The Confederate Battle Flag and My Novel

If I were God I’d spread my arms to calm the stormy waters, to stop the battle flag hysteria that has popped up following a heinous mass murder of innocents in church.

But, I’m not God and I actually do have a dog in this fight. Take a look at the cover of my novel Tangled Honor. There’s the Confederate battle flag as a background feature at the top.

In that context l admit that I’m conflicted. I’m more than conflicted. My feet are planted firmly on both sides of the fence. But here I go anyway:

I probably included in one of my first blog posts my favorite quote from southern novelist William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” The current Confederate battle flag hysteria is living proof that Faulkner got it right.

I don’t own a Rebel battle flag bigger than the size of my fingernail and those are attached to the pewter flag staffs of toy soldiers I use for wargaming the Civil War.

I’ve also reenacted many battles as a Confederate soldier under a full-size cloth Confederate battle flag, and will continue to do so. Yet, I’ve never put a Rebel battle flag bumper sticker on my car or worn one as a lapel pin of my suit. Why? Because the battle flag makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uneasy. It makes feel like a whiner who can’t let go of a war my ancestors lost.

Maybe that’s it. I don’t like whiners. Our ancestor Confederate soldiers gave it their all. As the poignant phrase goes, our Confederate ancestor soldiers gave their last full measure. God bless them for that. I’m like the John Wayne billboard I see nowadays: I don’t much like quitters. Go ‘til you fall, then get up and go further. Give that last full measure.

But for all that courage and perseverance, in the end they (we) lost the Civil War. After 150 years we southerners need to get over it and move on. Quit whining, for heaven’s sake. That means taking down the damned battle flag from places where it is a slap in the face of the African-American citizens of our wonderful country. That doesn’t mean everywhere, but it does mean many public places.

Forget the KKK and their “hijacking” of the Confederate battle flag. Those white-sheeted goons also carried the US Stars and Stripes and big Christian crosses. The KKK were (are) racist thugs who stole every symbol they could, so forget them.

Symbols are powerful and important because they mold emotions, and the Confederate battle flag has outlived its initial positive function to motivate southern soldiers to honorably give their last full measure.

I can’t get away from the stark fact that my Confederate soldier ancestors’ devotion was to a flawed cause. A deeply flawed cause. Not a lost cause, but a flawed cause. The wrong cause.

Just think of the Confederate battle flag as the banner carried by an army forged to protect the southern states’ “right” to secede so that the institution of slavery might be continued and the political power of the southern plantation planter aristocracy secured for a few more decades. That’s enough.

Come on, think about it: What can be more flawed than human bondage, slavery, ripping families apart? Generations of white men raping young African-American women with impunity? White men ignoring their children borne of a slave?

Do you know that in 1860 the US Census had three choices of race: White, Negro, and Mulatto.

 White daddies of kids born to black women were so pervasive that a name was created for those kids. And how many of those couplings between a white slave-owning man and his young black female slave would have been consensual? 

A word worse than “flawed” or even “despicable” needs to be invented for what slavery did to the white men of the south.  Not to mention the young black women, their mulatto children, and all African-American slaves destined to lives of bondage.

How disgusting is it to create terms like “mulatto” to acknowledge white fatherhood, but to let the term replace any responsibility for that fatherhood, knowing he may even profit by the young woman slave giving birth to a new infant slave worth a $1,000, a sum that would be more like $25,000 in 2015. It may have been the norm in the south before the Civil War, good business even, but even the memory is despicable, abhorrent. And the battle flag is the primary symbol connected to that aberration.

A short rhetorical question comes to mind. One used often with great effect in movies and books when a misguided person realizes in a moment of epiphany the great harm his actions have caused others. I remember it best from the grand WWII movie The Bridge Over the River Kwai when Alex Guinness’s incredibly strong, but flawed character utters, “Dear God, what have I done?”

