Southern Exposure
Last week’s turmoil over the Confederate flag triggered a firestorm of commentary, and while people are certainly entitled to their opinions, I was distressed by the amount of vitriol heaped on the South in general. As a native Southerner who grew up in the days of segregation, I’m all too aware of the region’s violent history, as I am aware of race riots, past and ongoing, in other parts of this country. I also know there’s more than enough guilt and blame to go around, and while it’s crucial to learn from the past, we should not be so consumed with evil deeds that we ignore the good ones. There were numerous white Southerners, myself included, who recognized the injustice of segregation and contributed to the civil rights movement. Yes, it’s time to relegate...
Read MoreThe Lovely Bones
Arguably the most famous and iconic plantation ruin in the South, twenty-three pillars are all that remain of Windsor, a home so grandiose in its heyday that Mississippi steamboat captains used it as a landmark. It’s haunting under any circumstances, more so when glimpsed through a dense morning fog, emerging as a series of vertical phantoms which slowly morph into great columns supporting only thin air. The evocative stone skeleton holds a preponderant sense of time lost and forgotten and, with minimal surrender, conjures images of what was. Indeed, no one knew what Windsor actually looked like until an accidental discovery late in the last century. Located below Port Gibson, Mississippi, Windsor was begun in 1859 and finished two years later. On a...
Read MoreThe Burnings of Atlanta
While writing about the burning of Atlanta in my blog on Gone with the Wind’s 75th birthday, as an ex-Atlantan, I remembered that the city had been plagued by other fires. Aside from the 1864 blaze set by the Confederates, followed by General Sherman’s notorious conflagration consuming a third of the city, there was also the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917. It arose from four separate, relatively insignificant blazes one quiet May morning and quickly spread the fire department’s resources dangerously thin. Morphing into one enormous incendiary beast, it required the assistance of firefighters from as far away as Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee, to bring it under control. After raging for eleven hours, it consumed 22 million gallons of water and destroyed almost...
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