Confederates in the Attic (57 page)

Integration had also turned the Civil War into a minefield. “Suddenly, whatever I said was wrong,” Shambray said. Blacks accused her of soft-pedaling slavery while whites thought she was vilifying their ancestors. Shambray found herself dreading the subject. “For a few years, I would take a running jump from about 1855 to Reconstruction,” she said.

Then, from about the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the atmosphere improved and Shambray learned to ease her students into the Civil War. “I’d preface the whole issue by saying that none of us here today were responsible for what happened. It’s history, and we need to discuss things in an open, intelligent fashion.”

But like others I’d spoken to across the South, Shambray sensed a hardening of attitudes from about the mid-1980s onward. Both blacks and whites became contentious and less interested in facts. “I’ve taught two generations now, and this one is different,” she said. “They’re much thinner-skinned than kids used to be, but at the same time more insensitive to others.”

Each year, she asked for a special report on an historical subject. “There’s always a white student now who wants to report on the Klan. I’ve had a few claim they’re members.” Blacks, meanwhile, seemed intent on tuning out the nineteenth century. “They feel like it’s someone else’s war, history that belongs to someone else,” she said, echoing what I’d heard in Selma.

The split extended to school trips to Montgomery. Black kids
perked up at the civil rights sites, whites at the capitol and White House of the Confederacy. They also kept their distance in the classroom. “I don’t seat students. The classes just segregate themselves. They’ve all just got used to it this way.”

Shambray had taken a step back as well, feeling queasy again about teaching the Civil War. The new curriculum let her off the hook, since she wasn’t required to teach events before 1877. “I have to talk about slavery and the War—it’s too important,” she said. “But I don’t dwell on it.”

The bell rang and I returned to Faulk’s classroom for her eleventh-grade advanced placement history class. These students, at least, had a basic grasp of the facts and the discussion quickly turned to the War’s causes and legacy.

“The Civil War’s relevant because the effects are still obvious,” one student said. “A lot of people are still poor and prejudiced in the South, and that basically goes back to the War.”

“I think the racism is worse now than then,” another girl said. “Back then, blacks and whites both farmed and often worked close by, even if they weren’t equal. Today, we’re so much more separate.”

Another student stroked his peach fuzz and said, “The North deserves some blame. They talked a lot about emancipation but didn’t do much for blacks after the War. And when blacks started moving North, whites weren’t much better than here in the South.”

A black student blamed parents for the persistence of prejudice. “The racism, it’s generational. It gets passed down,” she said. “It’s like church. You don’t choose which one you go to. You just do what your parents did.”

The conversation had become free-flowing and I raised my hand. Why, I asked from my lonely perch in the middle aisle, were all the whites sitting on one side of the room and blacks on the other?

“It’s just always been that way,” one of the whites said. A black student nodded. “When we were younger we were all friends,” she said. “You didn’t think about black and white. But you get older, you hear things on the news. You look around. You hear the little things people say. Things change. We’re still friends but it’s different.”

There was no animosity to this observation. It was just the way things were. At least the students were occupying the same classroom
and talking to each other, unlike Rose Sanders’s students or the home-schoolers I’d met in Montgomery. Or, for that matter, most students in the North. Washington, D.C., where I’d been educated, now had a public school system that was 97 percent black.

After the day’s last class, I asked Faulk about the school’s informal apartheid and the fact that white students seemed far more outspoken and self-assured than blacks. “We had an exchange student from Macedonia,” she said. “He told me, ‘You know, blacks are in the majority here but they’re afraid of you.’ He was right. Blacks have grown up with whites being dominant and they seem to tolerate it.”

Like Ruby Shambray, Faulk was also bewildered by what she called “a blip of good ol’ boyism” in recent years. “Before, kids really wanted to get along and understand each other. Then the urge just withered.” She paused. “I graduated from a segregated high school here. I knew black kids got educated somewhere, but I didn’t really think about it or stand up for change. Somehow, I’d hoped these kids would think more about these things, but I’m not sure they do.”

I
SPENT TWO MORE DAYS
at Greenville High and left with mixed emotions about what I’d seen and heard. Clearly, the Lost Cause was close to being truly lost in the minds of young Alabamans. Only the advanced students grasped even the dimmest outline of the War’s history. Nor were these teenagers unusual. I later read a survey about Southerners’ knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor.

This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them.

But Alabamans seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King’s famous speech. “I have a dream,” he said, of an Alabama where “black boys and black
girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Alabama, like Mississippi, appeared to have made much greater strides than places less seared by the civil rights struggle, such as southern Kentucky. Even so, the past-tense rendering of King’s quote in Selma seemed a sadly apt commentary on most of the 1990s South I’d visited.

On my last evening in Greenville, I went to see a retired teacher named Bobbie Gamble who taught for many years both at the public high school and at one of Greenville’s private academies. “We really believed that if you started kids together from first grade, the whole racial attitude would change,” she said. Gamble recalled staging a production of
Hello Dolly!
in the early 1970s. She cast black kids in many of the white roles, and parents of both races mingled comfortably in the audience. “Given what it was like here before, that was a small revolution,” she said.

