train stations. In the Place St. Michel in France, I found a couple of guys wearing black leather jackets with Confederate flags stitched into the backs; they were listening to a boom box. The song playing on the boom box was the Everly Brothers' "Bird Dog." It was gratifying. I wanted to ask them about their flags, and their musical tastes, but they didn't speak English.
A little later, British punker Billy Idol sometimes wore a Confederate flag during performances; he had a song called "Rebel Yell." It was, as far as I could figure, about sexual insatiability.
Later, I asked some friends in London. They said they saw it as a symbol of rebellion, and more specifically as a symbol of rockabilly music. I asked them specifically about the racial element, and they said, no, that wasn't it, at all.
Of course, to some contemporary radical Irish expatriates—like Knoxville editor John Mitchel—the Confederate flag represented the Celtic rebellion against the Anglo-Saxons.
Some say it's just a symbol of the South, a symbol of our Southern heritage. But is it? Obviously, it's no symbol of black heritage, and black heritage may be the biggest part of what makes the South different from the rest of the world. Maybe the flag's just a symbol of white Southern heritage. But even that's problematic.
White people have been living in the South for 400 years; the Confederacy lasted for barely four years of that. One percent of white Southern history is Confederate. Southerners like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John Sevier, Edgar Allan Poe—none of them would have recognized the Confederate flag. Robert E. Lee's mother never saw it.
However, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson's old ally at Horseshoe Bend, did live just long enough to recognize it. Houston, the Southerner, hated the flag and everything it represented. So did other born-and-bred Southerners like David Glasgow Farragut and Andrew Johnson and William Sanders.
Last November I attended the Veterans' Day Parade on Gay Street. A handcart vendor was selling American and Confederate flags. Some people bought them, and with their kids they waved them as U.S. soldiers marched by.
There were no Confederate veterans in the parade. Established after World War I, Veterans' Day was never a Confederate celebration. But there were people at the corner of Gay and Union, waving a rebel flag at U.S. soldiers marching down Gay Street. They were wise not to try that on the same corner in 1864.
I always had a soft spot for lost causes, and still do. For all its moral ambiguity, the Confederacy had a genius for symbols. One is the choice of "Dixie" as a rallying song. It's the best pep song every penned in America (and I do give some credence to the theory that it was written by a black songwriter in Ohio). The images of Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Forrest, Mosby: they're dynamic figures. Compared to them, the bulk of Union officers seem like bankers or railroad conductors.
And they chose a St. Andrew's cross, with bold colors and bright stars, for their flag. It seems to shout, "The hell you say."
I wish that were all it meant. I would hang my big flag out my third-floor window over Market Square.
March 7, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 10
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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