Civil War casts long shadow for Subban
CIVIL WAR CASTS LONG SHADOW FOR HOCKEY SHOWMAN
P.K. Subban is a great hockey player, highly skilled, entertaining, charismatic, outspoken and, in general, irrepressibly appealing to hockey fans in a sport where, too often, the greats are about as interesting as a can of paint in interviews.
Subban also happens to be black, something he has been asked about a number of times over the years. There are reasons for this. Hockey is still, at the professional level, painfully white. Look around the NHL and who do you see? White players, white coaches and white managers working for white team owners — and Subban — a black superstar, a natty dresser, a showman, a huge, loud, brilliant personality raging against the archaic definition of how a player should act (look?) in a game that has never really seen his likes before.
“I never look at myself as a black player,” Subban told ESPN recently, a sentiment he has expressed in the past. “I think of myself as a hockey player that wants to be the best player in the league. I know I’m black. Everyone knows I’m black. But I don’t want to be defined as a black hockey player.”
It is an admirable wish. What makes it especially compelling, in the Nashville context, is that here is Subban, a Canadian, a child of Caribbean immigrants from a diverse city (Toronto) bedazzling Predators fans and potentially winning a Stanley Cup in an arena that is about a 20-minute drive from one of the most vile Confederate monuments in the great state of Tennessee.
A towering eyesore, erected in honour of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate Civil War general, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, a war criminal — his men massacred unarmed black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in 1864 — and a miserable piece of work, who got fantastically rich by trading in cotton, land and slaves.
Subban’s stardom is emblematic of the new south, and fits nicely with Nashville’s image as a progressive city. PK could be white, green, black or purple. The fans love him for his game — and because he is PK, end of story, only it is not the end, because the battles of the Old South aren’t over.
The Civil War is still being fought in Tennessee and other states around the south with race as a subtext and with monuments, to the likes of Nathan Bedford Forrest, dotting the land and dividing the public between preservationists and those who believe the Forrests of the world should be dynamited from their pedestals, post-haste.
The Forrest statue bordering I-65, just south of Nashville, is 25 feet tall. It depicts the general, atop a golden steed, with beady blue eyes and pistol in hand. As a work of public art, it is garishly cartoonish.
The sculptor, Jack Kershaw, was an amateur artist and a fulltime attorney whose most famous client, James Earl Ray, gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The statue was erected in 1998 and sits on 3.5 acres of privately owned land. Kershaw, now dead, once said in relation to it: “Somebody has to say something good about slavery.”
Its current owner, Bill Dorris, made his money manufacturing bathtubs for the elderly. He cuts the grass on the property, makes sure the array of Confederate flags surrounding the statue look crisp and smart, and that the floodlights illuminating Forrest stay lit at night.
Dorris has received death threats because of the statue. The statue has been shot at. But the 80-year-old won’t take it down. Nor is he willing to concede that Forrest, a slaveholder, was racist, or that his military brilliance and bravery as a cavalryman — he had his horse shot out from under him 30 times — shouldn’t obscure the fact that he was fighting to preserve slavery and became a significant player in the KKK.
“I am not taking that statue down,” Dorris says in a phone conversation from his Nashville area home. “That property is land that Nathan Bedford Forrest occupied during the war of northern aggression. You know what the war of northern aggression is sometimes mistakenly called? The Civil War.
“Slavery was never an issue. Nathan Bedford Forrest was not a racist.”
Dorris resides at the extreme end of pro-monument Southerners. He blames the recent removal of several Confederate monuments in New Orleans — including one to Robert E. Lee — on “cane blacks,” who were probably “illegals to start with.”
But he isn’t alone. The Confederate camp is full of otherwise rational, tolerant people, with a glaring misconception of what a monument is. (There is a bust of Forrest in the state capitol building.) Brandon Byrd is a historian at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Originally from North Carolina, he played hockey for two years as a kid, owns a Subban sweater and believes that P.K. has “captured the imagination of the city.”
He also believes that the monument war is the product of one of the “most effective propaganda” campaigns in American history. Monuments aren’t historical records. Records reside in archives, primary documents, eyewitness accounts and oral histories, passed from one generation to the next. A monument’s intent is not to document a historical truth but to celebrate, uplift, commemorate and, most of all, concoct a narrative as to how we, the living, should view the past.
The Civil War ended in 1865. It wasn’t until almost 30 years later — after the brief honeymoon of black freedom in the south gave way to Jim Crow, segregation and lynching — that the age of Confederate monument building began. What the monuments depicted — and there are hundreds of them — were gallant, chivalrous white men, fighting in defence of a noble Southern cause.
Says Byrd: “Part of this propaganda campaign goes like, “Well, if you take down those monuments — the biggest opposition recently was to the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans — then you are erasing history. That’s obviously not the case. Taking down a monument does not change anything in the historical record. What it does, theoretically, is it stops elevating Confederates as heroes.”
And then there’s Forrest, beside the highway, south of town, cartoonish, looming and impossible to miss.
The battle for the Stanley Cup returns to Nashville Sunday night. P.K. Subban might even get to be the hero. Now, wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to see a monument to that?
I COME FROM NORMANDY AND FROM A VERY EARLY AGE WE ARE TOLD OF THE ROLE OF THE SOLDIERS ... WHO CAME TO THE RESCUE OF FRANCE. — LAURENCE MONMAYRANT