My Confederate Girlhood

2021. They've hogtied that poster boy for the Lost Cause. He's riding rough and dusty. Riding his trusty mount right down to the ground. I'm in Brooklyn, wide-eyed before the livestream as a crane lifts the Robert E. Lee statue from its lofty perch on Richmond's Monument Avenue.If you know anything about the guy, you wouldn't be wrong to assume his steed was fashioned after Traveller, the saddlebred the Confederate leader rode for the duration. But Traveller's proportions did not impress sculptor Antonin Mercié as grand enough, so he selected a larger, sleeker French thoroughbred as his model for the general's mount. A mythic horse meant to stand for all time. To deliver the sinister lessons of White supremacy to children like me in tomes marked Honor and Liberty.Family cell numbers fill my text stream. My sister is on the scene, cheering as the demolition crew takes a chainsaw to the general's torso.Glued to the screen, I watch them take the old Reb apart. The legs, though severed from the torso, still bestride the lower regions of the sculpted mount.Done and dusted, texts my sister, her voice joining the chant: Hey, hey! Good-bye!Never did I think I would see it.Such memorials were meaningful symbols where I come from—a descendant of the Southern planter class, a White native of a small Virginia city with the unfortunate name of Lynchburg. I know too much about history now, about my family's specific role in it, to think that what the statue stood for could ever be deconstructed with a mere sledgehammer. And yet, as a flatbed truck hauled away the legless Lee, I wanted to believe it was an auspicious sign.At Lee's 1890 unveiling, John Mitchell, publisher of the nation's leading Black newspaper The Richmond Planet, decried the expenditure of public funds to honor a traitor. Mitchell correctly predicted that a Black man would bring Lee down. A Black-owned company did oversee the crane operation to remove the statue. Moreover, the removal of the Confederate shrines along Monument Avenue and throughout the country is a testament to years of diligent efforts by African American leaders dedicated to Civil Rights and racial justice.Discussions on how to address Richmond's monuments, whether to remove them or contextualize them, persisted for years. The regional authorities might still be debating the issue, if not for widespread national demonstrations during the 2020 pandemic, led by young Black activists. Protesting the murder of George Floyd and other BIPOC citizens by police, crowds of folk of all races and backgrounds got the wrecking ball rolling. But it was only after protesters toppled Jefferson Davis's seditious bronze ass on June 10, 2020, that the City of Richmond decided to remove the other Monument Avenue statues.Lee was the last one standing. And he stood for months and months while the old guard fought to keep him. Finally, Richmond's mayor Levar Stoney, an African American, expedited Lee's removal in 2021 through an emergency declaration, which then Governor Ralph Northam, who is White, did not block.You can hear it, though, can't you? As the Confederacy's patron saint makes his long overdue exit, listen to the hedging, the plausible deniability. The patriarchy's grip remained firm.And now, the insurrectionists are back in the saddle, a mere four years after they mobbed the U.S. Capitol, brandishing a large Confederate flag through its hallowed halls. The Lost Cause is, indeed, no longer lost. 1965. My father is taking me out in his shiny black car with the red seats. It's not often that Daddy and I go out together alone. I'm glad to be leaving my mother and my fussy little sister behind. Glad to have an adventure that doesn't include a baby who has lately claimed most of the glory that had so recently belonged exclusively to me.There is some consolation, though, in being the “big girl” now. Going out with “Daddy Rabbit,” as he calls himself when he's in a good mood. And he's in a good mood as we travel down the street to visit his friend.In those pre-seatbelt days, I slid around the backseat in many an unanchored ride. This may be the first time I am big enough to sit in the front seat and hold myself up. Daddy Rabbit comes around the side of the car to get me. My walk is still a wobble, and he must take my hand as we approach the front of the tall white house that is and isn't a regular house.The place is called “The Columns”—as I must have been told before the visit, as I will certainly understand soon if I don't already—a place I'll frequent over the course of my young life with my mother and grandmothers who often lunch in the first-floor tearoom, served by Black men in crisp white coats.Inside, we pass the desk where the fat White boss lady sits. I raise my short neck and gaze up the main staircase. Up, up, all the way up to the top. I am awed by the steep climb before me. I must have taken the stairs by myself—or some of them—because I can still feel my hesitation there at the bottom. I pull on the spindles, rising toward the second story where the ancient man awaits us.I recall an open door. An old White man seated by a window. My father bending over me, his widow's peak level with my nose as he introduces us. This may not be the first time Mr. Lamar has met me—but it may be the first time I've approached him on my own steam. I seem to remember a bristly mustache. He wears a suit and tie. Maybe a vest.He shakes my father's hand. I veer toward him. He pats me on the head.I recollect a presence that is at once charming and formal. (“Dignified,” is how my father remembers him.)The old man's mannered bearing echoes the customs of some faraway place—a land I would learn much later to recognize as the past, the collective Southern slaveholding past possessed of a culture and cadence that reached across the centuries to land on me as surely as did his hand on my small head.Mr. Gazaway Basil Lamar would live but a few months longer. Born in 1872, he was, like my great-grandmother Lena Logan, a member of his family's first