Personally, I think all of us should be asking “Dear God, what have we done?” about a lot of wrong-headed laws and individual practices that have grown large in our culture as aftershocks of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Shame on us for Jim Crow voting eligibility laws and barring the doors of our schools and universities to African-Americans for a hundred years after the Civil War ended. Separate but equal schools were never equal, but were certainly very separate. Shame on us now for the ongoing  white flight from our city schools to continue the separation of our white kids from kids of darker colors.

Looping back to the battle flag on the cover of my second Civil War novel Tangled Honor. I liked it when the graphic artist revealed it to me and I still like it. I freely admit that the Confederate battle flag is a bold, beautiful and striking design. It’s on the cover of my book because the characters are southerners caught in the middle of the Civil War.  As of today Amazon offers my book for sale, Confederate battle flag notwithstanding.  

Yet, at the same time as Amazon posts my novel for sale, the company has pulled from their virtual shelves all Confederate flags.  As of yesterday, the National Park Service souvenir stores located on Civil War battlefield parks have reportedly pulled stand-alone Confederate flags from their shelves.

I just read an hour ago that the head honcho at the National Cathedral in Washington DC has said the two Confederate flags included in stained glass windows honoring Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson need to go.

That’s wrong-headed too. We shouldn’t try to scrub history shiny clean and simply erase the memories of devout Christian southerners as Lee and Jackson both were. By that line of thought we might as well “redact” all those Bible passages that tell the story of King David when he was less than a paragon of virtue.

Jackson and Lee had flaws. Both owned slaves. Yet Jackson also practiced civil disobedience to Virginia law that forbade teaching slaves to read and write. Jackson openly founded and operated for many years a school for slave children from all over his home town of Lexington.

Yes, winners of wars get to write the history books. But smart winners don’t try to erase their opponents’ most cherished symbols and heroes.

So here it is for me: Take the Confederate battle flag down from modern public and government venues. Get it off statehouse lawns and off state flags. Let the Confederacy’s first national flag serve the heritage function that is a valid historical interest to many of us. Let the market decide where the battle flag will be seen in the private sector. 

Yes, some people and organizations will continue to flaunt the battle flag, just because they can. But most of us won’t. Its appearance will fade away in time.

Back to my novels, I will say that even before the current battle flag hysteria began this week, I had already directed the graphic artist to replace the battle flag with the Texas flag on the sequel to Tangled Honor. My thought is the Texas flag on the cover will add variety and attract more buyers to the second book in the series, Redeeming Honor. Good timing, huh? I guess so. But I don’t plan on taking the battle flag off the cover of the first book.

 

Bug Out Bags

This is my fiftieth weekly blog post. I never thought I’d last this long, and now I’m hooked on writing the posts. Thanks for hanging in there with me for nearly a year, regardless when you started reading the posts.

So, you say, what’s a “Bug-Out Bag?” It’s the backpack, bag, or small suitcase that you keep fully loaded by the front door or under your bed or in the corner so that you can pick it up on your way out of your house fleeing in an emergency. What goes in a Bug-Out Bag?  I suppose that depends on what sort of emergency you are anticipating or are most afraid of occurring.

I confess that Nita and I do not have Bug-Out Bags. And I’m an old Boy Scout, Be Prepared, and such. Yet, if we had five minutes to get out of the house, we’d be running into each other trying to grab this (old family photo albums) and that (our wallets) and likely would forget our pocket handkerchiefs just like Bilbo Baggins did.  If we had no minutes to get out of the house in the middle of the night, with water quickly rising around our legs, like tragically happened to some folks in Central Texas during the Memorial Day Flood a couple of weeks ago, we’d run outside barehanded in our PJ’s.

