“Where’s Your Accent?”
If asked if I’m a Southerner, I say yes. I don’t hesitate. I was born and raised in North Georgia, after all.
“But you don’t sound all that Southern,” comes next. “Where’s your accent?” I respond with “Well” and a next-subject-please smile, or I go into a story of how I went through speech therapy at the age of 6 to repair some faulty “th” sounds. Depends on who asks. The truth is my accent comes and goes, emerging obviously only when I am very tired or incredibly frustrated.
Questions of accent go with the territory. If you leave the South, bring your accent, or be prepared to explain why you don’t have it to hand. I’ve been answering these questions since I was 11 years old. I’ve come to expect them.
Lately, I welcome them. Because other questions aren’t as easy to answer.
***
In 1902, the U.S. Army acquired land in North Georgia and established Chickamauga Post to serve The Fighting 6th Cavalry. The post was renamed Fort Oglethorpe to honor Georgia’s founder, General James Oglethorpe. My grandfather was stationed there during WWI. After WWII, Fort Oglethorpe was decommissioned and in 1949 it became a town.
Fort Oglethorpe is where I grew up.
Just south of Fort Oglethorpe is America’s first national military park. The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Military Park was established in 1890 to commemorate the Battle of Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest in Civil War history. The battle was considered a victory for the Confederacy.
We called it the Battlefield. Dotted with historical markers, preserved log cabins, marble and granite memorials from participating states on both sides of the conflict, and inactive cannons placed next to welded stacks of cannonballs, the Battlefield is sprawling and green. Filled with piney woods, wide spaces of tall grass, rolling hills that grow choked with clover and daffodils in springtime, it’s where we went to have picnics, to fly kites. This was where Cub Scout troops could hike safely all Saturday long, and where enterprising teenagers could find privacy not otherwise afforded them in a small Southern town.
We drove through the Battlefield to visit relatives, aunts and uncles, all of them living in subdivisions, on streets named for dead Confederate generals and lieutenants. Family lore said my grandfather’s house was built around a cabin used as a landmark during the late 1800s. Maps confirm this.
We drove through the Battlefield to go to church, a Methodist church founded by that same grandfather at the corner of MacFarland and Schmidt Roads. Both roads are cited in Chickamauga battle histories as routes of troop movement and retreat.
The Battlefield was part of my everyday life.
***
When my older brother went away to college, I would steal into his mostly unchanged room to play, to read his books and to look at his model cars. I was six, maybe seven. My brother is 13 years older than me, so his toys were from an era before my own. Stepping into his room was like going back in time.
On my brother’s windowsill stood a pair of miniature flags on tiny stands. One was the U.S. flag, somewhat sun-faded. The other was the flag of the state of Georgia. Part of the flag was dark blue with a white emblem, Roman numerals underneath. Most of the flag was taken by two crossed blue bars of thirteen stars on a field of red. I would take those flags carefully from their stands and make them flutter, then put them back, right where I found them.
***
I opened my first savings account with rolled pennies and nickels at a bank with a stack of cannonballs as its logo. Confederate soldiers drawn as flag-waving Johnny Reb cartoons were mascots for electricians, mascots for plumbers, mascots for exterminators.
And that flag. That flag was everywhere, a thing I saw daily. It was in storefronts, in decorations, on t-shirts and stuck to the backs of pick-up trucks and family sedans. In high school, halls were filled with the sons of good old boys with thick Southern accents wearing enameled belt buckles shaped liked Rebel flags and “Forget Hell” t-shirts.
In elementary school, playground divisions of Rebels and Yankees were just as frequent as cops and robbers. None of my classmates wanted to take up the Yankee cause. It wasn’t ideological. We were kids. We knew only that we were Rebels and they were Yankees. We wore grey and they wore blue. Reduced to just one team versus another, it looks like just a game.
The flag, the Rebel soldier, the Civil War, all were part of my vocabulary coming of age in the South.
1924. Source.
Visible from downtown Atlanta some 20 miles away, Stone Mountain is rumored the largest piece of exposed granite on Earth. It juts out of the ground unique to everything around it, 700 feet tall, like it fell out of a titan’s pocket and stayed where it landed. Geology alone would make it worth a visit. I remember a field trip from elementary school. Permission slips were signed and two or three busloads of kids were driven south to Atlanta. Some two hours later, we arrived at Stone Mountain. Without question, it is impressive.
