Connor Towne ONeill - Down Along with That Devils Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

Down Along with That Devils Bones

A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

Connor Towne ONeill

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2021

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

V iet T hanh N guyen , Nothing Ever Dies

They say when trouble comes, close ranks, and so the white people did.

J ean R hys , Wide Sargasso Sea

Ever since that bright morning in March 2015, when I came across a Confederate cemetery on a major civil rights anniversary, Ive been chasing the story of Nathan Bedford Forrestthe Confederate generals brutal life, his long afterlife, and the fates of four of the monuments that honor him. That chase prompted a personal reckoning, too, and the story, for me, begins and ends with an empty pedestal. The first pedestal was the one I found in Selmas Old Live Oak Cemetery, and the tale starts innocently enough (or so I thought at the time). I was looking for free parking. It was March 7, fifty years to the day since Alabama police officers beat, whipped, and teargassed hundreds of Black demonstrators on Selmas Edmund Pettus Bridge. President Obama was in town to mark the anniversary with a speech and to cross the bridge in remembrance. More than 40,000 other people showed up, too. On my drive into Selma that morning, the streets of the usually sleepy city were suddenly constricted with cars, and the sidewalks were overflowing with people gathering for the event. So I turned into Old Live Oak Cemetery, just two miles from the bridge, figuring I might find an out-of-the-way spot where I could park. Old Live Oak is one of those cemeteries that is so expansive that it has its own system of roads. Its also a bingo board of Old South clichs: shaded by centuries-old live oaks and magnolias bearded by Spanish moss, and with dappled sunlight spilling across the mausoleums. And all around there were signs to alert visitors that Confederate Memorial Circle was closed for maintenance: do not trespass .

I was there to report on the Bloody Sunday anniversary, so I had people to interview, plus I wanted to hear President Obama speak, and I was already running late. But those signs caught my eye. At the center of the Circle, a woman was resealing the brick surrounding a pillar topped by a generic Confederate soldier. Next to her, a German shepherd sat at attention. Workers in jeans and cutoff shirts were putting up a wrought iron fence around an old cannon, and on the far side of the circle stood a tall granite pedestal missing a statue.

These days it wouldnt be the most surprising thing to encounter neo-Confederates at a civil rights anniversary. After Dylann Roof, after Donald Trump, after the man-boys with undercuts Sieg-heiling before his inauguration, after the tiki torches and the Dodge Challenger in Charlottesville, these sorts of juxtapositions have come to feel inevitable, the deep dissonance of the American story floating so much closer to the surface. But on that day back in 2015, I was affronted, yes, but also curious, the way you might feel when passing a bad car wreck. I just wasnt yet aware of the ways in which I was a part of the pileup, too.

I got out of my car and approached.

A woman with hair down to her shoulders, the wisps gone gray, and a man with a long white beard that grazed the third button of his blue coveralls came to meet me, their pace hurried, their eyes wary. The woman, whose name I later learned was Pat Godwin, told me the Circle was closed, that I had to leave.

Okay if I leave my car here? I said, then asked if they were standing guard.

Its private property, Godwin said. But her tone was not so much Get the hell on! as it was We can do what we please. So I asked again, and this time she told me they were preparing the grounds.

For what? I asked.

Well, for Forrest, Godwin replied, the answer apparently as obvious as if I had inquired about the color of the sky.

That empty pedestal, she then told me at great length, had once borne a bronze bust of Confederate Army general Nathan Bedford Forrest, but exactly three years earlier, on the weekend of the forty-seventh anniversary of Bloody Sunday, under cover of darkness, the statue had vanished. The theft had sparked a heated yearslong battle over both a replacement statue and the very ownership of Confederate Memorial Circle. Finally, after protests and lawsuits and city council showdowns, the Friends of Forrest (as they called themselves) came away triumphant, with a deed to the land and plans to replace the statue. The time was nigh to unveil their new Forrest monument.

B y that weekend in March 2015, I had been living in Alabama for almost two years, but I am originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Think Amish country, whoopie pies, an accent that stretches ohs, and a lilt at the end of sentences that makes everything a question. I grew up first on a farm, then on a subdivision that used to be a farm, and was now attending the writing program at the University of Alabama. I had been getting acquainted with my new home against the backdrop of several civil rights anniversaries. I moved into a drafty bungalow that abutted a train switchyard in Tuscaloosas West End three months after the fiftieth anniversary of George Wallaces stand in the schoolhouse doorhis infamous attempt to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling at the school where I now apprenticed as a writer. My first week of classes marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham. These anniversaries echoed through the present, a moment dominated by stories of voter-suppression efforts and the state-sanctioned murders of Black Americans by police officers. So it seemed only fitting to make sense of my new home by looking to its recent past. In fact, the story that had brought me to Selma that day was a reinvestigation of an unsolved murder from the civil rights era.

The Civil War, on the other hand, seemed distant and remote, while Forrest registered as little more than a joke about the Klan from that old Tom Hanks movie, Forrest Gump. He was, in my mind, a dimwitted relic of the defeated Old South. But the Friends of Forrest insinuated a sharper edge to Civil War memory, one that cut closer to the bone. Listening to Godwins voice harden as she described the pitched battle over this missing Forrest statue made me realize that if I wanted to make sense of this statehell, to make sense of this countrythen I needed to go back another hundred years.

In other words, I needed to study up. Thats how the bearded man in the blue coveralls put it, anyway, perhaps noticing the blank look on my face as he and Pat went on about Forrest. His name was Todd Kiscaden and he handed me a homemade brochure. Not to be outdone, Godwin told me that if Todd was giving me readings, then she had some for me, too. From the trunk of her car, she handed me a stack of pamphlets. Some were treatises with titles such as 12 Reasons to Fly the Confederate Flag and Forrest Fought for You, Will You Fight for Him? Others were reprints of propaganda from the era of the civil rights movement. One called the 1965 march to Montgomery an orgy, another claimed that the cold case I was investigating was actually a false-flag operation intended to generate sympathy for the movement. The packet usually went for $13, plus shipping and handling, with proceeds going to the cost of the replacement statue, but Godwin said she was giving it to me for free because we were both writers and she wanted me to have some material to write about. Shed been working on a book, she said: