Flying Weeks

The seminar is over. Four weeks have flown by.

In our last week, we went on a tour of Savannah. We started at the very large Confederate edifice in Forsyth Park.

We examined the ways the past was displayed on Savannah's city streets.

I especially "enjoyed" that you can't see this sign, which announced this building was the Union Army Headquarters in 1865.

I walked up the building's steps to snap a picture of the whole sign from where you could see it, and when I actually read it when I got home, you can see the authors were more interested in suggesting the U.S. army's occupation of the house may have damaged the family's property than in helping readers understand when or why Savannah fell to U.S. forces.

So, the pro-Confederate content of the sign blew my "hiding pro-Union history through vegetative overgrowth" conspiracy theory out the window!

Anyway, we wandered through the beautiful and hot city streets,

looking at markers old and new,

past beautiful houses where enslaved people once worked,

surrounded by all sorts of architectural elements that make Savannah seem so delightful.

We ended at a riverfront statue, dedicated to African Americans in the region.

The marker's text, written by Maya Angelou, caused a lot of controversy. The inscription says:

We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships together in each other's excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy.

That last line was, apparently, added to soften the quote's morbid sentiments. Even with that line, however, you can understand why there might be a reaction. How many tourists want to think about the horrors of slavery and its legacies on a day when there is the smell of pralines in the air and the river is home to fake sidesteamers?

Still, I'm glad that it is there, even if one not terribly historically enlightening monument can't really compensate for the city's generations of reflexive Confederate memorializing.

As I got ready to leave, I kept thinking about how the publicly displayed history of Savannah, like the publicly displayed history of so many southern places, seems so disjointed.

Antebellum Savannah had a large African American population, many of whom sought their freedom when they could, and yet right next to the African American monument on the riverfront, which tries to speak to slavery's role in shaping the lives of African Americans, is a marker which completely discounts their experiences and even their existence.

Perhaps what is most appalling about this particular sign is that it is a recent addition to the waterfront, and yet it is as if all the work that people have done to write more inclusive and all-encompassing history for the last four decades never happened.

The South is still all pro-Confederacy, all White, and all anti-Sherman according this sign, funded by the Georgia Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration.

As I leave Savannah behind, and go home to the Carolinas, I wonder, with all the competing ideologies, agencies, interest groups, and understandings, will the 150th anniversary of Emancipation and the Civil War add to the country's understanding of the past?

Will we knock down old signs/interpretations and/or put up new ones?

Can we stop fighting the Civil War? Do we want to?

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