As a child I used to go out into the dirt road after a heavy rain and search for fragments of Civil War relics. I often found fragments of clay pipes, slate tablets, bullets--one with the cap and powder intact, rusty grape shot, and Confederate belt buckles. By the time I was in high school my collection rivaled that on display at the Georgia Historical Society in downtown Savannah. Ridge Road, where I lived, was just off US 17, and between Richmond Hill (where Fort MacAlister was during the Civil War, taken by surprise from the rear by Sherman's troops) and Savannah (where Sherman relaxed before invading and laying waste to South Carolina). Playing in the heavy woods around the houses on our road we found the path of old trenches used in the Civil War. Almost every time we plowed up our sandy soil we would find more grapeshot, the deadly iron equivalent of shotgun pellets blasted from cannons at approaching enemy infantry. Not surprising that this was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of the United States of America. The soil I grew up on was literally blood-soaked with murderous exchanges as Sherman approached Savannah in that terrible "March to the Sea," a swath of destruction sixty miles wide from Atlanta to Savannah. It did not take an overactive imagination to picture the ghosts of those terrible, bloody exchanges wandering around our road and in our fields on dark nights and in the light of a full moon. I'm glad I had not at that time read James Hillman's book called A Terrible Love of War. He maintains that "blood-soaked soil cries out for blood." I would not have slept well during my whole upbringing had I thought any such thing.
In grade eight in Savannah you were required to take a course in Georgia history. Neither the textbook writers nor the teacher could admit there had been a "Civil War;" they insisted we call it the "War Between the States." Maybe they would have liked the French way of designating the conflict--the "War of Secession." But Civil War it was and all the euphemisms in the universe of discourse cannot disguise the bloody truth. Some truths seem hard for people to swallow. A hundred years after that War, some people could not accept the simple fact that the root cause of the conflict was the evil of slavery. The dark history of human bondage in the United States still casts a long shadow over American history and politics. Little boys like my earlier self were imbued with an awe and respect for the Confederate battle flag, we learned to hate the very name of Sherman, and we learned to mistrust Yankees and their funny way of talking. My Uncle Jesse, a military careerist who was stationed in many different countries and who lived many years in the North, finally came home with his Yankee wife. She did not like living in the South. He was later remarried to a good Southern woman, the "salt of the earth." But he never lost his funny accent, his Yankee speech with its foreign intonations and turns of speech. I had mixed feelings since he was one of my favorite uncles. But his damned Yankee accent was offputting! (Many years later, even to this day, my sister who never left the South, is put off by my accent and what she thinks are my "Yankee ways." And that, despite the fact that my accent is really more Canadian after living nearly twenty years in that country. I feel more Canadian than American and even prefer the French language to the English language. That puts me very far from the country of my origins, the American South. (The real irony in all this is that I like French Canada because it reminds me of the South!)
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