had long regarded my history as a ball and chain, so had spent every spare minute trying to file it off. Raleigh itself had seemed a purgatory of the obscure whose most malevolent power was to suck me back. In two short years I realized that the past was instead terrifyingly evanescent. Increasingly, the town where I grew up did not exist.
“I mean, now Mordecai’s going to force our house on the market,” I went on. “Maybe that’s the limit. No house, no parents—I’m not sure I want to be that free.”
We were on the outer edges of Oakwood, where the Colonial Revivals were smaller and closer together, painted in original Reconstruction colors that approached garish—magentas, lavenders, and corals glared on window sashes, which must have suited the onslaught of posh homosexuals that had recently moved in en masse. We turned on Polk Street to enter Oakwood Cemetery, where the setting sun lemoned gravestones on hillocks.
We hiked up to the Confederate burial ground, a grid of modest identical slabs a foot high, engraved with nameless dates. After the Civil War, Union troops still occupied Raleigh. They refused to allow Confederate dead to remain in the federal cemetery on Tarboro Road, insisting that the corpses—gray in every sense now—be exhumed to make room for Union graves: one more Southern grudge to bear, and this town thrived on them. In 1867 the Wake County Memorial Association dug up some five hundred bodies and lugged them over here. Later, the same association hauled corpses down from the heathen North, and now there were 3000 Confederate graves on this hill. We used to play here as children, upsetting the caretakers with our shrill irreverence, and swiping plastic stars and bars from headstones to bring home and deliberately appall my father.
The official halfway point in Truman’s walk was a small memorial house erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with cold cement benches and flagstone floor. The damp, still air was sweet with unraked leaves. From one of many bronze plaques to fallen rebels inset in granite, Truman read out:
Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently it is holy—
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not—unfold it never,
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people’s hopes are dead.
“The American South,” I observed, pretentiously like my father, “it’s the only place I know that revels in defeat. Most countries, after suffering ignominy, try to put it behind them.”
“Did you ever notice,” said Truman, “that Father’s attitude toward the Civil War was a little weird?”
“Weird? It made him mad.”
“But he wouldn’t work himself into an abolitionist lather. He was mad at Sherman. Like everyone else.”
True, and I treasured the inconsistency.
We tripped out the south cemetery gate and threaded through the margins of Oakwood, where big black mamas still darned socks on splintered porches. The central part of the neighborhood had gentrified, and now contained the highest concentration of Ph.Ds in the city limits. It was thanks to the Eighties boom that Heck-Andrews had multiplied into a staggeringly far-sighted investment, for this had not always been an upscale locale.
Oh, it started that way, though these tattier homes we strolled past now had been built for the Negro cooks and housekeepers who toiled in the Big Houses, like ours. Yet little by little the help didn’t remember their place and encroached on Oakwood proper, and in their wake many white owners fled.
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