0. How I Got Into This

For decades I harbored in the back of my office closet an archive inherited from my father’s Alabama kin.  Wills bequeathing family oil portraits; yellowed newspaper clippings about antebellum homes-turned-museums; hand-drawn genealogical charts, held together with rusty paper clips, tracing my connection to high-profile Confederates from Gen. George Pickett to L.P. Walker, the first Secretary of War of the Confederacy. 

I nicknamed this trove “The Pile” and for years I kept it in quarantine.  If these bits and pieces told a story, I wasn’t ready to hear it. The idea that facing history is a path to justice has been advanced by Black thinkers from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates to Bryan Stevenson. For a long while I resisted that, at least when it came to my own family.  

For a long while I believed that the Civil War was over.   I knew it had a huge fan base -- from the hobbyists who reenact favorite battles to history buffs who debate the fine points of military strategy. When I encountered members of these fervent and possessed subcultures on the Internet, I always felt like I was walking along the edge of a tar pit.   I didn’t want to get too close. 

Then, after the 2016 election, the Civil War came for me, and there was nothing quaint about it. When a reinvigorated white supremacy began sweeping the country I knew it was time to take the Confederates out of the closet and to face the enslavers in my family.

I’m descended from Southerners only on my father’s side of the family -- though that side includes some high-profile Confederate skeletons (Gen. George Pickett, most famously.)   I don’t remember my father professing affection for the Deep South way of life  – he left it for a career in the military.  The U.S. Army was the culture I grew up in.  Col. Banks didn't care if my sister and I knew all the words to “Dixie” (though we did) but we had better be able to sing “The Artillery Song” upon command.   So, although the Army posts where we lived  were mostly in the South, we were never explicitly  indoctrinated in the creed of the Lost Cause, with its fierce nostalgia for the antebellum “way of life.”  Yet looking back, I am shocked at how much of it we breathed in anyway.  Valued heirlooms, dyed-in-the-wool Southern aunts, and, of course, stories.

A foot-tall stack of paper — The Pile — sat waiting for me in my office closet for many years.  These documents are the family archives and they came down to me along with my grandmother’s silver.  My sister, who has a house, got the furniture, as well as a 4’x6’ oil portrait of an anonymous ancestor:  (“He’s an Alston, I think” says my sister.  “He died young in a fall from a horse and didn’t have any children.” )  I got some engraved silver serving spoons, a gold-plated replica of the Confederate seal, and The Pile – ancestors in another form. 

How did The Pile come into being?  And how did it end up with me? From the mists of childhood memory, I dimly recall a visit to some ancient (as they seemed to me then) cousins of my father, sisters who lived together in a big house in Montgomery, Alabama.   What I recall most vividly is their cats, which they’d trained to jump into a basket so they could be hauled to the second floor by a pulley system.  [For more about these cats, see “Daring to Face the Past.”] The women were sweet to me and one gave my father a ring to be passed on to me when I was old enough.  

The sisters were granddaughters of Albert James Pickett, the Alabama historian and plantation owner, and my own great great grandfather.  Edna, who gave me the ring, was an enthusiastic family historian.  My guess is that many of the documents in The Pile probably originated with her – and  were likely given to my father on the same visit to Montgomery that I remember. Some of these documents have notes appended in Edna’s handwriting: “You may keep this.”  Others say, “Be sure to return this.”  This instruction was directed at my father who appears to have ignored it.  He had plenty of years in which to return Edna’s papers, as she lived until 1986.   

For the longest time I was allergic to these papers. They scared me, really.  They documented my connection to people I was not eager to claim as kin. The past they tied me to didn’t feel like mine.  When you reinvent yourself every three years, as Army kids can and must do, forbears lack importance.  Your status is defined by your daddy’s rank; no one knows or cares who your people are.   

So The Pile remained untouched over the years for a reason -- or for many reasons.   But after 2016, I could no longer ignore it.  I began to poke at the archive tentatively, pulling out a  few pages to examine. 

Right away I extracted: 

A 1963 newspaper story about an event that took place in 1791, headlined “Col. Alston Shot Dead in Bed in Georgia.” 

An advertising circular announcing “Your only invitation to own a numbered, authentic and authorized exact replica of the Great Seal of the Confederacy in sterling silver,” including an invitation to become a charter member of The Society of the Confederacy.  

A hand-written document, its pages held together with rusty paper clips detailing the disposition of Pickett family portraits: “Clarice to Lizzie Banks and Eliza the following portraits:  I William Raiford Pickett; II Francis Dickson Pickett; III Eliza Goddard Whitman.” 

A pair of newspaper feature stories about historic houses owned by ancestors that have been turned into museums, one in Montgomery, Alabama; another a Revolutionary War era plantation in Moore County, North Carolina.  

Three pages in tiny print titled “More about Banks lineage,” from which I learned for the first time that my father was the fourth Richard Griffin Banks, and that his great-grandfather was a Confederate surgeon.  Looking up that Dr. Banks in census records, I learned that in 1840 his Virginia household had included 7 slaves.  

There are many kinds of not knowing.  There is knowing and then forgetting.   There is knowing but failing to imagine.  And then there is just looking away.  These were all ways I did not know the stories that make up my paternal family history, populated with slaveholders and Confederate generals.  The stories have been there all along, waiting for me to be willing to know them.  Such willingness comes gradually, in slow stages, and then suddenly in moments that illuminate the landscape like summer sheet lightning.