Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  Fort Pillow was fronted by three lines of trenches extending outward in semicircles a half-mile into the forest. Neither a strategic hold nor a well-stocked one, the fort was built by Confederates, then abandoned, taken by the Union, but then ordered closed. Still, in April 1864, a regiment of the Tennessee Cavalry (known as Tennessee Tories for fighting for the Union) and two divisions of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) cooled their heels at the fort.

  Black soldiers had been serving in the Union Army for over a year by then. Frederick Douglass had successfully lobbied President Lincoln to acknowledge that African Americans were a crucial fighting force and should not only be emancipated but allowed to fight. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, in addition to freeing those in slavery in the rebelling states, also called for the enlistment of freedmen in the Union Army. In response, the Confederacy passed a law that categorized all Black soldiers as runaway slaves and called for Confederates to treat them with “full and ample retaliation.” Black soldiers fighting for the Union struck at the heart of their whole theory of white supremacy. White people had justified slavery by convincing themselves that Black people were subhuman and thus better off—content, even—under the rule of white masters. Former slaves taking up arms against the Confederacy flew in the face of everything they believed about their cause, about their way of life, and about themselves. As one Confederate put it, “You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution.”

  Forrest’s troops had yet to meet United States Colored Troops regiments in battle when they arrived at Fort Pillow on the morning of April 12, 1864. But they came spoiling for a fight. After two hours of reconnoitering and sharpshooters’ fire, Forrest had the fort surrounded. He sent a truce flag and a note calling for surrender, but, perhaps hedging against what he suspected his men were capable of, he added, “Should my demand be refused, I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command.”

  The note back to Forrest read: “I will not surrender.” So Forrest nodded to the bugler and the Confederates charged. The fighting lasted less than an hour, but the toll was enormous. Confederates routed the federal troops almost immediately. Some fled down the steep bluff to the banks of the river; many did not make it. Of the nearly six hundred Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, almost half were killed. The numbers make clear the racial motivations of the fight: Confederates killed 31 percent of men in white units, 65 percent of the US Colored Troops. Conversely, only 58 Black soldiers (some of them recognizing Forrest from his slave jail in Memphis) marched out of the fort as prisoners, compared with 168 white soldiers. Survivors wrote of Confederates shouting, “Goddamn you, you’re fighting against your master,” to the Black soldiers and, to the white soldiers, “You’ll fight with the n-----s again, will you?” And they fought past surrender. Confederate soldier Achilles V. Clark wrote in a letter to his sisters two days later, “The poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.” But Forrest himself penned the most indelible image of the battle in his report the day after. “The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards,” he wrote. “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”

  Historians to this day debate Forrest’s culpability in the massacre—whether he ordered it, permitted it, or stopped it from going further. He had positioned himself with the sharpshooters firing on the boats below, but there are reports from both sides of the battle that have soldiers shouting that Forrest had ordered the slaughter, for the men to be “shot down like dogs.” Confederate soldiers might have embellished their general’s orders, though, eager for a pretense to set upon men they saw as property. Others report Forrest ordering the ceasefire. “If it hadn’t been for Forrest,” Samuel Green, a Black artilleryman, wrote, “none of us would be alive today.” But that order to stop the massacre would have come only after over two hundred soldiers, mostly Black, had been killed. And his report conveyed his sense of the battle’s meaning, that Black soldiers were no match for him. Still, there’s enough gray area for his admirers to find reason to let him off the hook, enough contextual evidence to think him guilty. Like so much with Forrest’s legacy, what you see in this battlefield of memory depends on where you stand.

  The way the battle is presented today at Fort Pillow State Historic Park reinforces that doubt. To me, Fort Pillow is about one thing: the racialized killing on April 12, 1864. But the museum, a dank building carved into the hill about two miles into the park, devotes as much attention to the various iterations of howitzer cannons and Confederate battle flags in the fort as it does to the events of April 12. Even the short video about the battle is at pains to point out that the question of a massacre “turns on what was fair game and what was not,” while emphasizing its utility as propaganda for the Union. The video concludes: “Although the whole truth will never be known, the events of April 12 forever changed how war was fought.” There is no mention of Forrest’s line about the river running red with blood, about his professed belief in the inferiority of Black people. When, in the remaining year of the war, Black soldiers charged into battle, crying “Remember Fort Pillow!” they likely did not intend to call to mind the games of euchre played in the fort. And yet that is what a visit to the museum invites you to remember. It’s on this spot that more than one hundred Black soldiers were slaughtered, but the ground is not hallowed.

  It’s another two-mile hike from the museum to the rebuilt fortifications on the edge of the bluff. I set off in the heat of an Indian summer afternoon, the woods smelling the way I imagine honeysuckle would if you microwaved it. The mile markers, done in neon colors, featured motivational workout quotes: “You don’t have to go fast; just go.” You would have no sense that you were on a trail heading for the site of a Civil War massacre.

