It's (Not) a Joke, Son!

OK.

At last, we come to the tried and true, the traditional, the reason for most of these Confederate Memorials that pepper our Southern landscape.

For those of you who haven't lived in the South or visited the South, almost every southern city, town, or village has at least one standing memorial to either the Confederacy itself, or to the men who fought for it, or sometimes to specific individuals or armies. Next time you're off the Interstate and riding through a small town, just take a look. Usually they're located either on, or near county courthouse property. But sometimes they're put in more imaginative spots.

The defenders--I say--the Defenders of State Sovereignty, sir!

I hear there are a lot of them in New England, too. For the Union soldiers, of course. But they're around.

A few years ago I read an article about a pair of monuments that had been standing in the wrong towns for about 100 years. The statues were made by the same company and one was sent to a town in South Carolina and one to a town in Maine. Only the company screwed up the manifest and sent the Confederate one to Maine and the Union one to South Carolina. And nobody noticed for about nine decades. Finally a New Englander (it would be the Yankee) noticed the "CSA" letters on his statue's marble belt buckle.

Official communications twixt nawth and souf were exchanged. I think each town let it lie. Which is saying something, if you think about it.

I grew up with a dad who would often say something negative about Yankees. But as my mom was a Yankee, and with the sarcastic voice my dad would use, I always knew that he was kidding. I thought everyone made jokes like that. It was only after spending time with one of my dad's older brothers that I realized that there really were Southerners around who still hated Northerners. It wasn't a Kenny Delmar "That's A Joke, Son" funny, but the real deal. A lot of Southerners who grew up directly in the shadow of the Civil War really did hate Yankees.

It was sobering as a kid to discover this sad fact as I did on a trip to visit one of my dad's brothers in Florida.


My uncle Ersley was a master fisherman. I mean, if there was anyone better at fishing than he was...well, I don't believe there was, so there! The guy was a magician. If he'd waved his arms over the water and the fish jumped out into his arms I wouldn't have blinked. He was that good.

Once my dad and I were visiting him at his home at Sebastian Inlet in Florida. We were on a pier casting our lines out and reeling in one fish after another. Of course we had Ersley to coach us and tell us what kind of bait to use, where to cast, etc.

After a while, a father and son who were standing farther down the dock and watching enviously as we filled our buckets with fresh fish came over. The dad approached my father (luckily it was my dad he chose and not my Uncle Ersley) and asked him how we were catching so many fish. So I stood there while my father explained how to do it. My dad told the guy that he and his son were using the wrong bait and rigs and explained what kind of hook to use and to switch to shrimp as bait. He told the fellow to walk down to the end of the dock and the bait shop would sell him some white shrimp. Soon the guy and his little boy were catching many fish. He thanked my dad.

But my Uncle Ersley was livid. I watched in horror as he walked up to my father and dressed him down, just short of violence. "WHY DID YOU TELL THAT GODDAMNED YANKEE HOW TO CATCH FISH??!! DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, GODDAMN IT!"

He was serious. He was not kidding. He did not like the idea of that Yankee catching our southern fish. What a tool.

For my dad, the "damn Yankee" thing was a joke. After all, my mom was not only a New York-born Yankee, but half-Jewish, too! For my uncle, the Yankee-hatred was a harsh and unending reality.

This is the only photo I have of my Uncle Ersley. With a big fucking bobcat he killt on his property at Sebastian's Inlet. He bought that acreage in the days when that part of Florida was lightly populated, and he scowled constantly as it became surrounded over the years by new homes. "Goddamned Yankees!" He'd tell me, cursing them one and all. I kept my mouth shut. After all, I was half-Yankee!

All-inclusive Exclusive Memorial

Before I get to the usual suspects, I wanted to post one more out of the ordinary icons in the Confederate Memorial Park in downtown Fort Mill, South Carolina.

