We Don’t Give a Damn, Scarlett: Jonesboro, Georgia
Living Unthinking over Unmarked Graves
Before I found Jonesboro, I was sure Tara, Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation, didn’t exist. (And it doesn’t. Gone With the Wind was fiction, people!) Still, like most Northerners and lots of Southerners and other Earthlings, I “learned” most of what I “knew” about the South watching that movie. I think it was re-run on TV every year when I was a kid, as if it were our own national epic, like the Odyssey was to the Greeks. Weird, since the narrative is slanted to make us feel sorry for our former enemies. Weirder still, our epic’s enemies were, and still are, within “us.”
For our trips into the southeast, Atlanta would be the eternal crossroads, all flights and roads eventually leading there–even to Rome, Georgia. One trip South led me in and out of Atlanta at least four times. On this trip, I discovered “Tara” was close to the airport, so I squeezed in a visit.
Tara Boulevard is actually an exit off Interstate 75. Imagine if there were an exit for Oz outside Kansas City or one for Middle Earth outside Wellington, New Zealand—but wait, there probably are, complete with kiddie rides, witches, wizards, and/or hobbits. We’re inured to fakery. Tara Boulevard is real but doesn’t lead to hoopskirts, waltzes, and refinement. It is one of the most scaborously ugly suburban roads in the South, and that’s saying something. It’s lined by billboards for accident lawyers and struggling businesses in strip malls, rows of used tire shops, tattoo parlors, and, of course, those other heralds of American down-market capitalism, wig and pawn shops. The unrelieved ugliness sprawled for miles. Even the Southern cookin’ place along the oddly foodless strip served dried-out fried catfish with catatonic indifference.
Yet, just off the boulevard, the town of Jonesboro was a marvel, shilling its claim to be the inspiration for Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s imagination. Jonesboro clung to antebellum history with a few gracious houses, like the privately owned 1840 Warren home, where a war hospital had been set up during the Civil War . I knew Jonesboro was a key historic battle, completing Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta. Even though I didn’t yet know Jonesboro buried a subchapter in my own family history, I was mainly curious about seeing the battlefield.
But there was nothing to see. I couldn’t believe the town had done nothing to commemorate the battle, so I stopped at the visitor center/ museum to find out more.
An old rail depot housed a Tara Tour in the county’s “history” center. The Official Clayton County Visitors Bureau claimed to be the True South, complete with a website (http://www.visitscarlett.com) with a crackling soundtrack of Atlanta burning arrayed around a cameo of Scarlett and Rhett smooching. Puzzled by hulking busses unloading Italian and Japanese tourists suckered into the gift shop, I ran smack into the garrulous Tiffany, a clerk and history student who gave me her version of Jonesboro’s realities. It was interesting to meet someone even more cynical than I about phony history and America’s gradual Disneyland-ization of everything. She talked, I listened amid the “history” museum as an endless spool of Gone with the Wind played on the video screen and foreign tourists studied movie gowns and other memorabilia in glass cases—you know, authentic American historic artifacts. The movie scene played Scarlett’s slaves’ confusion about the attack on Atlanta for comic relief.
Tiffany confirmed the town’s lack of real Civil War commemoration. “The town, especially the north end, IS the battlefield,” she told me, “and hundreds of residents live unthinking over unmarked graves of combatants.” The last remnant of the battlefield was about to disappear, a developer having won an easement to build a parking lot over it.
Tiffany showed me the museum’s tiny corner devoted to the Jonesboro battle story, saying that locals really weren’t interested in either the battle or Gone With the Wind, only tourists, especially foreign ones. She was also forthright and irreverent about her version of Civil War and Southern history in general, asserting that the Confederacy’s General Hood was a fool, (living out his last years as a “drunk on a front porch”), that the Union’s General Sherman was indeed a rough prick (with slaves of his own via wife’s family in Missouri) and a war criminal; that Lincoln was also merciless—“a dictator, suspending habeas corpus.” Tiffany claimed that many Northerners were relieved when Lincoln was assassinated.
I returned to Tara Boulevard bit shocked at the town’s lack of concern for the battlefield. All museums engage in marketing one way or another, but I’d never seen such overt pandering, such shameless dumbing-down of history. Clayton County ignores our true shared past, speaking to our Hollywood hearts, not our brains. Heading back to Atlanta, I endured Tara’s ugly roadside again, wondering why we don’t give a damn, Scarlett, about living in sprawling commercial squalor while we idolize gracious country estates that never existed; why we cover our past—our sacred ground–under pawn shops, wig outlets, and funeral parlor parking lots.
I would soon find out that my own blood had a claim on that real estate.
