Flags

I am staked out at Sushi Muramoto, right across the street from the administrative building where Lexington City Council tonight will vote on whether Confederate flags may be flown from city stanchions in this town that has been called the “Shrine of the South.” Right now the building’s doors are locked, and a TV camera man from Roanoke is pacing back and forth from his truck. The event starts at 8. It’s  6:46.

Both Robert E. Lee and T.J. “Stonewall” Jackson are buried here.

I grew up here. To grow up here was to grow up knowing people who were the children of men who fought in the Civil War, on the side that lost, defending their beliefs but also their homes. 

Many of my friends’ great-grandfathers fought under them, or under “Jeb” Stuart, or A.P. Hill. They fought under the flag they call the Dixie cross, that red one with the blue X and white stars.

My grandparents’ fathers fought on the other side. They were officers in the Union army. But that, and how we got here  -- and why I returned after a lifetime of work elsewhere --  is another story.

Tonight’s story is about flags. What to fly and when and where. The ordinance that’s up for a vote will forbid  flying any flag on city poles except the American, state and city flags. No longer will flags of the town's  two universities -- Washington & Lee and Virginia Military Institute -- fly, nor any others, for special occasions. The flap about the Confederate flags is the reason. 

People can still carry whatever flags they like in parades, under this ordinance. They can fly the Dixie cross on their houses, cars and trucks, wear it on their bodies, run it up on their lawns. Just not on city poles.

By 6:50, the TV crew has been joined by about a dozen people. Doors open at 7:30, with a batch of city police officers standing around and half of Main Street blocked off. A Confederate flag rally earlier in the evening drew about 300 people.

By 7:55, the council chambers are packed. The cameras are poised. In the second row sits a slender middle-aged man in wire-framed specs and a Sons of Confederate Veterans T-shirt that proclaims, “The Cause for Southern Independence, 1860-1865.” The room seats 110. Another 50 or so folks are jammed out in the hall, most of them wearing or carrying the Dixie cross.

Lexington residents speak first, by Council decree. Almost to a person – black or white, old or young, man or woman – they support the ordinance. Ban the flags. Many note that their great-granddads fought and some died for the Confederacy, under the Confederate battle flag. Bury it, they say.

Next come county residents. Many speak of heritage, honor, and their own ancestors who died under that flag. They want it to fly on one particular weekend each year: the weekend of Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday in January that infelicitously happens on the weekend preceding MLK Day. Some of them speak with voices breaking of the power a lost cause still holds, of the valor of their forebears and the losses they endured. They are white.

Also from the county are a handful of other voices, who speak of a different kind of family suffering: of  a life sentence of hard labor and sometimes cruel punishment, without any hope of parole. Of slavery, in short. They are black.

It’s testament to how far we have come that we are able to have this discussion. It’s testament to how far we have not come that we are still having this discussion. 

At one point, a young man in what looks like an Army cap, carrying a Confederate battle flag, comes to the microphone. He says 300,000 people died for this flag and he will use his allotted three minutes to honor them. He sits in silence. After about a minute, people in the room begin to murmur. 

The mayor leans forward. “Let him have his three minutes of silence, please,” she says. The room falls completely quiet. You can hear a pin drop. It stays that way.

A black man from the county says he’ll be glad to erect a flagpole on private property for anyone who wants to fly a Confederate flag at home. A white woman from Fairfield remarks that no one carrying a Confederate flag ever fired a shot at Lexington; those who did, did so under the Stars and Stripes.  A young woman from neighboring Buena Vista chokes back tears as she talks about her great-granddaddy’s death in battle. A college professor, Romanian by birth, likens Southern slavery to horrors her own people witnessed in another time and place. 

The weight of history and our common humanity lies heavy in the room, and despite our best efforts, we are largely talking past each other. Is anyone listening? 

By evening’s end, council has voted to limit flags flown on public poles to those of city, state and country. A spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans has said the organization will sue.

And in just a little more than a week, this nation will remember September 11, 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the day we call 9/11.  The unity that came of that disaster now lies in tatters on the floor of our nation’s Capitol building, while out here in the hill country, we are still fighting a war from a century ago – and I am not at all sure those two facts are unrelated.

Is anyone listening, America?