Chris Hedges: confronting the past

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Mr. Fish / Truthdig

JONESBORO, Ga.—I boarded the Gone With the Wind Tour bus outside the
train depot built in 1867 to replace the depot burned during the Civil
War. The building
now houses the
Road to Tara Museum.
It has displays of "
Gone With the Wind
" movie memorabilia including dolls of Mammy, played in the film by
Hattie McDaniel,
and the pantalettes and green hat worn by
Vivien Leigh,
who played Scarlett O'Hara.

Rick, the bus driver, switched on the audio track, written and
narrated by a local historian, Peter Bonner. We listened to the
familiar story of the noble
South and its "Lost Cause." We heard about the courage of the
Confederate soldiers in Jonesboro who fought gallantly on Aug. 31 and
Sept. 1, 1864, in a
failed effort to block the Union Army from entering Atlanta. We were
told of the gentility and charm of the Southern belles. We learned
that the war was
fought not to protect the institution of slavery but the sanctity of
states' rights. Finally, we were assured that the faithful slaves, the
"mammies,"
"aunties" and "uncles," loved their white owners, were loved in return
and did not welcome emancipation.

That this myth persists and perhaps has grown as the country
polarizes, often along racial lines, means that whole segments of the
American population
can no longer communicate. Once myth replaces history there is no way
to have a rational discussion rooted in verifiable fact. Myth allows
people to deny
who they are and the crimes they committed and continue to commit. It
is only by confronting the past that we can end the perpetuation of
these crimes
in other forms.

When loyalty to the tribe is more important that truth, fact or
justice—a tribalism on display in the hearings for Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh—an
open society is extinguished. Reparations for African-Americans are
not only just, they are the only way we as a nation, as with Germany's
reparations
to the Jews, can build a shared history based on truth, atone for the
crimes of the nation and reverse the legacies of white supremacy. The
Southern cause,
as Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his laconic memoirs, was "one of the
worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the
least excuse."

David Blight in "
Race and Reunion:
The Civil War in American Memory" documents that in the decades after
the war whites in the South and the North furiously rewrote the
history of the conflict.
"As long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a
politics of Civil War memory," Blight notes. The root cause of the
war, the need to emancipate
4 million people held in slavery, was erased, he said, and replaced
with the "denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of
emancipation from
the national narrative of what the war was about." As
W.E.B. Du Bois
lamented in his book "Black Reconstruction," which looked at the
brief postwar period, from 1865 to 1877, when African-Americans were
given some political
space in the South to resurrect their lives, "little effort [was] made
to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, action, work and
wages, homes
and families. Nearly all of this has gone down beneath a mass of
ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement."

The Civil War, as portrayed in novels and films such as "Gone With the
Wind," histories such as "The Civil War" by
Shelby Foote
and television programs such as Ken Burns' documentary series on the
conflict, is usually reduced to stories about the heroic
self-sacrifice and courage
exhibited by the soldiers from the North and the South who fought as
brother against brother. The gruesome suffering, widespread looting
and rape and senseless
slaughter are romanticized. (For every three soldiers who died on a
battlefield, five more died of disease, and, overall, 620,000
Americans, 2 percent
of the country's population, perished in the war.) Meanwhile, the far
more important struggle, the struggle of black people to rise from
bondage to be
free, is effectively eclipsed in these narratives of white self-pity
and self-exaltation.

"Gone With the Wind," the 1936 novel by
Margaret Mitchell,
has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and, according to one survey, is the
second favorite book
among Americans, after the Bible. The 1939 film version of the book
is the highest-grossing movie ever, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The
book and film
are unapologetic celebrations of historical myth, historical erasure
and white supremacy.

The Lost Cause romance and veneration of Confederate military leaders
have a powerful hold on white imaginations, especially among those for
whom economic
and political marginalization is becoming more pronounced. The myth of
the Confederacy resembles the retreat into a fictional past I saw in
Yugoslavia
during the
Bosnian War,
an ethnic conflict that lasted from 1992 to 1995. That retreat gave
Yugoslavs—whether Serb, Muslim or Croat—who had been cast aside by
economic collapse
and a failed political system manufactured identities that were rooted
in a mythologized past of glory, moral superiority and nobility. It
allowed them
to worship their own supposedly unique and innate virtues. These
fantasies of an idealized past were accompanied by the demonization of
opposing ethnicities,
a demonization used by demagogues to fuel the hatred and violence that
led to a savage war.

"He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which
150 years ago was more important than country," White House chief of
staff and former
Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly said last year of the Confederate
military commander, Robert E. Lee, a slave owner. "It was always
loyalty to state first
back in those days. Now it's different today." Kelly blamed the Civil
War on "the lack of an ability to compromise," adding that "men and
women of good
faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them
make their stand."

During my bus ride in Georgia, a woman on the audio guide impersonated
Scarlett O'Hara as music from the 1939 movie played in the background:
"Now y'all
sit back and enjoy this journey back into a time of cavaliers, ladies
fair, and cotton fields—called the Old South."

