Chapter 2

For all my twelve years of school in Arlington, and well beyond, I had no grasp of Arlington's political and social topography.

I knew the hills physically, the way a kid knows them, bicycling up and down the residential streets – back when kids played outside, exploring the creeks, damming them with stones, looking for crawdads. The housing developments were all built on hills, bounded by small creeks. I bicycled on my fat-tired one-speed 24-inch bicycle all around Dominion Hills, our first neighborhood; then on my four-speed English bike with thin tires, before our family moved to Stratford Hills.

But Arlington had a larger topography I could not comprehend – not because it was hidden from me, like so much else was hidden, but because it was so obvious. You either got it or you didn't. Colored kids got it, of necessity. White native Virginians got it in their own way. But newcomers like us were slow to get that particular lay of the land:

Arlington straddled an ideological fault-line.

You had Abraham Lincoln seated in marble on the Washington D C side of the Potomac, looking harried and profoundly human, and maybe bayonets bristling somewhere beyond. And on the Virginia side, you had the invisible presence of General Robert E Lee with his clipped white beard and brass-buttoned uniform sitting astride his invisible white horse, forever ready to protect his native Virginia and the Confederate cause.

Militarily, Arlington occupied a strategic position. The Potomac protected the capital from a rapid strike. And even while I was growing up in pre-Beltway Arlington, our stretch of the Potomac – from Great Falls and Chain Bridge, downstream past Francis Scott Key Bridge and Georgetown, past Memorial Bridge, the Tidal Basin, and Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon – all remained a silent battleground.

What I did feel, even without benefit of the more sweeping view that time accords me now, was the ubiquitous presence of the Civil War in my boyhood. Now I realize too, the Civil War was still within living memory – remembered by the oldest Americans around the country. I knew vaguely that my maternal and paternal great-grandfathers had fought in it, but I didn't know on which side.

Realer for me were the acres of identical white marble tombstones spread across our own Arlington National Cemetery. Those too had their origins in the Civil War.

You couldn't grow up in Arlington without feeling a certain proprietorship over the cemetery. I don't think I even knew it was created to bury the Civil War dead. What I recall is the swell of vague pride I felt whenever we took my aunts and uncles and cousins visiting from Oklahoma to see those rows of tombstones.

Overlooking the grave markers was Lee's Mansion, the stately white-columned house that guidebooks were careful to identify as the Nellie Custis-Lee Mansion. We all shortened it to Lee's Mansion. It was easier to say, and to be honest, it conjured old Robert E himself up there strolling among the painted wooden columns. Lee had married into the Custis family, which was related to George Washington, and wealthy enough to own 200 slaves and the sprawling tract of tobacco plantation along the Potomac that included the land on which the Pentagon was built eighty-some years later. So even the Pentagon – the largest office-building in the world, as we reminded our visitors, also with pride – was bundled in with the Civil War.

All that helped illuminate the war. But for kids like me, pedaling and roller-skating around our neighborhoods, the specter of the Civil War arose not so much from those tourist sites as from the voices of our teachers and our friends.

My eleventh-grade American History teacher at Washington-Lee High School was Miss Sally Lovings. She was short and chunky with gray curls and a strong jaw, and a proud spirit – with a dramatic flair for teaching. She brought bushels of delicious ripe peaches from her trips back home, to Georgia, to share with her students.

What I remember most vividly, though, was how transformed she was by her emotions when she described General Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia. Her normally sunny face darkened, her brow deepened, her whole body swiveled about, as she described the swath of ruin Sherman left, after he burned Atlanta and marched his 50,000 troops the whole 285 miles all the way to Savannah. Never in my life had I seen anyone vent such fury. And for an event so long ago! She described a trail of destruction far worse than the normal pillaging and theft of livestock to feed troops. Sherman ordered his men to burn farmhouses and barns and crops, to throw dead animals into wells. Atlanta was the industrial hub of the South, with rail-lines in several directions. Sherman did not just cut the rail-lines; he ordered the crossties ripped up and burned, and the steel rails bent into loops known afterwards as "Sherman's neckties," all of it aimed at breaking the industrial backbone of the South.

At the end of her rant, Miss Lovings clenched her jaw and shook her head fiercely. "Georgia will never forget. Never forget."

Her anger was a gift. It helped me understand what divided the nation, and what divided me.

I hear those voices now, and they still resonate within me enough that I realize I felt an answering chord. I'm tempted to call it borrowed loyalty, a kind of contact high, and count it one of the threads woven around me. The passion of southerners was sometimes enviable. It was part of theilaments that bound me.

