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In the Shadow of the Flag – fivefifths
Long drives down Carolina state roads through dusty main streets straight out of the 1950s and miles and miles of tobacco fields. We would go from Charlotte to Elizabethtown, the tiny town of narrow roads and backyard pecan groves carved into the deep green woods of Bladen County. Me and Dad; I sat in the hot leather passenger seat with the giddiness of a kid finally old enough to graduate from the backseat -or, as in my case, had a very understanding father. A stop in Rockingham, a town I remember as not much more than gas stations and foul hog trucks
A man blocked our truck with his. Dad blew the horn and the little grey truck crept up slowly so I could see clearly the license plate. A symbol—a blue X on a red field with stars; the battle flag of the old confederacy. The Rebel Banner. The man, a little man about as dark from the sun as my own brown skin, with angry eyes. An argument. A threat to get his boys from inside the store and kill me and my father. My father’s hand creeping toward the glove compartment. Him waiting 30 minutes to the next gas station to show me the bareness of it. A map of the Outer Banks.
Like any Black kid throughout the South, my childhood was defined in part by the gargantuan space taken up by the Confederate flag and the ghost of the Confederacy. For many of us, there’s that sinking feeling when we see bumper stickers or shirts. The wariness when two or more people with the emblem get together. For me there was the cognitive dissonance of being friendly classmates and group partners with boys who wore the flag on their shirts. There’s murals and state flags and university mascots and magnets and everyday grocery products. It is the biggest brand in rural Southern America.
It is also one that indicates a profound unsafeness for many Black folks. I’m still an avid adherent to the “flag test,” where I judge the potential safety of gas stations on long country roads first by the presence of any other Black people and then by the presence of rebel flags. Many places from Virginia through and to Texas are not safe. My life of driving has been building my own mental Green Book, of places where I can go and not feel the burning heat of hatred. Of course, there are often hiccups. As in my dad’s case, sometimes you have a kid who drank a large Coke and just can’t hold it anymore. And then you have to make decisions.
Regardless of your reading of the origin of the flag or the Confederacy, ignoring the strong context in which the flag and Confederate iconography and rhetoric have been used is an act of willful self-delusion. In the space after the turn of the 20th century, when violence against Blacks in the South had become formalized as policy and the second incarnation of the Klan burned crosses across the South, the Confederate Flag became a talisman of hatred. It presided over hundreds of lynchings, of cars full of burned activists, of bombed churches and beaten and broken protesters. It waved proudly by the South Carolina capitol when Dylann Roof assassinated a state senator and murdered eight others in cold blood at Mother Emanuel. And it waved proudly at full mast, even as the other flags were lowered. The symbolism is almost too rich to be believable.
Black folks in the South are born under, grow up under, and die under the shadow of that flag. As much as it represents some largely imaginary heritage of gentile whiteness, it also represents our heritage, a heritage of lynchings and Jim Crow and beatings and poll intimidation and death sentences and mass migrations. As equal claimants to the legacy of the South, we want it gone. Burn it.
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After Charleston – Eve Ewing
As he stood at the podium, tall and gray and grim as ever, we knew he would summon the words of the man whom one calls upon at times when unshakeable reassurance is called for.
“…God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope.” So spoke Dr. King, and so spoke President Obama. Men we are to love as we love our own fathers, if we are to be called good citizens of the republic and game for the play of liberty. Believing them—these stalwart, learned men in suits—is like believing that high school love will last forever. When you’re in it, when it’s true in your heart, it seems as incontrovertible as your own fingertips. And the second you see how thin and temporary it is, it dissipates so thoroughly that you forget what it felt like.
Ours is the generation reared on hope. We believed in it when it came to succor us from the mouth of the man on the red and blue poster, eyes turned ever upward. A man who looks like me, who once lived in the neighborhood where I now sit here writing these words and not feeling buoyed by hope or by anything at all. Not feeling anything at all. I spent most of last Thursday staring at the wall, unable to keep any food down or go outside. I was physically sitting in bed but mentally sitting in church, absentmindedly touching the fabric of the blanket like the fake velvet on a warm pew. I wasn’t alone. “Numb” was the word that emerged on the screen of my phone over and over, from friends in New York, in Boston, in DC, chirping at every arrival, ignorant of how devastating it really was. “Angry,” too, and “sad.” But mostly numb.
So I have to ask. To the men in suits, dead and alive, I need to ask you, though I have long stopped expecting an answer: what comes after hope? Because I’m afraid I’m all out.
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