A photographer by the name of Allison Stewart is creating a gallery of a collection of photos of the innards of people’s Bug-Out Bags. Allison lives in California where some people are waiting for THE earthquake or tsunami, or comet strike, or violent revolution of angry ghetto dwellers, or stoned old hippies, or whatever. To see some of the images of Bug-out Bags she’s already photographed, check out her website here:   http://allison-stewart.com/bug-out-bag/

I’m fascinated by the variety of what people put in their Bug-Out Bags. What different people consider their essential survival basics runs the spectrum: Food is a commonality, but that’s about it. Even water containers seem to be hit and miss. Some bags have little bottles of wine and batteries for electronic “essentials.” Some have guns. Some have outdoor camping stuff like a folding shovel and little lamps on a head strap.

Some have books. If I took a book it would be the old Boy Scout Field Book from the 1940’s, an amazing manual for living with nothing in the woods, published back when urban Scouting took a back seat to rural Scouting. Back to the modern Bug-Out Bags, I couldn’t tell how many of the photographed bags had kitchen matches or maps or even pocket knives.

Allison’s dad owns the gym where I lift weights to stay slim. Just kidding about staying slim. I go to Mike’s gym to “Live Strong and Die Old,” my girth notwithstanding. Mike doubts my plan will work. Regardless, during Allison’s visit to Lockhart last week, I volunteered to put together and bring a Civil War vintage Bug-Out Bag for her to photograph. That’s Allison on the ladder photographing my old reenacting stuff laid out on the white cloth.

I suspect my Civil War Bug-Out Bag stuffed with goodies from the 1860’s is the only one in her collection that will include hardtack crackers guaranteed to never spoil but will break teeth, a wrinkled apple, a little pressed steel frying pan and a lidded tin boiler, a wood canteen (in modern real life, I’d also take a bottle of iodine pills to purify nasty water).

My Civil War bag includes a brass powder horn and a handful of round lead balls for the black powder revolver I’d have stuck in the waist of my trousers, a big-ass Bowie knife (a hatchet would be better, but I don’t have one), a Barlow pocket knife, a candle and a little box of Lucifers, a canvas sheet coated on one side with Mr. Goodyear’s amazing new rubberized black paint, and a handsome cotton-wool blend knitted bed coverlet in a design popular in the 1860’s. All essentials needed to survive cold and wet weather, eat, drink, and shoot bad people.

The connection of my Civil War Bug-Out Bag and Allison’s photography project to my Civil War novels lies in a two sentences from the memoir of Private John C West of Waco. Describing the battle of Chickamauga, Georgia in September of 1863, West wrote of seeing a woman refugee crossing the battlefield, her home likely caught in the crossfire of the opposing artillery batteries:

“One poor woman was overloaded with coverlets, tin pans and other utensils, with a child on each side and two or three bawling behind. She fell down two or three times but scrambled on for life, while muskets sputtered in the surrounding hills.”

My heart goes out to that young woman 152 after the event. She probably had to bug-out in a hurry, her husband likely gone for a soldier, and the memoir doesn’t read like she had a Bug-out Bag waiting by the door. West didn’t write any further about the fate of the woman and her four or five children, and mega battles seem to be as tough on the local population as they are on the soldiers.

Artillery was pretty indiscriminate in the 1860’s, an all-inclusive facet of the war, if you will. Looking way back to the medieval times, black powder and then artillery started changing everything about war, for the worse, if you ask me.

Still, I like to think that young woman’s perseverance paid off and she reached safety with her brood. Lord only knows what happened to all of them in the days and weeks after the great battle. Maybe some Christian family took in the lady and the kids.

I borrowed West’s short aside about the woman and included her appearance in front of the advancing Texans in my current novel, Redeeming Honor. And, yes, I’m a softy and created at least a temporary sanctuary for the anonymous fleeing woman and her bawling children. After all, I have grandchildren now.

Fathers Day Image and Reflections

I’m a lucky man. Not only am I a happy husband, but I’m also a son, a father, and a grandfather – three degrees of kinship running concurrently.

Since this weekend is Hallmark’s other big holiday, the one which lags far behind Mother’s Day, I want to honor dads in this week’s post.