I hear my friend Barry's voice that way. I don't even remember Barry's last name. I just knew him through Explorers. Born in Virginia – as I imagine his parents were too – Barry was a skinny kid with an angular face, dark hair, slightly bucked teeth, and a highly opinionated intelligence that set him apart from those of us who were less formed. He wore black-framed glasses and a knowing sneer, when he called us newcomers 'Yankee carpet baggers' He said it jovially, but you could hear the grit behind it, the challenge – maybe from his own family, but his face has become for me the face of generations beyond.

Whenever our Explorer post camped in the woods by the battlefield at Manassas, Barry was usually the first one to dash out in search of Civil War artifacts. The bullets turned up sometimes in the plowed fields that agonhat remained of the old trenches and earthworks – exposed by a plowing or by a drenching rain; those chalky-gray oxidized lead bullets the size of your thumb. Or they showed up glittering under the current of Bull Run, the nearby stream where a lot of the fighting took place – so much exchange of gunfire in and around that stream, as to give the Manassas battlefield its alternative names – the First and the Second Battles of Bull Run.

Barry was after more than bullets. Bull Run creek was only knee-deep across its whole width, so Barry would wade, methodically zigzagging, feeling his way upstream with hands and feet. One time he discovered the iron hub of an old wooden-spoked wheel lodged in a cleft between rocks. He was exuberant lugging that treasure back to camp.

"It's a caisson wheel, I'm pretty sure!" He showed me the thick water-blackened stubs that remained of the old spokes.

"What's a caisson?" I wanted to know.

Barry explained it was used for carrying heavy ammunition, how this one must have gotten mired in a retreat. But after turning the iron hub every which way for inspection, he concluded "There's no way of telling whose it is."

I saw the hint of disappointment in his slump. Which retreat? The First Battle of Bull Run, when Robert E Lee was forced to retreat, or the Second, when it was the Union army's turn? Somehow Barry needed to know.

I envied his intensity. I didn't ask myself the question I pose now, looking back: Why were Virginians so attached to the Confederate cause? We, especially in northern Virginia, were not Deep South, like Georgia or Alabama. And why did Barry insist on calling it the War Between the States, rather than the Civil War?

Those are the sort of questions I pursue now – questions I either didn't think to ask at that age or chose not to ask – that I can ask only now, which lead me from one discovery to another. I found out only recently, from reading, that more major battles were fought in our little corner of northern Virginia than anywhere else in the entire Civil War.

As a boy, I subscribed unconsciously to the prevailing Hollywood myth, that the heart of the Confederacy lay in the Deep South.

I pictured rows of cotton, not rows of tombstones; scenes from Gone With the Wind; Brer Rabbit hopping down an idyllic roseate dirt road past split-rail fences and kindly old Uncle Remus. I loved the lush Disney animation, the richly painted backgrounds, the scheming of Brer Fox.

Recently, however, I've gotten past that particular veil, enough to better understand Virginia's claim to the heart of the Confederate cause. Most of the Virginians I knew carried a touch of intellectual pride and class, distinct from the blunt pride I heard from Georgians. They were literate, proud that Virginia was the birthplace of five Presidents; proud of the University of Virginia, with its beautiful rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, I discovered only recently, had to be dragooned into writing the Declaration of Independence – which someone with an eloquent pen was going to have to write, after the Continental Congress decided in 1776 on the need to break with the mother country. Benjamin Franklin was the obvious choice, but he was back from an exhausting council of the Iroquois Federation and suffering from acute gout. The next obvious choice was John Adams.

Adams refused, demurring in favor of the younger Jefferson.

"Why will you not?" Jefferson asked Adams. Jefferson was only 33, anxious to return to Williamsburg to help write the Virginia Constitution,

"First," said Adams, "you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Third: you can write ten times better than I can."

Another moment of state pride came nearly a century later, just ahead of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln approached Robert E Lee to offer him command of the Union army, and Lee chose to lead the Confederate army instead. If the South did secede from the Union, Lee declared he would fight for Virginia.

Virginians extolled Lee as an aristocrat – educated at West Point, well-married, and a consummate tactician, who out-generaled his Yankee counterpart, the uncouth Ulysses S Grant, at the at the head of the North's superior forces.

Virginia, having contributed its finest to the War of Independence, contributed its finest as well to the Confederacy – Lee at the head of the troops, Jefferson Davis as its president, Richmond its capital.

