Down Along with That Devil’s Bones
A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy
Connor Towne O’Neill
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2020
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies
“They say when trouble comes, close ranks, and so the white people did.”
—Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
contents
Prologue
part one: Forrest Lost and Found—Selma
1. A Pronouncement of War
2. The First Battle of Selma
3. Monument Is Now Headless
4. Deo Vindice
5. From Civil War to Civil Rights
part two: Forrest in the Age of Confederate Reproduction—Murfreesboro
6. Laying Forrest Low
7. We Have a Choice
8. The Marshmallow Wonderland of the Past
9. Palliatives
10. A Letter to the Editor
11. The Way of Forrest
12. More Gump than Bedford
13. A Flag in War
part three: This Is Us—Nashville
14. At the Foot of the Ugliest Confederate Memorial
15. Same as It Ever Was
16. The Resistance
17. This Is Us
part four: Down Along with That Devil’s Bones—Memphis
18. A Symbol of Everything We Are Fighting Every Day
19. The Dead Bury Their Dead
20. The Dead Bury Their Dead Again
21. The Mountaintop
22. A Preponderance of Goodwill
23. Remember Fort Pillow
24. The Weight
25. “Yeah But . . .”
26. Re-membering
Epilogue: The Two-Face God—Montgomery
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Prologue
Ever since that bright morning in March 2015, when I came across a Confederate cemetery on a major civil rights anniversary, I’ve been chasing the story of Nathan Bedford Forrest—the Confederate general’s brutal life, his long afterlife, and the fates of four of the monuments that honor him. That chase prompted a personal reckoning, too, and the story, for me, begins and ends with an empty pedestal. The first pedestal was the one I found in Selma’s Old Live Oak Cemetery, and the tale starts innocently enough (or so I thought at the time). I was looking for free parking. It was March 7, fifty years to the day since Alabama police officers beat, whipped, and teargassed hundreds of Black demonstrators on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. President Obama was in town to mark the anniversary with a speech and to cross the bridge in remembrance. More than 40,000 other people showed up, too. On my drive into Selma that morning, the streets of the usually sleepy city were suddenly constricted with cars, and the sidewalks were overflowing with people gathering for the event. So I turned into Old Live Oak Cemetery, just two miles from the bridge, figuring I might find an out-of-the-way spot where I could park. Old Live Oak is one of those cemeteries that is so expansive that it has its own system of roads. It’s also a bingo board of Old South clichés: shaded by centuries-old live oaks and magnolias bearded by Spanish moss, and with dappled sunlight spilling across the mausoleums. And all around there were signs to alert visitors that Confederate Memorial Circle was closed for maintenance: do not trespass.
I was there to report on the Bloody Sunday anniversary, so I had people to interview, plus I wanted to hear President Obama speak, and I was already running late. But those signs caught my eye. At the center of the Circle, a woman was resealing the brick surrounding a pillar topped by a generic Confederate soldier. Next to her, a German shepherd sat at attention. Workers in jeans and cutoff shirts were putting up a wrought iron fence around an old cannon, and on the far side of the circle stood a tall granite pedestal missing a statue.
These days it wouldn’t be the most surprising thing to encounter neo-Confederates at a civil rights anniversary. After Dylann Roof, after Donald Trump, after the man-boys with undercuts Sieg-heiling before his inauguration, after the tiki torches and the Dodge Challenger in Charlottesville, these sorts of juxtapositions have come to feel inevitable, the deep dissonance of the American story floating so much closer to the surface. But on that day back in 2015, I was affronted, yes, but also curious, the way you might feel when passing a bad car wreck. I just wasn’t yet aware of the ways in which I was a part of the pileup, too.
I got out of my car and approached.
A woman with hair down to her shoulders, the wisps gone gray, and a man with a long white beard that grazed the third button of his blue coveralls came to meet me, their pace hurried, their eyes wary. The woman, whose name I later learned was Pat Godwin, told me the Circle was closed, that I had to leave.
“Okay if I leave my car here?” I said, then asked if they were standing guard.
It’s private property, Godwin said. But her tone was not so much “Get the hell on!” as it was “We can do what we please.” So I asked again, and this time she told me they were preparing the grounds.
For what? I asked.
Well, for Forrest, Godwin replied, the answer apparently as obvious as if I had inquired about the color of the sky.
That empty pedestal, she then told me at great length, had once borne a bronze bust of Confederate Army general Nathan Bedford Forrest, but exactly three years earlier, on the weekend of the forty-seventh anniversary of Bloody Sunday, under cover of darkness, the statue had vanished. The theft had sparked a heated yearslong battle over both a replacement statue and the very ownership of Confederate Memorial Circle. Finally, after protests and lawsuits and city council showdowns, the Friends of Forrest (as they called themselves) came away triumphant, with a deed to the land and plans to replace the statue. The time was nigh to unveil their new Forrest monument.
