One morning this week, I rode the elevator up to my desk with a well-dressed young Black woman who had kindly keyed open the building door for me – in these days when odd folks are taking pot shots at the President, we have decent security.
She smiled and asked if I had enjoyed my day off on Confederate Memorial Day? Her expression betrayed no irony, just genuine goodwill. I was mortified. “I can’t believe they still call it that!” I responded, telling her I was ashamed to live in a state where that was still the case.
“Oh, you have to laugh…...” she responded. “Yes! It’s comical!” And we stepped off the elevator to start the working day.
But Confederate Memorial Day is far from comical, it is racial and ethnic insensitivity carried to the point of idiocy. Surely someone at the capitol can find a fairly neutral title to hang on a state holiday that does not semi-deify the primary issue causing a civil war in the country, nearly 170 years ago!
Half the population of Mississippi consists of men, women and children of color, some degree of whose ancestry was forcibly kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery. “Two Mississippi Museums” documents at least the surface record of that, but cannot convey what it actually felt like to sweat under a burning sun for a quota of pounds of cotton per bag, which might earn one a beating if the required amount was not picked by sundown. Even a greatly accurate historical museum can never convey the anguish of a father or mother whose children were monetarily valued and dispensed with as cattle in a slave sale.
Do we actually want to memorialize this and dignify the practice of slavery by designating a formal holiday of this type? Yes, some of my grandfathers times-two or three rode with the Confederate cavalry and shot Yankees at Shiloh. That was then, and by the way, none of them held slaves, they just fought “because y’all (said Yankees) are down here.”
And all of it was wrong, not less so because we now awkwardly remember their real courage in battle while ignoring the outrage of imprisonment, family separation and forced labor which lay underneath and which they defended.
To ignore the fact that Black adults now comprise a large portion of the state’s electorate as well as its news-watching and reading public is to write off a sizeable sector of moveable votes which can drive key elections, if mobilized. At some point, this is going to occur. Until then, I will continue to be embarrassed by my workmate’s kindly greeting in the elevator. She shrugged at my apologies “you just have to laugh it off,” and stepped out at the third floor.
I am tired of laughing, I expect she is, as well. Surely our august senators and state representatives can find a way to better designate a day off for their staff.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
