Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  The Charleston Nine murders, as they came to be known, provoked a national referendum on Confederate symbols. When Bree Newsome Bass, an activist and filmmaker, scaled the flagpole of the South Carolina State House to remove the Confederate flag, she gave the millions watching a sense of their own ability to join the fight. Soon, protesters from Baltimore to Los Angeles, St. Louis to Tallahassee, were calling for the removal of Confederate monuments as well. There were, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s count, over 1500 “publicly sponsored symbols honoring Confederate leaders” in the country—about seven hundred of which were monuments. They were everywhere, and everywhere they were now under fire.

  We mostly think about monuments in terms of their surface: who they represent and what they reflect. They are, after all, meant to honor and immortalize the person they depict, often by literally putting them on a pedestal. But the architect Aldo Rossi suggests that a city’s monuments also serve as containers for the collective memory of that place. And Roof seemed to understand this, drinking from these vessels of American memory—of race and region, of terror and tradition—to steel himself before attempting to spark a race war. In response, activists began to tip these vessels over, their stories spilling down from pedestals and into the streets, schools, city council chambers, and state capitol buildings where the meaning and fates of these monuments would be debated.

  Forrest’s symbolic return to Selma and Roof’s terrorism became, for me, inextricable. And so, as activists mounted campaigns to remove Confederate monuments, I began to follow those aimed at Forrest specifically. For the last five years, I’ve chased Forrest’s memory across the country, standing in the shadows of his monuments, talking with the activists fighting to take them down and the admirers working to keep them up, investigating the stories these monuments tell and searching out the ones they withhold—stories of cavalry raids and cemetery standoffs, white supremacist movements and nightmarish sculptures, impassioned campus protests and backroom political intrigue, all amounting to a reckoning of America’s past and a desperate struggle for its future.

  That journey is chronicled here, in a series of dispatches from the battlefields of our country’s symbolic landscape. Four cities, four battles, four monuments, all as fiercely defended as they are protested. Monuments like those dedicated to Forrest were, as Derek Alderman, professor of cultural geography at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, explained to me, “built for the purposes of communicating who mattered in Southern society and who mattered within American society.” In that way, they are a reflection of the times in which they are erected as much as they are a reflection of the times they seek to commemorate. You can think of them, Alderman went on, as monuments to the power of the people who erect them, rather than as solely of the person depicted. They are double-jointed, holding the present in the past, the past in the present. And in all four of these stories, Forrest is deployed into symbolic duty during moments of racial tension. In Memphis, a massive bronze statue of him is erected in 1905, as the city is imposing Jim Crow laws and in the aftermath of Ida B. Wells’s investigative reporting on lynchings. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a university building is christened with his name at the height of the civil rights movement. In Nashville, a statue of him goes up in the 1990s as a symbol of the backlash to multiculturalism. And in Selma, a few years later, he is honored just after the city elects its first Black mayor. So, over the last five years, as activists mounted campaigns to remove Confederate monuments, they weren’t just taking on specific historical figures, but were taking on long-standing systems of racial, political, and economic power. Following these stories told in marble, bronze, and brick, I’ve seen the whole of American history blowing through, fanning the embers of a cold Civil War, as they chart an unexpected but revealing account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville—and where we might go next.

  When i first started writing about Forrest, I conceived of myself as an outside observer. I would bear witness, document, report on the referendums on Forrest taking place in these four cities. But I came to see a larger proxy war in the offing, one that has engulfed the entire nation and implicated me as well. As I logged thousands of miles in my dusty old sedan, conducted scores of interviews, burrowed into archives, and trudged across battlefields, cemeteries, interstate roadsides, and college campuses to stand before these monuments, I was prompted to ask questions about race that I’d never asked before, had never thought to ask before.

  So much about American life encourages white people to take our whiteness for granted. It is the stock photo, the room tone, of American life, meant to be conflated with the norm. It’s insidious that way. Growing up, whiteness often went without saying. But that’s precisely it: it goes without saying because white people don’t want to talk about whiteness, don’t want to see it, don’t want to think about what it means, where it came from, or why we seem to still need it. This assumption gets expressed when people wonder aloud about why we don’t have a white history month, or insist that all lives matter. But as I charted the battles over Forrest’s monuments, I would come to see how whiteness operated—its prerogatives and its amnesia, its symptoms and its sickness.

  There were no Confederate monuments where I grew up in central Pennsylvania. Instead there were a series of charred stone pylons that stretched across the nearby Susquehanna River, just west of my childhood home. In the summer of 1863, in order to prevent Robert E. Lee moving on Harrisburg and Philadelphia, town leaders decided to burn a portion of the Wrightsville Bridge. The whole thing went up in flames. Stymied, Lee regrouped to the southwest. That’s why the Battle of Gettysburg happened in, well, Gettysburg. The pylons of that bridge still stand in the water. I used to kayak past them all the time. But even though Lancaster County’s riverbank doubled as the Confederacy’s high watermark and its southern border was the Mason–Dixon line, I didn’t think that history had anything to do with me. I figured I floated above it like a kayak on the river. I felt this way despite how common it was to see Confederate flags affixed to the cabs of pickup trucks or the fact that my ninth-grade-history student teacher began the Civil War unit telling us that it was fought over states’ rights. Or even what political strategist James Carville famously said about how everything between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia might as well be Alabama. I never thought about being implicated in any of that history because, well, this was Pennsylvania. Growing up in the North had fostered in me a sense that I was somehow exempt from the legacy of the Civil War and, for that matter, the racial madness of the country.

