Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  The Civil War was still so close at hand for this generation—literally, in Andrew Lytle’s case. Lytle’s grandmother was shot in the throat by a Union soldier in 1863. She pinned a velvet ribbon above her collar to cover the scar. Lytle kept that ribbon on his bedpost at his home in nearby Monteagle. Many of the Agrarians chose Civil War men as subjects for biographies: Allen Tate wrote one of Jefferson Davis, Robert Penn Warren (perhaps foreshadowing his ideological split with the Agrarians on issues of race) on John Brown. But for Lytle, Forrest was the paragon of the Agrarian ethos: a natural man, a frontier genius, and, as the Grand Wizard of the Klan, “The last ruler of the South.”

  Lytle’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, an essay titled “The Hind Tit,” sketches a Southern idyll. He sees the Southern white yeoman as existentially untroubled, at peace with self, land, and God. “The great drain” was his term for industry. His essay features koanlike bits of argument: “A farm is not a place where you grow wealthy; it is a place where you grow corn,” and “Industrialism is trying to convince the yeoman that time not space has value.” But if you are going to define and defend a certain culture, you must, at some point, draw a border. Lytle notes how emancipation knocked the poor white man’s sense of self akimbo: “With an entirely different race to serve the rich men as in slavery, the small white man could feel no very strong social inequality, and those who lived in isolation, none at all.” But in an industrializing world came a new social hierarchy, based “not upon comparative use and enjoyment of nature, but upon a possession of cash.” Lytle saw both the white Southerner’s culture and self-esteem as under threat. The social stratifications wrought by industrial capitalism should be resisted, Lytle argued. Not through cross-racial class solidarity, but rather by something more recalcitrant. He ends his essay with, “It is our own, and if we have to spit in the water-bucket to keep it our own, we had better do it.”

  Soon after the school published their yearbook with an illustration of a lynching and Lytle published this essay, the state of Tennessee would pass laws that classified miscegenation a felony and a “one drop law” that will define any person with any African ancestry as legally Black. The year after that, men in nearby Manchester, Tennessee, lynched Richard Wilkerson, a farmhand, for allegedly slapping a white man in defense of a Black woman. It was one of over two hundred lynchings in Tennessee between 1877 and 1950. Jim Crow laws and lynchings defined and enforced the racial caste system while letting the white man know that, no matter his class, he stood above Black people. The bucket may have had spit in it, but at least it was yours.

  A palliative relieves pain without curing the illness. You might think of Lytle and MTSU’s pining for Forrest as symptoms of a very old, very American, madness about race. The received wisdom about race in America is that it has always been this way—racial hierarchy the original sin attending the birth of the nation. But, in fact, it was necessary to invent it. In the seventeenth century, indentured servants and prisoners of European descent provided much of the labor in Colonial Virginia. The price of the ticket across the Atlantic was paid in years of labor in the tobacco fields of the harsh, burgeoning colony. Conditions were dreadful; few survived their indenture. But as settlement continued and the colony became more established, life spans increased. It became cost-effective for planters to import a greater number of enslaved-for-life African laborers, and thus the colony’s labor force became more racially mixed. Then came Bacon’s Rebellion—a 1676 uprising against Governor William Berkeley by servants, enslaved Africans, and poor freedmen, all led by the colonist Nathaniel Bacon. The rebellion was not fueled by cross-racial solidarity, but instead by anger at raids by Native American tribes, which the governor was reluctant to retaliate against. Still, the rebellion did point to a problem for the colonial planter class. In a colony organized along class lines, it would be hard for the few patricians to control the many laborers. Historian Edmund S. Morgan writes in American Slavery, American Freedom that “It was not uncommon, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together . . . In Bacon’s Rebellion one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of 80 negroes and 20 servants.” And so the colonial powers countered with initiatives to reorganize their new world colony along racial lines. The Virginia House of Burgesses (the legislative body of the British colony) began to legislate whiteness. The invention of race afforded a new sense of status to the pale-skinned Europeans—a palliative that could sustain the delusion.

