For Which It Stands

There is no place I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300 foot tower. There's no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi.

--Toni Morrison

No nation rose so white and fair,
None fell so pure of crime
Worthy to have lived and known our gratitude
Worthy to be hallowed and held
In tender remembrance
Worthy the fadless [sic] fame which
Confederate soldiers won
Who gave themselves in life
And in death for us
For the honor of Georgia
For the rights of the States
For the liberties of the South
For the principles of the Union, as these were handed down to them
By the fathers of our common Country.

--Inscription to "Our Confederate Dead," Augusta, Georgia

Tradition does not make [the Confederate flag] right or necessary.

--UNC-CH undergraduate student

If you live long enough, autobiography becomes history--at least microhistory. I speak as a voice from the South, a native daughter of North Carolina, and involuntary emigrant recently returned South--to a very old place. (I used to quip that it was my intent to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong!) I speak of the South with some ambivalence, however, since in ways that are important, the South has changed--and I, too, have changed.

Gone are the days of the openly Jim Crow South of my youth in the 1940s and early 1950s: the South of segregated neighborhoods, schools, cemeteries, public facilities, water fountains, trains and train station waiting rooms, buses and--well, typically, the bus stations had no waiting rooms for "colored." One entered from "round back" into a little alcove that led directly to the "colored" restroom. Often there was a small cubbyhole that connected to the kitchen or luncheon counter where one could stand and, as it were, order "take-out" (but mostly colored people packed their fried chicken and biscuits in a lunchbox, and dined more heartily than their white traveling counterparts anyhow).

No, this was no longer the South where, along some US Route near Charlotte, North Carolina, an angry, raw-boned, red-faced, middle-aged white woman shouted, "There's enough of us on this bus to throw her off," in an attempt to incite other white passengers to remove a young traveler who had unreasonably (and impertinently) refused to surrender her seat toward the front of the bus to the lady in question. It was fortunate for the 10-year-old young colored girl to whom the lady was referring--traveling alone on the Greyhound Bus, en route to her grandmother's in Spartanburg, South Carolina--that cooler heads prevailed that wintry afternoon. Nor was this the South where that same girlchild, performing chores in the kitchen of the white woman for whom her grandmother occasionally worked, was "touched" by the octogenarian (or so he seemed from my prepubescent perspective) who was husband to the lady of the house.

Hell, it was not even the same South she had encountered some twenty years later, when she blindly fled the North Carolina "Welcome Center" on Interstate 85, where late one evening, she had confronted a large, red-lettered, white placard-like sticker plastered across the ladies' bathroom mirror, advertising membership into the local branch of the KLU KLUX KLAN. (Before running for my life, or so I felt, I had had the presence--or absence--of mind to remove the offending sticker--fearing that the colorful invitation might indeed entice potential recruits.) This sticker remains today in my possession, where, buried among piles of collected paraphernalia, it's...