Flag

The late 1960s and early 1970s--such a long ago time, although to me it still seems vivid and immediate. My husband and I and our three sons lived in a small river town in Mississippi. My boys adopted, embraced (as teenagers usually do) the uniforms and styles of their peers. They wore bell bottom blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts and their hair was long and their jeans ragged. One of them, I particularly recall, had a lavender undershirt that he was partial to. To his grandmother it must have been a symbol of the chaos and sexual freedom and degradation that she thought threatened young people of that generation, that signaled an impending tearing apart of the fabric of our country's life. She never said so, but I recall her tightened lips and the look of distaste, of revulsion, even, that crossed her face when she first saw my son in his purple undershirt and ragged jeans.

To me (Well, I'm a writer and shock at the behavior of other human beings is not a useful tool in my trade) long hair and bell bottoms were not shocking, but they had a symbolic significance that I believed then and still believe was far more immediately threatening than the possible collapse of society that my mother feared.

One of my son's friends, for example, a lad of nineteen, wearing all his counter-culture paraphernalia, was hitch-hiking home from college when he was shot at from a pickup truck that passed him as he stood with his thumb out on Highway 61 just south of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Fortunately, the shooter missed. Equally fortunately, the truck did not return. It was just a warning shot.

The set of symbols that identified the occupants of the pickup truck as threatening, as literally life-threatening, we knew well: CB radio antenna, gun rack across the rear window holding shotguns and rifles, and a Confederate flag sticker on the bumper. Sometimes, too, on the bumpers of these trucks, there would be a sticker that read, GET YOUR HEART IN MISSISSIPPI OR GET YOUR ASS OUT. The fear we parents felt when we saw these symbols was real fear for our children's safety, even for their lives. People, young people (and some older people, too) working for voter registration or for Head Start programs, for example, were being threatened, were being jailed, were being murdered even. What was that CB radio for, except to signal to other men in other pickups that Civil Rights workers were in the neighborhood? What was the flag for except to declare allegiance to the cause of segregation? Who was promoting the cause of Civil Rights? Young people in ragged blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts.

I am white. In truth I didn't think one way or the other about the Confederate flag when I was a young girl going to football games at Ole Miss or walking past the Capitol in Jackson. There were a great many things I didn't think one way or the other about. I was thinking about the boy I was in love with, the professor I had a crush on, the book I was reading. It may even have been Gone With the Wind. If a young man I thought especially handsome wore a Confederate uniform to a costume ball, I probably thought him glamorous. I was white. I was "Southern." At least two of my great-grandfathers fought under that flag. But that was a long, long, long time ago.

Even now, even remembering the potential threat to my sons and their friends, I cannot feel the depths of revulsion that black people in the South feel when they see versions of the Confederate flag flying over the capitols of their states or on the grounds of their public institutions. That black outrage is rooted in the knowledge in their very bones that for 140 years the Confederate flag has been the primary symbol of all that was repressive in the world: the poll...