It’s natural that for most of us, our wives, daughters, and granddaughters are the flowers in our families, and we’re the gardeners, the guys who hoe the rows and plant the seeds, taking care of business. Nita will probably challenge me on that one as I don’t actually like yardwork or gardening, and it’s taken both our paychecks since the get-go of our marriage to keep our household blooming. Nonetheless, I contend that the recognition of dads takes a backseat to honoring moms, which is OK. I’m sort of glad no one expects me to wear lipstick.

The big black and white picture at the top was taken in 1950. My granddaddy Orland Todd is holding me. Yeah, I’m the baby with the Michelin Man arms. My 30-year old dad Frank is the guy under the cap on the far right, not long returned from two years in Europe during WWII. The other folks are my brother John, mom Betty Lou, and Uncle Jimmy.

The top side photo was taken two months ago and is my dad again, now at age 95, son Todd, and his son Jackson, age four months, and me again, some 65 years after the Michelin Man photo up there.

The next image is son Ben and his new daughter Violet. We all gathered for Ben and Meredith's wedding in April, a time when he said "I Do" and got not just a beautiful wife, but two beautiful daughters.

The photo under that is of Ben, Todd, and I in our Confederate duds at a parade a couple of years ago on Fathers Day weekend. The guys clearly have inherited their dad's proud nose. Sorry, boys, but thin has never been my strength.

Fatherhood in the McBee Novels

Now to the Civil War novels: One of the themes in the McBee war saga is fatherhood. As it is for many men, John McBee’s entry into parenthood doesn’t unfold according to a well-thought out timeline. If you’ve read Tangled Honor, you know that pretty much just the opposite happens more than once to McBee, in spite of his good intentions. I’m trying to keep the unpredictability and importance of fatherhood in the second McBee novel, Redeeming Honor.

I’m especially making an effort to highlight McBee’s dilemma in regards to his man-servant Levi, who may or may not be McBee’s son, or is perhaps his half-brother. The truth of who is Levi’s father is one of those unanswerable questions from the times before DNA and paternity tests. That uncertainty is overlaid with the apparently not uncommon forced sexual compliance of young Negro slave women, one of the more disgusting facets of the South’s “peculiar institution.” McBee is confronted with the constraints of the day in how white men treat their black (or half-black) man-servants, blood relative or not.

During the Civil War the white sons of officers often served as aides-de-camp to their fathers. McBee is not so lucky. As a forty-year-old captain, he has the services of an enslaved twenty-year-old man, who may be a related, but could not be acknowledged as such, and cannot even be publicly afforded such common courtesies as were offered to white civilian teamsters, laborers, and lowly privates in uniform.

The wall of separation was high and not to be scaled. Maybe such situations didn’t bother Southern officers until the end of the war brought about the dissolution of slavery, but I’m still wrestling with it.

One of the most interesting challenges in writing these books continues to be finding ways for John McBee and Levi to develop a relationship that is more than master and slave, yet does not endanger either man by crossing the deep abyss between the races. All in all, I think the 1860’s must have been very vexing times.

Top Ten Reasons Why I Write Civil War Novels

I like to read “Top Ten” list type articles about almost anything, and I’ve sometimes used that format in articles written for the Civil War reenacting magazines.  So I’m going to try a Top Ten list for this week’s blog post:

My Top Ten Reasons For Writing Novels About the Civil War, instead of putting my characters in some modern setting.

In no particular order:

Number 1 - “The Past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” I think William Faulkner wrote that and he was fine southern writer. From my experiences traveling across the south over the past fifteen years, I’d say he pegged it.  Perhaps the south is still so interested in the past because the winners of a conflict find it easy to move on to the next thing, but the losers have long memories and need to rationalize why they lost. Face it: Americans are not good losers and a bunch of southerners don’t want to forget, even 150 years later. Whatever the reason, I find it easy to read a good Civil War novel as if the events are happening right now.

