Long Division
Tony Horwitz has done
something remarkable. He has written a book about the Civil War that will
interest not only war enthusiasts but also people who find the subject a
vexation or a bore. Speaking as one of the latter, I discovered that Horwitz
made me confront my aversion in a way that was both troubling and revealing.
Let me explain.
I was
born in the South of two Southern parents but raised mainly on Army posts,
curious nonplaces that, even when located in the South, feel more like Ohio
than like Alabama or Georgia or North Carolina. Growing up on an Army post, we
brats looked at the civilian world with a wary eye, particularly in the South,
where we were doubly different: not just outsiders and transients but also
Goddamn Yankees.
If we went off-post to school, we adjusted to Southern
folkways, standing at football games for the "national anthem," as "Dixie" was
called, even though we knew that our anthem was the one heard at the
parade grounds on weekends. More important, in those pre-integration days, we
attended lily-white classes and witnessed racial barriers that were absent, or
at least being dismantled, back on the forts.
Tied to
this Jim Crow order was a social reality that seemed as peculiar as any I had
experienced overseas. Years later, reading Walker Percy's superb essays on race
and civil rights, I had it spelled out for me: The South, at least the white
South before integration, was one big kinship lodge. And it was precisely
because the public realm was taken to be an extension of family that white
Southerners took any effort to bring blacks into it as a direct attack on their
most intimate social space.
Idimly sensed this whenever, as a boy, I
visited my Southern relatives. People I barely knew talked to me--and "did for
me," as they say down there--as though I were their brother or cousin. I was
touched by these kindnesses, but also suspicious: Why were they doing this?
What did I owe them? Beyond the suspicion lay a Puritan sense that this was all
dreadfully wrong.
That is
why this semi-Southerner does not like to think about the Civil War,
particularly about the way Southerners fetishize the whole Lost Cause business.
It takes him back to memories that lie uneasily at the base of his identity. I
can't help but think that many white Americans share this queasy
ambivalence.
Horwitz turns out to be an oddly perfect guide for us
divided souls. A descendant of Russian Jews, born and raised in the North (to
the extent that Maryland is the North), he would seem to have little reason for
interest in that war. But this is America, and when Horwitz's
great-grandfather, Poppa Isaac, made his way from czarist Russia to the East
Side of New York, one of his first purchases was a book about the Civil War.
The interest was passed on, and Horwitz's father, a physician, kept his son up
late at night reading from the 10-volume Photographic History of the Civil
War . By third grade, Horwitz fils was completing his own "highly
derivative" history of the war and commencing a Sistine-scale project: a mural
of the war, pro-Rebel in slant, that would soon cover every inch of attic wall
space.
Horwitz soon put aside such
childish things. As a Wall Street Journal reporter, he covered both the
Gulf War and Bosnia and, returning to the States, settled with his wife in the
shadow of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. There he lived in tranquil
expectation of their first child until one day, a band of Civil War re-enactors
stumbled into their yard in search of water.
This
encounter with "hard-core" re-enactors--whose dedication to authenticity
includes camping out under thin blankets and huddling spoon-style to share body
heat--brought Horwitz's curiosity about Civil War mania to a head. Where did it
come from? Some people who were thus obsessed were so because, as Horwitz
notes, "roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from
Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in [it]." But
there was a greater prod to Southern memory: defeat. Losers don't forget. Nor
do their children. The only Southerners who want to blot it out are black
Southerners, who wish that all the noise and symbolism would go away.
These are generalities, of course. The strength
of Horwitz's book lies in his gift for fleshing them out through precisely
rendered encounters with Southerners of all walks and all colors, united only
by the common Southern compulsion to answer a question with a story. Such
meetings, spontaneous and arranged, punctuate Horwitz's zigzag journey through
the Old Confederacy, with stops at battlefields, museums, redneck bars,
gatherings of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an Afrocentric school, and the
living rooms of countless affable Southerners.
If this
makes Horwitz sound like a journalistic Sherman, he wears his Yankee bias
lightly. "Y'all always do the same," says the white mayor of 60 percent black
Selma, Ala., at the end of their interview. "Come in here smiling and then go
home and write a dig at us." Not only does Horwitz not do this, but he also
understands that the mayor's remark was the real point of the interview--that
and the jocularly aggrieved way in which he made it.
What comes through repeatedly is not just grievance but
also the pride, vulnerability, and sometimes desperation of people who see
their lives and daily predicaments as having been shaped by a cataclysm that
occurred more than 130 years ago. There's probably no staler chestnut than the
Southern alibi that it wasn't slavery's defense but honor and loyalty to place
that made most Confederates take up arms to fight the Northern "aggressors."
Yet, in the mouths of the white townsfolk of Salisbury, N.C., it sounds
convincing. Horwitz makes us see that the pinched circumstances of their lives
are not so different from the conditions of their ancestors, dirt-poor yeoman
farmers who seldom saw, much less owned, a slave. For such people, then and
now, a sense of place and community is not merely the most sustaining fact of
daily life, it is the most dignifying.
Not much
further into the book we are treated to a more worked-up, intellectualized
version of the alibi--today called the "neo-Confederate" ideology. But because
it is put forward by a fatuous Charleston, S.C., college professor, we hear it
for what Horwitz rightly calls it: "a clever glide around race and slavery,
rather like the slick-tongued defense of the Southern 'way of life' made by
antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular." Horwitz doesn't leave it
there. He's neither immune to the professor's charm nor untroubled by what the
professor says about the Northern agenda: "a culture war in which Yankees
imposed their imperialist and capitalist will on the agrarian South, just as
they had done to the Irish and Scots."
Many moments in the book are indelible. There's
nothing but tragedy in the trial of a young black man who has killed a white
man for driving on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday weekend with a Confederate
flag flying on his truck, an incident that has thoroughly riven the once fairly
harmonious town of Guthrie, Ky. Almost as unsettling is the conversation
Horwitz has with the bright black woman who founded an Afrocentric alternative
school in Selma, a conversation that soon breaks down in a venomous exchange
over Louis Farrakhan. "Don't tell us who our leaders should be!" she snaps.
Poking around the Civil War
can lead both to such impasses and to bleak comedy. What more need be said
about the name given to Selma's all-black housing project, the Nathan B.
Forrest Homes, than what Horwitz dryly observes: "an odd choice, given
Forrest's notoriety as a slave trader and Imperial Wizard of the KKK"?
This is outstanding
journalism, artfully constructed and unfailingly vivid, as good a rendering as
I've seen of the mysterious pull at the heart of American identity. Being
fascinated by the Civil War is central to what Robert Penn Warren called "the
very ritual of being American." If so, there may be no more fitting conclusion
than Horwitz's tentative insight into his great-grandfather's attraction:
"Poppa Isaac came from learned, rabbinical stock. Maybe he sensed that the
Civil War was an American Talmud that would unlock the secrets of his adopted
land and make him feel a part of it."
