Snide jokes aside, I stand firm on my Southern roots

By Tanya Brown, Journal and Courier

2-14-2005

When I was an intern learning my chops at Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2000, I had already been greatly disillusioned by the complications that simply opening my mouth created.

I had come, young and determined, to Franklin College in Indiana two years before from a tiny southern town at the bottom of the Bluegrass State.

When I arrived in Indiana, I found the so-called Hoosier Hospitality severely lacking, and traveling to the nation's capital had afforded me no relief.

There, as in Indiana, my culture was the source of cruel jokes, unfair assumptions and an anger, that as a young, white girl hoping to seek out the truth though journalistic endeavors, I found difficult to understand.

I was proud of my roots, of my ancestors who wore grey in the Civil War.

I quickly understood that my accent would have to go if I was to be taken seriously in my work. I also understood that for whatever reason, being pro-South, or proud of anyone in the Confederacy, was about as popular as being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, two separate ideas which many people in Indiana and Washington, D.C., seemed to mistakenly equate as one.

I spent many of my weekends that summer sketching and writing under the shade of trees in section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery, where the Confederate Memorial Monument is located.

On that monument, which was unveiled in 1914 after years of turmoil in which relatives of Confederate soldiers were not allowed to decorate their family's graves and even denied entrance to Arlington, is a phrase written by the Rev. Randolph Harrison McKim, a Confederate chaplain:

"In simple obedience to duty as they understood it, these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all -- and died."

Upon returning to Indiana, and being hurt time and again by rude remarks from unknowing friends, coworkers and academics, I have often thought of that line, which summarizes for me one of the chief reasons I find it important to continue to honor the memories of my Confederate kin.

Michael Morrison, a professor at Purdue University, who studies the political causes of the Civil War extensively, explained at a recent Rotary Club luncheon, "If you want to understand why non-slaving holding whites would go off to war, it had to be about something more than slavery."

My brother, Shannon Jefferies, who still lives in Kentucky, takes it a step farther. He is a Civil War re-enactor for the South, who participates in mock battles.

When I tell people about my brother here, they are puzzled.

Is he a racist? Doesn't he understand that flying the Confederate flag is wrong?

Of late, I have recommended that those people read a book titled Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South , which was recently released by author and journalist Mark Kemp.

Kemp, a southerner from North Carolina, explores questions of race and guilt in his book, eloquently juxtaposing the feelings of young southerners like myself against the historical discussions that were created in southern rock music immediately following the civil rights era.

"It's the human tendency to project one's bad feelings about oneself onto a safe target, and in America -- whose history of displacing native peoples and taking Africans as slaves has left a deep psychological and spiritual wound -- the South has long served as that safe target," Kemp writes.

"At best, southern music, literature and folk life are romanticized by those who don't live in the South ... at worst (it) is often caricatured. For some time, it's been acceptable to scoff at the folly of the 'ignorant southerner.'"

Kemp explores many ideas in his book, including the reality that assuming all southerners are racist and stupid is to commit an error similar to the one made by slave owners who painted blacks as simple-minded and inferior.

Since I have met my husband and made my home in this state, we've been blessed with a son.

Now eight months old, I find myself looking ahead to how I will teach him about his joined pasts. I struggle with how I will help him understand the importance of honoring both his Union and his Confederate forefathers.

It will not be an easy task.

I hope that at some point in his lifetime, our southern heritage will no longer be looked upon as a politically incorrect footnote that should be rubbed out.

Brown is a reporter with the Journal and Courier.