Daughter of the Confederacy

by

A year ago, we moved back into our repaired home after the Great Flood of 2016. It’s a testament to our slow recovery that we’re still unpacking boxes of stored items. One item I came across recently was a true treasure: a file containing the genealogies of both sides of my family of origin.

I delivered the file of crumpled papers to my husband, who has developed an affinity for genealogy since his mother’s death earlier this year. After he entered the information on my paternal line into his online family tree, he came back with news: my great-great-great-grandfather, Neill Buie Jr., served as a Confederate corporal in the Civil War. It was a shock to realize that my direct ancestor’s military service qualifies me for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, one of the primary sponsors of monuments to Confederate soldiers. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the UDC as a “confederate” organization leaning toward white supremacy.

Somehow, confirmation that three-times-great Grandaddy Neill was a Rebel soldier drove home once more the reality that I’m a recovering racist. There’s no other way to say it; I was born into a Southern white family, reared in Southern white society and benefited from white privilege for decades before I knew what it was. I’ve said the N-word carelessly and unintentionally insulted African-Americans out of thoughtless prejudice. Now that I’m aware of racism and white privilege and do my best to overcome it, I still struggle with what to do with my family history, which is peppered with experiences in a context of Southern racism.

One memory stands out. When I was a teen-ager, one of our last family vacations before my father’s untimely death included a stop at the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Ga., subject of a new short film, “Graven Image.” At the time, I thought only about the carving’s white beauty standing out from the mountain’s gray granite. I think I even bought a replica Confederate officer’s hat at the gift shop; there’s certainly a photo in my mother’s album of me wearing one. All the pictures from that trip show my parents, my brother and me, happily posing in front of monuments to a mythical heritage that none of us questioned.

Only later did I learn that Stone Mountain was the site where the Ku Klux Klan was relaunched in 1925. We’d had two brushes with the Klan. Once in Tampa, a convertible filled with robed Klansmen sped past us on a main road, frightening my mother. And on that happy family vacation, we came ‘round a bend in North Carolina to confront a huge billboard showing a robed Klansman mounted on a rearing white charger proclaiming, “This is KLAN Country!”

Not until decades later did I understand my own complicity, however distant and tangential, of such white supremacy. It’s a sin of omission rather than commission; I didn’t overtly practice racism, but until late in life I didn’t overtly reject and resist it, either.

With Great-Great-Great-Grandaddy Neill now confirmed as a Confederate soldier, I understand a little better the fury of those who defend Confederate monuments as historical monuments. When you’ve been taught that such memorials enshrine a key part of your heritage, you hang on to them. It’s only when something triggers the monuments’ deeper meaning that you realize their symbolism emits a "stained white radiance," as novelist James Lee Burke wrote.

Ironically, just a few days before its removal began, I stood beneath the gigantic statue of General Robert E. Lee in Dallas as part of a protest on behalf of the Dreamers facing the rescinding of DACA. Part of me secretly regretted that Marse Robert’s memorial was going to be taken away because it was a magnificent sculpture on its artistic merits. But there was nothing for it; its symbolism outweighed its artistry and it had to go.

It turns out that the relocation of the Lee statue will cost Dallas taxpayers close to $500,000 because of court-ordered delays, technical problems, and a fatal accident involving the removal crane. That may seem a high price to pay for the sins of preceding generations, but I think it’s a pittance compared to the lost, broken, mangled, and oppressed lives it represents. Never to be measured are the costs in blood of Civil War soldiers on both sides, or of generations of slaves used and brutalized inhumanly as livestock. Never to be counted are the costs of African-American lives blighted by racism. Never to be assessed are the costs to the hearts, minds and souls of racists infected by hatred. Still to be determined is how much racial enmity and injustice will cost America today and tomorrow.

Yes, I am a daughter of the Confederacy, but I am not and won’t become a Daughter of the Confederacy. I can lament the sins of my forefathers and foremothers, but I can’t redress them and won’t extol them. I can only thank God that I have become first and foremost a daughter of God through Jesus, the Christ, and pattern my behavior after his teachings of love and justice. So, if their relocation moves us toward becoming the beloved community that Jesus envisioned, that Black leaders like Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr. extolled, I’m fine with transferring all those prideful, foolish memorials to history’s scrap heap.

Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.