I'm on the road today. In fact, I'm composing this on my laptop, inside a Wendy's. Hooray for free wi-fi!
I suspect that 'sophisticated' travelers consider all Southern towns alike; you've seen one, you've seen them all. Pull into a Thomasville or a Cairo or a Quitman and you see the same backdrop, as if each little burg came from one Hollywood shop: huge live oaks, a quaint town square, an imposing Victorian courthouse, and a host of little shops run by slightly overweight women of a certain age with harsh highlights. A Southern main street inevitably houses a host of antique shops, proving (sadly, to this native daughter) that all our towns have left to sell is their past, and they display washboards and china cabinets like medieval churches once offered saints' bones. Central to the county seat, of course, is the monument to the 'gallant Confederate dead.'
Many books have been written about how Southerners can't let go of the war. I suppose I have to raise my hand and confess my guilt, as my own interest in the Civil War sprang from conversations with people who didn't let the past die, not because they wanted to sell battle-flags and trinkets or impose a cruel racial code, but because they had such vivid memories of people who actually remembered the war. Last night, I chatted with a distant family member who grew up in the house of my great-great grandfather, a man who was born seven years before the Civil War began. In her late 80s, my relative's mind is "sharp as a tack," her stories of my great-great grandpa are clear. To be, in a sense, only one voice removed from the living memory of our nation's pivotal moment is, in a word, humbling.
So naturally, whenever I'm in a small Southern town, if I have time I go look at that Confederate soldier. I'm always curious whether he will be atop a high pillar or a squatty one. Will he carry his rifle on his shoulder (as if on the march) or will he rest it against the ground (as if weary from marching). Will be be clean shaven or sport a mustache? Will he look more like Colonel Sanders or a nineteenth century Brad Pitt?
In Bainbridge, where I am at the moment, they have a soldier with a long coat, atop a short pillar. He was placed there by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1905. But what makes him unique, at least in my experience, is what lies below him. He is surrounded by a little moat, and in that circular stream swim a number of koi, including the biggest one I have ever seen! I wonder, what motivated the town leaders to put in these creatures? Are they simply ornamental? Or do they somehow suggest what the Johnny Reb above them really wanted most of all, for the horrible war to end, so that he could get back to his clear Georgia streams and some fine fishin'?
