On Flags and Fraternities: Lessons on Cultural Memory and Historical Amnesia in Charles Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy"

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I think South, which I love, and then I think racist, which I hate, and those two ideas are stuck together in this flag—forever. —Mary Elizabeth, Any Day Now We come up to the courthouse, and I see the flag waving there. This flag ain't like the one we got at school. This one here ain't got but a handful of stars. One at school got a big pile of stars—one for every state. —James, in Ernest Gaines' "The Sky Is Gray" When Pat Buchanan remarked several years ago that if there is room for "We shall overcome" in our country, then there is room for the Confederate flag, I was struck again by the obtuseness of his (and others') failure to see why the flag flown by an army fighting to preserve slavery (albeit among other issues) is offensive, not only to the descendants of slaves but also to all who find the institution reprehensible—like writer Reynolds Price, for example, who argues against, simply put, offending others: As a white native of Warren County, North Carolina, who was born only 68 years after the end of the Civil War and slavery; as a man who knew several elderly men and women who had been born slaves; and as the great-grandson of at least one slave owner, I can see no appropriate present use for any of the several Confederate flags outside a museum or a serious historical film or other dramatic reenactment that makes no attempt to defend the rebel cause. Perhaps a few generations from now the stain of slavery, which so appallingly blots the entire Confederate enterprise, will have faded in its power to offend; but as the direct descendant of many otherwise decent souls who supported the awful machine of slavery and who defended their holdings against Union forces, I'd have to say that any present display of the flag in situations other than those named above seems to me a moral insult. (155) Around the time that Buchanan and others began to defend the Confederate flag against those who would have it taken down from state buildings (the mid-1990s), I found myself bringing up the issue of flying the Confederate flag when teaching Charles Waddell Chesnutt's conjure tale "Po' Sandy." In "Po' Sandy," Chesnutt illuminates clearly how a symbol of the Old South—whether it be a kitchen built off of the main house, as in Chesnutt's story, or a Confederate flag—cannot be separated from the history of slavery and just represent the romantic side of the time period or southern pride. Not only should one not ignore the not-so-romantic other side of the coin, the reality of that "other" side reveals the illusory nature of the romance. As Louis Rubin writes, "There is nothing sentimental or pathetic about the heritage of the Civil War. What it is is tragic—people, most of them ordinary, decent people, fighting hard and well for a cause that was basically wrong. Thank God it was lost" (46). In her book Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, Tara McPherson suggests that, while Americans seem to recognize "the horrors of slavery," "we remain unable to connect this past to the romanticized history of the plantation. . . . The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our representations of the material site of those atrocities, the plantation home" (3). Chesnutt's short story illustrates that romanticizing the plantation home goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century—indeed, for as long as romance writers have used the Old South as a setting for their books and entertained readers with their sentimentalized portrayal of that place and time. "Po' Sandy" is the second story in Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899). The reader learns in the first story, "The Goophered Grapevine," that John, the white narrator of each story's frame, and Annie, his wife, have recently moved to North Carolina from the North. Subtleties in "The Goophered Grapevine" reveal that although the move was ostensibly made for Annie's health, it also allows John to take advantage of the cheap land and labor in...