The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was a kid in Georgia, first grade until seventh. We moved there from the North Carolina Appalachians and we’d moved to North Carolina from the pine forests of central Mississippi. Y’all can still hear some of my Southern drawl even 55 years since I moved back into the North. But when I moved to Georgia, what they heard was Yankee. And what I heard from them was nearly an incomprehensible foreign language.

I took a mandatory year of Georgia History in 6th grade. Mrs. Crabtree taught it and Mrs. Crabtree thought 90% of Georgia History was the Civil War. We didn’t study much U.S. History, probably to my school it was more like World History. Mrs. Crabtree was pretty adamant that the wrong side won the War Between the States, the Yankee Invaders. Me, I was definitely on the Wrong Side, story of my sorry life.
You folks who haven’t lived awhile south of the Mason-Dison Line, you maybe think the North won that war. What you don’t understand is that the Confederacy never really surrendered. Oh sure, Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant at Appomatox in 1865, but most of the South didn’t sign those documents. They still haven’t. You maybe think slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, but like I said, you haven’t lived down there. The KKK still runs rural towns, blacks weren’t slaves, they’re sharecroppers, voting rights are systematically undermined by Jim Crow and now voter suppression laws, the South still flies the Confederate flag, the South still reveres Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the rebel generals who fought to save their ‘culture’.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re tackling that thorny issue of whether we should be celebrating the folks who fought to preserve slavery. One hundred and fifty years later we’re fighting the same war Lincoln did. Most of this country thinks the statues should stay put. Sort of like Grant letting the rebels take their horse and their guns and their white privilege home — you know, in the spirit of Yankee generosity.

Me, as a former Yankee in Jefferson Davis’ Court, I say it’s time to declare Victory once and for all. Take the statues down, remove the Confederate flag and give blacks equal rights. If this seems harsh, if this seems like we’re disrespecting Cracker Culture, get over it. We let this go for a century and a half. And Mrs. Crabtree, if you’re still alive, I got some news for you. The right side won.

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