  One can see, in the years after the rebellion, the colonial powers begin to consciously construct a racial caste system, establishing Machiavellian laws that forbade free Black people and Native Americans from owning Christian servants, laws that protected the property of white servants and confiscated the property of enslaved Africans, laws that criminalized the striking of any Christian by an African or Native American, which, as Morgan writes, “allowed servants to bully slaves without fear of retaliation, thus placing them psychologically on par with masters.” It is from the House of Burgesses that we see the first usage of whiteness (as opposed to the terms English, European, and Christian) in print in America. Then, in 1691, legislature threatened to banish any white citizens who marry someone of another race. Black translated to slave; white, no matter the class, to free. Taken together, these laws enshrined a sickness, the lie of racial difference, and with it a palliative, a psychological sense of superiority.

  Race is a construct but, nevertheless, it has shaped so much of American life. As the new country grew, race became the center pole on which the country was built. The signs are evident throughout our history: the three-fifths clause in the Constitution ascribed only partial humanity to those enslaved Africans, defining their inferiority and thus justifying the cruelties of the institution; the 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to “free whites of good character”; the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that African Americans, free or slave, had no standing to sue in federal court, as they were not citizens; into the twentieth century, the Jim Crow laws that codified public space to reflect the racial hierarchy; redlining that did the same to homes and mortgages; and the war on drugs that ensured the country’s prisons did, too.

  As that MTSU yearbook put it, happiness is having your own Confederate flag to wave at the pep rally; likewise, America’s conception of race has been the kneecapping of people of color in order for white people to feel tall. But claiming an identity based on a lie deranges you. So does winning a rigged game. Just look at how white people have reacted when confronted about the lie of their racial superiority in moments such as Reconstruction and the civil rights movement: lynchings, night-riding. Terrorism. Sociopathy. Instead of admitting the lie and working to establish a true democracy, white Americans consoled themselves with palliatives—Confederate flags during the civil rights movement, the Confederate monuments during Jim Crow—and made whiteness fungible, choosing to count the Irish and the Italians, say, as white while coining markers such as “quadroon” and “octoroon” and “one-drop” to legislate Blackness. Doing so eternally emphasizes some sort of not-Blackness at the core of American whiteness. Whiteness is a void, an emptiness, a lie on which Americans birthed and built a nation.

  When Sarah Calise first handed me that 1930 yearbook with the image of the Klan lynching, she noted that, “The yearbook is what you want other people to think of when they think of your school.” So what is this one, with its lynching and the subsequent dancing under the moon, saying to us? How might it answer the questions raised in Sylvester Brooks’s letter? That the minds of white folks still moved backward, still honored Forrest, because they still treated the same old sickness with the same salve.

  When I spoke with Sylvester Brooks, he reflected on the persistence of the debate over Forrest at MTSU and connected it to the long and pernicious legacy of whiteness in the country. “Faces have changed, uniforms have changed, but the same arguments are there,” Brooks said. As a slave trader and plant
er, Brooks pointed out, Forrest had become one of the wealthiest men in the state of Tennessee before the war, who then joined his fellow rich white men in an effort to “convince poor whites that they were going to fight and die for a cause that was going to keep them poor and keep Blacks enslaved.” And so, it seems, for as long as we organize our society along racial lines, we will continue to wrestle with these questions of prerogative and inequity. Or, in the words of Selma’s former mayor James Perkins, Jr., we will continue to fight the same war with the same general.

  Ten

  A Letter to the Editor

  March 24, 2016, the third and final forum in the battle over Forrest Hall: again the tense atmosphere, again the same debate, and again, a walkout. This time Crutchfield and Woodruff headed for the president’s house, which they found cordoned off by police tape. They stood outside in the rain until Dr. McPhee agreed to meet with them. But even as they seemed to be making headway on the protest, Crutchfield was losing patience. On April 8, just a week before the task force would make their final deliberations, Crutchfield published an op-ed in the local Daily News Journal urging all Black students at MTSU to transfer to historically Black schools.