generation in over two centuries not to hold slaves.I invoke the old man here not because he plays any further role in my story, but because he belongs to a defining scene. Though “The Columns” was an actual three-story manse, built around 1900, in my memory it functions as a dollhouse would, an iconic setting that will exist at the periphery of my consciousness for as long as I live, I expect: the columned house; the plantation echo.I often think of Mr. Lamar buttoned up in his room at The Columns exactly a century after the war. A signifying totem linking me to the antebellum world, figuratively—and literally.My father later told me that Mr. Lamar shook Jefferson Davis's hand—twice. As I was coming up, there was a tone with which my family and close friends—all White Virginians, most descendants of the former planting class—spoke of “the wah” that gave me to understand that the conflict carried a peculiar significance.It wasn't the war that had traumatized my father as a child with scary newsreels and blackouts along the coast. It wasn't the war that took my mother's father to a submarine tender in the North Sea. Frightening as that war had been, that was not “the wah.”The wah defined both my parents and their families. The wah signified a rupture. I understood this before I understood anything else about it. As I grew, I began to detect a wounded note in the voices that spoke of the wah. There had been heavy losses. Of land, of big houses, and holdings. And yet I sensed a pride in this defeat.These conversations—overheard in snippets, grasped in stages—hardly ever referred to the central property in question, though. The word “slave” was rarely, if ever, joined in conversation with our family's name or any other descendants of slaveholders I knew—and I knew plenty. Slavery came up in passing, in mild and matter-of-fact terms: That's where the slaves lived. Over there.“Slavery” was most certainly not referred to when speaking about dear old great-great Gran whom some old aunt remembered from childhood, maybe, one of the celebrated belles of Virginia, you know. Before the wah.They didn't talk about how the wah had ended their power to own people. A practice that provided the means to buy the dainty white dresses in which dear old Gran and all her White sisters had danced about. A direct corollary was never drawn. Did it escape them—or only appear to? In Belledom, of course, appearance counted for almost everything. 1963? My father takes me to see the war horse. I am barely old enough to walk. He lifts me so I can see it. Look-a-there, he says, pointing to a very dead horse ridden by a very dead general who fought in the war. I don't remember the horse itself, so I call my father to ask about it. “Sure, I remember that,” he says—91, his mind as sharp as ever.I tell him what I've read about Traveller's skeleton on exhibit in Lexington, Virginia in the early 1960s. We were there at the time while he was in law school at Washington and Lee University. “Skeleton?” Dad interrupts. “But I recall a stuffed horse.”So I dig a little deeper to learn that Traveller's articulated skeleton, put on display at W&L in 1929, was removed about the time my father started classes there. I was not yet a year old.It's possible I cast my infant eyes on Traveller's bones, but the stuffed horse that Dad recalls taking me to see must have been “Little Sorrel,” Stonewall Jackson's mount. This taxidermized specimen stands to this day at Virginia Military Institute down the road from W&L.Such was the strength of the Lost Cause tea in which I was steeped: Two dead horses ridden by two dead generals in one small Virginia town. All of them blending in my young mind, no doubt, with my namesake: the little-known Confederate brigadier, General Thomas Muldrup “Mully” Logan. My great-great-grandfather. Returning from Lexington to Lynchburg in 1964, my parents, my baby sister, and I moved into a house next door to my mother's parents. I was allowed then, under supervision, to cross the driveway on my own, my mother calling behind me as my grandparents beckoned from their front stoop, 20 yards away. Once I was safely on the other side of the driveway, my grandfather Harry often looked after me.I must have been about four when Grandfather first showed me the old paper framed on his sunroom wall. I was his first-born grandchild, clay to be formed in the ways of the Southern planting class, as he had been. Right there, he said. His finger traced the handwriting at the bottom of a letter.“That's General Lee's signature,” he said, “promoting my grandfather Logan—your great-great-grandfather—to brigadier general.” A quiet swell suffusing his voice told me that the paper imparted value to him, to us. The title meant little to me at the time, but its meaning was crystal clear: We were superior. My great-great-grandfather Mully Logan and his family lived in Richmond from the late 1870s through the 1910s, a short distance from what would become Monument Avenue. His youngest child, my great-grandmother Lena, likely strolled by as block and tackle hoisted one martyred soldier after another. Eleven in 1890, she surely attended Lee's unveiling with her parents, cheering from the VIP stands while a roster of Southern apologists held forth on their glorious cause.When the war broke out, Mully was an unlikely soldier. A 19-year-old college graduate when he volunteered for the assault on Fort he was so and that his called him the come up riding and with in the at the He a he in the he served under and Lee called Mully “the in the of his brigadier at the of two months before the Mully fought to the led the of the attended at where they to two after The Mully didn't as I it wasn't for of I remember when I first that my were My to remember to me that the was not in my any it was in my or remember the first time I the I was in the a on the Civil My grandfather Harry had been dead a few years. My still lived next door. It was to her that I in of for my I with the the and I as I I an for Civil My was grandfather would never have