By that weekend in March 2015, I had been living in Alabama for almost two years, but I am originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Think Amish country, whoopie pies, an accent that stretches ohs, and a lilt at the end of sentences that makes everything a question. I grew up first on a farm, then on a subdivision that used to be a farm, and was now attending the writing program at the University of Alabama. I had been getting acquainted with my new home against the backdrop of several civil rights anniversaries. I moved into a drafty bungalow that abutted a train switchyard in Tuscaloosa’s West End three months after the fiftieth anniversary of George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door”—his infamous attempt to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling at the school where I now apprenticed as a writer. My first week of classes marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham. These anniversaries echoed through the present, a moment dominated by stories of voter-suppression efforts and the state-sanctioned murders of Black Americans by police officers. So it seemed only fitting to make sense of my new home by looking to its recent past. In fact, the story that had brought me to Selma that day was a reinvestigation of an unsolved murder from the civil rights era.
The Civil War, on the other hand, seemed distant and remote, while Forrest registered as little more than a joke about the Klan from that old Tom Hanks movie, Forrest Gump. He was, in my mind, a dimwitted relic of the defeated Old South. But the Friends of Forrest insinuated a sharper edge to Civil War memory, one that cut closer to the bone. Listening to Godwin’s voice harden as she described the pitched battle over this missing Forrest statue made me realize that if I wanted to make sense of this state—hell, to make
sense of this country—then I needed to go back another hundred years.
In other words, I needed to study up. That’s how the bearded man in the blue coveralls put it, anyway, perhaps noticing the blank look on my face as he and Pat went on about Forrest. His name was Todd Kiscaden and he handed me a homemade brochure. Not to be outdone, Godwin told me that if Todd was giving me readings, then she had some for me, too. From the trunk of her car, she handed me a stack of pamphlets. Some were treatises with titles such as “12 Reasons to Fly the Confederate Flag” and “Forrest Fought for You, Will You Fight for Him?” Others were reprints of propaganda from the era of the civil rights movement. One called the 1965 march to Montgomery an orgy, another claimed that the cold case I was investigating was actually a false-flag operation intended to generate sympathy for the movement. The packet usually went for $13, plus shipping and handling, with proceeds going to the cost of the replacement statue, but Godwin said she was giving it to me for free because we were both writers and she wanted me to have some material to write about. She’d been working on a book, she said: We Fought with Forrest. That fight, it seemed, was not just about the Civil War, but about civil rights, a fight still raging today.
Brochures in hand, I headed downtown toward the bridge, brooding on a set of questions about a Confederate general whose face I’d never seen. But his name—three words, two syllables each—had already set its hooks in my head. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
The walk from the cemetery to the bridge was only a few blocks, but it traced a major fault line in the country’s ideological terrain, one that was about to send tremors through the country. Down on Broad Street, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, people were somberly reflecting on the legacy of racial violence and the sacrifices made to dismantle American apartheid. It was tempting, from that vantage point, to think of the anniversary in terms of progress and optimism. When Barack Obama had visited Selma as a presidential candidate in 2007, he told the crowd that he was there because others had marched, that he counted himself among the Joshua generation—the descendants of the movement’s foot soldiers, the Moses generation who had crossed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Now he returned to Selma as president, the first Black president. In his speech that day, he listed the places where America’s destiny has been decided: Lexington and Concord, Appomattox and Gettysburg, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral. “Selma is such a place,” he said. “In one afternoon fifty years ago, so much of our turbulent history—the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher—all that history met on this bridge.”
But President Obama sounded a note of caution, too. Progress, he knew, was not inevitable. His presidency had provoked a fearsome backlash—one that included the so-called Birther movement along with a proliferation of extremist right-wing groups. “We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts,” he said, “to know that this nation’s racial history still casts a long shadow upon us.”
Indeed, you didn’t need to look far for one source of that shadow. Half a mile from the bridge stood a billboard that invited visitors to tour Selma’s “War Between the States Historic Sites.” The image on the billboard was of a stern-looking goateed man on horseback: Nathan Bedford Forrest. The caption read “Keep the Skeer on ’Em.” The billboard had been papered up by the Friends of Forrest, a group who was, at that moment, just blocks away, spoiling for a fight and preparing to erect a new Confederate monument.
All that history had met once more in Selma.
In the weeks after the Bloody Sunday anniversary, I began to experience a sort of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon with Nathan Bedford Forrest, seeing him everywhere now that I knew to look. That goateed, scowling face pinned to the corkboard in the gas station where I would often stop for breakfast? Oh, so that’s Forrest. The residential street in East Nashville where I parked my car for a weekend of honky-tonking? Forrest Ave. That weird, cordoned-off mound on the University of Alabama’s quad that I hustled past late to fiction workshop every Monday? The burnt wreckage of the old campus set ablaze by a Union general before he faced Forrest in Selma. When I called up Madison Smartt Bell, whose time-bending novel Devil’s Dream paints a vivid, paradoxical portrait of Forrest, he told me that Forrest was like the water you swam in if you grew up in middle Tennessee. I was still new here but suddenly felt sopping wet.
