This was late May 2016, almost a year since Donald Trump rode down his gold-colored escalator to announce his candidacy in a speech in which he referred to Mexicans as rapists. A few months later, he called for a total ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. These displays of nativism, combined with vague assurances of prosperity for the long-suffering white working class, continued through the early primaries. Trump finished second in January’s Iowa Caucuses, then took the New Hampshire primary. Reports of violence at his rallies that spring only served to make his campaign a media spectacle, amplifying his demagoguery and consolidating his support. Just a few weeks before the Talladega race, he’d torched Ted Cruz in Indiana to become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee.
The morning of the race, I emerged from our tent bleary-eyed, smelling like soot and curdled milk. I headed for a porta-potty for my a.m. ablutions. By force of habit, I perused the graffiti on the walls. Mostly it was the usual reststop “For a good time, call . . .” scribblings. But next to the empty hand-sanitizer dispenser was this: “If I was a damn dirty Mexican I’d go ahead and shoot myself.”
That afternoon, hungover in the stands, I kept one eye on the race and the other on gathering storm clouds, but saw mostly that line scrawled onto the blue plastic siding. I was appalled by the sentiment but fascinated by the phrasing, the twisted self-loathing of it. It wasn’t saying Mexicans—the others—should die. It was saying that, if I were a Mexican, I would hate myself enough to kill myself. Apparently, the only thing keeping the writer of that sentiment from suicide was their whiteness. That old bucket still held water, it seems, and a great deal more spit.
Brad Keselowski took the checkered flag that afternoon, but I couldn’t tell you how. Mitch and I walked out of the speedway in a sea of people retreating to their cars and campers, nearly all of them white and many sporting Trump gear they’d picked up on the midway. I considered for the first time that Trump could actually win the presidency, and saw how he might do it.
Back in Murfreesboro, I descended into the valley and passed the fortifications of strip malls that surrounded the city. I turned onto East Main and puttered through a quaint residential neighborhood before arriving on the square. Murfreesboro is the geographic center of Tennessee. At the center of the town square sits the courthouse—a three-story brick building, columned, corniced, and clock-towered. A small plaque on a bench facing the courthouse doors read “Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce encourages you to discover the heart of Tennessee.” So there I was: at the middle of Middle Tennessee, the heart of the heart. There’s a Confederate Memorial statue on the northeast corner of the square: a soldier mid-stride, with musket and haversack, facing north. Never retreat. Confederate symbolism is a bit laughable in its predictability, even as its glum sentimentality and its racism are anything but. As such, only the heroics of the Lost Cause are mentioned on the square. Plaques about Forrest and the Confederacy dot the courthouse. “The beginning of a legend,” one is subtitled.
Having caught his winks in Woodbury, Forrest came into the city with the sunrise; dramatic lighting for the beginning of this legend. It was the morning of his forty-first birthday. And it was a homecoming, too, as he was born only twenty-five miles from there. Horses’ hooves woke John Anderson from his sleep in the city jail, where he was being held by Union officers for insubordination, set for execution that day. “I shall never forget the appearance of General Forrest on that occasion; his eyes were flashing as if on fire, his face was deeply flushed, and he seemed in a condition of great excitement,” Anderson remembered. The Union soldier guarding the men in the jail set fire to the floor when he heard Forrest approach. “To our horror we realized he was determined to burn us to death before the rescue party could break open the door,” writes Anderson.
After rescuing the prisoners, Forrest headed across the street to storm the courthouse and smoke out the sharpshooters, then shrewdly negotiated the surrender of the rest of the Union troops. All in all, about as successful as a raid could be. “[Forrest] became overnight their particular idea of what a soldier should be,” Andrew Lytle writes, claiming that after the raid, women in Middle Tennessee would threaten to set Forrest on occupying Union soldiers. “He was a bogeyman they all believed in.” Lytle concludes his account of the raid with a story about a woman who approached Forrest as he made to leave town, requesting that he rear back on his horse so that she might scoop into her kerchief a bit of dirt from under the steed’s hoof. Forrest obliged.
It took some asking down at the Heritage Center, a few blocks off the square, but finally someone in a back room was able to dig up an old photograph of the courthouse square and pointed out, in a shadowy corner, a canvas awning. The former slave market, now unmarked, occupies the corner of Church and College—just a block off the square and on a direct sightline with the courthouse statue of the Confederate soldier. It’s a long stone building, two-story, painted a neutral grayish green. “Built 1843 / Repaired 1873” reads the date stone.
This tableau at the heart of the heart of Tennessee neatly arranges the contradiction at the heart of Confederate memory: Honor the soldier but make no mention (at least in public) of the actual cause for which he fought. Derek Alderman, the University of Tennessee expert on monuments and memorials, pointed out to me that even though Confederate monuments are ostensibly about remembering the past, “[they] can also be about facilitating forgetting . . . the public is encouraged to see the past in one way. So inherently it is being encouraged not to remember another part of the past.”
