Ms. Mitchell was my eighth-grade history teacher. She stood about four foot nine, a small dynamo with a disarming smile and an amazing ability to make you feel guilty for misbehaving. She used to sing, but she damaged her vocal cords. I don’t know how. She might have told us, but I can’t remember now. Such forgetting comes with age. With each passing year a memory fades or fragments. I do remember that Ms. Mitchell needed a microphone to teach us history. With her somewhat raspy voice and the periodic static from the amplifier, she made history come alive.
The Civil War was my favorite topic. The battles and heroic generals stoked my imagination: General Robert E. Lee, the ironclad ship, the Merrimack, fighting the Monitor, the Battles of Bull Run, the Vicksburg Campaign were epic. I was particularly fond of General “Stonewall” Jackson. I identified with his boldness and brilliance. “Stonewall” called up my own hope to be less fragile, to step outside of the shadow of my father’s immediate presence. Ms. Mitchell taught about Jackson with passion. He was obviously her favorite (or so I imagined). She noted that his death changed the course of the war. I agreed. I understood the fears of the rebel soldiers who mistakenly took him for Union cavalry. But their fatal mistake not only took General Jackson’s life, but it also led to the defeat of the South (or this is what Ms. Mitchell led me to believe). Jackson was, after all, my civil war hero.
Here I was, growing up in a small town on the coast of Mississippi, a descendant of slaves, identifying with Stonewall Jackson. I don’t even remember our discussion of slavery; I don’t even recall feeling a hint of unease or moral disgust at the South’s rationale for war. Ms. Mitchell represented, or at least this is how I remember it, the South’s rebellion as a valiant defense of states’ rights. She evidenced no prejudice or disdain for African Americans: I was her favorite student (or so I believed). She simply loved the South. And, for a moment, so did I.
Mississippi constitutes the backdrop to this educational blunder. To be sure, the state can be seen as a metaphor for America. With its rolling hills, lush landscape, and brutal summers, the state contains the contradictions of America’s promise and failures: poverty stands alongside wealth; patriotism joins with an edgy nativism; and pride of self-reliance can blind and easily turn into unfettered violence.
The brutality of Mississippi’s racial past is well known. Emmett Till, the sacrificial lamb of the modern black freedom struggle, was murdered in my state. Medgar Evers and countless others soon followed. That violence suggested Mississippi was what James Silver called a closed society – the one state that symbolized concretely the sickness of the nation.
In my little hometown, rumors circulated in 1964 of black children eating poisoned candy handed out by white men. The rumors proved untrue, but the sense that white folk were capable of such evil was corroborated daily. The New York Times reported that the White Citizens Council’s call for defiance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 precipitated an attack on a mass meeting at the Knights Hall in Moss Point on Magnolia Street. Three hundred people were attending a voter registration rally, singing “We Shall Overcome,” when bullets rang out. Nineteen-year-old Jesse Mae Stallworth, clutching her chest, fell to the floor. The Black men who chased the shooters were later jailed and charged with attempted assault, use of profane language, and for possessing a concealed weapon. Jesse Mae survived, but the reality was clear: white folk were capable of unimaginable evil.
Even though I was born in 1968 and came of age after the civil rights movement (not learning of Jesse Mae’s wounds until my forties), I still have vague memories, real or imagined, of the Klan burning a cross on the fairgrounds a few miles away from my home. My family says it never happened. The Klan simply marched downtown. But I still hold the memory with confidence. It continues to move me about, often triggered by some sensory experience. The sudden sound of a particular kind of southern drawl or old footage of the cruelty of the country. The fact that the memory itself may be false doesn’t diminish its felt quality or do away with the fact that it is, remains, real to me.
I agree with the Argentine novelist, Jose Saramago: “I don’t really believe in false memories, I think the difference between those and the memories we consider certain and solid is merely a question of confidence, the confidence that we place in the incorrigible vagueness we call certainty.” Perhaps the certainty of my view of Mississippi, of the known violence of the Klan and of respectable white folk in Citizens Councils, ensures that memory’s longevity.
