Now that John Ashcroft has been confirmed as U.S. attorney general, the furor over his interview in The Southern Partisan may quickly fade from memory. For Ashcroft’s foes, after all, there will be plenty of fresh material as soon as he starts taking action, making choices. What interests me here, in any case, is not what Ashcroft said or didn’t say and how that might bear on his fitness to serve, important as those questions doubtless are, but rather the outrage and incomprehension that greeted his remarks in a magazine most Americans have never seen and never will.
I don’t read The Southern Partisan myself, but sometimes I pick it up at my local library to see whether a good friend of mine is still on the masthead. He does book reviews and once talked about reviewing my first novel, until he read it and decided that it was neither very Southern nor very partisan. After reading strong criticism of SP in the press, I called my friend to see whether his magazine had really printed t–shirts celebrating Lincoln’s assassination. He’d already gone into the Witness Protection Program, but his wife told me that National Public Radio had asked him about the t–shirt just a few nights before.
“Well,” he told them in his Carolina drawl, “I didn’t buy that one.”
Nothing about this situation surprises me. In the mid–eighties I went to Mississippi with a group of Christian college students from the Midwest. We painted houses, laid bricks, taught Bible school to poor kids, and sang with a local choir. At night we slept on the floor of a rickety trailer behind a black church, two to a mattress. I’d grown up in the South, but for most of the group, this was a shocking first encounter with Very Deep Dixie (Orlando at spring break doesn’t count). Memory tells me that most of them came from Minnesota and Wisconsin, that they were all blond, and that they had names like Ingrid and Heinrich. But memory usually lies.
In any case, one highlight of the trip was a quasi–civil rights tour, in which a van took us around town showing us how people lived in a city which had only been officially integrated for 20 years. First we looked at a white neighborhood: a dull cluster of 20– or 30– year–old ranch houses on wide streets without sidewalks. Then we drove a mile or so across the tracks to an older part of town, abandoned by the original inhabitants and now occupied by low–income black families. Cameras clicked around me; cries of horror and pity drifted through our cracked windows to the cracked sidewalks below.
I’d seen Southern poverty before. What surprised me was Midwestern self–righteousness. It seemed that for Ingrid and Heinrich, the injustice of small–town Mississippi was a wholly separate, wholly Southern kind of injustice, shocking to the sensibilities of real Americans.
It’s funny to me now to think of white 20–year–olds from Minnesota passing judgment on The Southern Way. Had anyone thought of taking them on a tour of a poor black neighborhood in the Midwest? How far from home would they have had to drive to find one? And would they have cried out in shock like Victorian missionaries? Would they have pressed their cameras to their windows and their hands to their hearts?
I live in a small–town in Alabama. Here, whether you’re black or white, you have no leisure to consider racial questions from the other side of a moving window. In the newer, more cosmopolitan South (Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham), people of various colors and persuasions segregate themselves by geography. Urban sprawl enables whole communities of like individuals to hedge themselves into separate squares on the map. They’re divided by highways, rivers, and mountains: physical boundaries that affirm psychological ones. Hail to sprawl, the New South’s new answer to racial, economic, and perhaps even philosophical tensions. But in the old rural South, things are different. We still live together, black and white, in contiguous neighborhoods. We shop together. We share libraries and restaurants. We share public schools and Christmas parades. We may not share a lot of conversation, but we share a lot of space.
The Confederacy still lives here, too, holed up with all of her mixed baggage in ancient neighborhoods and trailer parks, wealthy new developments and government–subsidized housing. Just before I began this paragraph, for example, I drove a few blocks to the drugstore to pick up some film. An 18–wheeler roared past me on its way to the local cement plant, its grill glistening with a well–polished Rebel Flag. A car parked in front of the pharmacy had a bumper sticker showing the same flag next to the motto, “Pride, Not Prejudice.”
Most of the time, Dixie’s about as threatening as a hood ornament (a lot of the time she IS a hood ornament), but sometimes she shows her claws. Alabama finally voted this November to remove its legal ban on interracial marriage. That sounds encouraging until you consider that the measure only passed by a few percentage points, reminding everybody that a heck of a lot of Alabamians still support segregation in the home, if not everywhere else. The Confederate flag flies stubbornly over the tiny city hall in a nearby town: my friend there (who’s white) was afraid to go in and vote for Alan Keyes. What would it be like for a black man to go in at all? Or to live nearby? Would it be like the grandchild of a holocaust victim living in the shadow of the Nazi flag?
My Southern Partisan friend might remind me that the Dixie flag is not a symbol of racial superiority (and few people believe that the Nazi flag represents anything else), but a symbol of the right of states to govern themselves and declare independence from an oppressive federal government. The rebellion of the South was, in the Confederate view, an essentially American act, a patriotic imitation of the first American rebellion from Great Britain less than one hundred years earlier. Deny the right of Southern states to secede and you must also deny the right of the original colonies to declare independence from Britain. Thus you become (if you are Abraham Lincoln) the very sort of tyrant that the Founding Fathers first opposed.
Pride, Not Prejudice. Fine. So try and imagine the poll workers at that small city hall standing up to greet the black man as he comes in. They shake his trembling hand and put him at ease. “Welcome, friend. It’s always good to meet a new voter—to greet a Southern citizen here under our mutual symbol of patriotism and freedom. We want you to know that the flag flying above this building is not a symbol of exclusion. It’s as much yours as ours.”