Carved into the face of Stone Mountain is a bas relief of three men and their horses: General Stonewall Jackson, General Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. The carving is massive, covering an area the size of two football fields. It looks like history. I’d never seen anything like it. I didn’t know these men, only that they were in my history books, mentioned but never investigated.
And as far as I can recall — as this was over three decades ago — their names weren’t mentioned more than once if at all by our chaperones and teachers. We visited Stone Mountain, we watched a film, we rode a train around the base, then spent our allowance in the gift store before having lunch and going home.
***
Today, Stone Mountain is a huge tourist attraction, a favorite spot for Atlantans, and still occasionally a historic site. The surrounding area is wooded and beautiful. All year long, Stone Mountain goes through the seasons with new features every month or so, culminating in a winter festival centered on a huge pile of actual snow.
And everything happens under a monument to three icons of the Confederacy.
So why are they there? The modern history of Stone Mountain begins in the early 1910s. The United Daughters of the Confederacy raised funds and commissioned sculptor Gutzon Borglum to erect a monument to the Confederacy on Stone Mountain’s north face. In 1915, the burning of a cross at its peak marked the rebirth of the Klan in Georgia. Borglum abandoned the project in 1925 and later went on to carve Mount Rushmore. The project lay dormant until 1958 when Georgia’s legislature bought Stone Mountain and commissioned Walter Hancock in 1963 to complete the carving.* *
It was finished in 1972.
***
Rebels to advertise restaurants. Picnics under Confederate monuments. Cartoons on bumper stickers. Flags flying in front of state houses. It seems baffling these emblems of a frankly traitorous era have become almost dismissible kitsch. And these elements are romanticized and hailed as tradition. It’s like kudzu, a creeping and insistent thing that grows unseen and claims what it can. And like kudzu, it was allowed for so long to grow unfettered beneath our feet and the feet of our fathers and grandfathers.
I look back and I wonder why I never thought to ask so many questions.
How long had the Confederate Flag occupied so much of the Georgia flag? It was a state flag, after all. A piece of history, the flag was something we learned to recognize in school along with the brown thrasher and the dogwood tree as things that were Officially Georgia.
When an idea has flourished quietly and fervently for so long, it will take more than bans and ceremonial removals to send it away. For every confederate flag that comes down, there are tens, twenties, hundreds more still flying in hearts and minds. The casual acceptance and admiration of a Thing becomes a design for life. Why are otherwise rational people casually defending the Confederate Flag today? Because the flag is a part of their landscape, usually faded into the background, but there all the same. They cannot see the offense of a Confederate Battle Flag flying over a state capitol because that flag has been flying there for so long already.
The Confederate Flag offers a pillar of belief that keeps the unluckiest Southerner above people, institutions, ideas he believes to be less valuable than himself. He might lose his job, he might grow up in poverty, he might watch cultural absolutes melt away, but he will always have an imagined and virtuous South. This is the South of The Lost Cause, a South that suffered defeat in 1865 because nobility and chivalry fell victim to the sheer industrial force of the North. This is a South that went to war over State’s Rights and not to defend the institution of slavery. This is a South where Confederate officers were as noble as Arthurian knights.
Because of this imagined South, the motto of “Heritage Not Hate” repeats like a mantra in defense of the Confederate Flag, even when the heritage remembered is an imagined past delivered in Technicolor, Gone With The Wind held close like gospel history.
In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, a Canadian named Shreve McCannon asks his Mississippian roommate at Harvard about the South.
“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Do they live at all.”
The question says a lot about perception, about how how outsiders choose to view Southerners. The South is so entirely foreign to Shreve’s experience, he can barely imagine being there. Shreve is asking the question I’ve heard over and over: “Where’s your accent?”
Absalom, Absalom is a novel about how stories change in the retelling. So the question is asked twice. Or rather, the question is remembered differently another time.
