Flags in the Dust

"Ms. Hamilton, have you seen this?"

I looked up. The time was 12:55 p.m., the day was Monday, and I was sitting where I always sat that semester, at that hour, bathed in fluorescents in my University of Virginia classroom, twiddling my thumbs until the freshman composition crew finished filing in.

The voice belonged to Katie, one of my star students--a tall willowy girl with a thick fall of bright red hair. I smiled, my lips beginning to form the words "seen what?" Then my eyes focused on what she was holding--the Saturday New York Times, the one I shook my head over then tossed into the recycling bin two days earlier, the one with the photo of weeping re-enactors re-burying Confederate dead in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery--and using the occasion to shout defiance at the NAACP. I looked from the paper to Katie's face, the smile fading from my lips.

"This story says they're still flying the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Statehouse! How can they do that?" The girl's pansy-brown eyes were wide with shock and indignation.

You see, Katie takes these matters very seriously. She's an Arkansas girl, a proud graduate of Little Rock's Central High--though proud for reasons that might baffle Orval Faubus. Katie came to class lit up like Christmas the day the "Little Rock Nine" received the Congressional Gold Medal. She is what used to be known, before the term was discredited, as a white Southern liberal.

And a real firecracker, too. In a twinkling, her outrage had the classroom buzzing. Heads with dark hair, fair hair, long hair, kinky hair swiveled; faces pink and white and six shades of brown creased with interest.

"Oh, yeah!" Tanya interjected. She was perhaps the best writer in the class--a "black Brahmin" from Boston with skin the smooth lemony brown of a pound cake. "We were going to have our family reunion in Hilton Head. But when the NAACP announced the boycott . . . Well, that was that. We canceled."

"Ms. H!" This time it was Jaime speaking, from northern Virginia by way of San Antonio. "Didn't you say you're from South Carolina?"

I hesitated. There's always a split second when I want to deny it, when I want to claim anyplace I've lived--Virginia, Texas, Louisiana--anyplace as home but that state that was once called "too small for a country--too large for an insane asylum."

That was especially so last fall, when I couldn't pick up a newspaper or turn on a television without hearing something about South Carolina's battle with the NAACP over the Confederate flag. That battle has been fought to a bloody draw. The Legislature claimed victory with a "compromise" that removed the flag from the Capitol dome and moved it to a historically appropriate site--the memorial to the Civil War hero, governor, and senator Wade Hampton. But ironically, the flag is now many times more visible--it flies just thirty feet above the busiest corner in the state capital, a deliberate affront and a daily provocation.

"Heritage-not-hate" has always been the rallying cry of the "thinking" flag waver. When the flag returned to its perch over the state Capitol in 1962, the all-white, all-male Legislature claimed the vote was tied to the centennial of the Civil War. But six weeks before, Harvey Gantt had made headlines by applying to Clemson College and bloody violence was looming over James Meredith's impending arrival in Oxford, Mississippi. Heritage? Hate?

I was four years old in 1962, and no one in my household marked that event. Nothing occurred to burn the flag into my child's memory the way my mother's grief marked the JFK assassination, just one short year later. That flag, the sort of people who flew it, they just didn't exist for me. I grew up protected, safe, loved in a South Carolina that was...