Confederates in the Attic—Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (review)

Confederates in the AtticDispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz Pantheon, 1998, 406 pp., $27.50 Spurred on by his own boyhood fascination with the Confederacy, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz set off on an Odyssey through Dixie to find explanations for America's continuing obsession with the Civil War. In Confederates in the Attic, he chronicles his adventure. In the process, he paints a sometimes amusing yet often sobering portrait of a region fixated on heritage and tradition, where the Confederacy and its ideals are sanctified by a surprising number of Southerners still in thraU to the legacy of the war. En route, Horwitz is awakened to the complexity of Southern identity, which appears deceptively simple to Northerners. Horwitz introduces us to a host of unforgettable people and places. In Virginia, he encounters the weird subculture of hard-core Civil War reenactors, whose commitment to total authentidty produces a euphoric "period rush." In Kentucky he attends Klan ralUes; in Alabama he meets Alberta Martin, the last living Confederate widow; in Andersonville he finds that the commander of the notorious prison there is now exalted as a martyr, his date of execution a local holiday; and in Richmond he encounters a heated civic debate caused by the dty coundl's proposal to erect a memorial to Arthur Ashe alongside monuments of Confederate heroes. Along the way he visits cemeteries, battlefields and every conceivable sort of smaU-town shrine dedicated to the Confederacy—for example, Jimmy Olger's folk museum , located on Robert E. Lee's retreat route to Appomattox, the main attraction of which is a life-sized, gold-spray-painted statue of Lee made from junk hardware and sheetrock . His visit to Olger's is part of the high point of his tour, a "Civil Wargasm " that consists of a seven-day pilgrimage to battlegrounds from Manassas to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric reenactor who prides himself on his authentic impression of a battlefield corpse. In his quest for answers, Horwitz seeks out well-known historians such as Shelby Foote as weU as countless homespun authorities who inform him that much of what he had learned about the war is more myth than fact. At the same time, he comes to realize how easUy truth can be distorted and transformed to myth by local revisionists who conveniently reshape the past. The resulting "feelgood " history quickly becomes instiUed in the native consdousness and is seldom refuted. But beyond the larger-than-life characters and descriptions of pecuUar locales is a very serious observation regarding the state of race relations in the U.S. Horwitz uncovers the deeply rooted antigovemment sentiment, bigotry and ignorance that lie just beneath the surface of the deceptively placid Southern landscape . His research brings him into contact with the flourishing network of neo-Confederate organizations, from the more well-known Southern institutions such as the Klan and the Sons of Confederate Veterans to the lesser-known Heritage Preservation The Missouri Review · 171 Association, with its toll-free hotline to report "heritage violations" whenever they occur. Written with a combination of journaUstic insight, humor and an eye for the bizarre, Confederates in the Attic brings to light a world that for many of us has heretofore remained well camouflaged behind the façade of our contemporary cultural homogeneity . Entertaining and picaresque, at times frightening and disturbing, this book is about more than just damn Yankees and the sanctity of the rebel flag. (BR) Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 72 pp., $22 The poems in Andrew Hudgins' fifth collection probe "the dead world's constant simmer," which to Hudgins' eye is everywhere apparent —on the nightly news, in his garden, at cocktail parties, in the classroom. His desire to recognize history's cycles of compounding violence and terror necessarily prevents the poet from settling into his daUy comforts. Babylon in a Jar percolates with the dark intrusions of ruined empires, blood sacrifice and pain. In "Poem," Hudgins catalogues the cities of the ages—Babylon and Nineveh, Athens, Berlin and Tenochtitl án—that come and go Uke the daffodUs in the garden: "The murderous...