talk about slavery

The menu at the Cabin was long, one of those unwieldy, laminated mega menus that grace the tables of roadside diners and chalets everywhere, and reflected a classic attention to theme (gumbo burger, gumbo omelet, gumbo). If the menu had been covered in tinfoil, I would've had a late summer tan by the time I reached the dessert page. When our waiter approached, I asked in what I imagined was a small act of clever, Yankee defiance if the gumbo was any good. cheap jerseys My friend Gabbie and I had come directly from a tour of a former sugar plantation down the road, in Vacherie, La., calledOak Alley, and I had a crook in my neck. Up until that morning, whenever I heard the word "plantation," I'd thought "slavery." When I'd booked the tour, I had done so in the spirit of a visitor to Dachau or Wounded Knee. But the tour itself was given in the spirit of a visit to the home of a tasteful, Southern movie star. Our guide, in a tone equal parts admiring and envious, devoted 90 minutes to the armoires, linens and chamber pots of the home, but almost no time to the people who built, creased and cleaned them. The words "slave" and "slavery" were never mentioned. cheap jerseys wholesale nfl jerseys We did hear the word "servant" on the tour, two or three times, in the telling of what were meant to be amusing anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of the servants' owners. Our guide was dressed in an elaborate, sky blue ball gown, and chirped about what fun it was for her to "go back in time and live like Scarlett O'Hara for a day." wholesale nfl jerseys As Gabbie read from the menu in her best Vivien Leigh, her eyes began to widen. She dropped the drawl and informed me that the Cabinhad been serving busloads of visitors to Louisiana's plantation country for more than 30 years on the strength of its reputation for authenticity, which the menu explained thusly: goal is to preserve some of the local farming history, serve meals typical of the River Road tradition, and make your visit a relaxed and memorable one. The Cabin Restaurant began as one of the 10 original slave dwellingsof the Monroe Plantation. Through the efforts, ideas, the love, sweat and patience of friends and family, you are able to enjoy a small sampling ofSouthern Louisiana history." The love, sweat and patience of actual participants in the "local farming history," the original builders and tenants of the Cabin, were not dwelt upon or mentioned in the menu's text, but their contribution to the restaurant's ambience was subtly alluded to. As the waiter brought our food I read: "In the grand dining room,the roof is supported by four massive beams placed so that theroom resembles a Garconnier (the visiting bachelor quarterson a river road plantation.)" And we put our menus down. I've enjoyed almost every spoonful of gumbo I've had over the years, whether in expensive restaurants, coffee shops or train stations, but I might have had my last one contemplating the events witnessed by the roof beams of a bachelor's quarters on a 19th century sugar plantation. When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering. wholesale jerseys Southern apologists earned sudden fortunes in a gold rush of nostalgic forgetting. Within a year of the war's end, a Virginia journalist named Edward Pollard published a novel called Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, a breathless, self pitying fantasy, and the first of many to recast the conflict as a tragedy of fraternal strife and regional repression, to blame the Confederate defeat on the overwhelming resources and underhanded tactics of the North, exalt the Confederacy's most ruthless generals as paragons of honor, revel in stories of freed people run amok, wallow in cheap jerseys tearful, postwar family reunions, and pine for the "Golden Age" of hoop skirts and happy go lucky chattel. It depicted slavery as a benign if not beneficial institution, and relegated further discussion on the topic to the offstage realm of "touchy" subjects, where, for perpetual Northern fear of offending delicate Southern sensibilities, it has languished ever since. wholesale jerseys "Have you ever dreamed of waking up to an antebellum room that would be the envy of Scarlett O'Hara? The fulfillment of just such a dream is the essence of the Edgewood experience. Hosts Dot and Julian Boulware offer eight luxurious and charming guest rooms; six in the main house and two in the former slave's quarters." Country Collections Magazine. Cheap Jerseys from china The scores of histories and plantation novels that followed Pollard's, many produced by members of what came to be known as the Dunning School (after its founder, Columbia history professor William Archer Dunning), an influential movement of celebrity, revisionist scholars a sort of mutton chopped Heritage Foundation helped concoct a broad, new Southern culture of perpetual grievance and nostalgia for a reimagined, antebellum idyll. The primary focus of most Dunning School stories was not the war itself, but Reconstruction, a period that Claude Bowers, an early 20th century successor to Pollard (and given to similarly Glenn Beck ian flights of tearful, dissociative rage) called "The Tragic Era. It was a decade, as he saw it, marked by unrestrained Yankee corruption and sadism, which punished the South for secession and forced black suffrage on an already politically neutered white population. Bowers' books demonized "fanatic" abolitionists and Ulysses S. Grant, exalted the Ku Klux Klan and Andrew Johnson, and sold hundreds of of thousands of copies. Cheap Jerseys from china cheap jerseys a nigger died they let his folks come out the fields to see him afore he died. They buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with a ax in the middle enough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger in betwixt it. They cart them down to the graveyard on the place and not bury them deep enough that buzzards wouldn come circlin round. Niggers mourns now, but in them days they wasn no time for mournin Mary Reynolds, former wholesale nfl jerseys slave, 1936 cheap jerseys By 1932, and the publication of With the Wind the ultimate Lost Cause novel and still the most popular book in America, after the Bible Lost Cause literature succeeded in sacrificing the very meaning of the Civil War to the demands of myth making. (The 1939 movie sealed the deal.) The culture of forgetting had become a national religion. cheap nfl jerseys Seventy years later, movies like Help the latest in a long line of tributes to the unsung white heroes of black history, and a gauzy rendering of the civil rights era as a triumph of the human spirit over mean people have taken up where With the Wind left off. A direct descendant of Lost Cause culture, modern nostalgia is souvenir nostalgia, a taxidermical, preservation fetish that isolates parts from wholes, pulls symbols out of context, and shrinks cultural memories to the cheap nfl jerseys size of a9/11commemorative coin. (Never Forget!) It's woven into every corner of the