Without awareness, I exiled myself. Committed to being a foreigner, existing in near-constant visceral pain of missing Virginia’s Southside, until I can put my finger exactly on what I love and why and how. Until I can make sense of where I begin and my love for a land ends—where I begin and my love for my family, my father ends. Until I can separate my feelings and my consciousness, my reactions and my reality. Until I can reconcile my heritage of shame with my love of myself and my need to belong to a culture squeezed tightly between ugly and beautiful.
I unknowingly chose the perfect place for such examination: North Idaho. It is odd—no matter where we go, everything and nothing is the same. I didn’t know anything about the Aryan Nation presence here. It had never occurred to me that there could be a place this monotone—white. I hadn’t thought about any reason for moving here specifically, except snowboarding. The winter before my move I’d learned to ride, watched the weather and chased storms all over the West. That spring, I received a call offering a chance to caretake a piece of property in Priest River, Idaho. I packed before I hung up the phone—an opportunity to ride every day of the season. All I could think is with that much riding, I was bound to get good.
I have been lost here for fourteen years now, trying to make sense of myself and my world. I still recall ordering my first breakfast burrito, a few days after arriving in Priest River. A waitress came to the table. I ordered water. She came back, sat the water down. Without so much as a sideways glance or deviation in tone, she assured me that there was only one black man in town and they always knew where he was. I just stared. I didn’t say anything except I’d like a burrito. I wish I could say James Baldwin’s ghost entered my body and I threw my water glass at her. But, I didn’t. I sat there in shock and somehow ate my burrito with my mouth shut like a good little girl. Shamed, quiet, and bonded into a hatred I didn’t share.
The only way I can make sense of it is to accept that the waitress detected a Southern accent and assumed I was racist. Unfortunately, my silence assured her. It wasn’t that I had never witnessed racism or made unforgiveable errors myself, it was that I had never felt forced into bondage to others in a hatred for people with black skin. And I did not want to be. Once moving to North Idaho, hearing jokes about lynchings became commonplace. When I said I didn’t think they were funny, people always responded with mouths open gaping in disbelief, well, you’re from the South.
It is painful enough for me to reconcile my love for my ancestors and the land where I am from with my desire to feel whole and love myself with the inexcusable brutality undeniably a part of that ancestral and soil history without being linked to racists all over the country by their false assumptions.
My intuition, not fact, tells me that as white landowners living in the southern United States since the American revolution, my ancestors probably held slaves. I like to hope not, but most likely my heritage is involved in some way. This recognition makes it difficult for me to reconcile my love and admiration with my shame.
It is further complicated by a Confederate flag stapled to a tree at a camping spot all the way in North Idaho. Or the flag waving large from the back of a jacked up white pickup truck with a tiny blonde pale girl driving who, my intuition also tells me, has never been East of Montana.
The South, as a whole, is striving to take Confederate flags and monuments down not only because of the history it glorifies, but also because as University of Texas at Austin President Greg Fenves said in a statement referencing the deadly clashes in Charlottesville and his motivation to remove four Confederate monuments from the UT Austin campus, “Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”
Here, 2,552 miles west of Virginia, people adamantly fly the Confederate battle flag for exactly that reason. It represents hatred. Flying a flag thought to represent the South feels like an attempt to make me a co-conspirator in their ignorance. The Confederate flag is synonymous with the Civil War South and with the South’s violent history, which unfortunately has outlasted the Civil War.
In her poem “Everybody in America Hate the South,” Jacqueline Allen Trimble wrote
America ought to say
thank you, Miss South, thank you for being like
Jesus and taking on the sins of the whole country.
Flyers of the Confederate flag use the South to speak for their blindness. That flag represents families divided, women raped, bodies mutilated and dismembered. Grief. A wound that continues to bleed. Flying the Confederate flag advocates American injustice and indecency—massacred Native Americans, interred Japanese, exploited migrant workers.
Throwing the Confederate flag up around an old growth tree at a campsite along the Coeur d’Alene River robs America of its potential. We, as a nation, have been stumbling for a long time. Divided, we will fall. Take the flag down wherever it is being flown.
Let’s turn our humiliating and inhumane history into something good. If for no other reason, so that we can begin to forgive the history running deep and hot in our veins. So that our nation can find reconciliation, forgiveness, and wholeness. So I can find my way home.
How do you work to heal the still bleeding wound caused by the South’s history? Tell us in the comments.
Image credit: Flickr
The future is a dream. The past is an experience. We experience the present as the past transmuted into woven habits. A series of Russian doll cocoons, one within the other. They imprison our thoughts within our emotions, our loyalty within myths and symbols, other times, other places, and other people; anything but our true selves. The struggle to break free of those shrouds feels futile. It turns aspiration to anger. And the rising desperation turns into to a search for something, someone, anything to blame for the suffocating darkness foreshadowing an early grave, if not for the body, most certainly for that thing we call our selves. Look into a mirror and call yourself by the name you were given by those who only had dreams of who and what you were to them; a screen to reflect the projected image of a world that never was, back to the eyes of dreams that will never be. Look in the mirror and call that name and know that that which is not you is dangerous. It will kill you if it can. It is the past and it means to survive. It will kill us all if it can.
People here in the South and around the country seem not to realize that the war wasn’t popular here. Unlike the scene in “Gone With the Wind” men didn’t run from parties to enlist – especially wealthy landowners or their sons. A draft had to be instituted here and in the North to raise armies. In the South a tremendous percentage of those draftees just quit and went home to take care of their starving families before the war’s end. Hatred did grow but that was from people trying to kill one another not a philosophical difference. Afterwards former soldiers enjoyed the reunions of Northern and Southern veterans. They were proud to be under one flag again.
Using the horrible war as a justification for violence today has nothing to do with the realities of history. It is merely co-opting the symbols of a flawed state to hide the overt racism they hold dear. Many of the problems then and now have to do with the growing wealth of the very rich and the increasing poverty of the poor. Then the super wealthy on both sides blamed any and everything but the economic disparity for the looming conflict.
We in the South must tear down the flag, raze the monuments, and look at the realities of our problems.
I think Malcolm X put it best: “As soon as I cross the Canadian border, I’m in the South.” In the early seventies, I was a part of the court-ordered busing that took place in NC to achieve true desegregation of the public schools. In the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County and Charlotte/Mecklenburg County school systems the experiment worked; unlike the fiasco in Boston. There are no easy answers except exposure. Sitting next to each other in class, going to the same dances, playing sports, dating, it all breaks down barriers. Unfortunately after about fifteen years, everyone re-segregated. And then there is the internet. Everyone gets to pick their favorite blog to reinforce their tribal affiliations. The South is vilified, and rightly so, because it would not peaceably let go of slavery. The distressing reality is that it is too easy to blame another for your own frailties, hatred and bigotry; to cast oneself as a saint while punishing the sinner. Yes, religion, too has played a major role in perpetuating this pox on America. Well, no not just America. Yes, I’m from the South,traveled the US, lived abroad and really see no difference anywhere in anyone. As Sartre once observed: “Hell? Other people.”
Great article! My husband and I are both from the South. After years and years of arguing with certain members of our extended families over their racist ideas, we had to cut those people out of our lives. It breaks our hearts, but it seems necessary to us.