Some Thoughts On Winds That Move the Flags

I agreed to write something for Callaloo about the confederate flag many weeks ago. I have put off beginning this project, partly because of a busy life and partly because the subject is a box I am almost afraid to open. I had meant to write a conventionally researched essay about the doubleness of the confederate flag as object and symbol, dealing with recent confrontations about its public display in South Carolina and elsewhere. But that kind of piece would not hold the conflicting resonances I feel around this object, this piece of cloth multiplied and changed, used both to justify exploitation and to symbolize genuine losses in a region itself exploited, and finally as emblem of an easy ignorance and simple evil.

This banner has as often been used to advertise hatred as to cement tribal or regional loyalties. People died because of it, the innocent as well as the guilty. Most confederate soldiers never owned slaves, after all, and many might have been like my husband's great grandfather, who was a simple farmer snatched away from his family by conscription, certainly no slave owner. Captured after several battles, he was held in two of the notorious prisons of the time. Given the option by his Union captors, he decided eventually to defect to the other side. He could not, of course, go home again. He'd have been seen as a traitor. He stayed with the Union army for seventeen years, helping to exterminate Native Americans out west under the flag of the United States.

The confederate flag, any flag, is perhaps too complex a subject for prose. It needs the interstices of poetry, the hard edge of the vivid image, and the quality that W.H. Auden felt defined poetry: "the clear expression of mixed feelings." Yet on some counts my feelings are unmixed, and prose is most useful, allowing me to state perfectly clearly that I don't believe the confederate flag should be flown from any public building, or on any public occasion. I believe decency and human feeling should dictate that it not be flown privately, or worn as a badge of either identity or hostility. These last mentioned we can't make laws against, but laws against official display by states, towns, or any publicly funded organization are right and just.

Having said that, I can get to the mixed-up part. First, I searched my memory for what the flag of the Confederacy might have been in my life. I grew up in deep east Texas, in one of the very earliest of the Texas settlements. My ancestors helped found the town, which was made up entirely of Anglo-American settlers from North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. A number of these settlers brought slaves with them to the free land grants Spain was handing out in its Mexican territory. My ancestors on my father's side were slaveholders who called themselves planters, not farmers, and--as one Texas historian has put it--did not go into their fields to work but only rode past them occasionally. I am not proud of this, but I cannot change it, nor can I change my love for family members, all dead now, who participated in what was left of that world. Tenants lived on the land owned by the grandfather I adored. They weren't slaves, but it was a close call, however friendly and comfortable it seemed to a child who couldn't see the reality beneath. Later, I had deep conflicts with my family, but I couldn't stop loving them. I did begin to identify with more than one heritage, however. My mother died when I was only six. Her family lived in another county, and I barely knew them. Later, I sought them out.

Of Irish stock, with a great grandmother who was half Native American, my mother was the oldest of ten children in a family that had never owned much of anything...