Here is the distinction I'll make in these pages, which I've not seen drawn elsewhere:

I have never heard anyone take pride in that more distant past, when in 1619, a hundred miles south of Arlington down the lacy-fingered shore of the Chesapeake to James Bay, the first human cargo of kidnapped Africans was unloaded in chains. My teachers glided over that event, as if it were simply one of the many 'firsts' at Jamestown – among which were the first blast furnace for ironmaking built in the western hemisphere, and the first plantation to grow tobacco for export.

But the arrival of that captured slave-ship could hardy stand up as a source of pride for Virginians. It was only by a severely twisted logic of convenience that the Jamestown colonists sought to capitalize on the windfall that had dropped anchor with its human cargo. That logic came straight from the perverse hodgepodge of magical thinking that roiled around the throne of King James I, for whom the river and bay and settlement of Jamestown were named.

James was an ardent believer in witchcraft. He liked imagining that certain women opened their loins to the devil, kissed his anus, took in his evil, conducted black sabbaths in the forest where they drank the blood of sacrificed infants. Witches were to be burned at the stake, whatever their protestations of innocence.

The same magical thinking turned Elizabeth I's virginity into a political instrument. Virginia was so named. The virgin Queen had dominion over unicorns as well as the British isles, and God-ordained victory over the Spanish armada, destroyed in a storm.

The same convenient magic trumpeted tobacco as healthy for the lungs, which justified the Virginia colony's new and lucrative export. The colonists had learned about tobacco from the Indians, who smoked it ceremonially, 'remaking' the tobacco for peacemaking and other rites. The Virginia colonists used their white magic to turn tobacco to addiction and cash.

In short, this was the quality of thinking that the Jamestown colonists used to justify putting a price tag on the enslaved Africans – to convert them from human beings into chattel, like the ivory and gold already being pillaged from the west coast of Africa. Unlike the slavery of ancient Greece and Rome, where enslavement was a temporary condition, brought about by war and economic circumstances, where slaves could rise into the upper ranks of society, the Jamestown colonists promulgated the concept of permanent slavery based on color.

It was not a proud moment in human history. It was a shameful moment: the creation, out of magical thinking, of the racism in America that haunts us today.

I wonder, too, if the shame of that moment helps further explain the pride Virginians take in the Civil War, two and a half centuries later, and could stand in the spotlight of erudite discourse concerning this tactic and that, and the heroism or villainy of generals. I think of Barry crouching over that water-logged caisson wheel-hub, turning it every which way in search of clues to its origin. The Civil War could be discussed rationally, across differences – discussed even elegantly, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson's classical rotunda – discussed passionately, as Sally Lovings raged over Sherman's march through Georgia.

Compared to the origins of racism in the era of King James, the Civil War was safer. I wonder if it was even an avoidance.

We were all avoiding, I think now, in different ways.

As teenagers, my outlander friends and I used to joke at how the locals were always refighting the Civil War. We snickered at their arguments, their determined advocacy of 'States' Rights', their declarations of "The South will rise again!"

Why did we newcomers dismiss such fervid attachment to a war that had taken place more than eighty years earlier? Their fervor should have been a warning. Instead, we turned it into a joke. That was our avoidance. I don't know how we could have done it any better. We were teenagers. We had to be cool. And we couldn't see into the future: the resurrection of American racism that surrounds us today.

In any case, the joke was on us. The war was not over – not the way our textbooks said. Yes, Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but only as a 'fit and necessary war measure'. It freed only the slaves in the Confederate states. Slave-holders in the Union states were allowed to keep their slaves. I must have known this simple fact, growing up in Virginia. I am shocked now by its cynicism.

And yes, in 1865 General Lee surrendered his sword to Union General Grant at the Appomattox courthouse, ending the war where it had begun, in Virginia.

But the war was not over. Not for those kids. Not for Sally Lovings. The war was just simmering.

In the meantime, our segregated schools were teaching us all white supremacy.

Today I recognize essentially the same fault-line that ran along the Potomac, zigzagging now across the whole landscape of our nation; across regions and cities; and across the dangerously volatile digital terrain of social media – a division that crackles with new force, amidst the political instability of the present.

W E B Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, declared in 1904 that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." He was taking aim rhetorically at the then-popular phrase, 'the Negro problem', and his being asked in various ways, 'How does it feel to be a problem?'

The biases are losing force among the young. But for now, the reins of power remain in the hands of white males.

As an old white man, I watch on my television screen all the old white men parading their preternaturally silver haircuts around the floor of the Senate for the cameras like prize sheep at a 4-H Fair. I know, as most of us do, that many are fronting for unseen moneyed interests and powerful lobbies and are blocking legislation on such crucial issues as climate change, gun control, immigration policy, voting rights, and women's reproductive rights – all of which they understand in only the rankest political terms, which is to say not at all.

