flag

We haven’t for more than thirty years, but when I was a child we lived in a perfect neighborhood for kids. Mostly boys on our end of Massalina Bayou, and we were all guns and holsters, cap guns that made a genuine firing pop like a gunshot, and you did not want to run out of caps. And because we were that age during World War 2, it was more soldiers than cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers. It was nearly always soldiers, and some got to be the Americans, and somebody had to be the Germans otherwise there was no enemy to shoot. As yet, no alley had been cut, and no houses had yet been built on Linda or Allen Avenue, so we had solid, thick woods to run, play and climb in right out the back yard. 

This was floating around in mind because yesterday’s blog post wandered on and on and on about the Confederate flag until I gave up on it and went to the office, the first day I’ve not posted (Tass and Joe wrote and posted for me a few days while I was in Cleveland Clinic) since October 2010.

We grew up mindful of war and of good guys and bad guys. I don’t recall ever playing Yankees and Rebs, for one thing, nobody would likely have been willing to be a Yankee even for play. The Civil War with its brutal treatment of the South after Lee surrendered, and that resentment, even bitter hatred, was still in the memory of our grandparent’s generation, and sure and certain knowledge of the carpetbagger enemy was engendered in us as well. Family lore included that my great-grandfather, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Jacksonville, Florida, had been jailed by Union forces for sheltering Confederate soldiers in the basement of the church. And I have told our story of his returning from taking Holy Communion to General Sherman on his yacht anchored in the St. John’s River there, and being told by his wife, angrily, contemptuously and with squinted eyes when he returned home, “Heber Weller: wash your hands before you come in this house.”

Our next door neighbor was Bill Guy. His mother was Mary Burgin Guy, and her mother Mrs. Burgin, whom Bill called Nanny, lived with them all our growing up years. Mary Guy’s sister Maggie, Aunt Maggie and Uncle Chuck Pryor and children used to come down from St. Paul to visit now and then, Uncle Chuck always driving a Lincoln. His first that I recall was a black 1930s Lincoln Zephyr, before and during the War. Already I’ve wandered, not where I’m going with this, so It’s a diversion to remember the year, I reckon it was summer 1950, both families took a couple of days and drove downstate in two cars, and all around Gainesville to see the university where I would be going some future year, and I got to drive the Pryors’ new 1949 Lincoln Cosmopolitan. I was fourteen nearly fifteen and had been driving since I was twelve, and felt tremendously trusted by Uncle Chuck. Well, he was Bill's uncle actually, but at thirteen Bill wasn't driving yet.

Before I wander too far, it’s time for the anyway. So anyway, probably at the University of Alabama because their family was from Tuscaloosa, Aunt Maggie Burgin had met and married a Yankee, Chuck Pryor, and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota with her Tuscaloosa, Alabama drawl. There are Southern drawls and there are Southern drawls, and I know a lady with one today, and I don’t know if Maggie Pryor cultivated hers, but it was slow. Slow. Even slower than a Brewton, Alabama drawl. And because we could not understand how a Southern lady could love and marry a Yankee, much less have children with him, there was much chat about how life was way up North, and Aunt Maggie liked to talk fondly about “The Cause” as though we were all still living in Gone with the Wind — as mentally, emotionally, attitudinally I suppose we were.

The Confederate flag, now being singled out as the Confederate battle flag, was our cherished emblem, symbol of who and what we were. If you’re “down” you grab something to cling to, dignity and pride, and the flag was always there, in mind though not on display, reminding us of who we were, as in “Who are your people?” The flag, and Robert E. Lee, respectfully referred to as “General Lee.” 

Beaten but not bowed, we were Southerners, baby! When I went off to the University of Florida it was perfectly natural for me to follow in the steps of a cousin from an earlier generation there and pledge KA, the Southern fraternity that, as all our chapter houses did, had a huge Confederate flag hanging over the front door of our old Southern mansion; and an oversize portrait of General Lee, whom we revered as the ultimate gracious Southern gentleman, above the fireplace mantle in the living room. And every spring, our Old South Ball, or Plantation Ball, when we all dressed in the uniforms of Confederate army officers and danced the night away with our Southern belles. If that sounds grand and romantic, my memory is that my uniform was solid wool, seemed a quarter inch thick, it was May, hot, humid Florida, there was no air conditioning in the early 1950s, and the KA house was full of hot college boys holding girls dressed in long gowns, the sweat pouring down our heads, faces and necks, and no Listerine or Scope.

Time for another anyway. 

In our minds, it had not the least connection with slavery or the racism that one can read back into Dylann Roof, the child’s face of evil as he sits there holding our flag, a boy who evidently saw no other way to distinguish himself in life. In our minds, not the least connection; and yet we grew up in the totally, solidly segregated post-slavery South. To us at the time, it didn’t seem right or wrong, it’s just the way the world was. But now Dylann Roof and the photograph of which he seems to have been so proud, the worst possible example of grasping for dignity and self-respect of which he had none. It will never be time for intelligent people to burn history books, literally or figuratively. But as a Southerner, I know that the flag is no longer, if it ever was, what we thought we were clinging to, and it’s time for the flag to come down and be folded and put away.

W