Down Along with That Devil's Bones by Connor Towne O'Neill

Author:Connor Towne O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Same as It Ever Was

Jack Kershaw was born fifty years after the Civil War ended, but had enlisted in many of the subsequent proxy wars fought over its meaning. For Kershaw, it was a civilian struggle—the battle fields now courtrooms, classrooms, roadsides—but the aim was still the same: to maintain white supremacy as a central structuring force in American life. Call it a cold Civil War. In the months after my visit to his grotesque Forrest statue, however, I began to feel as though that cold Civil War was smoldering back to life. Hate crimes had tripled the day after Donald Trump’s election and continued to occur with increased regularity in the following weeks and months. At the University of Alabama, someone wrote “Trump 2016 Kill the N------” in Sharpie on a bathroom door. I published a letter in the state’s major online news outlet calling on the university to be more proactive about its toxic racial climate, and in response, I received intimidating messages and threats, some of them coming from a commentator calling himself “Bombingham.” White nationalists, emboldened by the president’s racist rhetoric and retweets, were reaching larger and larger audiences and offering “Sieg heils” to him. In Berkeley, far-right groups brawled with the anti-fascist group Antifa. Battles over Confederate monuments escalated, drawing similar confrontations between armed militias and black-clad Antifa members in cities such as St. Louis, Houston, and New Orleans. By the time the showrunners from the television series Game of Thrones announced they were working on a new project, set in a future in which the Confederacy had won the Civil War, it seemed inconceivable that their fiction could be stranger than the truth we were then living.

It was amid these hostilities that I headed back up I-65 to visit another Forrest landmark in Nashville. One that pointed to the origins of this cold Civil War and that served as a reminder that although white nationalism seemed to be reemerging, in truth it had never really gone away. One that allowed me to feel the deeper pull of the tensions now threatening to tear the country apart and that provided a reference point against which I could chart the movement of the gathering storm. So one day in the summer of 2017, I sped past Kershaw’s roadside grotesquerie and pushed on another twenty exits or so, waded through the city’s Downtown Loop traffic, and headed for the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue North and Church Street.

Nashville, if you haven’t been there in a few years, might strike you as a city transformed. High-rise condos, neighborhoods with new names, people dressed in the hats and shirts of the local hockey team. I could tell you that Church intersects Fourth just up the hill from the honky-tonks on Broadway, but perhaps better to locate it as a ten-minute walk from the Bridgestone Arena. Though the corner here at Church and Fourth is now occupied by the twenty-story SunTrust building, it was—until a fire on Christmas Night, 1961—the location of the Maxwell House Hotel.

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