a that the a war a The the war was fought two enough, I an where she it would under the my on of the conflict that to few I back across the driveway to ask my a that had been me throughout my first with the war. I her in the her in leading out to an of was before a an she a the it with she said. eyes in with her she began to the took a seat on a I approached my with a of our family own she said. “But then, first that she meant all Southern White had held though, I began to that she was wasn't about who was White but as in those who belonged to in this was the as And company was a good family a of company with and and as a child, I knew that company you feel when you did you were not to In I the which the history of many White of the American on the to pull up and deeper into the This a role in what she calls her family's In to the story, the of my is the planting story, in which the central are to put and their and land formed the of the plantation that defined Virginia and the from the in in the and His Logan, from early who in in the in time to in in some on along the coast. My had a hand in the of in the as as the and the name but a or a century of my is to out the of the story in that for all the with the the of the on The planting story its own and its of the planter was very large exactly in as in of the of who in the with a family and a as as and to out a of the their planting story, my of African to an of the a the to that in to them from a the story and the White planting story have The of the story have to with you while if you to or over baby who is not the will you in the planting story, the has to with It is and around in of and in the the the It's in the presence of the children be or It's in the of by the or in the it is the that the that makes possible the of which the would Mully and Logan and their were of the Lost apologists who to the Confederate as an for and while central role in the was an member of the of the which if not of the war The that the the of past my public in the efforts to the of not to the to and any are right out of the Lost Cause Logan her most to the Lost Cause with her My Confederate is a of the that the Lost Cause the In she her in antebellum Virginia as an with and in and in But the during the the of the when national and that the and in of and the class, the North and a a the of this American as it in and memory into a from which it has never its way years when I first read I a first the at my the time, I the on the as a the and her brigadier before the “big It was only after I understood how her story to the Lost Cause that I for what it The house has no The General and his are the up the house of Logan. In the early after I my Civil I began to for that could on a of antebellum Southern family's in in I and I from to I at and on Over the course of two by the of and have a family from and to and to my from one about a two I a of with the you to dig up a But I'm not for the of I'm because what it takes to the door leading to the in our the of the and their all who where by our of being In all the of my no word for me A word on of for of African A in the by of my and their who had the not only to buy a specific but to to the of her children and and their children and so the and at the of and the means The only as it can My were not only in Black they were in Black is to where we are at The men and who those were on it. and ever, And if you are not to to their then you not at the of I came to this with a level of The of the late and a of the he The first and The of A I I looked and a man in the name was as had this man the value of one The that was He was the of meaning he was to his or to the who the that the old man was the the I to Richmond during the that time, the city had removed the from Monument for Lee, who stood his with In and around the Lee citizens an of with and and took on the of a with and of Civil Rights leaders over the martyred I the the and of that the Lee statue. and the and of all and about. As I me a I the and the of Monument at the and the of that A before what had been the Jefferson the the most of his remained by the sculptor the two central had stood on the lower his his right on the open of The on the Davis's our White to our to our at the in along the bottom of a grand that behind the where had My eyes that to its a perch for the But it, had been And though I must have it of I had no what had been up there. I had to who was to the Confederate in the as “the of Southern in the her finger pointing her other hand to a Confederate the of all the Confederate of the Lost Cause. the on her will and her will that White supremacy and to it. The that is, White will that And here we A of still and the title are a of to ancient where was is a in a And with her and her hand in she was a her before the of to the ancient to And here the may the many of her from the meaning from the to to to or to to or by means of to to to to to other is the of may be from her but over my As I take her to she that I my I I of this story I have a a to I be from my what might I deliver in the of in I did see Traveller's as a my to bring me to Lee's war in the of a slaveholding in of I came across a of crisp white marked with from the them as I the All My first was I was were of from the on of a few the from which the had been The from infant to then, I was by how it was, the to a to an many African most their actual of But on the of that came the old of voice I up around that said, this belongs to There will never be anything or about my to the I my way through the one specimen was from the in A of to the almost The note the as been from Traveller's Lee himself had it out and it to my so the in the I a small to the as as the at it to be one of the most in the of that I've across the on most for the only were those that the of the for the which he had was by I see how the a sinister The as to or the on the of the The a to cast over Black and And the like some from a meant to the of our days, I recall the feel of Traveller's and