Remembering the fallen

26 years have passed since my grandfather passed away. I was 10 years old. I remember my mother returning from the funeral with some of his belongings in old cardboard boxes. Old things, musty smelling things steeped in childhood mystery. Amongst those treasures salvaged from my grandfather’s home were two big books with slightly worn gray covers, one with a graphic of a tattered flag. A flag I had never seen before, white stars on a blue cross which lay atop a red field. What was this flag and whose was it?

I remember those two large books having a place on the hearth of our fireplace for many years growing up. There for me to pick up when those inevitable childhood questions were too much to keep in. I recall carefully thumbing through the hundreds of pages full of text with great men’s names and black and white photographs of distant casualties of war. But this was no ordinary war, this was a war between the States that made up our country. I remember how I felt a reverence and respect for those unknown men laying in contorted positions upon the dusty ground, motionless, forever frozen in time. They it seemed would never forget what they had experienced. To me, a child not ever having a personal experience with death, those figures on the pages I imagined were just sleeping, and were just about to wake up as the sun rose. In my young imagination, it was almost as if I was looking out through a window on something that was happening right outside my house.

Those images from the books and names I would read about stuck with me all of my life. Growing up in many different locations throughout the South, I remembered seeing and visiting some of the monuments honoring the memory of those men from that city or county, that made the ultimate sacrifice for home and hearth. I began to realize that I had stepped through that window from my childhood home and into the reality of that war. Those bodies, those men in the pages of those ancient books had become real. They were not simply black and white images of some other place so long ago. They were a wife’s husband, a parent’s child, a child’s father, a brother. They were my ancestors.

As the years have passed I have gained an understanding as to why these somber and solemn monuments to fallen comrades and loved ones were commissioned and erected on so many Southern town squares, cemeteries and public greens. They were placed in these places so that we never forget them. Those who won the war and those that disagree with the causes of the war, taut racism and hatred, bigotry and violence, and will stop at nothing to eradicate all that we, the descendants of those brave citizen soldiers, have to remember them by. The lone Confederate soldier silently standing watch over their fallen brothers.

Why is it sacred and right to have monuments to other fallen heroes, other causes, but not for our ancestors? They by birthright were Americans! Their ancestors fought for the freedom from a tyrannical government but a short generation prior. The reasons for the constant onslaught of accusations and eradication of all things Southern are many. Our reason for keeping our sacred monuments and symbols are but one, to keep their memory alive. To remember is to honor. Are these monuments unlike a gravestone or tombstone? Would you demand the removal of some persons gravestone simply because you did not agree with what the deceased may have done? I think not, that would be preposterous. Are there not great monuments to the fallen Northerners as well in many places across the North? We do not demand them to be removed because they remind us of the coercion and atrocities wrought upon the Southern people. Those monuments, like ours stand for something, and we understand and respect that.

Others claim that the monuments instill fear and stand for slavery, and that these monuments offend them. If we all were constantly demanding the removal of all things that offended each and everyone of us, there would be nothing left of any so called American heritage and culture. Why can they not choose to commission and erect monuments to their ancestors? I think that monuments to freed slaves would be fitting to honor them and their descendants. What is stopping them? Are they not proud of their ancestors achievements? Do they not want to honor their fallen as well? Or do they just simply want to complain, and spew forth more hatred and racism and more false accusations? It seems that this long passed war did not end at Appomattox and Palmetto Ranch. The battlefields are still much the same. The war was mostly fought in the south from 1861-1865 and is still being waged here today.

It is my heartfelt desire that some understanding can be had by all those who still want to dictate to the South what we can and cannot do. We’re not constantly trying to persuade anyone that we are right. We simply desire the war to end so that we can let our dead lay at peace, and that we may respectfully honor and remember them, just as their sons and daughters, wives and mothers and comrades did when they chose to place those monuments on the soil.

Those two big books with worn gray covers have aged some since coming into my home. Their dust jackets, have some tears and tatters, but the pages of those books are just as crisp as the day that I first put my hands on them. They, for a long time have had a place upon my bookshelves silently guarding their valiant history. Those volumes will remain there quietly, waiting for those little hands of the next generation, to tell their stories.