But, in Ms. Mitchell’s classroom, this past was buried, obscured as her microphone amplified claims about the valor of the South and the courage of its fallen martyrs. The memory of the Civil War entailed, unconsciously perhaps, a denial of the scourge of slavery in the sense that the War and “reunion” banished the horrors of the peculiar institution from southern memory.
This act, at least for some, set the frame for how Jim Crow would be remembered. As the historian David Blight puts it: “reunion trumped race, but the war itself had bludgeoned the problem of slavery out of history.” Many folks in the South, now without a certain historical frame, carried with them the historical wounds of the region’s racial past. The wounds were understood as individual experiences, examples of isolated acts, the artifacts of a lost age or remnants of a world fleshed out in the imagination of the likes of William Faulkner.
This form of remembering or forgetting, among other things, gives the South its ghostly quality: that the burdens of past deeds and present failings weigh down the region, shadowing every facet of southern life with anxiety masked as charm and ease. This sense is heightened by the fact that the region has had to bear the burden of what is a national sin: that the story of a barbaric, racist South protects the illusion of an inherently progressive nation. I understand anxiety here not in terms of that which follows from desires buried deep inside the southern/national conscience; rather, anxiety registers that sense of terror experienced as one’s own helplessness – a region, and by extension a nation, haunted by its own bloody hands and its inability to come to terms with that very fact.
Of course, the wounds of our racist past register differently depending on what side of the railroad tracks you happen to live. For southern Black folk, history became the place where sorrow, death, and possibility came together; it contained the facts of brutal experience, examples of profound courage, and the powerful will of a people. The terror of black history resided in its perpetual haunting (remembrances of our dead) and its absolute necessity (the moral lessons that death and struggle impart). That history framed the choices, beliefs, and actions of a people caught in and captured by the illusions and failed promises of a fragile experiment in democracy. To invoke it, to remember history’s groves and contours, carries with it certain political and ethical claims about African American life and the evil of racism.
The blues chronicled this delicate dance. Here I am thinking of Duke Ellington’s powerful composition, “Across the track Blues” (1940), where the charm and ease of American social mores stand alongside a kind of melancholia that threatens to overwhelm. Across these tracks, slavery was not an abstraction. An old family member who would not talk about the past walked around the house or stayed in bed and stared vacantly awaiting God’s call home. A physical place somewhere in the town carried with it memories of a horrific act or the more mundane relics of a long history of racist neglect. Across the tracks, the brutality of Jim Crow did not disappear with the successes of the civil rights movement: memories of risk and violence shadowed each encounter with white folks and, beneath the surface, informed the rearing of children.
Memory, in this context, works on history, opening spaces for creative action in the shadows of ghastly acts, both past and present, by casting the whole lot into the messiness of experience rooted in a gamble about the future: that America could be otherwise.
I am certainly no longer that little boy, smitten by the heroism of a man who gave his life in defense of slavery. I have seen too much. Felt it in the gut. And now I see that some of them, who can’t imagine themselves as anything other than white, want to forget again. To palm off a fantasy for truth. A second “Lost Cause.” But we remember. We know the evil they can do. And we will not forget no matter what they try to teach us about what they have done and what they continue to do.
“Negro Is Shot by Sniper” by Claude Sitton https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1964/07/08/118668957.html?pageNumber=19
During the 1983 - 1984 school year, I was a freshman at Coahoma County High School in Clarksdale, MS, and took Mississippi History. We received new textbooks that year but still had access to the old textbooks, which taught the Civil War as "The War of Northern Aggression." Thus, as late as 1983, Mississippi was still justifying slavery and the war it fought to maintain slavery. As such, we can't be surprised by the battles we're fighting today.
Having lived in the Deep South for 20 years (10 of them in Mississippi), your recollections and observations strike a deep chord. Indeed, it seems the evil many of us wanted to believe was past is once again rearing up. All it seems to have taken is one election; it must have been buried in a shallow grave. Thank you for your heartfelt essay.