Saturday, December 9, 2017

This is About the Confederate Flag

It's day something or other of the Southern California fires. Six, I think.

Atlanta is not burning, but I wrote this about the Confederate flag. If you are a friend or a family member, I hope you will not post anything in the future in support of the Confederate flag.

Thanks for reading. It's longer than my usual blog post. Get a beer. Or a cup of coffee. Put your feet up. Open your heart.

Looking toward Ventura


I loved him, my Robert E. Lee, for his horse—though I can’t remember if I knew the horse’s name the day I brought my replica of the Confederate general home. Complete with saber, pistol, and a Confederate flag secured to the back of the saddle, both horse and rider were cherished. All of the various accessories were separate pieces, and sometimes at night, I would unsaddle the horse, remove the general’s gray hat and lay them both on the ground (which, in reality, was a shelf in my bedroom) to sleep. In the morning I’d set them up again, saddle the horse, place Robert E. Lee astride him, and prepare for another day of battle, saber raised, flag flying. In my head, this involved galloping, and Traveller, whose name I learned at some point, was a galloper beyond compare.
             I knew about galloping. And I knew the names of some of the other horses in my collection because I learned them from television. Buttermilk and Trigger were excellent gallopers too. I was five years old in 1957, the year that I received my final horse and rider, and my head was a receptacle for whatever I saw on TV. Galloping with abandon toward the screen astride my palomino Wonder Horse, it’s a wonder I didn’t give myself whiplash bouncing on that spring-loaded steed. Roy Rodgers, Dale Evans, the Lone Ranger, and Tonto were my heroes, and it was thrilling to keep pace with them.
            I have 13 of the Hartland horse and rider sets manufactured in the 50s. I memorized to which general, TV cowboy, U.S. president, or Indian warrior each pistol, feather, spear, rifle, bow, knife, saber, flag, or hat belonged. I did not know the history of the Confederate flag or that my General Custer had engineered genocide. On TV cowboys and Indians fought each other. Soldiers defended the nation. Women and children needed protecting. By the time I finished grade school in 1969, I must have known something about the Civil War. Walter Cronkite was already covering the Civil Rights Movement on the evening news. When I started high school, I must have learned something about the struggles of Native Americans, but all that comes to mind is the anti-littering crying Indian TV commercial. At least I knew enough not to throw my Coke bottle and Hostess Cupcake wrapper out the car window. By that time Robert E. Lee, General Custer, and their anachronistic companions had been in my possession for more than a decade, and my head was still soft as a Twinkie when it came to social consciousness.
            There were approximately 40 horse and rider sets manufactured (some were different poses of the same character) by the Hartland Company in the early and mid-1950s. My 13 were acquired one horse and rider at a time. My father bought them for me. Some auditory memory track tells me that Sundays he took me to church to give my mother time to rest at home with my little brother. I have no memory of actually attending church with my dad--a Presbyterian who’d tried and failed to convert to Catholicism when he married my mother. Maybe he told my mother he was taking me to church in the same manner than he told her he’d convert while failing to mention that he was divorced and therefore not eligible to become a Catholic. What I remember is holding my father’s hand in a cramped store that smelled like cigarettes, cigars, and candy. My dad would buy a newspaper for himself while I had the agonizing delight of choosing a new horse and rider for my collection.
            It wasn’t until I left for college that the collection was packed away. Knowing how much I valued them, my mother wrapped each horse and rider and hid them away in the attic in a sealed box out of reach of my little brothers. My sophomore year of college my father died suddenly of a heart attack one February night after supper. His death was so unexpected that I never thought of asking for one of his vintage silk ties or one of the pens he carried in his shirt pocket. The neon sign from his business would have been a treasure, but I had nothing of his (until my mother gave me a pair of cufflinks year later) except the box of Valentine’s Day candy that he’d already mailed to my dorm by the time I was en route to his funeral. And my horses and their riders, still tucked away in my mother’s attic.
            I was in my 30s, a mother myself, by the time my mom sent the box from her house in Iowa to my house in Los Angeles. When I displayed the horses and riders in my family room, I wasn’t thinking of the Confederate flag or racism or genocide. I was thinking of my father and how I’d tell my kids that the grandfather they’d never know bought each and every one of those horses and riders for me. The collection lived a quiet life in that house, tucked away in dark room with garishly unfashionable carpeting and used only as a playroom and occasional guest quarters for visiting relatives.
            The collection has moved with me four more times over the years. It’s garnered many compliments from my children’s friends and nostalgic children of the 1950s. No one has ever exclaimed, “Cool! A Confederate flag!” Or "How terrible! A Confederate flag!" Mostly the generals, presidents, cowboys, and Indians have kept a low profile, sandwiched between books and travel souvenirs on an upper shelf in a study or family room until, post-divorce, I moved into a house where I could put anything anywhere I wanted. In this house that I moved into with my mother, I put the horses and their riders in my kitchen on a high perch above the kitchen cabinets overlooking the kitchen island that is the heart of every gathering.
            This year, post Charlottesville, I hosted a writers’ salon and there were writers of color attending. Some of us do not really know one another personally, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone or come under suspicion as an idiot or a racist. I took the horses down. It was easy. Robert E. Lee and Traveller were not purchased by my father to inculcate me with racist values. They were purchased to indulge my love of horses and to indulge my father’s love for me. My Robert E. Lee has no chance of attracting a gathering of white supremacists with Tiki torches, but by removing him and his companions, I was honoring my respect for my fellow human beings.
            The Confederate flag was, and is, the banner of the seven states that seceded from the United States of American in order to preserve for themselves the institution of slavery. The Confederate flag, often argued as being about Southern pride or history or patriotism, is first and foremost the emblem for the states that chose not to abolish slavery. We pour a lot of fiction into the heads of children, and as adults we are exposed to fiction too—on Facebook, on TV, and on talk radio. Sometimes it’s difficult to track down the beginnings of ignorance, but we can always find its end. As for knowledge, there’s no end to it. Or to paraphrase the actor Iron Eyes Cody (not a Native American, but an Italian American who pretended to be an Indian) in the famous crying Indian commercial: People start prejudice; People can stop it.  
             
Looking toward the past

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