  But, I suppose, that is the point. While the park offers only half an answer to what happened here on that April day in 1864, I realized that it poses another, related question. It asks you what country you want to live in. You could spend whole days in this park barbecuing, fishing, strolling through the butterfly garden, hiking on this trail, and never be reminded that you were doing it on the grounds of a racial massacre. It’s like one big coping mechanism for the horrors of America’s past, laid out as a state park.

  As I hiked up the bluff, I recited some lines of an Adrienne Rich poem I was trying to commit to memory. “What Kind of Times Are These” starts out bucolic, telling of an old place out in the woods, but soon turns to dread. “This is not somewhere else but here, / our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own ways of making people disappear.”

  The trail climbed high along the ridge and then reached the fortifications—a tall wooden wall with wildflowers growing at its top. The trail deposits you behind the walls, as if you were there to wait for the breach. One Confederate, in a letter after the battle, noted how “their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen.” That’s where you arrive.

  I did a lap of the breastwork. There was a ditch on the outside of the wall—extra protection, I figured, like a moat or something. Not so. A sign I later found let me know that it was once a mass grave for dead Union soldiers before they were interred at the national cemetery in Memphis. I sat on a bench at the top of the bluff and read the end of Rich’s poem, when the poet refuses to tell you where this place of American dread is, because she already knows who wants to make it disappear. So why say anything at all? “Because in times like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.”

  It felt like a desecration to even be here. It felt necessary to talk about the trees.

  I thought for a while about the oaks and the pines and about which country I wanted to live in: that foreign country of the past, or the familiar one of forgetting and grilling
and hiking and traipsing across unhallowed ground.

  Twenty-Four

  The Weight

  On the morning of December 20, 2017, Tami Sawyer could barely speak. The night before, her family had to cancel her father’s birthday dinner because Sawyer had laryngitis, her brother the flu. But, “dead in bed,” that day she got a call from a confidant in city politics, telling her: The statues are coming down. Tonight. Go to the city council meeting, they told her, with an ear out for a certain docket number.

  She dressed quickly, threw on a coat, dashed off texts to friends telling them to head to the statue. “I’m gonna go to city hall,” she wrote. “Watch for movement.”

  Could this really be it? She had read whisperings on social media that a plot was afoot but, well, that was social media. This source, though, this felt like the real thing. On the way downtown she picked up a friend, who sat in the car, engine running, while Sawyer headed into City Hall’s mid-century honeycomb of concrete and glass.

  The meeting that night had come about after a chance meeting at a preseason Grizzlies basketball game. Van Turner Jr., a county commissioner and lawyer, a dapper man prone to bow ties and striped shirts, bumped into City Attorney Bruce McMullen in the stands of the FedEx Forum and, as so often was the case that year in Memphis, the two chatted about the city’s Confederate monuments. Even Memphis Grizzlies coach David Fizdale had weighed in, saying, “I’m not even saying tear them up and melt them down. Put them in their proper context in history. Their proper context is in a civil rights museum, where you could put them in context and talk about how awful they were.” The county commission was about to vote on the issue, and would be unanimously offering support to the city in advance of their hearing with the Historical Commission. It was there in the stands at the FedExForum that McMullen first floated an idea to Turner. It was provisional at first, as the city was still hoping to resolve the issue through the state’s established channels, but given that the Historical Commission had already denied the city once, and with the MLK50 anniversary approaching, they needed alternatives. And they’d found one in the phrasing of the Heritage Protection Act. The law prevented the removal of monuments on public property, yes, but what if the city sold the statues to a private nonprofit, who could then remove the statues, unencumbered by the law? So, McMullen asked, might Turner be interested in buying a few city parks?

  “[City government] knew litigation would ensue, so they wanted someone used to the court system,” Turner explained to me. They also knew that, given the violent climate surrounding the monuments, it was not a decision to be made lightly. Check with your family, check with your colleagues, McMullen told Turner, and get back to me.

  By the time the Historical Commission denied the city’s appeal in October 2017, Turner had made up his mind: He was in. When he got the go-ahead, Turner filed for nonprofit status for a new organization, Memphis Greenspace, then began raising money. There was still a possibility of another appeal, on the grounds that perhaps the statue would be considered a historical monument, not a war memorial. But by late November, frustrated by court delays for mediation and appeal, McMullen drew up the paperwork for the sale. Then, the city council had to pass legislation that allowed them to sell property under market value. Check. And finally, on Wednesday, December 20, the last day before the state’s legislative session began (when the state senate might close the loophole the city hoped to thread), a nondescript item on the docket came up for a vote.

  “If you were just sitting there, you would have thought they just voted on bathroom breaks,” Sawyer said. The council, without announcing the contents of the ordinance, proceeded to vote on the issue. This was the docket item Sawyer had been told to watch for. And, in a sleight of hand that would outrage the monuments’ supporters, the ordinance passed. The city sold Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park to Greenspace for $1,000 each.

  It was on. McMullen ran upstairs to get Mayor Strickland’s signature, Sawyer ran downstairs to the car waiting to take her to the Forrest statue. Van Turner was already there, waiting to meet the removal crew under the statue.

  “I was filled with anxiety,” Turner told me, knowing that at any moment a judge’s injunction or a misstep with the removal could jeopardize the whole plan. Instead, it was members of #TakeEmDown901 and the local media who flocked to the south end of the park. Not long after, police descended as well, clearing the park, closing Union Avenue, and sending everyone who wasn’t an elected official—media and spectators alike—to wait in the parking lot of the Office Depot across the street. “It was an emotional rollercoaster,” Pastor Earle Fisher told me. He had to cut short a dinner out with his wife to get to the park—he wasn’t going to miss this. Once he saw the police set up a barricade and the cranes roll in, he thought, “Okay, any minute now. And then any minute now turns into thirty minutes turns into forty-five minutes to an hour.”

  Finally, at 9:01 (the city’s area code, a little symbolic flourish from Turner), it was time. The final strap was ratcheted into place. The crane clanked into gear. The statue wobbled as the slack caught and, bathed in the blue light of the police cruisers, lifted from the pedestal. For several minutes, the bronze Forrest on horseback hovered in the air, swaying gently above the marble base, above the graves of Forrest and his wife, above the activists and journalists below.

  “It was just elation,” Turner told me. He thought of his father, who grew up in the city when it was illegal for him, as an African American, to enter the park, and whose birthday it was that day. He thought also of his grandmother, who lived in Sunflower County, Mississippi. “I remember as a child down in Mississippi, any time she talked about white folks, she would whisper as if they were in the room,” he told me, describing the “mental weigh down” that came with growing up in fear of the white power that this statue represented, where you could be lynched for just saying the wrong thing, where you knew people who had been lynched. “It meant a lot, mentally, for people who grew up in that history,” Turner said. And now two yellow nylon straps—one just in front and one just behind Forrest’s saddle—held that weight, all that bronze and all those anguished memories and all that tortured forgetting, lifted it up into the blue light above the park, for all to see, and then set it down on the bed of the tractor trailer below.

  “There was a level of shock and awe,” Pastor Fisher told me, speaking of the mood in the crowd across the street. For so long, so many people, so many generations, had tried to get that statue down. And now, finally, they had succeeded. (Statues of Jefferson Davis and Capt. J. Harvey Mathes, in another park now owned by Memphis Greenspace, were also removed that night.) “Symbols matter,” he told me. “For us to have those things removed, I think articulates to us that other things are possible. That a more equitable city and a more equitable county and a more equitable state and country is possible.”

  As the tractor took the statue to a police storage unit on the outskirts of town, politicians headed across Union Avenue to address the media, describing how the city maneuvered to finally get the statue down. Noting a conspicuous omission, many of the gathered spectators began chanting, “Say her name! Say her name!” Obliging, somewhat sheepishly, one councilman thanked the grassroots efforts of people like Tami Sawyer.

  Shelby county commissioner Reginald Milton came across the street next and reached out a hand to Sawyer, who went to shake it. Instead, he took her by the arm and led her across the street to the park. “Being a community organizer, I know people behind the scenes don’t get the opportunity to get recognition for their work,” Milton told me, but as an elected official he had the requisite clearance to enter the park and, knowing how instrumental Sawyer was, wanted to give her the moment.

  “We’ve been protesting there forever,” Sawyer said, but that night, crossing Union Avenue at Manassas, “[it] felt like I was crossing the ocean. It felt so big. And I’ve dodged traffic crossing that street, I’ve done a million interviews there. It never felt so wide.”

&nbs
p; “This is your moment,” Milton told her as he shepherded her past the blockade. “You did this. You deserve to be across this street.”

  Sawyer ducked under the police tape, climbed onto the marble base, turned to face the crowd across the street, and raised her fist.

  We did it, she remembers thinking. Nathan Bedford Forrest rides no more.

  Twenty-Five

  “Yeah But . . .”

  Four months after the statue came down, I met Lee Millar at the foot of the statue’s former home. Chain-link fence hemmed the now-empty pedestal on the south end of an otherwise bustling Health Sciences Park. Lunch-hour joggers in neon Techwick and nurses and doctors in pastel scrubs lapped the park. The outer ring of oak trees swayed in a stiff breeze, the cherry tree at center unfurled in full bloom. Millar is the spokesman for Camp 215 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the N.B. Forrest troop, and he is a descendant of the general as well; Forrest’s paternal grandmother was his great-great-great-grandmother. Millar looked to be in his fifties or maybe early sixties. A white goatee framed his narrow face. He sounds a little like Buddy Garrity in Friday Night Lights and was similarly animated.

  At home that night in December, he told me, his phone began to ring. And ring. And ring. “I got a call from a friend who was parked over there,” he said, pointing down the street from where we stood. His friend had had a meeting in a nearby building and saw the police cars roll in to close the park. “So he called me up and said it’s happening tonight. They’re gonna steal the statues.” So Millar started making calls, too, desperate to reach a judge, to get an injunction or a restraining order. But no one picked up. “You just don’t get help here.”

  Millar was upset but not taken totally by surprise. “We knew the city council and the mayor wanted to remove the statues.” But the secret amendment? That irked him. “You can’t just take them,” he said.