In their documents of secession, Mississippi avowed, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Two months later, Confederate vice-president Alexander H. Stephens would announce that the Confederacy’s cornerstone rested upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” They were waging the war to maintain their states’ rights to hold slaves, to expand their slave society further west into the frontier, and they were making no secret about it. And yet, though slavery was their “greatest material interest” and white supremacy their foundational belief, the slave market now goes unmarked.
When I spoke with Steve Murphree, who testified before the task force in support of keeping Forrest Hall and who is the chaplain of the Murfreesboro Sons of Confederate Veterans, he told me that each year the troop marks Forrest’s birthday by supping on sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas, reenacting Forrest’s celebratory meal the night of the Murfreesboro raid. “Some people say we’re overly romantic,” Murphree said. “And we just might be guilty of that, but we’re just trying to protect the good name of the Confederate soldier.”
But protecting the good name of Confederate soldiers requires forgetting. And so the campaign to extract slavery from the Confederacy becomes a necessary fiction. It lays down cover—lets you continue to revere, in public, an armed campaign to create an ethnostate in thirteen former American states. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, understood this well. In 1860, Davis proclaimed that, “We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.” Before long, Davis would revise his own history; in his post-war memoirs he claims slavery to be “not the cause, but an incident.”
And so through remembering by forgetting—the method blueprinted in downtown Murfreesboro—we arrive at the preposterous and yet all-to0-common refrain of “heritage not hate.” Thus, those advocating for MTSU to keep Forrest’s name could, with a straight face, claim a martial heritage without mentioning that it derives from a war waged on the belief that many of the students in the room were, because of their race, inferior.
This is what ideology does. We don’t adapt our views based on the facts at hand, we assemble facts based on our ideology. We remember what we like.
And white Americans are well practiced in this magical thinking, this selective memory. American exceptionalism dictates that we are entitled to a good history as our birthright—received wisdom that, in the defense of our good name, encourages white Americans to be less than critical about our past. The aspirations of our founding documents are, indeed, commendable. But, in order to maintain moral authority, our collective memory holds that we have already achieved them. As many a flag-pin-wearing politician will tell you, that’s what makes us the greatest nation in the history of the world. And so we overlook how the American flag flew over a slave society for more than eighty years. Likewise we ask not what the three-fifths clause in that sacrosanct Constitution says about who we are, morally. We leave unanswered the question of to whom, exactly, the “we” in “We the people” refers. Or, for that matter, that the US only became a true democracy with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. “Slavery looms up mountainously,” wrote Robert Penn Warren of the legacy of the Civil War, but we’re more likely to look away to the roadside where Forrest slept, more likely to paint over the slave market. This keeps intact the things we want to believe about our country, our past, our present, ourselves.
On the day of my visit to downtown Murfreesboro, early voting was underway in Tennessee for the 2016 presidential election—an election that was proving to be another referendum on our memory, and our forgetting, of American history. At the polling place on the outer ring of the courthouse square, a line of people snaked out the door and halfway down the block. Many were there, no doubt, to cast votes for Donald Trump, whose campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” could only be admired via the remembering and forgetting at work here on the courthouse square, and whose signature policy proposal was to build a two-thousand-mile monument along the southern border. He’d win Tennessee handily. When Pennsylvania was called in his favor, too, his path to victory was clear.
Twelve
More Gump than Bedford
During that October visit to Middle Tennessee, Forrest’s name still stood above the doors of the ROTC building, though by then it was in bureaucratic purgatory. The Historical Commission had agreed to hear the University’s request but had yet to set a date for deliberation. From the courthouse square, I headed back to campus thinking that it might be the last time I’d see it while the ROTC building was still named for Forrest. Middle Tennessee State’s campus is long, flat, and low—the buildings like haystacks in a meadow. I came up on Forrest Hall slowly, hobbling with a bum ankle I’d recently injured while playing pickup soccer. Compared to the admissions building where I got my parking pass and the student union across from it—all glass and curving lines—Forrest Hall’s brick and mortar felt like an anachronism, there on the eastern end of campus. Inside it felt even older: with the yellow fluorescent light and mildew smell of a dilapidated gymnasium covered by what I described in my notes as a “Lysol factory meltdown.” Despite my ankle, I did a lap, inspected the medals in the trophy case and the photographs of enlisted students framed and on the wall, poked my head into empty, standard-looking classrooms. I’m not sure what I expected, but there wasn’t much to see. No stray Confederate-flag sticker on the lockers in the bathroom, no Sons of Confederate Veterans flyers in the rack of recruitment brochures, no likeness of Forrest in the portraits of old commanders.
After poking around for a while, I went back outside and sat on a bench. Just down from me was a bus-stop overhang, and I watched students gather and board, gather and board. Out here I could feel it—the thing I’d been searching for inside, some disturbance in the energy of the place. A friend once told me that if you don’t believe in ghosts, you won’t see ghosts. At this point, it’s safe to say I not only believed in Forrest’s ghost but was actively calibrating my Confederate spectrometer. Others have felt it, too, though for different reasons. Students of color testified at the forums that they avoided the building because they do not want to think about the man who did not think them human. I stretched my ankle and watched a few more buses go by as I thought about how there are no bus stops I’ve ever waited at, could ever wait at, really, that I would go out of my way to avoid. None that could remind me that others considered me sub-human. Instead, I waited at bus stops named for men who built this country with me in mind.