I can’t quite see it.
I do, however, see the Southern point of view. How can I not? Southerners have old family loyalties and long memories. My own grandmother’s grandfather was mayor of Chattanooga during the Civil War and a surgeon at Chicamauga, one of the war’s bloodiest battles. I grew up in Virginia, the state which provided military and moral leadership in both American wars of independence. Robert E. Lee was, after all, the son of Lighthorse Harry Lee, the American Revolutionary hero who delivered George Washington’s eulogy in 1799 with the famous words, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” For many Virginians, as for many Southerners, the mythology of the Confederacy is bound up with the mythology of the nation. Confederates were wrong about slavery (just as Andrew Jackson was wrong about native Americans), but they were right to assert the sovereignty of local people over an outside force. No wonder that, even for some Southerners who defended America in World War II, mention of Robert E. Lee raises the same lump in the throat as mention of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, himself. Imagine their shock during Ashcroft’s confirmation hearings at the suggestion (made by Senator Joe Biden) that it was somehow dishonorable to think of Lee as a great patriot.
And yet. And yet. And yet. The Southern cause, if ever it was just, has been cursed beyond redemption by racism. In spite of progress, the South itself is still cursed. That curse reveals itself not just in public flare–ups of violence and cruelty, but in the lack of everyday charity from people you’d expect to be nice. A friendly woman at church tells me she needs to use more suntan lotion because she’s “black as a n––.” An elderly woman I know, well–read and intelligent, told me she was going to vote for George Bush but couldn’t believe he kissed “that colored woman” right on television. A friend my own age, a devout Christian, doesn’t want to shop at a certain mall because, last time she went, she was the only white person there. And me: I want to be friends with my black neighbors but I proceed awkwardly. I try too hard, embarrassing myself and them, too. Sometimes, for instance when I speak to a certain very kind man at the grocery store, I hear myself slip into odd language patterns, as if I’m lost in his foreign country.
My own relatives are scrupulously polite toward African Americans, but I’m a careful observer. There’s the way they say “BLACK,” with a long, flat “A,” which makes the word sound self–conscious and dirty (the way you might say “sex” when you’re teaching Sunday School). There are the occasional, careful jokes, and the black women serving hors d’oeuvres in lacy white aprons at a luncheon after a funeral. I want to think there’s nothing wrong with this—after all, the women in the aprons own the catering company, they choose those uniforms themselves, and they’re probably making pretty good money on that curry and almond salad. Yet something’s strange. Maybe it’s the way we all slip so comfortably into the roles our parents played just 30 years ago, when those same women, as little girls, had to stand at a white woman’s back door because they weren’t allowed at the front.
Two years ago I bought a postcard of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (a celebrated Confederate cavalryman), because he looks like an old professor of mine. I wanted to send it to my friend Pam (who was ironing for the professor’s wife), with the inscription “Miss Shade! Ironing my undershorts on a Friday evening! Don’t you have anything better to do?!” written on the back. However I never sent the postcard, and forgot about it until a black woman from Terminex came to spray my house for “pests” (the kind polite people don’t talk about in the South). While she sprayed my bedroom, she told me what a difficult thing it had been for her to come back to Alabama (from California) to take care of her mother. As usual, I wanted to be this woman’s friend. I was fumbling awkwardly with language, trying to bridge the enormous gap between my brain and my mouth. And then suddenly I remembered something about Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the chaos following the Civil War, he’d organized a secret militia to defend the rights of white Southerners. I had a photograph of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan on my mirror.
I doubt the woman noticed the photograph, but at that moment, the mythology of the Confederacy met the mythology of black America. There we stood, she and I, framed on a smooth plane of glass like images in a painting. I imagine that this is precisely how Southern whites and blacks often view themselves and each other in relation: as two–dimensional figures placed in opposition above the pantheon of our heroes and demons. It’s a wonderful political strategy to pretend your position is so uncontroversial that anybody who could disagree is hopelessly out of the mainstream—hence Senator Biden’s passing scoff at Ashcroft’s admiration for Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. But the real question is not whether Senator Biden was right (that love of the Confederacy implies bigotry), or whether John Ashcroft is merely a man who, like many Americans, respects our forefathers for their opposition to tyranny while trying to disengage himself from their racism.
The real question is why people cling so desperately to the myths that both relate them and separate them. I guess it’s understandable that a lot of us want to identify with the struggle of our particular people. Whether it’s the battle for Southern independence, black civil rights, women’s rights, Irish self–rule, Polish Solidarity, a Jewish homeland, Palestinian autonomy—when we claim for ourselves the suffering and perseverance of our separate communities, we may find immense enlightenment and meaning. In our various mythologies, we discover kinship with other sufferers, heroes to worship, a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves, and occasionally something to die for.
The problem is, though, that the truths we find in these myths may be only as deep as the images on a mirror. Though they offer us views that are both beautiful and sympathetic, they show us only in shallow particularity. If we all continue to look at ourselves and each other so much in the framework of cultural mythology, how will ever see underneath the surface to those places where all people are exactly the same? In both our hideous capacity for tribalism and our God–like desire to love and be known, human beings really do share everything. There is only person in the mirror, and it is us.
Betty Smartt Carter is the author of two novels. She has written for Books & Culture, Christianity Today, Marriage Partnership, and other magazines.
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