It's really strange and somehow curious how the city fathers went out of their ways to be all-inclusive in this park. Not every southern community was full of hood-wearing, lynching and murdering degenerates, I reckon.

This monument was erected to the Women of the Confederacy. Now, I've seen monuments to this outfit before. In fact, these ladies were sometimes completely and totally instrumental in having these monuments and parks created in the first place. Back in the day, I guess, someone had to organize these things, and if they were the ones organizing them, then by God they were sometimes going to get their own due.

So far in this Confederate Memorial Park, we have monuments for Indians, black slaves, and now the wimmenfolk.

And here she is: Monument to the Women of the Confederacy.

Closeup image of the pedestal for puttin' the women on.

I thought I'd put this here because they seemed to be VERY proud of the fact that this here band shell was built without one thin dime of stinking gummint money.

Catawba Indian Memorial

It took a few days to get back to this subject. I have even more to say about it in future and I'll try to finish posting some photos and comments tomorrow. For now, I have to rewrite a short story for an anthology. The editor asked for some logical changes and I need to finish that project.

As I said earlier, this is one of the more unusual Confederate Memorial parks that I have ever seen. One of the monuments there is dedicated to the local Catawba Indian nation. Like all of the nations that were here before the Europeans, the Catawbas have suffered terribly. One thing that they did--probably in an effort to ultimately survive--was to bend before the white man. That is, they largely sided with whites against other Indian nations and did their utmost to keep from being wiped out by the flood of Europeans. This they have (barely) managed to do. Of course there hasn't even been a fluent speaker of their native tongue since some time in the 1950s, and most of the Catawbas I've met look whiter than I do. But they still have a dab of a reservation and there is something remaining of their culture. So in that respect I reckon that their ploy to survive worked.

To this end, the local folk who created the park to honor the Confederacy erected a monument there for the local Indian tribe. To pat them on their collective head for being good neighbors, I suppose. Still, it's an unusual marker to see in what in most southern cities is a uniquely white-boys-only club.

Robert Garrett Marks informed me that the statue (unfortunately cast from concrete rather than carved of marble) was vandalized by local kids when he was in high school. It has since remained ruined. I guess there's no money in the box to fix Indian monuments.

The Catawba Indian monument in the Confederate park.

Details on the marble support column.

Closeup of the statue itself. Garrett told me that the arms were hacked off by teens some years back and that repairs have never been deemed important enough to tackle. I wonder if those cast concrete limbs are still in the possession of some dim-bulb asswipe.

Most Liberal Confederate Memorial Park on Earth

I went to Fort Mill in South Carolina today to be interviewed for a local publication there. I arrived with time to spare and decided to explore the small town for a bit. I strolled into the Confederate Memorial Park in downtown Fort Mill.

Now, it's pretty much average here in the South for just about every town to have a Confederate memorial of some type. Most have a simple statue or an obelisk or at least a plaque honoring the Confederate soldiers and states. It's almost a given. So I wasn't surprised to see this park. What did surprise me was the nature of the memorials there.

I'll post details tomorrow, but there was the expected memorial to the Confederate soldiers, and one in honor of the very concept of the Confederacy (which was a little more unique than most that you see). However, the strangest thing were the memorials to the non-whites that are in the park. Yeah, that's right--Confederate memorials for non-white people.

One was to the local Catawba Indians. I'll post details of that one tomorrow. The one that surprised me the most, because in all of my travels I have never encountered one, is the Confederate Memorial for African slaves.

In total, this particular Confederate park has icons set up for soldiers, for women, for slaves, and for Catawba Indians. This is a first. And keep in mind that I live here in the South and have seen a buttload of Confederate Memorials. This one was out of the ordinary, for sure.

This is the memorial obelisk dedicated to the slaves.

And the artist devoted relief sculptures to the slaves. One for male slaves (this one) and one for female slaves. So even here the patrons were trying to be all-inclusive.

Carved in marble, the reason for this honor.

Weather seems to have eroded the faces of the woman and the child.