A Late Encounter with the Civil War

CHAPTER THREE: The Civil War and Its Afterlife

59 In the first volume of Will Shetterly and Vince Stone’s Captain Confederacy (2007), the eponymous superhero is a strapping blond hunk in tights, with the Confederate battle flag stretched across his rippling pectorals. He looks like a pickup truck in red, white, and blue spandex. His partner is blonde and buxom Miss Dixie, a Confederate Wonder Woman without the tiara and Lasso of Truth. Following the standard superhero trope, they hide a secret identity but not in an effort to preserve their daytime personae. Far from being mild-mannered regular citizens by day, they are puppets of a propaganda machine within a Confederate government, a century and a half (or more) since its triumph in the Civil War, a regime that, in order to survive in the twenty-first century, broadcasts phony episodes of black on white crime so that the Captain and Miss Dixie can be filmed performing “real” rescues. The sesquicentennial takes place in Captain Confederacy, in an era of elaborate charades and reality television. Lives are not lived but performed. The Captain and Miss Dixie are in fact cordial friends with the actors who portray their black nemeses , Blacksnake and Kate. Between episodes the four hang out and kvetch about how much they hate the forced deception and fakery of their jobs, and by the third or fourth page they brew CHAPTER THREE The Civil War and Its Afterlife In memoriam, Noel Polk (1943–2012) 60 Chapter Three up a plot to break free of their bosses and expose the big lie. Captain Confederacy (vol. 1) then embarks on a complicated set of plot steps in which the four superheroes attempt to “secede ” from governmental control. By the end of volume 1, only Kate (the black female superhero), Jeremy Gray (the actor who plays Captain Confederacy), and Roxanne Lee (the niece of the current President Lee of the csa and the actress who plays Miss Dixie) are left standing. The actor who plays Blacksnake, and who never wholeheartedly agreed with the plan, is killed in a shootout with csa secret police. Kate and Jeremy, after surviving several assassination attempts, and in Jeremy’s case death itself, have fallen in love.1 Evading the secret police, the lovers propose a new myth for the Confederacy to the current President Lee, and she presents them on Confederate television as the new heroic pair. Kid Dixie supplants Miss Dixie, and Kate, an African American woman, becomes the next Captain Confederacy (155–56). Transformation is the theme of the new era; genders and races shift places and roles. One thing does not change much: Blacksnake, the African American male, seems indigestible to the theme of trans-formation, and he is eliminated. Captain Confederacy might be shelved under “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” but the author and artist, Will Shetterly and Vince Stone, have uncovered one strategy for remembering the Civil War in the latter days of its sesquicentennial: alternate history or the counterfactual mode. In a brief afterword to volume 1, Shetterly explains some of the design and thinking behind his alternate history of the Confederacy . His commentary bolsters the theme of transformation . Although web sources place Shetterly in Minnesota now, he writes that he was born and raised in the South and that his family “took part in the struggle for civil rights” (157). But he is not interested in the history of the South (what did happen); rather, the malleability of alternate histories rivets his attention . In one possible history, “[a] modern-day csa could have The Civil War and Its Afterlife 61 become an enlightened nation. The economics of slavery and the pressure of international disapproval would have made the Confederacy abandon slavery by the 1870s or ’80s, and a victorious Confederacy would have treated its former slaves better than a crushed South did” (157). “Or,” Shetterly continues , shifting to another variant, “a victorious Confederacy might have become a place far worse than the one here [in Captain Confederacy]. The human instinct to resent meddling by outsiders could have produced a csa that clung to slavery well into the Twentieth Century. In the game of If, anything is possible” (157).2 Not “anything,” I would like to argue, in rebuttal to Shetterly’s theory about “the game of If.” Although much is possible to the imagination, even to an imagination not influenced by computer-generated imagery, the widest range of “anything” is not. We...