Horrible Harvest

I am a white male. My age puts me in the category of “elderly” to some, and to those people I say, fuck you! I’m old, not elderly. You’ll know the difference when you’re my age. I am also a Southerner. I was born in the South, and I lived most of my life in the South.

I tell you all this to give weight to my confessions that you will find in this post. If you are reading this, I assume you have read my previous posts that are chapters from my latest unpublished novel, Horrible Harvest: The Untold Story of the Confederate, Augustus Tennyson. What you are reading on this blog is the third iteration of the story.

This story has come easily to me, but it has been a struggle to write. The germ of the idea came to me in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, and yes, that is what I saw on the video, a murder. That is not a controversial declaration. It’s just fucking reality.  To argue otherwise is to step outside of all logic and reason. If you have a different opinion, I won’t bother arguing with you because ideology means more you to than facts. I’m sure you’ve got people who love you and will listen to you, but I ain’t one of them.

As a Southerner, I once wore hats and shirts decorated with the Confederate flag. As a youngster in a small Southern town, it was ubiquitous attire. None of us put any thought into the meaning of the flag. The black population in town never protested it and some even wore the same clothing.

In my youth, I used the n-word. We all did – White, black and the small number of other ethnicities in town. And it was used both in gest and as a threat. The first time I ever got the hint that it was offensive is when I told my dad a joke that used the word as the punchline. My Dad was a jovial guy that literally laughed at all my jokes, but this one produced nothing but silence and a disappointed look. He didn’t scold me. He just walked away. I got the message, and it hurt because I could see that he was hurt that his son had used that word. He was known for his laugh. It brought joy to everyone who heard it, and everyone within a city block could hear it because it was guttural and loud. I managed to snuff it out on that day, and I was terrified to try to elicit another laugh out of him for a long time after that terrible day. I just couldn’t bear another moment of silence from him. This is the environment in which I was raised. In the community, the word was accepted, even expected in certain situations. At home, it was considered abhorrent.

The weeks that proceeded George Floyds execution I watched the growing BLM protests in Minneapolis on cable news like most of America, and I was moved by them. The despair, the angst, the outrage – All the emotions that makes one uncertain of these times we live in were understandable. Floyd was seen as other by the police because of the color of his skin. Again, save your breath. See my earlier reasoning for not engaging in an argument with you if you believe otherwise. I’m old (not elderly), and I’m just fucking right about this. I’ve seen too much to not know the truth when It slaps me upside the head.

One day, I don’t know when, I saw an image from a BLM protest that included a group of counter protesters. There, amongst the white crowd holding “All Lives Matter” signs, was a heavily bearded man holding up a Confederate flag. In Minnesota. The North. A state that was devoted to the Union cause. So devoted were they that scores of Minnesota native sons died fighting in the war against the country that flew that flag. The heritage of Minnesotans was not tied to that flag. It was tied to burning that flag.

That’s when Augustus Tennyson was born. I wanted to explore the idea of systemic racism, and how it had become so deeply engrained in this country that a Confederate flag became the symbol of the counter BLM movement. ALM assholes were waving a flag that literally represented a philosophy that only white lives mattered. And as a side note, I have learned in the research for this book that not all white lives mattered in the Confederacy. Only the plantation class mattered, but that’s a post for another day.

What has been most difficult for me in writing this story is the use of the n-word throughout the book. Each time I write it, I see my dad’s disappointed face, and I hear the silence. It bothered me so that I tried using “softer” words. Different euphemisms that didn’t make me cringe when I read the passages aloud, but I realized I was doing two things by doing so. I was using contemporary racist language or, in some cases, words I invented that fit the context of the times. Just because they didn’t have the historical weight of the n-word didn’t make them any less offensive, and I was also making our history of racism more comfortable to the reader. It shouldn’t be comfortable. It should be sickening and vile. By leaving the word out of the book, I was creating a safe space for white supremacists. I was doing what the Daughters of the Confederacy had a great deal of success doing. I was erasing the morally repugnant position of the South during the Civil War and during the rise of The Lost Cause. I say this as a son of the South.

This concludes my confessions.  I’m not looking for absolution, and I don’t want to be seen as a proponent of white guilt. I’m just an old-fuck (again, not elderly) learning how to navigate life hour by hour on this goddamn planet.