  “From our perspective, it makes little sense that we are still engaged in a fight that should have been over decades ago,” he wrote, noting that, “As a historian, this battle is less about history and more about the right of a few to desperately hold on to a legacy and heritage that valorizes a time when my ancestors were deemed less than human.” Crutchfield summed up the feelings of frustration, anger, and futility he had felt over the course of a year spent having to argue that the university, to whom he paid tuition, needed to acknowledge his basic humanity. “How much longer do we have to tell you that having symbols of white supremacy on our campus doesn’t exactly give us warm and fuzzy feelings?” He ended the letter by saying: “We don’t have to beg institutions to be included. And we don’t have to be where we’re not wanted.”

  Crutchfield’s letter echoed the letter Brooks had written half a century earlier—same fight, same general. But where Brooks’s letter still saw the possibility that the school could find a new way to be, Crutchfield was bearish. Which makes sense. In Brooks’s moment, in the first years after the crescendo of the civil rights movement, white Americans had an opportunity to face the malignancies on which they had built their society, and to let go of the palliatives. But while some laws had changed, hearts and minds hadn’t, and inequities persisted. So Crutchfield was done explaining, done asking, done with MTSU.

  Still, his letter struck a nerve.

  In the task force’s final deliberation—videotaped and included in Calise’s archive—they were forced to take up Crutchfield’s letter and discuss its ramifications. Then the forum, with several strong dissenting views, voted to recommend to the president that they change the name on the ROTC building. And, in a move that surprised many who had grown cynical over the drawn-out, fraught process, the president soon recommended the same to the Tennessee Board of Regents. That summer, the Board of Regents concurred, too. By September 2016, the university had filed an application for a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission to officially change the name of Forrest Hall. The commission announced that it would consider the appeal at an upcoming meeting.

  A few weeks after the commission agreed to hear MTSU’s case, I asked Crutchfield if he was surprised by the initial success of the protest.

  “Not at one point did I believe this is going to happen. I didn’t even think it was going to get this far,” he said. Surprised, yes, but hopeful? No. “I don’t trust symbolic change because symbols don’t change the system.” But he acknowledged the importance of the symbolic work. “How can we begin to dismantle white supremacy when we can’t even take down its symbols?”

  I asked if, after the University’s willingness to change the name, he stood by his letter encouraging students to transfer. He did. “If it’s this hard to take down a symbol from the past for a war that’s lost, if it’s that hard, we got work to do.”

  Eleven

  The Way of Forrest

  During one reporting trip to Murfreesboro, I availed myself of some off-campus Civil War attractions. I headed first for Woodbury, due east of Murfreesboro on the McMinnville Highway. “Forrest Rested Here, July 12th, 1862” announces a marker posted just off the shoulder of the road. “Here Forrest, with his newly organized brigade of about 1400 cavalrymen, halted for a short rest before making his successful raid on Federal forces at Murfreesboro under Gen. T. L. Crittenden,” reads the inscription. To stand where Forrest stood. Or rather, in this case, nap where Forrest napped. A little patch of hallowed ground where the shoulder’s gravel bleeds out into the sloping, sunbaked grass. A creek up ahead babbled. The marker is just past a school, and since I was there during the morning hours when the enforced speed limit drops twenty miles per hour, every car that passed was either slowing to enter into the school zone or hitting the gas as they came out—it was as if I were standing in some kind of magnetic field.

  All told, it was pleasant enough to linger on the shoulder of a state road. But, I admit, I was at a bit of a loss for what to do with myself. The play-by-play recitations of battles have never held my interest—I could never find the romance in it. I’ve always been more Gettysburg Address than Pickett’s Charge, trying to understand the war in terms of its causes and consequences rather than its charges and retreats. When I spoke with Elizabeth Coker, the Old South tour guide, she suggested that this might be due to the fact I don’t come from a military family. Maybe. But I can’t help but be preoccupied with the stakes, what hung in the balance, what those 620,000 people died for: the unfinished work, as Lincoln put it, to ensure “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

  Where I was that morning wasn’t a battlefield, though. It was something closer to a pilgrimage site, a stop along the Way of General Forrest. I was struck by the precision of the memory. Forrest rested exactly here. I began to imagine the other routine tasks his admirers might enshrine. Forrest supped here. Forrest sneezed here. Forrest asked for directions here. That last one, of course, actually exists: remember Emma Samson, the teenager in Alabama who showed Forrest a low spot in the river where he might cross and whose likeness was, in return, cast in stone at the end of Gadsden’s Broad Street.

