On This I Stand Notes from the Editor

. . . men died for a principle, but that principle when traced back to its practical root was about keeping human beings enslaved.

--Bret Lott

. . . one way of thinking about the Stars and Bars is that it is a captured flag, a defeated flag, a flag that belongs to history.

--Guy Davenport

. . . it would seem that the confederate flag has become something of a "floating signifier"of whiteness--its history, its rebelliousness, and its heritage (with or without hate)--for many Southern whites.

--Mae Henderson

"An issue of Callaloo devoted to this subject would be an exciting project," I told Kendra Hamilton, as she continued to explain to me how emotionally draining and how politically liberating it was for her to write her presentation. "I am, you know, a native of Charleston, and my parents still live there," she reminded me. I had telephoned Kendra, after I had watched her, Sharan Strange, and Randall Kenan--three friends of mine--speak on C-SPAN in Josephine Humphreys' contribution to South Carolina's Spoleto Festival.

On June, 3, 2000, Josephine Humphreys, a native of South Carolina, assembled a group of black and white Southern creative writers and intellectuals at the festival in Charleston to speak on issues surrounding the Confederate battle flag, the Stars and Bars. Hers was a project with innumerable political and social implications and consequences, for it followed in the wake of the continuing South Carolina political debate and showdown over the Confederate flag that, since 1962 in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, had been hoisted daily atop the dome of the state's capitol building in Columbia. To address some of these issues as well as others evoked by official public displays of the Confederate banner, Josephine Humphreys selected eleven Southern writers to speak about the flag at the festival. What authenticated them as a group for me was the variety among them who, first of all, were born and reared in different Southern states and now reside in a number of regions, including the South: women and men, ranging from their thirties to, perhaps, their seventies; and five blacks, seven whites (counting Josephine Humphreys), and among whom [Begin Page vi] two or more were self-acknowledged gay men and women who added an unexpected dimension to the ongoing debate. It goes without saying that the inclusive project Josephine Humphreys mounted was indeed impressive.

Those twelve Southerners on national television made me feel proud once more to be a Southerner. Here was a racially integrated group of Southern subjects of varying sensibilities and ideologies meditating on issues that the Confederate battle flag engenders when flown or installed on state-sanctioned or publicly-owned sites as if it were an official symbol approved as such by all sectors of the body politic. Here was a gathering of engaging minds with eloquent voices probing, with care and deliberation, controversial issues which otherwise divide the races in the region. Here was a group of creative writers and intellectuals whose judicious words on the Stars and Bars were never before inscribed in the national conscience via the media. Upon watching them present their positions, I thought, Here is a South to be admired and affirmed against the hatred and bigotry we have heard emerging from certain sectors of this once regional now national debate. I was further impressed that the programmers at C-SPAN had the forethought to air the entirety of this segment of the Charleston-based festival for the national viewing public. In fact, I am grateful to them, to Josephine Humphreys, to Michael Grofsorean, the Spoleto executive who programmed the flag event, and to the eleven participating speakers, for it is from them and their visions that I conceived this special issue of Callaloo, a project inaugurating the 25th Anniversary Year of the publication of the journal.

To assemble this special number of Callaloo on the Confederate banner, I thought it appropriate, first, to invite each of the twelve Spoleto writers to contribute to this project. I...