A final stand for the Lost Cause
In Alabama, defenders of the Confederate flag are questioning old certainties even as they stick up for their symbols, said Stephanie McCrummen in The Washington Post.
THE OLD CONFEDERATE symbols were falling fast now—the statues, the names of streets, the Rebel flags flying over the Talladega Superspeedway— and in Heflin, Ala., a sense of unease was spreading in places people usually felt secure.
At Calvary Baptist Church, the minister was preaching from the Book of Revelation. At the local dirt track, fans were trying not to think about it. At the Dixie General Store, a kind of panic buying was underway. “I need a Rebel flag—a big one,” a customer was saying. “You going to put it on the back of your truck?” said Bob Castello, the store owner. “Yeah, the lady on the phone said you had one 12-by-18?” the man said, meaning feet, not inches. “You got anything bigger?”
“Well, 12-by-18 is huge,” Castello said, pointing to the enormous flag on the wall. “This one will fly better,” he said, showing him another one. “The lighter ones fly better.”
This is how the great American reckoning was unfolding in recent days in a place as white, evangelical, and Confederate flag–flying as anywhere in the country. A hundred miles to the south in Montgomery, the newest monument to Southern history was a memorial to more than 4,400 black victims of lynchings that took place in the decades following the Civil War.
Thirty miles away in Talladega, one of the most storied races in sports was about to be run for the first time in its 50-year history without Confederate imagery. “That Talladega crap” is what some people were calling it in Heflin, population 3,400, where President Trump received 82 percent of the vote in 2016.
Castello, who figured he was “everything these liberals hate,” had started checking in with police about possible threats to his store, which appeared along a rural two-lane road as clusters of flapping Confederate flags, Christian flags, American flags, and Trump flags bright against the Appalachian foothills. Inside was a shrine to all the Southern mythology being swept away.
“Whatcha got?” the clerk was saying now as she rang up a customer buying a Rebel flag blanket, a Rebel flag shot glass, and two etchings of Confederate
Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson. “Will this be all?” she said to a man buying a Rebel flag steering-wheel cover, a Rebel flag hat, a Rebel flag hood cover, and a Trump 2020 license plate, and all day long, customers slapped open the front door with a sense of urgency Castello had never quite seen. Battle flag holsters, belt buckles, belts, boots, T-shirts, wallets, lighters, key chains, lanyards, lapel pins, toothpick holders, a Rebel flag made from empty tobacco tins— it was all flying out the door so fast that Castello called in two clerks for reinforcement. “Seems like it’s just boiled over here the last few days,” he said.
“Especially with that NASCAR nonsense,” a customer said. “Yeah, that just pushed everyone over the edge,” said Castello, elaborating that the whole cultural tide was “denigrating everything that I am—white, male, Christian, gun-toting.”
“You got flags?” said Casey Britt, who began wandering the aisles, looking over the stickers that read “My Heroes Are Confederate Soldiers” and “Dixie: Still One Nation Under God,” glancing at the secessionist flags, then stopping at the Gone With the Wind section. She picked out a photo of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. “I can’t believe they’re taking
Gone With the Wind off the air,” she said. “I mean, she’s an icon. It’s all so stupid. I feel like, ‘Let’s just stick a pin in everyone and erase history,’ because that’s how it feels.”
Soon, another customer came through the door. Castello recognized him. He worked at the New Hollis Speedway, an old red-dirt track tucked into the piney woods three miles down the road. “You gonna fly the Rebel?” the clerk asked him. “Yeah,” he said.
FEW HOURS later, the sun was setting on a clear-sky day as cars began circling the track at the New Hollis Speedway, packing the dirt—a growling parade of fat tires, dented doors, and mismatched hoods, including two painted with the Rebel flag, one with the American flag, and the rest with flames, names of girlfriends, lucky numbers, and local sponsors such as D&J Used Tires. On a pole in the pit at the center of the track was the Rebel flag, and above it, an American flag, both limp in the windless evening.
A“Let’s go guys, let’s go!” the track announcer called out. “If you want hot laps, you better get on the track now. Bombers to the grid. Bombers to the grid.” Cars and trucks were pulling in stocked with coolers and lawn chairs and vinegar potato chips. People were sitting on rusted bleachers or leaning on the wire fence in T-shirts bearing names of logging companies and farm suppliers and auto stores. Kids were playing in the dirt.
“Hey, Michael! Is it going to be Jason’s night tonight?” a woman yelled. “We’ll see,” said Michael, who didn’t give his last name and was relaxing in a folding chair, not focusing on anything as weighty as a flag flying or not flying at New Hollis or Talladega or anywhere else. “This is where you go to get away from your problems,” he said as the first race got underway and dirt began flying.
A few chairs down along the wire fence
said Bell, who had a gray beard and a trucker hat and said he’d thought about tattooing the Rebel flag on his back and walking through the gates of Talladega. “NASCAR was invented here. It was created by people here. The racers. The bootleggers. It wasn’t the political garbage it is now. Black, white, who cares?”
“It’s their right to pull it down, but it’s not my right to keep it up?” said the man behind him, launching into a tirade about majority-black cities and black crime until Bell turned around and told him he was being offensive. shoes on? You can’t say one word. You just moved here two years ago anyway. You don’t know nothing about here.”
LL WEEK LONG, the Rev. Sonny Martin, pastor of Calvary Baptist, had been thinking about everything going on in the world and trying to decide what he was going to say about it all in his Sunday sermon.
A“See, I haven’t experienced the hatred that a black man feels walking down the street,” he had said the day before church, trying to understand all the emotion behind the demonstrations, including the small one that had taken place in downtown Heflin in which 40 or so black and white residents chanting “No justice, no peace” had marched past City Hall. “I don’t know how it feels. Sometimes I guess it’s like depression—like, if you’ve not gone through depression, you don’t know it. My son was killed in 2013 and people tried to give me advice, but they don’t know how it feels. Maybe it’s like that.”
He found himself reviewing his relationships with African-Americans, such as the elderly woman who used to clean the streets downtown who he said he “loved,” but whose life he said he knew little about, or the African-American worker at Lowe’s who always smiled at him but who had not been smiling lately, at least as Martin perceived it. “But there again, I didn’t ask him why,” he said.
He kept trying to understand why he found the Confederate flag ban so unnerving. “Some say the flag is of hate. Some say it’s of heritage. My biggest concern is, if they can take one flag, how far will they go? Well, next it’s the American flag is offending me, so let’s take that too. I mean, there’s got to come a point where we get a hold of this.”
That was what was so unsettling about the moment, he said. It was hard to get a hold of. It was not in his control. It did not rest upon the old certainties of life in a place like Heflin. Martin had prayed about all of that, and when Sunday came, people settled into the wooden pews, and the sun came through the stained-glass windows, and Martin stood at the front and said, “I have something the Lord has given me to say today.”
He was pacing. He was sweating. He looked out at the people of a small Southern town bracing for all that was to come and he told them. “Time is running out,” he began.