Where We Are

The question here in South Carolina is not, finally, what to do with the flag. The question is this: What are we are to do with history? Because it is history at stake here. And history that confounds us.

Like a bad marriage or the pain of childbirth or the death of a loved one, the problem of history is that its truest rendering is a matter only of experience. To try and speak true history--what has happened to you and the sense of it you have tried to make--is to begin the alteration of its truth, no matter the noble intent of the heart, because history is most true only in its first generation. After that, history in its utterance takes on permutations that can only be passed on to the next generation, which gives it then its own permutations in giving it to the next, until finally and oftentimes its present manifestation is only a distillation of perceptions that reflect the sorrow and triumph and bad memory and weary bones and spoon-fed prejudices of one person to the next, father to son, mother to daughter.

The flag means only heritage, or, the flag means only hate.

Because we are first human beings, and so, whether black or white, we first bear the stamp of original sin upon our souls, no one is exempt from the way we reconfigure the truth; no one can lay claim to owning it. For this reason, history, whether written by the victors or whispered by the vanquished, becomes only fact-based fiction.

And though it would seem history would hold dear its closest blood relative, fiction itself, history defies the fiction writer's age-old confidant, metaphor. There is no metaphor for history, no means to illustrate through resemblance of one thing to another that firsthand moment of experience that yields in the instant after its having been lived through its own record: your own history.

To use a literary example of what I mean in all this--and I'm hoping that because I am a writer, I'll be allowed the luxury of literature--T.S. Eliot, when asked once what he meant by a certain sequence of lines the interviewer quoted to him from Prufrock, simply said, "What I meant was,"--and quoted back the lines to him.

Or this: the fifteen years I have lived here in storied Charleston, when compared to the vast landscape of human history in South Carolina--evidence for which ranges from the potshards it is easy to turn up when digging in the yard to plant flowers that will die in a season, to the cigarette butts that seem to breed in herds in the grassy medians at every stoplight in town--my fifteen years, when stacked up against the panorama of events that has brought us to the moment of this debate, are like--like--like fifteen years.

And this: a group of states seceded from a union of states over the principle that a sovereign state had the right to determine its own course; the preeminent right at stake among the seceding states was the right to continue slavery so that the agricultural economy upon which these states depended could continue unimpeded; a war between the seceding states and the union to which they had previously belonged was fought; that war was lost by those who had seceded, and lost along with it was that principle of sovereignty; though not necessarily economically or politically or spiritually, those held in slavery were, technically, set free.

This: there are no metaphors for history. A poem is knowable only through itself; my years on earth are only knowable by me, having lived through them; men died for a principle, but that principle when traced to its practical root was about keeping human beings enslaved.

Yet because we persist in seeking metaphor, and because only those distilled perceptions of experience are what we know, we have no choice but to acknowledge, for better and worse, the flag...