OK, I'm taking a break from the endless hours I've spent grading and working on Global Module planning to blog about my lovely trip to Lexington, Virginia, specifically carving off a couple hours to walk around the Stonewall Jackson Cemetary. As I blogged earlier I'm acting as chauffeur to a great group of Champlain students who devoted their spring break to helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity (and I'll have more to say about that later). They've been the ones doing all the work. Beyond driving south from Vermont and some shopping and one short period that I spent unloading a truck, I've mainly been either curled up in my bunkbed reading and taking notes on Journey to the West or sitting here in the wonderful Lexington Coffeeshop on W. Washington Street (the street runs right into Washington and Lee University). I nurse endless lattes and nibble at blueberry muffins so I don't seem like too much of a bum for sitting here for five or six hours sending emails around the world or slaving away at online grading. If you're ever in Lexington definitely visit the Lexington Coffeeshop (more on that later as well).
If you walk further out Main Street (heading in the opposite direction of VMI) you will come to the Stonewall Jackson Cemetery. As you might expect, it features the grave of the famous Confederate general (although there is an entire mythology about where his arm is actually buried, but that is another story). It is well-documented that I love cemeteries, and especially southern ones. Now by admitting this I suppose I'm failing one of the classic liberal litmus tests, but I can't help myself. Until you spend any time in the south, and remember that I lived in Georgia for nine years, you can't grasp how different things are. I remember my first year teaching at Georgia Perimeter College (then DeKalb College) in Atlanta when I was teaching American history, specifically the period around the Civil War. One of the students, quite sincerely, asked "what do they say about the War up there?" Now, I had to admit that I had never heard it discussed in my thirty years growing up in Indiana and Cincinnati, but for these folks the War was still something that they lived with. In a sense this is classic - those who lose wars are the ones who remember them. The Serbs remembered and brooded over the anniversary of the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in a way that the Turks certainly never did. The student who asked the question seriously was considering the possibility that yankees were still laughing at the southern defeat and humiliation a century and a half later. My good friend and former professor Lloyd Hunter has written beautifully on the southern myth of the "lost cause" and you can see it in southern cemetaries. Both sides, and only in the south would there still be a clear sense of "sides", love to over-simplify the War and its causes. Certainly it is inaccurate to think that every northerner was passionately devoted to ending slavery as it is to assume that every southerner was a slave owner. One of the pictures featuring an amazing tombstone from a young soldier by the name of Wilson Newman which speaks eloquently to the southern vision (even if it is mythologized in its own way) of the cause for which the young man gave his life. According to the tombstone, Wilson fell "defending the sacred soil and the constitutional rights of his native State Virginia." Yes, in a sense it is a "corrupted" history (just as the north's version is as well) - and it's the "corruption" that usually leads to the modern arguments - but it's interesting how the south is just "closer" to its history, whereas the north has let it slip away.
I also have to admit that the experience was intensified by being able to listen to Uncle Tupelo on my Droid while walking around - helped me get my southern vibe back.