The theme of the tour could be summed up as " 'Gone With the Wind'
accurately portrays life in the South during and after the Civil War."
Over and over,
incidents and characters in the novel and film were related to actual
events and people. Nowhere was this more pernicious than in the
portrayals of black
men and women who were enslaved.

"I learned that a black servant 144 years ago so loved her 'masters'
that she requested to be buried in their family plot. … And when I
learned that her
masters willingly allowed such a burial request, I had to conclude
that there must have been a greater bond, perhaps a loving bond of
slave for master,
and master for slave," Bonner writes in his thin book "Lost in
Yesterday," which is sold in the Road to Tara Museum. "The unique and
often misunderstood
relationship has been presented throughout fiction and the
entertainment media, in my opinion, in a multitude of unfair
portrayals."

Bonner goes on to argue that the slaves in the book and the
film—Mammy, Pork, Prissy and Big Sam—all supporters of the Confederacy
and loyal to the O'Hara
family, represent a true picture of many, maybe most, blacks in the
antebellum
South. He cites the small headstone at the feet of Philip and Eleanor
Fitzgerald in the local cemetery that reads "Grace, Negro servant of
the Fitzgeralds"
and insists "that Grace was honored as a family member."

That Grace was given no last name on the stone and was buried, like a
pet, at the feet of those who owned her seems to escape Bonner. Did
Grace have a
family? A mother? A father? Brothers? Sisters? Grandparents? Aunts?
Uncles? Cousins? A husband? Children of her own? Or had they been sold
by her beloved
owners?

We stopped outside the 1839
Stately Oaks plantation house,
which originally sat on 404 acres before being moved into the city. It
is now part of the Margaret Mitchell Memorial Park. The mansion hosts
white re-enactors
in period costumes, including Confederate uniforms, the equivalent of
re-enactors dressed in SS uniforms giving cheery tours of
Auschwitz.

In squalid, overcrowded shacks outside Stately Oaks, children were
born, lived and died enslaved. They spent a lifetime engaged in hard
labor, misery and
poverty. They watched in agony as mothers, fathers, sisters and
brothers were sold off, never to be seen again. They lived in constant
fear and humiliation.
They were beaten, chained, whipped, castrated and sometimes shot or
hanged. The male slave masters routinely raped black girls and women,
sometimes in
front of their families, and often sold their mixed-race children.

"Like the patriarchs of old,"
Mary Chesnut,
a white South Carolinian, confided in her diary in March 1861, "our
men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the
mulattoes one sees
in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready
to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in
everybody's household
but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."

The Southern tradition, as
James Baldwin
pointed out, "is not a tradition at all." It is "a legend which
contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply
than it should be,
is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means
of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro."

The ability to disregard the horror of slavery, to physically erase
its reality, and to build in its place a white fantasy of goodness,
courage and virtue
speaks to the deep sickness within American society. Most Confederate
monuments were erected under the leadership of the
Daughters of the Confederacy
 from 1890 to 1920, a time when the terror of lynching by the Ku Klux
Klan was at its peak. These statues were designed to romanticize white
supremacy
and divide blacks into good and bad "negros." There are no statues to
Reconstruction governors and senators or black political leaders, not
to mention
the leaders of slave revolts such as Nat Turner or
Denmark Vesey.
The few Confederate generals, such as James Longstreet, who supported
black rights after the war are not memorialized, nor are the 186,000
black soldiers—134,111
conscripted from slave states—who served in the Union Army. The
historian James Loewen calls the South "a landscape of denial."

"Public monuments," the historian Eric Foner writes, "are built by
those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are
worth commemorating
and what vision of history ought to be conveyed."

One of the most outrageous public celebrations of white supremacy is
Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta. Carved in the gray stone are
massive figures of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the generals Robert E. Lee
and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. The Confederate leaders, all mounted
on horses, hold
their hats over their hearts. The carving covers more than 1.5 acres
of rock face and rises 400 feet. It is the largest
bas-relief
in the world. It is also the most visited site in Georgia.

William Faulkner published "Absalom, Absalom," his searing
condemnation of slavery and the Old South the same year Mitchell
published "Gone With the Wind."
The hate-filled slave owner and Confederate veteran Thomas Sutpen in
Faulkner's novel, unlike the characters in "Gone With the Wind," is
"demonic evil."
Sutpen, who engages in miscegenation, buys his slaves "with the same
care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses
and mules and
cattle." Faulkner understood "the past is never dead. It's not even
past," that it is subject to constant revision by those seeking to
justify and hide
their crimes. He warned that the lies we tell ourselves about
ourselves lead to moral squalor and self-destruction.

The tour bus stopped at
Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery,
which holds the remains of some 1,000 Confederate soldiers who died in
the Battle of Jonesboro. Most are unidentified. The walkway is laid
out in the shape
of a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag flies at the entrance.

