The Soft Burden, Part 2

This is the second part of an essay I wrote a few years back about my family's history as slave owners and KKK members and how I try to cope with that. Here's a link to Part 1 and a better explanation of where this essay came from.

The Soft Burden

(Part 2)

I remember looking back through the newspaper archives in the county where my great-grandmother lived and seeing a very brief story about a young Black boy who had been found “accidentally lynched” in a barn sometime around the turn of the century. There wasn't much question in my mind about who might have “accidentally” lynched him, especially after I found out my ancestors who had lived in that county were part of a thriving population of Klan members in the area.

The same county was home to the first Black free enterprise in Texas after the Civil War – a pottery shop operated by the freed slaves of a Presbyterian minister. This could be taken as a sign of enlightenment, and the site of the pottery business has earned national landmark designation. But there are reports of “general hard feelings,” as The Handbook of Texas put it, and violence against the business owners. I can't help but wonder if my ancestors ever acted against the pottery owners  – if the robe that's now part of the KKK Quilt was there during any of the post-war attacks on these men who were trying to become truly independent.

This part of our shared heritage has created quite a few “general hard feelings” between Mom and me. Mom is unflinchingly proud of our family's past, but not because of any lingering racism on her part. She is from the last generation of my family to go to high school before desegregation, and she used the words “colored” and “Negro” for decades, but when social mores changed, she changed with them. And, after all, she raised me to accept everyone as equals and embrace other cultures.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

But Mom's genealogical research revealed so many details of our Southern ancestors' lives and their hardships and accomplishments during and after the Civil War that she became enthralled with the men and women who came before us. She saw, looking back at a century of slow migration and hard fighting, the miraculous sequence of events that had to occur for her to come into this world. Some of those events involved owning slaves. Sometimes I wonder if her pride is a kind of coping mechanism – she might not be at peace with the vein of racism and cruelty in our heritage, but since there's nothing she can do to change it, she's just decided to accept it and wave her Confederate flag high.

If you ask her about why she holds our Southern ancestors in such high esteem, she'll simply say, “You have to remember, these men were fighting for what they believed was right. They weren't right, but it's what they believed in.”

The last time we had that conversation, I wanted to respond that the same could be said for the Nazis, but that would have started a conflagration of a magnitude I was not prepared to deal with. I just shook my head, letting Mom know that even though I knew I could not change her mind, she had not changed mine, either.

A couple of years ago, Mom presented me with a special gift. She had just had one of her prouder moments: attending a rededication ceremony for a monument to Hood's Texas Brigade, the outfit in which one of our more prominent ancestors served during the Civil War. She bought me a limited edition medal struck to commemorate the rededication. The medal came in a plastic box with a certificate of authenticity that included the words, “May You Wear This Medal With Pride.” She also gave me a copy of the program from the ceremony, sure that I would want this souvenir related to one of our accomplished ancestors. According to the program, the crowd said the Pledge of Allegiance and also the Salute to the Confederate Flag: “I salute the Confederate Flag with affection, reverence and undying devotion to the cause for which it stands.”

What was that cause, exactly?

But Mom didn't care – the important thing to her was the recognition of our forefathers and their tenacity in fighting for what they thought was a noble cause. The important thing to me is that I can't wear the medal she bought me with pride, nor can I salute the Confederate flag with affection. But filial devotion, and a little joy at seeing Mom become momentarily giddy, kept me from mentioning either of those points as I accepted these mementos with a tired sigh.

Mom has even been able to justify our ancestors' membership in the Klan. She's not the only person who's ever done this, of course – a friend of mine who has the same sort of background I do said her grandmother told her that Klan members just put on their costumes and rode their horses together, as if it were some kind of social club to keep the menfolk busy while the women were at their knitting circles. Whenever I bring up the Klan's place in our family history, Mom always stops me in mid-complaint and says that whatever else it did, the Klan stepped in to see that justice was carried out whenever a Black man raped a white woman. Somehow I think it would matter less to them if a white man raped a woman of any color, but regardless, Mom focuses on the perceived chivalry of the Klansmen, as if they were actually white knights and not just calling themselves that.

One of Mom's favorite family stories (and her favorite Klan story) has to do with one of our foremothers: a woman with the improbably adorable name of Tiny Bell. Tiny Bell's husband died in the flu epidemic in the early part of the 20th century. At the funeral, in the middle of the ceremony, the church doors swung open and several Klansmen, in hoods and robes, walked into the church, found Tiny Bell, and handed her a bag of money. Her husband had been one of their own, and they had collected money to help support his widow.

I was surprised to learn that the Klansmen were capable of such an act of kindness, but I don't think the Klan could assist enough poor widows or avenge the honor of enough compromised women to save its reputation.

I know the Klan began as a response to Reconstruction. It was started by men who found themselves suddenly desperate – their fields and homes in ruin, cities burned, social order destroyed, friends dead or starving, and a crowd of politicians who seemed indifferent to (if  not pleased with) their suffering. But I can't accept the idea that man's inhumanity to man is reason to carry out more acts of inhumanity. Hunger is no reason to drag a family out of their home in the dead of night and whip them. Cognitive dissonance does not give a man the right to shoot a Black man for not tipping his hat as they passed each other on the street. And there is no excuse for allowing hatred to expand to include other minority groups. I can't say I fault Tiny Bell for taking the money the Klansmen gave her – perhaps it was their way of trying to help her avoid the destitution that had turned them into what they were, and I have no doubt she needed the money. But one act of charity – even one that benefited my relatives – is not enough to get me to ignore more than a century of violence. Instead, in a sense, it makes it worse.