Growing up in West Texas, I don’t remember anybody carrying or wearing a confederate flag. I learned that the Civil War was about state’s rights and slavery. And really didn’t think much about it. I didn’t identify with the Confederacy; I was a West Texan. Period.
About 30 years ago, I began to do some family history and listened to my mother as she told stories that had been passed down in her East Texas childhood. She talked about her Daddy and how he had been spoiled rotten because his Daddy had died in the Civil War and his mama and older siblings had let him get away with anything.
He had been real hard on his own sons—beating them with boards. She told about the time that she had stood up to him because he was cussing. She said he had never cussed in front of her again.
And she talked about how he would walk down to our house when I was a baby (we lived on the same farm with them). She talked about how he loved to hold me. He died when I was two months old.
On the day that he died, Mother had taken him and Grandmother and me into O’Donnell where we all had a picture made. That night, as he was eating cornbread crumbled up in sweet milk, he had a stroke and died. These were stories out of my life that seemed to have little connection with one another. And then I attended a conference in Sheperdstown West Virginia in 2019. I had the opportunity to tour the Atitiem Battleground with professors from Sheperdstown Center for the Civil War. The combination of spending a day moving from one horrific battleground to another with their appalling statistics and and of standing on the ground where 12,000 Confederate soldiers waited and died was almost overwhelming. As the day went on, I listened to stories of men crying for their mothers and I felt more and more of the terror, until there was no blue and gray—just grief and I no longer separated my own from theirs.
That night, I recalled my great grandfather Stokes – the few stories I knew about him – that he didn’t want to go fight, but I had learned that day that the Confederate army drafted men regardless. And suddenly the family story about him returning home and my grandfather being conceived during that visit took on new meaning. Decisions made about who would fight became personal. And as I looked on my geneology website, I was stunned to see that he died in September 1862 . Could he have died that day on that land? .
And in these last months, as we as a nation have divided over removing Confederate statues and symbols, I have agreed with the idea to remove the statues-it was a rational decision and I was shocked at how many statues there were. But sitting the next morning in the beautiful West Viriginia countryside, I knew why we must remove these statues.
These symbols to slavery and division should be taken down—not in victory or revenge—but in a spirit of nevermore. They should be removed with grief for the loss of goodness in all men and women. They should be removed with compassion in the certainty that hatred and oppression beget hatred and oppression that continues generationally.
We honor our forefathers by standing on their shoulders and reaching where they could not—reaching for goodness for all mankind.