Gracious Manners and White Riots: Ending Up in Oxford, Mississippi
Hardly an hour’s drive away from the village of Money, nestled in hilly woodlands and backed by a national forest, Oxford looked like a magnolia-scented citadel holding itself apart from the Delta’s social quagmires. Home of the University of Mississippi, the town mixed tranquility with student energy. I felt we’d stepped back in time from the raggedy world of campuses in the West. The kids we met were unfailingly polite, and so retro in the male students’ fashions of short-shorts or shirts tucked (!) into khakis. Old time Southern manners disarmed—I was “sir”ed more in one evening than in a whole year back home in Denver—all so sincere and natural that a Northerner used to brusqueness might just want to linger in the graciousness.
But the incident the campus is most famous for is not so gracious—just one more iconic case of Southern anti-hospitality. When African-American airman James Meredith won a Supreme Court appeal to attend the all-white university in the fall of 1962, he was met with local cruelty and state obstruction. The threat of mass hostility was so great that President Kennedy reluctantly sent in U.S. Army and Military Police battalions along with National Guard support for “battleground” conditions. On-campus riots against Meredith’s admission grew so violent that U.S. officers were shot in a burning car while armed locals killed a journalist and a young onlooker.
Visiting Ole Miss on a warm fall evening, George and I were told to “turn right at Meredith statue” as if it had been integrated, no pun intended, into mental models of the campus map, commemorating Meredith’s solitary steps into the administration building. Strolling, George and I did spot African-American athletes and cheerleaders around the stadium and random black faces in the central campus. Current black enrollment was nearly 17 % of the student body, but the overall impression was of a white fantasia, a bleached Mississippi spit-shined until it reflected back exactly what white Mississippi would like to be.
The 50th anniversary of Meredith’s admission was fully commemorated with educational programs, but the 79 year-old alumnus himself did not attend, finding nothing to celebrate and likening it to Germans celebrating the destruction of Berlin. In fact, Meredith called for the destruction of the 2006 statue erected in his honor, calling it “hideous.”
A month after the 2012 commemoration, on the night President Obama won re-election, a group of Ole Miss students rampaged on campus, breaking today’s apparent racial harmony when about 40 attendees at a pro-GOP rally felt blindsided by Romney’s loss. Animated by Twitter-fed fictions about counter-riots, fires, and gunshots, the group burned Obama signs, chanting “The South Will Rise Again” while the crowd grew to four hundred, including campus parents.
Though the rally remained a minor campus incident gone South, it made national news and stirred controversy in Oxford. Given the university’s tarnished image, Dr. Don Cole, assistant chancellor for multi-cultural affairs, told George and me that any racial incident on campus would be magnified. “We dug ourselves into a hole with our past and now we’ve got to dig out, above and beyond mere obligation.”
An African American and Mississippi native, Don has a startling story of his own, having dug himself out of a hole he most emphatically did not dig. He entered Ole Miss as a freshman only six years after Meredith’s admission crisis, experiencing the same raw racism. White students waved rebel flags in his presence, threw garbage at him, and shoved him off sidewalks. Eventually earning his PhD in mathematics, Don joined the faculty and later was tasked with raising racial awareness as part of student orientation. He added the Romney Rally Incident to the orientation program, insisting that students face misguided attitudes directly. He saw much of the misconduct growing out of the students’ range of backgrounds in social growth. Don saw racial awareness as a seamless part of the university’s educational mission, lamenting so much rigorous training in math and sciences but so little in social education.
George asked if there was any negative pushback from faculty.
“No, I have support from higher up,” Don said, adding a curiously measured phrase: “I’m not overly disappointed with the faculty on racial issues. Good guys in the North correct themselves quicker. It’s slower for folks to step up here, so bad guys get away with more.”
Though he saw the South’s social flaws so clearly, Don saw himself as “a black Southerner first,” before any other identity, whether American or Mississipian. “I still love the South,” he said, easing back in his chair with a wistful smile. “I still have hope for it. I want it to be the region that will liberate itself from the bondage of race.”
As I learned of Don’s work raising awareness and encouraging critical thinking about Mississippi’s past struggles and present progress, I felt satisfied that we’d ended our Mississippi journey in Oxford. We had travelled through what gets celebrated in the region’s history, what’s ignored, and what’s deliberately left out. We’d explored Vicksburg’s myths about its past, from getting stuck in that VFW pageant at the restored Civil War warship, through the military park historians’ still coping with warring views of history, and along the creaky planks of the Old Courthouse Museum. Greenwood seemed to be just waking from a prolonged nightmare, still stuck in racial divides, slowly revitalizing as it emerges from its long era of enforced inequality. Here in Oxford, our endless Southern conversation returned to how history is or is not commemorated, and how the collective memory grows dim unless we all keep on talking.
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