The Civil War is still with us – and with me.
I grew up in the Deep South of the 1950s and 1960s. Social change wasn’t only in the air; it was in the streets and, more importantly, in the city buses, the dime store lunch counter, and the public schools. The Civil War had ended a century before, but it seemed like it was still being fought in the civil rights battles that competed for newspaper space with the growing war in Vietnam.
The school board of Jefferson Parish in suburban New Orleans, anticipating the racial integration of schools, had segregated the high school student populations by gender – boys went to one school, girls to another. The first year of integration saw riots, fights, and protests, the more violent ones at the boys’ high school but including the girls’ school to a lesser degree. Federal marshals became an in-school presence.
I was in my last year of junior high. My parents were nearly beside themselves. They had grown up in a very different South – the Great Depression and World War II. They had not grown up in the South of racial and social unrest. And here they were, facing the possibility that they would be sending me into what looked like the daily violence of high school. They looked into several private and parochial alternatives, but the fact was that it would be difficult to afford it. Neighbors faced similar decisions, including the parents of my best friend next door.
It was an almost constant topic of dinner conversation. I was 14, and my opinion wasn’t invited or expected. For months, they continued talking during and after dinner. One night, in the early spring, I walked back into the kitchen from my room and told them I’d decided that I would attend the public boys’ high school, despite the chaos, violence, and integrated classes. I’m not sure what it was they heard in my voice, or the sheer surprise of their quiet son making the statement, but they looked at me and each other and then said okay.
I wasn’t being more virtuous; I just thought the conversation was becoming a bit ridiculous.
There was exactly one fight between a white boy and a black boy on the first day of class. And that was the end of it. The federal marshals eventually went away.
Looking back, I can say that, to one degree or another, we were all haunted by the Civil War.
Those scenes from my youth and others crowded into my mind as I was writing my historical novel Brookhaven. My grandparents on both sides had been in the first generation after the war. Their parents, my great-grandparents, had lived through it. Family members had died; the cities and towns they had lived in had been occupied by “enemy troops.” Reconstruction had turned the social order upside down, until Southern control had reasserted itself.
None of that had been forgotten. Versions and beliefs had been passed down through generations. One of my grandmothers refused to call it the “Civil War;” instead, it was the “War of Northern Aggression.” Racial attitudes had accompanied that, and thus my parents’ surprise with my announcement about high school.
It wasn’t only the South that had been affected by the Civil War. The North had been affected as well, in equally profound but different ways. As part of my research for Brookhaven, I’d read the poetry and fiction of Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Lonfellow, Stephen Crane, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, among several other writers. I’d also read and enjoyed literary studies, like The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993) by Stanton Garner. I’d read another one, published last year, entitled Haunted by the Civil War: Cultural Testimony in the 19th Century United States by Shirley Samuels. It is a contemporary academic work, aimed at an academic audience. It has some interesting insights for a general reader, but I preferred the book about Melville. I’d also read several of the novels of William Faulkner. If there was a writer haunted by the Civil War, it was Faulkner.
I didn’t intend to make Brookhaven a story about being haunted by the Civil War. In retrospect, it’s certainly a theme. It would almost have to be, since the Civil War seems like it’s part of mental DNA. It’s a fainter echo than it was for my parents and grandparents, but it’s still there. I think it became fainter that might after dinner, when I told me parents my unexpected decision about school. But it still lingers, and it likely always will.
Photo by Jason Boldero, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
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