So I started reading all I could about Forrest. In life, I learned, he was a hard-bitten striver. Born into dirt-floor poverty on the Tennessee frontier, he became a wealthy slave trader. Forrest went into business during the “Second Middle Passage”—the era between the outlawing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and the outbreak of the Civil War, when an estimated one million enslaved men and women were sold from the Upper South to the rapidly expanding plantations of the Deep South. “He wanted a way to prosper quickly,” Forrest biographer Jack Hurst writes, “and at that time and place there was probably no more profitable field than slave-dealing.” So Forrest signed onto America’s Faustian founding bargain, making a fortune selling enslaved people down the river from his Memphis slave market. When the war came, he used that fortune to equip a cavalry troop, and fought so viciously in defense of the institution that Union general William Tecumseh Sherman called him “that Devil,” while his Confederate colleagues dubbed him the “Wizard of the Saddle.” The late Southern historian and novelist Shelby Foote named him one of “two absolute geniuses to emerge from the war.” But he also became known as the “Butcher of Fort Pillow” after he oversaw the slaughter of more than one hundred surrendering Black soldiers. By the time he disbanded his troops outside Selma in 1865, he had become the most promoted soldier, North or South, having risen from the rank of private to lieutenant general. After the war, Forrest made occasional efforts at reconciliation, telling his troops they had been good soldiers and they could be good citizens, and late in life, he addressed an African American social club and reportedly experienced a come-to-Jesus moment. But his other postwar activities proved far more consequential and enduring: he was an early adopter of convict leasing and lent his preferred nom de guerre to the newly founded Ku Klux Klan, serving as its first figurehead, the Grand Wizard.
In his symbolic afterlife, Forrest haunts the landscape. In addition to the monument in Selma, there’s a statue of him overlooking a cemetery in Rome, Georgia, and a bust surveying the lobby of the Tennessee Capitol. There’s the thirty-foot bronze equestrian statue in a Memphis park, under which he and his wife are buried. A county in Mississippi, a city in Arkansas, and a state park in Tennessee all bear his name, along with many streets and schools and buildings. There are thirty-one Forrest monuments in his home state of Tennessee—more than all three of the state’s presidents (Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, and James Polk) combined. Sometimes even a brush with Forrest was enough to get you immortalized, as was the case with Emma Sansom who, as a teenager in 1863, pointed Forrest to a low spot in the Black Creek to cross in pursuit of a Union colonel, outside of Gadsden, Alabama. By way of thanks, the town honored her with a stone statue, her likeness standing with arm outstretched at the foot of the Broad Street Bridge.
While Robert E. Lee might seem the obvious candidate for a Confederate monument—as he was to cities such as Richmond, Charlottesville, and New Orleans—it’s Forrest’s symbolic importance that is perhaps the better bellwether for how we arrived at our current debates over Civil War monuments and memory. Lee was part of the planter class, a “First Family” of Virginia, the avatar of the Southern Gentleman and a graduate of West Point, while Forrest, born into poverty, was a quick-tempered man of action, disdainful of book learning. Author Andrew Lytle, in reference to his status as the Klan’s Grand Wizard, called him the “last ruler of the South.” Shelby Foote, perhaps trying to outdo Lytle in his admiration for Forrest, dubbed him “the most man in the world.” He’s a folk hero, both Everyman and Übermensch. And Forrest’s myth i
s stoked by thoughts of what might have been. Because Forrest enlisted as a private and fought in the often-neglected Western Theater, his skills as a cavalry commander were overlooked for much of the war. But what if Forrest had been given a more prominent role? Could the South have won? A good deal of teeth gnashing and sabre rattling gets channeled into Forrest’s mythos. He is the Confederate counterfactual, the great hope of the Monday morning Rebel quarterback who refuses to accept the war’s end or outcome. And so through each generation Forrest’s legend has only grown. Journalist Tony Horwitz reported in Confederates in the Attic that, by the 1990s, Civil War memorabilia retailers were selling five Forrest T-shirts for every one they sold of Lee’s.
The newest addition to the cache of Forrest monuments came just two months after the Bloody Sunday anniversary in 2015. It was another still and cloudless day in Selma when Todd Kiscaden, now dressed in gray wool, pulled a sheet from the pedestal in Confederate Memorial Circle to unveil their replacement bust. A crowd of onlookers, nearly one hundred in all, burst into applause. One imitated the shrill yawp of the rebel yell. From a lectern at the center of the Circle, Pat Godwin announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the General is back!”
Three weeks later and some five hundred miles away, on a humid and moonless night in June, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof pulled into the parking spot closest to the door of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and descended the stairs to the basement, where he prayed with the congregation and then murdered nine parishioners in an attempt to start a race war. After Roof was arrested, images and posts from his blog, “The Last Rhodesian,” circulated, detailing his motives and mindset. His blog posts chronicled a sightseeing tour of South Carolina’s slave memorials and Confederate monuments. He visited Sullivan’s Island, once a major slave port and where Fort Sumter looms in the bay. He visited the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville. He visited plantation slave cabins and the graves of Confederate soldiers. He posted pictures of himself with firearms and with the flags of three apartheid states: South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Confederate States of America. Then he headed for Mother Emanuel.
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