What's the Confederate Flag Got to Do With it?

I'm one of those black folks who identifies herself, along with African-American, female, author, womanist, and feminist, as "Southerner." I have always felt at my core a Southerner.

I was born and raised in Macon, Georgia, in the middle of the state, the aptly named "Heart of Georgia." When I was not yet 10 years old, my father picked me up from school one day and took me to a Macon public park. We walked past towering pines and majestic oaks to a concrete fountain in the middle of the park. There he pointed to the gushing waters and said, "That is the exact center of Georgia." I was impressed.

From that day forward, I have always thought of myself being at the center of the South, enveloped in the world around me. From that day, I have imagined myself a figure in a map from Geography class, standing at that fountain surrounded by my African-American community of Pleasant Hill, in my Middle Georgia hometown of Macon, with the muddy Ocmulgee River running nearby, with the entire state of Georgia around me, then all of the Southeastern section of the continental United States, then the country, the Western Hemisphere, then the world.

The image has forever made me feel safe. Enveloped by my surroundings, safe in the arms of "family" of one kind or another, mostly Southern family. That is how I see myself, a Southerner.

For some folks, my discussing my southernness makes them downright uncomfortable. I mean really, the very idea, a black person, an African American over the age of 35 going on and on about the South and her place in it as if she weren't aware of the region, its past and all it stands for.

A Georgian does not even have to travel one state up to see the image of the Confederacy emblazoned on the state flag. The Georgia flag also bears that image.

Doesn't she know history? Folks seem to think. And she's a writer, too. It's almost embarrassing.

As if a black person does not belong in the South, to the South. I have discovered that there is no place else I do belong.

Of course, I know the region's history, I want to tell folks looking askance at me. I know it because I am a part of the history. My parents were part of that history. And their parents were part of it.

My father's people came from Wrightsville in the south-central part of the state of Georgia. They were farming people, like most black people at the turn of the 20th century. At that time, black folks owned nearly 20 million acres of farmland in the United States. When my father's father Frank left the farm nearly 100 years ago for the city of Macon and work on the M-D-S--the Macon, Dublin, Savannah train line that connected those three Georgia cities--his brother, whom we called Uncle Sunshine, and his family remained there on the farm. As a child, when my parents, my two older brothers, my two older sisters and I piled into our green Woodie station wagon and left the "city" for a few days in summer to visit the "country," it was to Uncle Sunshine's farm we went.

My mother's people--the Lees--were also from Middle Georgia. But being "city people" they were not farmers. They were schoolteachers and tradespeople. Everyone in town knew my great-grandfather as "Pat, the barber." All I have to do now is say that name to make my mother smile with nostalgia and to begin telling me stories surrounding the antique red leather barbershop chair that sat on my great-aunt's back porch. Patrick Lee's maiden daughter Elizabeth not only took over her father's barbershop when he died in the 1930s. She also taught folks in Middle...