  There were, of course, more pointed moments that should have jarred me from this oblivion. One in particular stands out. Before we moved to Lancaster, my family lived in Philadelphia. As the only white boy in my kindergarten class, I was cast as the arresting officer in the annual Rosa Parks play. And so I pinned on the badge of Officer Day, Montgomery PD, stepped onto the Houston Elementary School stage, and removed Ms. Parks from the bus. (In a similar position the year before, my brother did the same.) By asking me to step into that role, my teacher, Mrs. Goodman, had provided me with an opportunity to see that being white meant something, that it carried a legacy—one forged by violence and injustice but cast as benevolent and benign. For years, though, that lesson was lost on me. I would have to learn the hard way what James Baldwin meant when he wrote that “people who imagine that history flatters them are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”

  The memory of the Rosa Parks play revisited me on the morning that I met the Friends of Forrest. Pat Godwin had grinned when I told her that I was from Lancaster. They were raising money for their new Forrest statue by selling miniatures of the bust, she told me, miniatures that had been cast in York, the city just across the river from Lancaster. A few minutes later, Todd Kiscaden would ask me if I believed in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. I nodded, unable to recall what it regarded, but went along with it b
ecause it was the Constitution. Suddenly he had me in a tight handshake and congratulated me on being a proud Confederate soldier who believed in states’ rights. I recoiled but he only held tighter. No sir, not me, I wanted to say. I’m from Pennsylvania. But his point was clear. Whether I liked it or not, they were putting this Forrest monument up in my name, too. I was implicated, pinned to Forrest like a sheriff’s badge. To tell his story, I would have to revise the story I told about myself.

  Part One

  Forrest Lost and Found

  Selma

  One

  A Pronouncement of War

  There’s a story about Forrest from late in the war that I’ve come to think of as a parable for his life and for his memory. It is September 10, 1864, just months before the Battle of Selma. The scene, a train depot near the Mississippi–Alabama border. Forrest is deep in thought, planning a raid. It’s been almost a year since Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, recast the war as the fight to refound the Republic, and just days since Union general Sherman took Atlanta. Forrest’s attempts to cut off Sherman’s supply lines have proved futile. Soon, Sherman will march to the sea. The Confederate rebellion to perpetuate and expand slavery is a cause increasingly lost. Forrest had enlisted in that rebellion as a private, but by now he’s a major general. He’ll be promoted once more, before the war’s end, to lieutenant general. Unlike many of the other commanders, Union and Confederate, Forrest had never been to West Point, had barely attended school at all. “I never see a pen but what I think of a snake,” he has famously said. So while other commanders might see to correspondence, read, or consult with advisors, the cagey, solitary Forrest walks himself into a trance to clarify his thinking.

  He tucks his hands behind his back, mutters to himself. His steps inscribe a circle around the squat brick station. A soldier in Forrest’s cavalry spots the pacing general. This soldier has grievances to air, so he approaches and begins his complaint. Without breaking stride, without winding up, without hardly even looking up, Forrest knocks the soldier unconscious with a single blow. Another of Forrest’s cavalrymen looks on and describes what happens next in his journal. After the blow, Forrest keeps walking as if nothing has happened, the soldier writes, “calmly and unconsciously stepping over the prostrate body each time he came around again.”

  Each time he came around again. His monuments have a way of doing that, too.

  I’ve often thought of this story while reporting in Selma, and never more frequently than when I was trying to reach the Reverend James Perkins, Jr. But Rev. Perkins didn’t want to talk about Forrest statues with me. At least not at first. Which is understandable. You’re elected as the first Black mayor in Selma, the city synonymous with Black voting rights, and less than a week after your inauguration, a group of Neo-Confederates puts up a Confederate statue? And not just any Confederate statue but one of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Then that statue is stolen and, just after another one goes up in its place, the whole country is engulfed in a debate about Confederate monuments and some white journalist with a Pennsylvania number starts calling you? He was skeptical; my calls went to voicemail. But I figured his sense of what was at stake in these debates would be crucial. So I kept calling. I left my card in his mailbox. I spoke with his niece. And, eventually, Rev. Perkins called me back and heard me out.

  I told him that I was using Forrest monuments as a lens to look at race, memory, and the legacy of the war. And in doing so, I was coming to some hard truths about my country and myself. He sighed and agreed to meet for an interview.

  “That statue,” he told me before we got off the phone, “was a pronouncement of war.”

