In the Land Where We Were Dreaming

Summer 2015 was a heady time to be in Columbia, South Carolina, researching proslavery southern literature. As per usual, I arrived a day late—just twenty-four hours after Republican governor Nikki Haley oversaw the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds on July 10, 2015. Responding with remarkable speed to the horrific shootings at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, the State Senate voted thirty-seven to three to remove the flag, which had flown over or near the Capitol for more than fifty-four years, since the early days of the Civil War Centennial and Civil Rights Era.

By the time I arrived at the South Caroliniana Library, all that remained of decades of fierce debate over this symbol of “hatred” or “heritage” was the concrete base that once held the flagpole. And by Monday July 13, contractors were hard at work replacing that concrete with sod. As a scholar of the Civil War South, I had to go over at lunch and witness in whatever small and belated way what had happened—and happened so quickly—in the “Cradle of Secession.”

Having walked the three blocks from the library to the remains of the flagpole, I found that the contractors were more than a bit leery about my interest in their work. While the previous Friday’s six-minute unfurling had drawn a crowd of nearly ten thousand, I was one of a handful of spectators for this much noisier and less ceremonial duty. When some members of the crew finally broke for lunch, we all walked in the same direction, toward a justly famous sandwich shop just around the corner. One of the workers and I struck up a conversation, first about what to eat—he recommended the “Hambone” sandwich—and then about our respective work for the day. As always, I stammered a bit as I tried to describe why I would spend the summer researching Confederate and proto-Confederate writers—“the bad guys and the losers,” as I call them—especially to an older, African American man. Our awkward conversation turned quickly to his work. After hearing his account of the previous Friday, I asked about the flagpole and concrete removal: “How deep did that thing go, anyway?” Without missing a beat, my lunch line companion put his hand on my shoulder and replied, “Son, it ran pretty damn deep.” His warm laughter and affectionate thumps on my shoulder did as much as they could to ease my embarrassment.

▪ The Oxford English Dictionary takes pains to separate the literal and figurative senses of the adjective “deep.” In asking about how “deep” the State House flagpole ran, I was looking for a simple, literal measure of its “extension” or “dimension downward.” My lunch-mate offered me a more figurative—and thus much more important—measure: “Deep-rooted in the breast; that comes from or enters into one’s inmost nature or feelings; that affects one profoundly” (“deep, adj.” def. 9). Of course I know that symbols of the Confederacy “run deep” for folks on both sides of the “hate versus heritage” debate. Indeed, I had encountered sympathetic forms of deep feeling earlier in the summer, this time a bit closer to home.

My office at the University of Texas at Austin looks out onto the South Mall, which features a lovely lawn framed by six midcentury buildings and several imposing live oak trees. UT’s Main Building and Tower perches at the top of the South Mall while the Littlefield Fountain rests at its bottom. The fountain features a dramatic Pompeo Coppini sculpture of a winged Columbia flanked by two World War I soldiers aboard an allegorical ship of state drawn by nymphs on giant sea horses. (Yes, it’s as weird and wonderful as it sounds.) The view looking up from the fountain toward the tower provides the iconic view of the university. Each year thousands of tourists, visitors, and students pose for pictures in front of this impressive backdrop, but very few notice the fountain’s dedication, which is artfully...