A Faded Icon

As I sit at my desk with computer, fax, and phone, I cannot escape seeing a small Confederate flag in my pencil holder. This faded icon of a time before internets and e-mail still sends a message as powerful as any in cyberspace. For almost fifty years, I have kept this flag on whatever desk I have used. I don't recall where or when I first found it, but it has been with me at least from my high school days.

The size of the flag is about four by six inches on a small wooden stick with a painted gold point at the top. When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, it was sold at every drug store, dime store, and souvenir shop in the South. Half a century has taken its toll. The cloth is worn, the threads frayed, the colors faded. But the stars and bars are fresh in their design and their symbolism. I keep it on my desk as I now live among the Yankees in Massachusetts and think of my sweet Southern home.

Growing up in Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, I cannot remember a time or place when the Confederate flag was not flying. But memory plays tricks in my mind. Was I really so proud of being a Southerner that the flag was always bright and unburnished? Could I truly have believed that the War of Northern Aggression was about states' rights and not slavery? Did I really collect Confederate money and cheer when the Dixiecrats marched out of the Democratic convention in 1948? I was 12 years old. I should have known better.

But what's a poor Alabama kid to dream about if not the glory of the old South and reclaiming a culture of honor? Born during the height of the Depression to an adolescent mother and an unemployed father, I started school during World War II. But I knew way more about the battles of the Civil War than those in Europe and Asia. My great uncle on my mother's side, for example, trained General Lee's horse Traveler and made a daring escape on horseback after being captured by Yankee soldiers. My paternal great grandfather fought in five campaigns across the South until wounded by a musket ball at Chicamaugau. My mother's family still lives on the Apalachicola river where close to 150 steamships plied the waters during the 1850s. The town of Apalachicola where my great grandfather and grandmother ran a hotel was the third busiest cotton port in the world until it was blockaded by Union troops. Even today, I walk the beaches where Confederate soldiers defended their salt works. The South was my homeland, my people, my place.

But we were a defeated people. Whatever our farms, our culture, and our dreams, we were never the same after the War. Like every Southern white child, I believed that we lost because of the nefarious, underhanded trickery of Sherman and the Union Army that stooped below the bounds of recognized military warfare. Aside from the Indian lands, the South, predominantly an agrarian culture, was the only part of this nation to have ever been occupied by foreign troops. Not content to fight only on the battlefield, Sherman burned entire towns and cities. He destroyed crops in the fields and stole farm animals. The only intact city to survive was Savannah, delivered by Sherman to Lincoln as a Christmas present. Convinced that Southerners would have been more gracious toward a defeated people, we hated Yankees with a passion reserved for the most vile and villainous enemy. Carpetbaggers and scalawags destroyed our farms and any means of making a living, occupied our homes, elected their politicians to our state houses, and made enormous fortunes from our despair. Seventy-five years after the War, I grew up as if these events had occurred only yesterday. I saw all around me the remnants of a defeated nation. What I didn't see were...