Damned for all time?
It's sort of like pulling back the sheet to view the face of a corpse. I know what and who's under there, so it's no surprise. I face it, own it, remember it, have done so, including here, many times. I don't like to look at it. But politicians and many decent human beings are being discredited and shamed because of pasts that are now culturally unacceptable. Someone recently, I think a governor? for a photograph of him wearing blackface when he was a college student decades ago. I never wore blackface, but I was there in the 1940s when others did and we all laughed at the racial characterizations. Am I "damned for all time" as a song in Jesus Christ Superstar sings of "Poor Old Judas"?
What stirs this to mind? Statues of Confederate generals being pulled down in the racial upheaval. At the national capitol, removing portraits of House speakers who had served the Confederacy. Reading an article that characterized Robert E Lee as a traitor. Another article casting Lee as a brutal slaveowner, and wondering could this possibly be true? Cutting men down for having lived in old Time without twenty-first century sensitivities.
One of the books I had to buy for indoctrination week at seminary, September 1980, is The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, mentioned here before. I kept it. From time to time I take it off the shelf, open it and read a story so I never forget who I am and where I was raised. As a friend likes to ask, "Who are your people?"
O'Connor tells our dark secrets, and reading her makes me self-conscious, because I know the secrets. Unlike when O'Connor wrote them, her stories are no longer chuckle-able. In my day we did not realize they were shameful. People my age, like some of O'Connor's characters, lived with beloved grandparents who were just out of the Civil War and lived through the bitter Reconstruction. Among our honored folk were Confederate veterans who rode in open touring cars at the end of local parades, to continuous applause.
Who hasn't read O'Connor may not understand. I'm not going to let that be my problem, read her short stories if you wish. May find them free online, IDK.
She has been praised for brilliant writing, and so it is. The reader is in the midst of every story and part of it. It would be an inappropriate horror of horrors today, as would Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that we read in class), but O'Connor would have seemed perfectly normal for high school or college reading in our all white schools of the segregated South. What we "knew" then was very different from what we know now. And except for O'Connor's shocking endings of cruelty, meanness, hatred, no one would have blinked an eye about the social milieu of her stories, because most of us never thought about it, it was the way life was, the way we were.
Though we don't get to know them well, O'Connor's black characters seem real, for the way her white characters saw them at the time. Her white characters are mostly low class who in the day would be called white trash, and not necessarily poor. Higher class whites didn't talk as crudely as O'Connor's low class whites, didn't speak the ugliest racial terms; but that social class divide did not divide the common white racist culture. Southern Gentlemen and their Ladies were as racist as low class whites, they just didn't speak racial terms so crudely: they softened them.
Which is a core of the problem to this day. We whom Dr King called "the white moderate" peacemakers who abhor violence, seek to restore but not change peace and order, urge everyone to calm down, be polite and cordial, resume courtesy, go home, report for work tomorrow as always, and no hard feelings. That's the enculturated, embedded, systemic, even unconscious racism that yields the self-delusional lie "I am NOT a racist" and that is so ingrained it may never be eradicated.
For my part, memories. At university in the early 1950s I joined a social fraternity whose ethos was to idealize the Confederacy as the golden age of genteel Southern living (two links below for what a couple of critical writers have said). Joining it was cool, a huge southern mansion as fraternity house, portrait of General Lee over the mantle and Confederate battle flag hanging over the outside front entry on University Avenue. TaDaTaDaa to the sound of the bugle, rouse up and lustily sing "Dixie" during football games while waving the Confederate flag. Instruction for pledges about how we Southern Gentlemen must emulate Robert E Lee. I wore an elegant Confederate officer's uniform to our Old South Ball the spring of 1954.
One night in chapter meeting we solemnly condemned and expelled a gay brother. I had a heated conversation about race with a fraternity brother and him telling me, of blacks, "I like them fine as long as they stay in their place". When I said "They don't have 'a place'", he retorted, "On that, you and I will never agree, the conversation is over". The fall semester of my junior year I did not go back and never returned. Not angry, I simply didn't fit in, it wasn't me even then. But I was part of it. As was a governor of Tennessee who apologized for attending Old South Balls as a member of the same fraternity. I don't believe he is really sorry. I am neither sorry nor apologetic for my past, and I cannot make reparations to history for my past. But thank God I've moved on. What do you think?
Born and bred a Southerner, some sixty-five years ago approving of the move to integrate the university, and now Black Lives Matter, but my history has blots as dark as anyone's, and I have no right to correct others whose views haven't changed.
I understand Southerners' upset about Confederate statues coming down, changing street names and school names, military base names. I have some issues to work out within myself. Leonidas Polk, graduate of West Point, a founder of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, at the urging of his military academy friend Jefferson Davis, resigned his diocese to accept a commission as a general in the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War, and reportedly was a much beloved leader. There are two links about him below. Shall Sewanee now be razed because it was founded by Bishop Polk? His portraits there be taken down because he is Incorrect? His remains disinterred from the Cathedral in New Orleans?
Though I'm working on myself, though I understand statues being toppled and other public honors going to disgrace, I disappreciate that Bishop Polk and General Lee and others whom we revered throughout my life are now being castigated as "traitors" when they were loyal to the South in an era when State and regional identification was as strong or stronger than nationalism. But I'm working to "get it" and as a Christian who has vowed to respect the dignity of every human being, I value living people who are hurting more than I value my own sense of heritage and former pride. The pain of others must be more important to me than my own feelings. Black Americans are hurt, hurting. And part of eradicating racism must include removing every visible sign regardless who takes offense that their "heritage is being destroyed"; even that selfishly, obliviously and uncaringly "taking offense" is racist. It's Time. Down with it, down with it, down to the ground. Now. Now. If not now, when?