Tag: Confederacy

Some people learn the true history and change. Others live with the myth and perpetuate hate and discrimination, and, in its darkest form, violence.

I’ve lived in the South for fourteen years—most of my adult life, it turns out—but because I wasn’t born here, or even raised here, I will never be considered of the South. My children will, however, and as they grow older I am curious to see how their consciousness and their identity are shaped by the legacy of this place. The joke (okay, the sad truth) about Atlanta is that there is no part of our history we won’t bulldoze over, but all the cranes and concrete and construction can never totally obscure the psychic fallout of what happened here 150 years ago, when the Battle of Atlanta presaged the end of the Confederacy.

The South is supposed to be haunted—crumbling houses and graveyards crowded with specters, spirits dripping like Spanish moss from ancient gnarled trees.