But viewed with twenty-five years’ hindsight, the revolution appeared limited, and seemed to have turned reactionary. “No one really talks about true integration now,” Gamble said. “Now, the goal seems to be separatism with everything equal. Not just in terms of facilities, but in terms of how we present society. Black history and white history. Black culture and white culture. We should be teaching all this as
our
culture,
our
history. But no one’s trying to do that anymore. It’s
Plessy
vs.
Ferguson
extended to everything.”

Nor was separate really equal when it came to education. At first, Gamble said, white parents who sent their kids to private academies “were people with money who didn’t want their kids sitting next to blacks.” But as public schools deteriorated, the academies began to attract middle-class families who simply wanted their kids to have a better chance. The academies cost $150 a month, straining budgets and deepening resentment of blacks, whom many whites blamed for the decline of public schools. “It’s a vicious cycle and the whole South is caught in it, the whole nation, really,” she said.

On my way out of town, I stopped at Fort Dale South Butler Academy, whose sign proclaimed, “established 1969”—the year Greenville’s schools integrated. The trim brick building was ringed with trailers to accommodate the school’s rapid growth. There wasn’t a black face among the hundred or so kids I saw running to buses as
school let out. I wandered past an outdoor play area and saw a large Confederate battle flag painted on the pavement. Like the rebels of old, the seg academies had effectively seceded from the changing society that surrounded them.

Leaving Greenville, shadowed by the same melancholic cloud that hung over my visit to Selma, I kept replaying Bobbie Gamble’s parting comment. “Remember, Bloody Sunday was only thirty years ago and school integration’s even younger than that. Maybe we’re just asking too much. Revolutions don’t happen overnight.”

Winding out of Greenville behind a long line of school buses, I hoped she was right.

I
was midway to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over one shoulder when I realized my Civil War Odyssey had come to an end.

Rob Hodge marched beside me through the tidy farmland of southern Pennsylvania. Not that we could see much scenery. It was 3
A.M
. “This is it—Nirvana,” Rob said, pointing at the silhouette of a barn dimly visible in the midsummer moonlight. “Not one sign of the twentieth century.”

Rob had pomaded his long black curls and greased his mustache in an upward twirl. He looked like a downmarket Pickett, clad in the still-unlaundered butternut he’d worn during our Civil Wargasm the summer before. In the year since, Rob had sought out new frontiers of hardcore reenacting. Forty other rebels trudged behind us, some of them barefoot, recruited by Rob for a twelve-mile forced march to a battle reenactment at Gettysburg.

“Most of what real soldiers did was march, not fight,” Rob said, explaining his rationale for the hike. The march was originally
planned for dawn, but Rob had decided at midnight to suddenly change plans, as commanders often did in the Civil War.

For added authenticity, Rob had purchased a rooster and three live chickens from a Pennsylvania farmer the day before. “The rebs carried livestock with them, so why shouldn’t we? We’ll cook these birds up before the battle.”

One of the chickens had been pecking and defecating on my shoulder for three hours now, and any squeamishness I’d felt about its fate had long since vanished. I was ready to wring the bird’s neck if Rob gave the order. Over my other shoulder I toted a gunnysack filled with mail from the homefront. Rob had painstakingly addressed the letters by candlelight before our departure, using a period pen. “We’ll do a mail call at dawn so you won’t have to haul that bag all the way to the battle,” he assured me.

Headlights flickered on a bend in the country lane, just ahead. Instinctively, I turned and shouted, “Wagon!” A sergeant ordered the men to “fall out” and they cleared the road as the car sped past. One soldier stumbled drunkenly into the grass and fell face-down, giggling hysterically. “Laudanum problem, sir,” I said to Rob. “I’ll report it to the medical officer at first light.”

Rob smiled and punched my shoulder. “Super hardcore,” he said.

I
T WAS THE THIRD SUMMER
since my return to America, since my return to the Civil War. I couldn’t glance at the calendar anymore without attaching parallel dates from the 1860s. May meant Chancellorsville and Stonewall Jackson’s arm resting in the shade of the trees. June 9th was my birthday, but also the cavalry battle at Brandy Station. July 4th, of course, marked the surrender at Vicksburg and Lee’s retreat the day after Pickett’s Charge.

August was special in a different way. Having seen through so many anniversaries and remembrances, I’d added one of my own: an annual conference on Civil War medicine in Frederick, Maryland, which I attended for the third straight year with my father. The conference had become a new father/son ritual—or rather, a reconstituted version of our old one. Where we’d once pored over volumes of Civil War photographs, we now sat in a darkened auditorium watching
slides and listening to lectures titled “Confederate Pest Houses” or “Substance Abuse and Anesthesia During the Civil War.”

My father had just retired from full-time neurosurgery and returned, like me, to the Civil War. When he wasn’t seeing outpatients, he poked around medical archives and wrote scholarly articles about wartime surgeons who pioneered techniques for treating head wounds. “Most of what they did was experimental,” he whispered during a gruesome lecture on penetrating wounds to the cerebellum. “Eighty-three percent of missile hits to the head ended in fatality in the Civil War.”

I was the last of three children and the only family member who had ever shared his passion for the War. My mother spent the weekend of the medical conference browsing with my wife through Frederick’s antique stores. Over lunch, my mother confided that she
had
once visited a few battlefields—while being courted by my father forty-five years before.