"In 1872, the state of Georgia pays Stephen Cars, a local
cabinetmaker, to rebury the Southern soldiers' remains and place them
in the Patrick Cleburne
Memorial Cemetery here," the audio recording said. "Mr. Cars did not
bury over a thousand soldiers by himself. Mr. Cars had a slave named
Tom who left
with a Yankee captain after the Battle of Jonesboro. When the war was
over, Tom returned to Mr. Cars' house asking for his job back. It was
in 1872 that
Tom and Mr. Stephen Cars reburied the Confederate soldiers in this
cemetery. I told this story to the state of Georgia building authority
years ago, they
oversee the cemetery, and they remarked that Tom was very similar to
the O'Hara slave Big Sam."

The bus paused in front of a 10-room green house built in 1880 that
once belonged to the president of Middle Georgia College.

"Under Reconstruction, five Southerners were not allowed to meet
together without a federal marshal present," Bonner said on the audio
guide. "In 'Gone
With the Wind,' meetings were held in secret. In Jonesboro, there were
those secret meetings that dealt with the issues the town had to deal
with, including
the violence in shantytown. Shantytown was a real location in
Jonesboro and many other cities that had a large population of former
slaves who are without
a job or a home. When this house was being restored in 1995, it was
found to have a secret room in the attic, believed to have been used
for those secret
meetings. There was also a ladder in the wall leading to the cellar.
In the cellar, people believed they had found a tunnel. However, upon
further research,
they found out it was not a tunnel but a bomb shelter where the city
fathers planned to store the county records if and when they got back
to war" (meaning
if and when they resumed the fight against the Union).

It is a safe bet that this house was also a meeting place for the
heavily armed goons of the Ku Klux Klan, who rode four abreast at
night through the Jonesboro
streets to terrorize the blacks in "shantytown." Over 4,000 people
were lynched between the end of the Civil War and World War II in the
United States.
Georgia had the second highest number of lynchings, with 589. Only
Mississippi, with 654 murders, had more.

Lynching was a popular public spectacle in Georgia that could last for
hours and included sadistic torture and mutilation. Children were let
out of school
and workers were given the day off to witness the events. When Sam
Hose, who had thrown his ax at a white man and killed him after the
man pulled a gun
on him, was lynched on April 23, 1899, near Newman, Ga., 1,000 people
attended. Many arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. Hose
was stripped
and chained to a tree. His executioners stacked kerosene-soaked logs
around him. They cut off Hose's ears, fingers and genitals. They
flayed his face.
Members of the crowd thrust knives into him. The logs were lit.

"The only sounds that came from the victim's lips, even as his blood
sizzled in the fire, were 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus,' " writes Leon
Litwack in "Trouble
in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow." "Before Hose's
body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into
several pieces and
his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over
these souvenirs, and the 'more fortunate possessors' made some
handsome profits on the
sales. (Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents, a piece of liver
'crisply cooked' sold for 10 cents.) Shortly after the lynching, one
of the participants
reportedly left for the state capital, hoping to deliver to the
governor of Georgia a slice of Sam Hose's heart."

On the trunk of a tree near the lynching, a placard read: "We Must
Protect Our Southern Women."

In May of 1918, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, publicly denounced
the lynching of her husband, Hazel "Hayes" Turner, who had been
murdered the day
before. She threatened to take those who lynched him to court. A mob
of several hundred in Valdosta, Ga., hunted her down. They tied the
pregnant woman's
ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. They doused her
clothes with gasoline and set her on fire. Someone used a
hog-butchering knife to
rip open her womb. Her baby fell the ground and cried briefly. A
member of the mob crushed the infant's head under the heel of his
boot. Hundreds of rounds
were shot into her body. The Associated Press reported that Mary
Turner had made "unwise remarks" about the lynching of her husband
"and the people, in
their indignation, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude."

In commenting in 1894 on lynchings, the crusading editor and activist
Ida B. Wells said, "[O]ur American Christians are too busy saving the
souls of white
Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones
from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians."

James Baldwin, in the second half of the 20th century, repeatedly
warned white Americans that their relentless refusal to honestly
confront their past,
and themselves, would lead to grotesque distortions of the sort that
decades later we see embodied in Donald Trump. There is a severe cost,
he wrote, for
a life lived as a lie.

"People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have
allowed themselves to become," Baldwin wrote. "And they pay for it
very simply by the
lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these
individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the
generality, as social
and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are
probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any
color, to be found
in the world today."

The first recorded lynching in Georgia took place near Jonesboro in
1880. We have only the name of the victim, Milly Thompson. No one
knows if Thompson
was male or female. There is no record of Thompson committing a crime.
But I suspect that, as in the cases of most lynching victims, the
crime Thompson
committed was the crime of freedom. If you were black, in this land of
gallant cavaliers and Southern belles, and you objected to being human
chattel and
to enforced deference and submission to whites, they killed you.

Chris Hedges