I experienced a bracing reminder of this influence when digging through the school’s archive. Perusing the pages of a fraternity scrapbook Calise pulled for me, full of snapshots, one after another, of all the frat brothers dressed in gray, of all the mascots parading down East Main St. in boots and duster, it struck me that I look a lot like Forrest: six foot two, 180 pounds, scraggly beard, unkempt hair, and with his cold blue eyes, and so I might have celebrated a Middle Tennessee touchdown atop a horse renamed King Philip, as Sylvester Brooks looked on from the stands feeling some part derision, some part repulsion, and some other part forever unimaginable to me. When I embarked on this journey, I expected that the longer I worked at it, the more people I spoke with, the more reasons I would find to decry Forrest. And that’s been true. What I didn’t expect was to be forced to consider our connection, our proximity. I can reject every tenet of the Confederacy and yet the fact remains that, in fighting to maintain white supremacy, Forrest sought to perpetuate a system tilted in my favor. Forrest fought for me. The work was to understand the proximity, not the distance. Not to try to imagine bus stops and buildings that I’d avoid, but to understand why we’ve needed to build the ones that others were avoiding. But, of course, it’s our prerogative to ignore these questions if we so please.
In an essay for The New York Times, Eula Biss writes that the condition of white life is one of “forgotten debt.” “Not a kinship or a culture,” Biss writes of the essence of whiteness, as genetics does not identify any closer relationship among white people than between white and Black people. “American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to Black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family,” Biss continues. Instead, white people are confederates in a lie meant to protect our advantages, dating back to the colonial era. Whiteness is a coalition of power among a loose, shifting group of pale-skinned European Americans. The courthouse statue that pretends it cannot see the slave yard.
But what debts did I owe to whiteness? When my family moved from Philadelphia to rural Lancaster County and my parents bought their first house, the likelihood of them securing a mortgage for a home in a “good” neighborhood with a “good” school district had much to do with their whiteness. At high school parties, my ability to run from police officers into the surrounding cornfields without fear, without even a second thought to what might happen next, was surely an indulgence provided by the color of my skin. When I graduated high school and needed loans to attend a “good” college, my parents co-signed for me, having, as they did, the backing of their home mortgage. Sufficiently propped up by modest intergenerational wealth, I’ve now ventured forth into the crumbling field of journalism—a decision made with the tacit assumption that, should I fail, I had generations of family members who would provide for me in my hour of need with a place to crash, money for rent, and professional connections to start again in education, medicine, public relations. Sure, my parents worked hard. And yes, they are upstanding, empathic people committed to social justice who raised their four sons to be the same. That doesn’t mean our lives aren’t shaped and mangled by our race—a fact we have the luxury of seeing or not seeing.
But these reporting trips had made my whiteness, as the Russian writer Victor Shklovsky might put it, defamiliarized. Shklovsky’s idea was that the role of art is to “make the stone stony,” to disrupt all we’d been habitualized to, and thus be able to see it anew. And here, on the yard of Forrest’s last toehold on campus, the stone was stony.
Brooding there on the bench, I watched another round of buses come and go, and couldn’t help but think of Forrest Gump. Tom Hanks’s titular character spends the majority of that movie at
a bus stop, prattling on about his life to anyone who will listen. Early in the film, he accounts for his name. The screen flickers sepia, and Hanks, dressed in a white bed sheet as his namesake Nathan Bedford Forrest, ambles up on horseback. His name, he says in that affected drawl, is meant “to remind me that sometimes people do stupid things,” then describes how “we was related to him in some way.”
In tracing a history from Bedford Forrest to Bear Bryant, polio to AIDS, Cold War conflict to ping-pong diplomacy, the Hanks movie reflects white Americans’ desperate desire for a happy history, to be reassured that although we have done some stupid things, we are always, inevitably, at the center of a sweeping, noble tale, with a daffy smile and an eager wave. We should feel proud of our past, goddammit. And what’s more, we should derive from that pride a divinely sanctioned sense of our own innocence. A reassuring story to tell yourself, no doubt, but a deluded one. If only we would sit at bus stops in the discomfiting silence that comes with the knowledge that we are instead antagonists, that we are implicated, if only passively, in a centuries-long campaign of oppression and extraction. A campaign waged in our name and for our pockets. Not the most pleasant way to pass the time, I admit, which is probably why we’ve developed such extraordinary ways to avoid doing it. But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we’ve been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story.
When protesters buried Forrest in effigy last year, they left his body in a coffin on the steps. Out on the bench, I was suddenly seized by an urge to find it. I got up and went back into Forrest Hall. I poked my head into every office, asking if anyone knew about that protest last year? About the name of this building? I think they left a papier-mâché doll on the steps? Any chance you know what happened to it? Eyebrows raised, then furrowed into frowns. Some remembered the protests, fewer the funeral, none the whereabouts of the body. One asked if it was mine.
Down Along with That Devil's Bones Page 10
