The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Those were some good times in the plantation mansions of Dixie before the War ruined everything. Manners, gentility, mint juleps, ballgowns flowing, pickaninnies cavorting, cotton harvested, banjos playing with cicadas thrumming accompaniment and happy Negroes dancing. What’s not to love? What’s not to feel nostalgia for? Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben in the summer kitchen, preparing dinners for Massa, I know it makes my pea pickin heart yearn for the antebellum paradise lost after those Yankee invaders burned Atlanta and most of the rest of the Deep South.

And now they want to take down the statues of fallen heroes, ban the movie with Vivian and Clark, purge the sweet potato memories of good old boys from Georgia to Virginny. Oh, the horror, the horror! They even want to remove that last vestige of the Confederacy from the flag of the great state of Mississippi! Is there no shame, you carpetbaggers, you Union jackals, is there no limit to the perfidy of you and these protesters and their pals?

You never really surrendered, did you? You never gave up the dream of owning other people, maybe not outright, but as sharecroppers, indentured servants, minimum wage earners. You never believed those Africans were people like you were, just folks beneath you, beneath your bootheel. You didn’t believe they should be emancipated much less given the right to vote. You don’t want your kids going to school with their kids, you don’t want them living in your suburb, you don’t really want them living in your country. When one of them, a half black man, was elected President of your conquerors’ United States, you didn’t accept that any more than you accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. You still believe in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Posse Comitatus. If the police kill an unarmed black man, no big deal, just cops protecting your property rights, right? Black Lives Matter? You don’t think so, you never did.

So now the country is finally waking up to you, finally staring at the redneck face of racism. Hell if I know where they’ve been, watching too much TV maybe, binging on internet, too busy to notice that you never really gave up, just kept suppressing votes, kept fighting against segregation and civil rights, kept going to your pretty steepled churches. But they seem to be paying attention now and they want your statues taken down, your flags relegated to the moths, your Jim Crow sent packing. And oh my, how you wail, how you cry. Well, frankly, my dears, we don’t give a damn.

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