8. Bless Your Heart, I do think you are lucky no one has shot you
When my friend Tammy saw my copy of the Great Seal of the Confederacy, the first thing she noticed was the motto: Deo Vindice. “A vengeful god,” she said. “Them Southerners really know how to hate, don’t they?”* Tammy is from a slaveholding, plantation-owning family herself; she is the one who brought me into Coming to the Table.
It was some time after this that I stumbled across the thorny thicket of how exactly the Latin phrase should be translated – with some contending that the true meaning confers God’s blessing on the Southern cause. Not being a Latin scholar, I have no opinion on this. But perusing some of the comments on the Internet, I have to think that Tammy has a point.
Andy Hall, in his blog Dead Confederates, does not hesitate to go toe to toe with Lost Cause true believers on such divisive issues as Did Confederates soldiers own slaves? For these transgressions, he has garnered an impressive collection of slurs, which he helpfully gathers in one place. Besides being called a “coward bastard” and a “pompous, bigoted, un-educated ass,” Hall has been accused of slandering the South. He’s been compared to both a piece of dog crap and a serial killer.
He’s also managed to provoke my favorite example ever of that velvet-gloved Southern insult, “Bless your Heart.” As in: “Bless Your Heart, I do think you are lucky that no one has shot you in the face or gone to your kids school and shot up the place. . . . Ah well, there is always next year.” (My sister, a stand-up comic in New Orleans, explains in her act that when southerners say, “Well, bless your heart,” it means “you are too dumb to live! I can’t believe your mama let you come out by yourself. You do not know how to act right.”)
Really, though, this is shocking and not at all funny. The “Bless your Heart” woman wrote her comment four days after the Sandy Hook school shooting and actually signed her name. It’s easy enough to dismiss these commenters as Deo Vindice Southerners.
But there was one criticism against Andy Hall’s website that halfway sticks: “My guess is that anti-Southern cyber-stalkers [like you] resent a living, vibrant culture with rich traditions and a sense of belonging and meaning that’s been denied them, so they snipe at those who [have them]. If they can’t have cultural moorings, no one else can, either. . . .”
I admit that I sometimes wish for the sense of place and the deep roots that were not part of an Army brat upbringing. But not at any cost. I know many white Southerners who, like Andy Hall, want no part of Lost Cause thinking. Who are doing their damnedest against serious odds to bring about significant change in the region – marching, organizing, registering voters, writing books and blogs. That is a tradition I would be proud to belong to.
For more on the translation of “Deo Vindice” see “The Mystery of the Great Seal.”