Number 2 - Ancestors: Many of us have great-great-great granddaddies who were soldiers in the Civil War. In this age of Ancestor.com research, Civil War novels provide a means to connect with those men who we’ve found on limbs of our family trees. In my case, since the day in 1994 that I first confirmed that one of my McBride ancestors was a captain in Hood’s Texas Brigade in the Confederate army, it was a done deal that any novel I would write would be about the Civil War. I wasn’t courageous enough to write about my Confederate ancestor, though, until Novel #2, after I wrote Novel #1, my “learning novel.”

Number 3 - It Happened Here, Not Over There:  The battles in the War For Southern Independence (my preferred name for the Civil War) reached from New Mexico to Pennsylvania, and the soldiers were recruited from California to Maine. Moreover, most of the battlefields are still places where Americans can walk the same ground their ancestor soldiers fought over. Many battlefields are now state and national parks, great places for family vacations.  (I’ve discovered that is not the case in Europe.)  On the flip side of the positive aspect of visiting battlefield parks, some southern cities and thousands of farms were utterly destroyed by the war. It’s not hard to uncover harsh family memories and attitudes that still exist not too deeply buried.

Number 4 - It Was All In the Family: We, as a nation, own the Civil War. It was us against us. Brother against brother and all that. We love family feuds, and boy, was the Civil War a doozy. Moreover, the conflict set the stage for 150 years of ongoing cultural fencing between north and south, urban and rural perspectives. Until recently, there was even a college football all-star game promoted as Blue vs. Gray.  

Number 5 - Language: Both sides more or less spoke English. It helps an author when all the characters can understand what the others are saying.

Number 6 - History: The Civil War was horrible, but it determined the path we’ve been on for the 150 years since it ended. Beyond the obvious fact that the Civil War violently settled the question of a state’s right to secede from the union, the Civil War drilled deeper than the geography question of borders. I don’t think anyone ignorant of the Civil War can truly understand our national culture or get a sense of our national identity. I don’t think anyone can appreciate our wonderful national racial inclusiveness, which exists juxtaposed in stark contrast to lingering racial strife, without knowing some history of the Civil War.  What better setting could there be for a truly American story?

Number 7 - Boyhood Infatuation with guns and soldiers: Some days I’m quite sure I’m still twelve years old, because muzzle loading muskets still are art objects to me, and uniforms are what real men wear. Yeah, knights in armor are pretty manly, too, but armor rusts. Real men in blue and gray uniforms didn’t rust. They got wet, dried out and soldiered on, and I’ve always wanted to write about them.

Number 8 - Slavery: No other issue has bedeviled our nation more than the “peculiar institution.” Evil incarnated. A relic of the barbarism of ancient times. How to rid our nation of slavery stumped the best brains of the colonial era, men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, nearly a century before the Civil War. Any good book about the Civil War has to include slavery through characters who are enslaved, or at least include a setting that reflects slavery as an unfortunate reality in the south, a reality that was widely believed to be irreversible.

In my case, it was the discovery through reading census documents and city directories that my southern McBride ancestors owned slaves, slaves who were named and described in the documents, making them real people, not vague textbook references to an evil institution. I hated to learn that my family tree includes slave owners, but I was also morbidly fascinated by the discovery, and wanted to write about it.

Number 9 - Romance: From reading quite a few published memoirs of southern soldiers, it is apparent many young ladies of the south were not so personally shy or culturally constrained that they spurned the attention of the young southern soldiers. The soldiers’ memoirs don’t usually directly address romance, but veiled references are not uncommon. It’s a human condition that lusty young men and lonely young women will find each other, and that is wonderful grist for a novelist’s mill. Plus, the lack of a language barrier helps, not unlike our GI’s bringing home more war brides from England than France after WWII.

Number 10 -Heroic Acts:  War certainly brings many bad things to a country, but no one can deny that war also provides a setting for men and women to perform heroic acts of bravery and heroic acts of compassion and kindness. Those are gratifying things about which to write.

And a Bonus Number 11: Young grandson Jackson is already a reader J, and I want to him to read Grandpa’s novels someday, and how better to hook him than with a good Civil War tale?