  Perkins is now the pastor at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. We met for pastries between visits to his parishioners. Perkins, now in his sixties, tall and muscular, was dressed in a maroon and gray raglan shirt and a crisp pair of chinos. For eight years, from 2000 to 2008, Perkins served as the mayor of this small Alabama city. He was inaugurated on the first Monday in October—a day of celebration, of long-held hopes finally realized. And that first weekend in office, he remembered, he was attending a seminar for Alabama mayors in nearby Montgomery when his phone rang. It was a local reporter asking him for comment on the city’s new statue.

  “Statue?” he remembers asking. “What statue?”

  The statue in question was a four-hundred-pound bronze bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest atop a nine-thousand-pound granite pedestal erected in the back garden of a city-owned museum. The morning of the dedication was overcast and threatening rain. A group calling themselves the Friends of Forrest gathered behind the antebellum Vaughan-Smitherman House to unveil the monument. The dedication was a quiet affair, or it was meant to be. Though the statue was going up on city property, the Friends of Forrest had not invited the new mayor to witness the dedication, to listen to the songs, or to hear the expressions of gratitude to the donors who’d helped raise the requisite $23,000. Friends of Forrest spokesman Benny Austin explained to the Selma Times-Journal that, “In order to avoid causing any embarrassment or hurt feelings among the citizens of Selma and the Mayor, we decided to keep the ceremony quiet and not to make a big deal out of the affair.”

  But word had gotten out nonetheless. From the perimeter of the garden, over those speeches, prayers, and songs, local activist Joanne Bland led a group of protesters, singing “We will not go back,” to the tune of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

  Bland had grown up in Selma, had gone to school with James Perkins, Jr., was just eleven when she marched on Bloody Sunday. She had gone on to cofound the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, a repository of the foot soldiers’ history, and now leads tours of Selma’s civil rights history. She remembers that she was at home the morning of the dedication when a fax came through. It was from a friend in Montgomery who worked in the media, who was passing along a flyer advertising the new statue.

  “As I read it, I became angry,” Bland told me. She knew immediately, and all too well, what it meant. “The statue was designed to intimidate us,” she said. “I was very upset with it and where it was”—a Confederate monument, on city property, in a predominantly Black neighborhood. It was, as she put it, a slap in the face. So she put the word out. Soon Bland and about a dozen others had staked out the courtyard. A police officer on duty described the ceremony as “a Klan meeting without the hoods,” although in fact one protester actually did bring a life-sized puppet decked out in Klansman’s robe and hood.

  The statue at the center of the garden bore a strong likeness to photographs of the general: his hair wavy and pushed away from his face, revealing a jagged widow’s peak and giving him a vague Krusty the Clown aspect. Nonetheless, he was somehow still handsome: the piercing eyes set off by the high forehead, the sharp jaw, and the sunken cheeks. Seeing the statue made it easier to imagine the man who killed thirty men and had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him during the war, who would joke about thus being “one up” on the Union by war’s end. Easier to contemplate the suffering in his life and the suffering he created in others; easier to see the way the mouth might have fixed around phrases such as “War means fighting and fighting means killing,” and, as he reportedly once asked, “If we ain’t fighting to keep slavery, then what the hell are we fighting for?” The sculpture trailed off around the collarbone, leaving his head to float above the six buttons of his double-breasted jacket. The pedestal below named the battles in which Forrest fought, along with a partial list of his nicknames: “Wizard of the Saddle / First With the Most / Untutored Genius / Defender of Selma.” This was the part of his history the Neo-Confederates wanted to publicly celebrate: the hard-charging, no-schooling, cunning soldier who, in the last days of the war, sought to defend Selma’s way of life. To that list, one might have added “Slave Trader / Butcher of Fort Pillow / Grand Wizard.” But his friends in Selma had not. Instead, the pedestal also included the phrase “Deo Vindice”—the Confederate motto that translates from the Latin as “With
God as our defender” or “God will vindicate us.”

  The Friends of Forrest felt that theirs was a righteous cause, Forrest their man, and what’s more, they resented the interruptions from the protesters. Joanne Bland told me that one of the attendees even confronted her that day, telling her, “We let y’all have your monument to Martin Luther King.”

  Let us? Bland says she thought. Let us!? But she paused, composed herself. “I had to leave her in her area,” she told me, not wanting to lose control and not knowing where to begin. “Too much is wrong with that.”

  But the comment laid bare the thinking behind Selma’s partition. A city with Black and white neighborhoods, Black and white churches, Black and white schools, Black and white histories, Black and white memories would have Black and white monuments, too.

  “Selma’s problem,” Alston Fitts, who has written two books on the city’s history, once observed to me, “is that it has more history than it knows what to do with.”

  Just a few weeks earlier, James Perkins, Jr., won the 2000 mayoral election in a landslide, receiving 57 percent of the vote. The nine-term incumbent, Joe Smitherman, conceded just a half hour after the polls had closed, prompting a spontaneous, joyful march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A three-day celebration of barbecues, parties, and parades led up to Perkins’s inauguration on October 2nd. “The man took the shackles off us,” one resident told the Los Angeles Times after his victory. It was a victory thirty-five years in the making (or, depending on who you ask, more like centuries). But it was also a victory that immediately brought a backlash.