I am not here in praise of the Confederate flag. Mostly, I would like to burn it and root out all it stands for. But its true story has been buried and overwritten with a false narrative. Its true story isn’t lost but misplaced and misused. Its story has been appropriated, revised, negated, replaced by the notion that America’s 19thcentury Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with glory and honor and a just cause. The remaking of the Confederate flag as story-bearing image became so powerful that in late 1990s, a former president of the Asheville, N.C., chapter of the NAACP dressed for the first time in the gray uniform of a Confederate soldier, stood on downtown bridge, and waved a huge Confederate flag at passersby.
That man was H.K. Edgerton, who once ran for mayor of the mountain town. When I interviewed him before the election, we talked for over an hour about black history, gentrification in Asheville neighborhoods, Edgerton’s drum-playing younger brother, the city’s ill-fated attempts at “urban renewal” in past decades, and his work for the local chapter of the NAACP. Edgerton lost the election. And he got kicked out of the NAACP when the local newspaper published a photo of him standing with two well-known, local, white separatists. The two men, Kirk Lyons and Neil Payne, have direct connections to the Idaho-based, neo-Nazi group, Aryan Nation.
In the photo, Edgerton stands with the men, each of them holding to their foreheads a white napkin folded into a triangle. In a long reflection on what the Confederate flag means, Chris Haire says of the photo, “It was a thing of bizarre beauty, an image that was so shocking because it simply could not be predicted” (2011).I remember the photo. I remember the two men, whom I had interviewed for a possible story but later ditched because they creeped me out so totally. So did the white-napkin stunt. My nicest thoughts on it all resembled what Haire said of Edgerton’s oft-repeated highway stand, his membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, his speeches at neo-Confederate events, his 2002 march from Asheville to Texaswith flag in hand: “[H]e was out of his gourd.”
Some say that Edgerton is paid to be out of his gourd (he’s still walking and talking, carrying that flag). I suggest he has bought into, or been sold, a false narrative that persists, even if (and perhaps especially if) easily accessed facts disprove it. Mississippi’s 1861 Ordinance of Secession, for example, states, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.”
Yet, in interview after interview, Edgerton repeats the well-circulated “heritage-not-hate” lie. He told “Ashvegas,” aka former Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Jason Sandford, that Americans should honor April as Confederate Heritage and History Month; they should “acknowledge [the] honorable folks who fought for the South.” Enslaved Africans did not see the Confederate flag when they were shipped to America; they saw the U.S. flag, he explained, saying, “Discarded history and lies created all this hate.”
Discarded history? American history isn’t that hard to find, even when various powers-that-be try to rewrite the textbooks (in 2016, a member of the Texas board of education told the Washington Post that slavery was just a “side issue” in the Civil War). At the Alamo, which I visited for the first time over the Christmas holidays, Texas history can be seen/read on large boards, or listened during the tour. Whose history do the boards and audio files tell? Who narrates the story? Which point of view gets transmitted?
I ask these questions now as a native Alabamian, a Deep South gal who grew up in a town where the “Azalea Maids” still dress up as Southern Belles. I say this as a Southerner who went to a university where, well into the 1980s, fraternities and sororities would pay local African-American children to dress up like “farm” children and follow their “Confederate” wagons (trailers towed behind BMWs) in a parade that had something to do with pledging or homecoming. I can’t remember which. Whatever the celebration, I’m sure the Confederate flag was waved there and about, with pride and an implicit support for Southern pride wrapped up with the Lost Cause—the belief, still held by many, that the Civil War was a just and noble one, that was simply a fight against “Northern aggression.” In this narrative, slavery was not the primary reason for the conflict.
Haire, who wrote about Edgerton and admitted that his Alabama-born, racist grandfather kept an old Confederate flag, said he hung “the Rebel flag” on his bedroom wall when he was in high school: “For me, the flag was a big ole fuck you to the man.” He carried the flag with him to Clemson University, where a roommate displayed a poster portraying Buzz Aldrin planting on the moon not the U.S. flag but the Rebel flag. Haire continued to believe in the Rebel flag until he learned more about it: The controversial flag we know today was not the official or even the first emblem of the Confederacy; it was one of many battle flags used during the war. Its connection to St. Andrew’s blue cross—a connection that Edgerton dutifully repeated—was spurious at best (historian John Coski notes St. Andrew’s status as a martyr, which aligns with the Lost Cause theme).
Haire goes on to explain that what really changed his mind about his beloved flag was learning that the “tradition” of flying it over the South Carolina statehouse came about in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement. Given the animosity in the South to that movement, the raising of the Rebel flag was “a revisionist middle finger,” Haire observed. Furthermore, he said, there are only two groups who buy into the revised history the emblem represents: bigots and “folks who believed in a fantasyland version of the Old South, one that was straight out of Walt Disney's Song of the South.”
Why do such false narratives persist? In 2010, Catherine Chaput wrote about rhetorical circulation. This theory expands on the traditional rhetorical situation—the “triangle” of rhetor, text, and audience canonized by rhetorician Lloyd Bitzer. Chaput argues that this triangular view is too static. It does not allow much if any agency to rhetors and audience once a “text” is created. It does not allow the “text” to be shared, passed along, appropriated, transmuted, revised, edited, and so forth as it moves or circulates through time and space, among various audiences (and with new rhetors who may have no notion how the “idea” came into being, much less how it changed from its original meaning). Chaput describes circulation as a kind of movement of commodities and products. In this light, rhetoric’s “persuasive power can be seen as deriving from the repetition of values added and exchanged through disparate communicative acts.”
What does that mean, in more or less plain English, for a persistently corrupted narrative like the one behind the American Confederate flag? Think of it this way: Through repetition, variation, invention, cultural shifts, appropriations and whatnot, words change in meaning over time. For example, the modern English word gaycame to us via Anglo-Norman French, perhaps as early as the 12th century (when a host of French words entered our language). In early usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, gaiemeant “Bright or lively-looking, esp. in colour; brilliant, showy.” This is the meaning used in the 13thcentury Ancrene Riwle, a Middle English text written as a guidebook (rule-book) for female anchoresses who wished to demonstrate the appropriate devotion and decorum in their monasteries. By the 1960s, the OED tells us, gay came to be associated with homosexual men. (The evolution of gay, its transmutation into LGBTTQQIAAP+, and the Rainbow flag is another story, well worth the telling.)
Back to the Confederate flag, if you’re still with me. Chaput says it “serves as a deeply affecting sign for many rural, white Southerners, who identify their patriotism and history through it.” Telling them about the flag’s connection with secessionists’ desire to maintain the slave economy “does not penetrate this affective energy.” That is, a series of communications, delivered and received and interpreted over time, have settled the idea in their minds and hearts. It’s connected to their “group’s social survival … independent of rational deliberation.” The idea of the Confederate (Rebel) flag energizes them, while also “rooting” them in the familiar and “quarantining” them from other ways of interpreting their world.
That rootedness displays the power of narrative, however true or false.
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