Cardinal Points

Atlanta, Georgia. Sometime in the early-mid-2000s, early-mid spring, my digital audio recorder, I find out later (last month), still running.

I am sitting on the steps of a building on the Emory University campus with a group of white third-year undergrads still uncertain whether the book I read from earlier in the day could allow me my so-called reputation, when one of them, a political science major, starts in on Reconstruction.

"Anybody from the North," he begins out of nowhere, his weight on the first and seventh syllables, "cannot possibly understand the harm done to the South by that most insidious of federal policies known as Reconstruction. Why, it was nine times worse than what the French demanded of the Germans at Versailles. Nine times! And what your government up there in Canada did to your Indians -- why, I believe it was worse -- or if not, at the very least, on par with -- that, too."

This went on longer than it should have, in no small part due to my mistaken belief that I was in a dialogue. Indeed, when our parson took a breath, when I began to respond to the first of his half dozen fallacies I was working so hard to remember, I was told ever-so-sweetly by another of this group to "Hush now, you had your turn when you read to us from your book."

(Ah, so it is a dialogue -- only I am too slow to remember that it started earlier. And that crashing sound? The sound of me losing track of all those fallacies.)

"We in the South are a patient people, Mr. Turner. We have endured a great deal since the Yankee politicians and the Yankee military and the Yankee carpetbaggers came into our neck and highjacked our economy, which, if it were a peach, was as particular to us as the tomato is to the Sicilian."

(Is he quoting Faulkner?)

No -- this is madness! The Confederate states had a slave economy, an economy built on the backs of Black people. As for Reconstruction, sure, it was an imposition, but what the American Civil War was really about -- the prize, as it were -- was the West, which, by then, was forming its own economies, based largely on the prospect of gold.

That's what Reconstruction was really about: not simply Northern capitalists crushing their Southern competitors under the auspices of Abolition, but a program that would corral Mormon, Chinese and indigenous people out West. We had something similar in Canada during the 1970 implementation of the War Measures Act, when a situation in Quebec allowed the RCMP carte blanche throughout the rest of the country -- like harassing hippie communes in rural British Columbia.