“What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman …”
Faulkner knew the South better than anyone. He knew what haunted us then and what haunts us now, wraithlike and indomitable. The Lost Cause lingers. The haunting casts Southerners as unsuspecting protagonists in a revenge tragedy, as if every new generation is expected to step out onto the parapet so a bloody ghost of the fallen Confederacy can insist we avenge a murder most foul. Only the insistence comes with a caveat, with the knowledge there’s something dreadfully comfortable about being defeated, about being able to always look North and say “Look what General Sherman did to us.” It excuses every failure, allows every shortcoming, permits a people to hold onto an empty hope that they might rise again.
So they pick up a flag.
That Georgia flag I waved at six without question, that I was taught to admire, it wasn’t hundreds of years old, but only tens. The Confederate Flag crept onto Georgia’s state flag as a protest against integration in 1956, only two years before the state’s acquisition of Stone Mountain. There it remained for over thirty years, flying over my elementary school, over my high school, over the Capitol Dome in Atlanta.
It’s like watching someone you love fall into madness. The South is such a beautiful place filled some of the finest people I’ve ever met. Put aside the trappings of tourism, the food and the music and the famed hospitality, and still you’ve a culture that’s worth knowing, worth cherishing. We have so much to make us proud. We have so much to say.
I was never one of those good ol’ boys in the high school hallway. My parents would never have allowed me to wear a rebel flag across my t-shirt. I thought that was enough.
I was a good Methodist kid. Not once did I hear a message of intolerance from the pulpit, only lessons of grace and acceptance, forgiveness and redemption. I thought that was enough.
I took swimming lessons at the YMCA, learning how not to drown from Mr Bohannon. A few years later, I took karate under Jesse Thornton and Robert Harris. Over the course of my young life, three African-American men taught me how to stay afloat and how to fight. I thought that was enough.
I went to college. I left home. I went out into the world and failed spectacularly for the first two semesters. I got my first taste of what life was like without home cooked meals and laundry done by someone else. I had to set my own schedule and budget my time and decide what was worth doing. But more than anything else, I met people that weren’t at all like me, who came from other parts of the country, other parts of the world. Until then, the only exposure I’d had to new ideas had come from novels, from television, from movies and even comic books. But the trouble with expanding your horizons through reading and watching alone is that you’ve only yourself to help with the processing. I could read about interdimensional aliens all day, I could watch a fictional London burn on television, but it fell into a limited context of home.
A turning point for me came in my second year of college. I’d dismissed a local school out of hand, said I needed to leave home to have a “real” college experience, but those first two stumbling semesters left me with a wrecked GPA. So I returned home to live with my parents and started classes at Chattanooga State, a local community college. It was at Chattanooga State where I met Dr John Stigall.
Dr Stigall was an English professor. He taught literature and creative writing. He was also the college’s poet-in-residence. I took three classes under Dr Stigall, but the class that mattered most was a course in African-American Literature. From the first day of class, it felt like Dr Stigall was on a mission, that this wasn’t just another literature class, but a sweeping history lesson. He was just as likely to teach us about Richard Wright as he was to play cuts from James Brown or Robert Johnson. He would talk about redlining as much as he taught James Baldwin. And what our college textbook failed to offer, he would provide from his own collection, handing out xeroxed pages from books by H Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver.
Dr Stigall was a professor who dealt with both hands at once, the raw material of literature from the one side, the implications and ramifications of societal wrongs from the other. Nothing comes from nothing, and anything worth studying was better studied in context. And all the while, he was incredibly down to Earth, approachable unlike any professor I’d met before. Between classes, he could be found in his office.
He welcomed student visits, so I spent as much time in his office as I did in his classroom, eager to learn and to spend more time with him. It was like I’d been missing something vital. I’d had teachers before, but never a mentor. I don’t recall asking him outright about my concerns, about the guilt I felt for being a privileged white kid in the South, but he could tell from the way I’d shake my head in disbelief that every new revelation was getting to me, getting under my skin. I needed that discomfort. I needed to know that there was more to my history than just who won what battle and where, that there’d been a human cost, a price that was still being paid in less obvious ways.
After a year and a half at Chattanooga State, I went on to another college to finish my degree. I’d arrived at State with declared degree in Psychology, but left with a determination to major in Literature. I’d never have made that decision without Dr Stigall.