culture, high and low, North and South, as pervasive as sleep. And it is a black hole of memory, the place where memory goes to die. cheap nfl jerseys "One woman thought all the slave houses (now guest rooms) should be torn down, because it was an insult and exploiting slavery and so forth. And I replied, very nicely, that I think she would be destroying history." Mary Hill Caperton, manager of the Quarters, a bed and breakfast in Charlottesville, Va. cheap jerseys The Cabin is only one of dozens of former slave quarters around the country that have been gussied up into hotel rooms or restaurants. It was exceedingly pleasant and brightly lit, full of cheerful, laughing patrons. Astonishingly tall, wholesome looking children in middle school basketball jerseys pointed ketchup dipped fries at their dad's brows and made gentle jokes about their hairlines. The Doobie Brothers' "China Grove" bubbled down from speakers in the rafters. cheap jerseys A man with a wide smile appeared next to our table, wholesale jerseys seemingly out of nowhere, and introduced himself as the cheap jerseys restaurant's manager. We chatted about the proper pronunciation of"crawfish," and the differences between the gumbos made on the bayou and in New Orleans, and when the subject turned to the Cabin, I asked him how it felt to run a place that used to house slaves. "It's history, and that's all there is to it, he said. not something we dwell on, or push out there for people to see. It is a touchy subject. We just want people to have a nice time wholesale nfl jerseys when they come here, and to enjoy the food and the history. This is a place where everybody feels welcome." He had a point. Gabbie and I seemed to be the only ones in the room not smiling, and for a moment the queasiness of chronic self doubt, the familiar nausea of the self ostracized, the vegetarian in the steakhouse, made me wonder if it was us. Were we the ones not seeing straight, arching our eyebrows through a life on the wrong side of the looking glass? And then I wondered why I was flattering myself. Dead eyed nostalgia, whether practiced by Tea Partyers, advertising directors or me, in my "heritage" running shoes, typing away on a computer built by indentured servants, can be invisibleto us. As invisible as the whip the very old, well used buggywhip hanging on the Cabin's wall must have been to whoever decided it was a good idea to hang it there. Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans." Buchanan Don't get me wrong I like nostalgia, Imissnostalgia. The kind that involves remembering, anyway: mostly private, typically accidental, not always rosy. When my great uncle told stories about flying bomber missions over Germany, he didn't merely recall events experiences that he had a complicated affection for he wondered about them. His eyes grew pained and befuddled; his chest rose and fell with a fullness no amount of time could diminish. He wasn't running from himself to an imagined past, he was finding himself in his story, sorting it out, trying to see it clearly. House (now Speaker) John Boehner recently complained that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats "are snuffing out the America that I grew up in." Progress, July 1, 2010 Cheap Jerseys china Of course childhood nostalgia the kind of remembering you do when remembering is new, when memories are full and dramatic because they few, and weightless is different. Mourning hamsters. Idealizing grandparents. Chronicling summers like they centuries. When I had 12 years to look back on, they were eons. When I had 20 I said, whole life and meant it. Cheap Jerseys china But the past I remembered then wasn even my own. I sported a ridiculous trench coat and well thumbed copies of the Road in the the way 20 year olds in ancient Rome probably carried Euripides in their vintage Greek togas. When you young, nostalgia isn about the cheap nfl jerseys past, but the future. It a train in the distance, a sound from the old days hinting at the new. When your own past is too frightening to look at, and the future is terrifyingly unknown, you fake your way through the present. I spent my days wanting something I couldn name, and because I didn have memories to attach to that yearning, I yearned for a time before me. I conjured a past and missed it and bought an overcoat I prayed I'd grow into. Lincoln's famous "house divided" analogy was a perfect one for a country in crisis, acknowledging as it did the psychic architecture of the nation, a collection of rooms under one roof. But his deep commitment to an authentic, family like, postwar reconciliation was not matched by his successors. The North's implementation of Reconstruction, in its moderate and radical forms, amounted to first coddling, then humiliating, a wayward sibling. Cheap Jerseys free shipping After Lincoln's assassination, Republicans struck an implicit deal with the South, a sort of economic/cultural tradeoff, in which the South was allowed to construct the edifice of the Lost Cause culture in return for letting Northern investors exploit the South resources. For decades after the war, at cemetery and monument dedications, Blue Gray reunions and Veterans Day parades, Northern politicians and former generals made a point of describing the conflict in the language of the Lost Cause, praising the chivalry of once estranged brothers, lauding their former enemy's fierce dedication to their mission, and rarely acknowledging what that mission had been. The relative postwar silence of the North wholesale jerseys on the issue of slavery, and the wholesale nfl jerseys flagrant corruption of newly established Union military governments, helped stoke already flourishing Southern resentment and denial. Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories. Cheap Jerseys free shipping The Reconstruction era South didn invent dishonesty, but its response to America's defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever growing edifice of false history. It's a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that's too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the and bars fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work onhighwaysnamed after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture. Cheap Jerseys china Just like Pollard and Bowers before them, modern day, Lost Cause ers like Pat Buchanan reversed the tide of postwar popular opinion about a conflict, this time in Vietnam, by pining loudly for a law and order Eden that had been despoiled by protesters. And now the wholly invented fiction of hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Southeast Asia is believed by more Americans than remember what My Lai was. Even a little grown up nostalgia could have gone a good, long way. The illness implied in its suffix, the sickness of the heart that a powerful longing produces, can be as necessary and cleansing as a storm. But of course that's what the Lost Causers were afraid of, are afraid of still, and have always been quick to nip in the bud Cheap Jerseys china.