Nothing to Me

1.

Sometimes I think I'm not a very good Southerner.

Though I've lived in the South all my days--except for a year and a few summers teaching at Cornell, and two frozen months teaching in Wisconsin--I simply don't respond to certain Southern icons. Elvis. NASCAR. Professional wrestling. Mint juleps. Gone with the Wind.

And the Confederate flag. Try as I might, I can't muster any reaction to any Confederate flag, whether battle or national. Not pride, not anger, not embarrassment, not even a sort of detached curiosity. I'm sure this is a colossal personal failure of historical imagination or racial empathy or regional identity, but that's just the way it is.

The Confederate flag means nothing to me.

2.

Why?

In part, I guess, because I was born in Asheville and raised in the mountains of western North Carolina, where the Civil War and its symbols were not a fact of daily life, as they would have been elsewhere in the state or deeper in the South. If I'd been born in Georgia or Mississippi, I would've seen that blue St. Andrews cross with its 13 white stars on a red field as part of my state flag. It would've been in our classrooms, on our flagpoles. I couldn't have escaped its saltire presence.

But I don't remember seeing any version of the Confederate flag flying when I lived in the mountains, from 1954 to 1972. I don't remember hearing much of anything about the Civil War, for that matter: we must have studied it in United States and North Carolina history courses, but the material was presented without the intensely personal us-versus-them angle that it would have had if the war had been waged on local Appalachian soil. I don't remember anybody talking about McFee men bravely fighting for the Gray, or McFee women bravely hiding our family silver from the Blue: I doubt my ancestors did (whoever my ancestors were: like most Scotch-Irish descendants, our genealogical roots were pretty shallow, going back only a couple of generations).

Remember, hell! I may be repressing our individual family and collective regional memory, but I don't think there's anything Confederate to remember about my or our past. The mountains were a refuge for deserters and Union sympathizers: most mountaineers had little use for what was called a rich man's war but a poor man's battle. We were the poor men. We had no silver. There were no plantations in western North Carolina.

And so I grew up Confederate-ignorant, Rebel-indifferent. As a mountain buddy of mine said the other day, the only time he ever saw a Confederate flag was when his family vacationed at Myrtle Beach and spied one on a beach towel.

South Carolina was where we North Carolinians went if we wanted to misbehave. When we crossed the state line, things got a bit tawdrier and weirder: we could buy fireworks or liquor, get married quick or divorced quicker. And catch a glimpse of that forget-hell flag, stretched out on the sand or hung in the back window of a redneck's pickup. But it was more a matter of indulging a tourist's curiosity than sharing historical roots with our Palmetto State brethren.

The Confederate flag meant nothing to me.

3.

Maybe I'm just not a very good patriot. I was a conscientious objector near the end of the Vietnam War, and refused to stand and honor the flag during the national anthem at events in high school and college. I'm not particularly proud of that phase now, but I believed I was doing the right thing then, when I liked to quote Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Or maybe I'm just too much of a North Carolinian. We were the last state to join the Confederacy, and our Civil War governor Zebulon Vance (a mountain native, I might...