What I learned from Dr Stigall is that racism is less about what people are and more about what people do, the reasons why. A place itself cannot be racist, but the systems and traditions that maintain it can be so motivated. Dr Stigall went to college in New York, did his graduate work in New York, but then brought that education back home to Chattanooga, a place he loved enough to stay and teach its children year after year. He loved it enough to be angry.
You can love a place and still be angry about it.
After college, I looked at my South through a filter of mistrust. After a childhood of taking history lessons at face value, I look for the bigger story behind every Southern tale I’m told. Most moments of so-called Southern history, even since the Civil War, are narrowly pulled from white Southern history, ignoring the contributions and tribulations of African-Americans, of immigrants, of anyone and anything that didn’t support a narrative of a “defeated, but proud” people. As a result, the word “Southerner” has become synonymous with “white, conservative Southerner.”
To be honest, we’ve let this happen. I’ve let this happen. I let my disappointment in the South’s history color the way I viewed my own origins. I never had all that much of an accent, but I made an extra effort to keep it in check. My brother’s wife spent years diving into our family’s genealogy, but I wasn’t all that interested past my grandfather’s folks. I turned my attention toward being a citizen of the world-at-large thinking that was a far better option.
I realize now that I was wrong. What I was doing was ceding territory, giving up on something that was rightfully mine. How can I expect the South to be better if I’m not willing to help?
I love the South and the South makes me angry.
I’m not angry at the North, not angry at faceless Yankees, not angry at Grant at Appomattox. I’m not even angry at that flag. I’m angry at what is done in its service. The Confederate Flag has been wrapped around the neck of the South for over a century, choking off the expectations and ambitions of those sons and fathers (and daughters and mothers) that never forgave General Sherman. It would fall away and turn to dust if the South would just let it go, but we just keep tying it around us again and again.
And I fear it is only going to get tighter.
Just this past weekend, several hundred Confederate Flag enthusiasts converged on Stone Mountain Park. Only the latest in a series of events that appear to be escalating in frequency and size, the rally was covered like a curiosity, something that might be news, but might just be camera fodder. I followed along from New York via Twitter, refreshing feeds from journalists local and national. Once the rally in the parking lot was over and the flag-wavers started their mile-long hike up the side of the mountain, I turned away. I did so with a smart ass remark. I dismissed it. Just like everyone else, I didn’t take it seriously.
But this is serious.
The flag isn’t a joke to those hundreds who gathered, but an icon. The myth it represents has been regenerated time and again, mutating and growing stronger as its adherents dwindle. And though there has been a concerted effort to remove the confederate flag from public places, from retailers online and in-person, forced underground, the icon is only going to become more precious and tightly held. The line between an assumed Us and several Thems will only get wider with time.
But we must get rid of the Confederate Flag. Furl it and bury it with the dead. Recognize that it was the banner of a traitorous and defeated movement. Acknowledge the flag has become a tool in the hands of those looking for history to support outrageous beliefs about race and class. No flag is a benign object absent of meaning. If a flag is raised, then respect is assumed, honor is expected, allegiance can be requested. And today, the Confederate flag is deserving of none of those.
As for Stone Mountain, perhaps the Atlanta branch of the NAACP has the right idea.
We love things because they make us angry.
I can love the South and want it to be better. I have to understand it, to turn it over and see it from all sides, the dark and the light. If the unexamined life is not worth living, then an uninterrogated place is not worth calling home.
When I moved to New York City from Atlanta, family members were very concerned. It will be so different there, they said, so dirty and busy. There will be so many people and so much noise. You’ll be farther from home for longer than you’ve ever been. They were worried about me and I don’t blame them at all, even if those warnings were far more dire than New York City warranted.
Entirely true were predictions from knowing friends who told me how moving away from the South would make me appreciate it more. That leaving the South would leave me more proud of where I’m from than when I was a resident. This is certainly come to pass. I’d never known what it mean to miss anywhere until I got to New York. From here, I can see the South so clearly, I can remember the smell of my Mom’s cooking, the smell of honeysuckle in my backyard, the sound of cicadas and treefrogs. The noise of New York has clarified my sense of where I’m from. And I love where I’m from.
If asked if I’m a Southerner, I say yes. I don’t hesitate.