I detest them. I want to run amuck in their flock, knocking their expensively coiffed heads together – take off one of my shoes and use it to whack their butts and listen to them baaaaing as they scatter for safety.

But I understand them. I recognize myself in them. I know their obliviousness and their fear. I know their blindness, from having grown up in my part of the South, which anticipated some of the blindness today.

James Baldwin understood them devastatingly: "Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can face."

When I hear the voices baaaaing 'Make American Great Again', I hear chosen ignorance, and under the ignorance, the white male fear of vulnerability in the face of a changing America.

The fear rises most stridently from whites in the Deep South, within the geographic footprint of the former Confederacy, the region historically dependent on the permanently enslaved to work their tobacco and cotton, their sugar cane and citrus groves – where whites have always trembled in fear of unleashed black manhood and democracy.

My tenth-grade American History teacher, Miss Sally Lovings came to mind recently, during the 2022 special election in Georgia, when control of the U S Senate hinged on the run-off vote, and the black pastor, Raphael Warnock, won by a hair's breadth. What would she have thought?

Sally Lovings declared her belief that the Ku Klux Klan had "served a useful purpose" at the end of the Civil War, and after Reconstruction, by way of "keeping Negros in their place." She had a way of pronouncing the word 'Negro" as Nigra, and sometimes directed that pronunciation with the suggestion of a wink toward two or three boys who sat languidly in the row of desks by the door – 'greasers', more interested in building hotrods than studying American History.

I know now from my own teaching that she was trying to engage those two or three boys. And she was, I continue to believe, an inspired teacher. But at the time her attention to them came across as a sort of racist flirtation. She concluded and got them to agree – that the KKK had "once had its place," but was "no longer helpful" – which I'm sure was intended to coax them, and perhaps herself, into accepting the changes that lay ahead. This was in 1955, two years after the U S Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools like ours unconstitutional. So, we were all at the threshold of change.

Whatever my judgements at the time, I have to credit Sally Lovings. She'd touched a chord with those greasers, gotten them to agree the KKK was "no longer helpful." And her discussion of the KKK came as close as any to approaching the issues of race and racism that my other teachers all avoided.

Her outburst over Sherman's march to the sea touched a chord with me; gave the war substance. Neither the anger nor the fear and bitter retribution that fairly sang in the blood of the defeated South was a subject for discussion in any of my classes – certainly not in my Civics class, taught dispassionately by a liberal teacher who was active in local politics and, for that reason I'm sure, refrained in class from venturing into current affairs or disclosing his true feelings.

That teacher's delivery was occasionally droll and ironic, but almost wholly canned. He diagrammed the system of checks and balances, and separation of powers that made our federal system work, with little attention to current affairs. About all I remember outside that airless presentation was his sarcastic grandiloquence in referencing 'the sovereign state of Rhode Island'. I remember no discussion of the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling that was beginning to resonate elsewhere, prompting resistance in southern states including of course Virginia. Surely it was a monumental opportunity to explore the tension between states' rights and the central government. This may be a failure of memory on my part, but it seems to me the 1954 desegregation order was generally avoided, like the stillness before a storm.

My teachers, including Miss Sally Lovings, avoided any direct discussion of race. They did not discuss 'race' as a social construct. Not 'race' as a factor in history. Not 'race' from the perspective of literature or language or science.

There we were, living in the compartmentalized society created under Jim Crow, bound by race, our prejudices deepened by segregation, and yet race per se was never discussed. No teacher ever invited us to try stepping outside our white identities long enough to consider our whiteness a subject for discussion. No one raised the possibility that the concept of 'race' as something intrinsic and permanent, and based on color, might be peculiar to the United States.

Stranger yet, considering all the visual evidence to the contrary, I heard no challenge in school to the assumption that people were either white or black, with nothing in between. Nothing to refute the legacy of the 'one drop of Negro blood' that prevailed in the South. Families that identified as black knew of the mixing in their family histories, even if they could not document its source – usually a white slave-owner. Families that identified as white, and could carry it off, looked the other way.

I will say this. Whatever the denial surrounding me, and my own denial, the recognition now of how much was hidden below the surface, helps me see how the color-line operates commonly below the surface elsewhere today. And I, as an old white man, am freer than some to call out those of my fellow old white men who are fearful of losing power, and ask: What is the cost to us all of your avoidance?

I've come to believe the answer lies substantially in our unwillingness to acknowledge the dark magical thinking of Jamestown that continues to sustain white supremacy.