My husband, Leon Hale, was shot at by
Hitler’s boys during fifty individual bomber missions in World War 2. “I had an
easy war,” he says. “I was in an airplane.”
Most of us have a relative who fought or
died at the hand of German Nazis, or one of their allies. Some of them, like my
husband, are alive to witness the outrage of self-proclaimed Nazis marching in
our country alongside white supremacists, the KKK and others opposed to
removing Confederate war memorials.
My grandfather fought on the Confederate
side in the Civil War. Family lore has him, as a boy of fourteen, shinnying up
a pole to raise the Confederate flag at Ft. Sumter in South Carolina. He
mourned the rest of his life for the plantation existence he’d left behind. The
life of a gentleman farmer whose family owned slaves.
My Texan father, born in the 1890s,
believed in segregation. It was as much a part of Houston at midcentury as the
smell from the Ship Channel, or any July 4th encomium to the virtues
of representative government. I would come home from college in the sixties, a
year or two before he died, and try to change his mind.
He thought my convictions about equality
were youthful idealism.
He was a thoughtful man who read history
in his spare time, but he had been molded by his upbringing and environment.
For him, segregation was a reality and a boon he didn’t question.
On Thursday nights, we often ate at The
Confederate House, a popular spot where fine food was served by dignified
African American waiters in white coats. Famed leaders of the Confederacy
smiled down on the scene from every wall. My particular favorite hung in the
entrance hall. Robert E. Lee. He looked so sad.
I loved the Confederate House. I loved
the fried shrimp, and the genteel waiters. I loved the “black bottom” pie.
It took a few more years before I could
see what I’d been looking at.
Today’s youth of all races don’t
understand how segregation insinuated itself into our lives. It was the air
passing through our lungs, saturating our blood. It was literally everywhere.
Every meal, every visit to a store, or a public toilet. Every day at school.
Unstated, unquestioned, rigid separation. Unforgiving, too. One black person’s
stumble became the shortcomings of a race. Imagine if your white nephew’s drug
addiction painted your family with the “sorry” brush, much less your race.
I never once heard anyone question it. Black
schools were shabby. No one asked why. The poverty was somehow the fault of the
people who dwelled in the surrounding neighborhoods. And yet, they were the
people who raised us. Generations of us. My mother, me, my son. We loved these
black women, respected and admired them. Our parents relied on them.
A perfect example of cognitive
dissonance, if ever there was one.
My father might have known better. He’d
been educated abroad, but the romance of the Old South dies hard. The romance
of losing. It rides the back of those Confederate horses we see on so many
statues. It mourns with the angels of sorrow in graveyards.
Honor. Chivalry. You will die for honor.
Your honor as a man, your family’s honor. The honor of your womenfolk. Suicide
is preferable to dishonor.
The dishonor of what made all that honor
and chivalry possible, namely an institution that required people to be counted
as “stock,” may not have entered my father’s mind. Did he ask himself how the
attitudes that supported slavery connected to the segregation we lived under? If
he did think about it, he never let me know.
Those Confederate statues in
Charlottesville, and elsewhere, have no meaning except what we bring to them. To
this granddaughter of a Confederate soldier they represent the South’s Defiance
and Sorrow after appalling bloodshed in the name of autonomy. Renewed defiance,
since most were raised well after the war ended. We have the right to be wrong,
and cruel, those statues say to me—even when the rest of the civilized world
has repudiated the institution we were wrong about.
My schoolteachers hardly mentioned slavery
as a cause of the war. Perhaps they were too much aware of the blood ties
between it and the segregation they still lived under.
But it’s easy now to feel how the
statues appear to someone whose grandparents were slaves. They cause pain.
Is that what you or I want? (I don't.) But maybe that’s what the demonstrators intend. To keep pain alive, to keep fear
alive.
Fear has always been a weapon
fundamental to Klan activities and to the rule of despots worldwide. When self-declared
Nazis march beside white supremacists, and everyone is armed, they vividly evoke
the bullies Hitler employed to intimidate ordinary citizens, the paramilitary S.A.,
or Brownshirts. Without them, he would never have attained power.
In Charlottesville, they carried
swastika banners, clubs and shields, wore Hitler quotations on t-shirts. Marched
with torches on Friday night while chanting “Jew will not replace me.”
Jew? Huh? How did we get from statues of
Robert E. Lee to antisemitism?
The United States Army—our grandfathers,
uncles, brothers—helped liberate Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, places of horror,
death and sadistic suffering. Places of mass murder. Places whose sole measurement
was the efficiency with which they turned white people of many beliefs into starving
slaves, then corpses.
White people. People exactly like you
and me.
A diabolical alliance, white rage and
Nazi brutality. An un-American alliance.