  Hagiography inspires minutiae, I suppose.

  From his temporary resting place, I retraced Forrest’s steps down into Murfreesboro—dawn when Forrest hoofed it, midday as I drove it 154 years later. The descent from Short Mountain into the Central Basin affords some peak Tennessee views: rocky tops beyond rocky tops. It’s said that, on a clear day, you can see Nashville from here, but today it’s mountain silhouettes one after another, receding to a fog-fuzzed horizon. Then came rolling pastures with grazing cows and several plywood signs, Trump emblazoned in blue spray paint.

  Reporting out these monument battles in four different cities gave me plenty of windshield time. To help pass it, I’d developed a Punch Buggy kind of game, like the one my brother and I had played as children over long drives in the back of the station wagon. Except instead of counting Volkswagens, it was bootleg Trump merch, and I didn’t have anyone to sock on the arm when I saw something. Instead, I’d just wring my hands and sigh.

  By October of 2016, the vivid red of the high-crowned MAGA hats and the deep blue of the Trump-Pence flags were fixtures on heads and houses wherever I went. I was more intrigued by the homemade and bootleg campaign gear—things like this plywood sign—which seemed to signal a deeper, more personal stake in the campaign. I’d been sensitized to off-brand paraphernalia like this after seeing stockpiles of it at a NASCAR race back in May.

  It would be a stretch to call myself a NASCAR fan, in that I’d never actually watched (or had much of an interest in watching) a race. But a few months earlier my friend Mitch had gotten in touch, told me he wanted to come down to Alabama for the race at Talladega, and I figured what the he
ck. Mitch is one of my oldest and closest friends. I still have his seventh-grade school photo tucked in the cigar box on my bookshelf; he still wears the same buzz cut and the same goofy grin. If a NASCAR race was the thing to bring us together for more than a night squeezed in between family obligations at Christmas, so be it.

  Stock car racing has always been an inescapable if ambient presence in my life. It was ascendant in the nineties, went mainstream as I came of age. I knew NASCAR the way a retail worker learns the words to all the Top 40 hits after a few shifts with the radio pumped in through the drop-ceiling speakers. So during that weekend with Mitch, much felt familiar, like home. The racers’ names and numbers came back to me like the lyrics to an old song. We pitched camp in a meadow across the street from the track, where the scene was a cross between a football tailgate, a carnival midway, and something wholly its own. There were makeshift casino tents, karaoke stages, tiki bars. In the air were the smells of cigarettes, weed, and porta-potty cleaning agents. In the waning light the atmosphere took on a hazy, uncanny feel, the edges softened by cans of suds. I admit the novelty of the scene was fun. It was like an amusement park for white guys. We lost all the cash in our pockets at a carnival game whose rules or purpose I never fully comprehended, washed down sausages with the beer we’d been handed by friendly passersby, and drifted through stalls of merchandise.

  There was all the requisite racer gear—the colorful faux-leather jackets, those mammoth 64-oz. gas-station thermoses emblazoned with racers past and present, key rings, belt buckles, T-shirts, tank tops, flip-flops, ball caps, beanies. And mixed in with all of the racing gear was Trump gear. Heaps of it. The sheer tonnage of Trump stuff for sale was staggering, if perhaps unsurprising. And there was a whole taxonomy of apparel: Gearheads for Trump, Truckers for Trump, Bikers for Trump. Then all the “Killary” gear, too, shirts testifying to all the sexual and violent and sexually violent things the wearer believes should be done to the Democratic nominee—a bracing reminder that the night wouldn’t have felt like an amusement park for people who didn’t look like me and Mitch.