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Hank Willis Thomas – A Suspension of Hostilities, 2019

According to my father, because I refuse to respect the Confederate flag, I am a traitor to my family and my Southern heritage. Considering how many of our ancestors fought the British for independence, including some who were Free People of Color in North Carolina, I disagree. 

He argues that while they were filming the Dukes of Hazzard, during the late seventies to mid eighties, the General Lee and its flag were not considered racist. They were just harmless symbols of cultural pride, meant for good old boys and other underdogs in the South. He says that because the use of those symbols wasn’t intended as racist, it shouldn’t be taken as such, and we should allow the show the naivety of its time. “It was only after Charlottesville and Charleston that controversy started,” is one of his canards.

If he would listen to Black people, which he has yet to do, he would learn that they’ve never liked that flag, long before Charlottesville and Charleston, because the KKK uses it and the good old boys flying it are usually mean-ass racists. I think he knows this, deep down, but he denies it. He gas-lights himself and gets mad when others won’t join him. Intergenerational trauma in action again. Some of our ancestors gas-light themselves into being “pure whites” instead of the mixed people they were. 

He also argues the flag’s meaning depends on context. This puts the responsibility on Black people to spend their time deciding which displays of that flag are hateful and which are not. Why on Earth would they want to do that? Because white people have been so kind and understanding towards them through the years?

My father and his fans can fly the Confederate flag. I wish they wouldn’t, but they have the right to. We didn’t ban it, the way the Germans banned the Nazi flag. (We should have.) But it should not fly in federal or state or local government offices. We had a whole war about it, and their side lost.   

So what to do with the Dukes of Hazzard—should replays of the show be banned? And what about all the merchandise that Ben and Alma now sell in their stores? Do I expect them to give up their living?

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A monument to General Robert E. Lee formerly stood in Charlottesville, Virginia. As part of the “Swords Into Plowshares” project, the statue was melted down. Artists will use the metal to make new public artwork. Photo by Eze Amos.

One example of me playing the fool: I’ve spent far too much precious time fighting with Lost Causers on Twitter. 

Twitter became an outlet for me during the lockdown, something I could do on the clock while stuck at home. I started playing around on the platform, using the account of my then employer, the tiny Institute for International Law & Justice at NYU. I began by promoting our events and publications, and within months our account was up from a handful of subscribers to 11K. I’m proud of this, and I have a hard time feeling proud of anything. 

Before Elon Musk ruined it, International Law Twitter was exciting. It disrupted the elite gatekeeping of the field and transformed scholarly communication, while new intellectual networks coalesced, especially in the Global South. By osmosis, I knew enough about International Law to help connect scholars, not as another expert but as a supporter, like a fan cheering on a team: Go International Law! 

Of course home and life and work and play were all mushed up together during the lockdown. I became a little loopy from the isolation. I started scratching at my skin and pulling my hair out again. I started drinking too much. The Law School’s Office of Communications chastised me for making a joke @ the BBC Twitter account about The Young Ones. [It was a funny joke and I stand by it.] So I moved over to my personal account, to make my jokes over there instead. 

Next I insulted a Lost Causer, or a Lost Causer insulted me, and they figured out who I was, and my connection to Ben Cooter Jones, one of their heroes. Then I was swept up into the ongoing Twitter Civil War, on the side of the Union of course, where I met many brilliant people with encyclopedic knowledge of the conflict such as Brooks Simpson. 

The Union historians waged intellectual battles, and I reveled in seeing them take Lost Causers down with facts and logic. I waged battles of mockery. I’ve developed a thick skin, after years as a New Yorker, and I’m not afraid of sparring with people. I discovered a talent for infuriating Those Still Fighting the Northern War of Aggression Online.

Lost Causers on Twitter are trolls for the most part, who hold misogynist, racist, and other repugnant views, and who insist on inflicting those views on others. A very few are deluded but polite, and they try to rein in the others from calling me a bitch, slut, tramp, whore etc. I’ve given polite ones a chance, hoping our interactions might influence their views on things Confederate. 

***

According to intermediaries, my father’s last straw with me was Twitter. His version of our estrangement boils down to, “Rachel talked ugly about me on social media.” I was honest. I spoke openly about things that happened between us, things he hoped I would never talk about, let alone on Twitter. I don’t feel guilty. If he wanted me to sing his praises, he should have treated me better. He should have told wife #5 Alma to retract her claws rather than ignore her constant cattiness. I asked him to engage in family therapy with me, and he never responded. So our relationship is over, by his choice, and yes, I processed some feelings about that online.    

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Stein Club linocut print by Katherine W. Linn

The day after the reunion was the 92nd anniversary of Lessie’s death. I walked along the Elizabeth River, in a posh Portsmouth neighborhood, noticing the big houses with private docks and expensive boats. As I was walking, I was also birdwatching. My mother’s bird obsession has rubbed off on me, so I always observe those around me.

In the water, there were ducks, egrets, geese, and herons. In the trees, there were big glossy crows, cardinals, and mockingbirds. One was making such a racket above me that I stopped and looked up to see what was going on.

I saw a small hawk. It looked quite pleased with itself, stabbing at its prey, strewing feathers below. The cries were from a nearby mockingbird. She couldn’t save her fledgling, but she refused to let the hawk have a peaceful meal.

I tried to help. I threw rocks towards the hawk to get it to stop, but I have terrible aim. Then I knocked a big stick against the tree, and that worked, although too late for the fledgling. The hawk flew away from the tree, leaving the ground below decorated with soft, tiny feathers. 

The hawk, the fledgling, the mockingbird. I know my mother would have told me to leave the hawk alone, to not interfere with nature. But the scene reminded me of the classic triad: abuser, victim, witness. 

***

After my walk, I set out to find Pinners Point, the place where my father grew up. But it has disappeared, as I discovered when I got lost in a desolate landscape of shipping containers. 

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I can’t write a memoir, as I’ve explained, because I have a bad memory, a deep sense of shame, and a desire to keep some remnants of privacy in a world of constant surveillance. There are other reasons. For example, my lack of journals. Many famous memoir writers rely on journaling, and they often mention the importance of it in interviews about their work. Journals allow memoir writers to factcheck themselves, so they can stay within the boundaries of nonfiction. No one wants to be the next James Frey.  

From my twenties to my forties, I kept journals. This meant I also lugged heavy boxes full of memories good and bad from Massachusetts to Texas to California back to Texas back to Massachusetts and then up to Maine down to Virginia and finally to New York, from apartment to apartment to storage unit to apartment etc. I moved so many times that I still have anxiety dreams about packing. I never read my old journals but I thought it was important to keep them, for the future, because that is what writers do, and I was trying to be a writer. 

Eventually, I got tired of the bother and the weight of my journals. I didn’t want to just throw them in a dumpster so I decided to burn them. My ex J. suggested the fire pit at her father’s house in the country, and we drove up there from the city, for one last time of moving those heavy boxes. We built the fire, and I had a wonderful time throwing journal after journal, reminders of my past, into the flames. It was cathartic as hell. I felt unburdened. I regret it from time to time, but I haven’t kept a journal since. 

***

The main reason I went to Portsmouth, Virginia last summer was a family reunion. The reunion was with people I’m distantly related to, through my father and Nova Jenerette Stephens. These cousins are Black and I am white, but we have a common ancestor, Gabriel Jacobs. I’ve written about Gabriel here before. 

I’ve been in correspondence for several years now with my cousins Tyrone and Luke, who’ve helped me piece together parts of our family history that long puzzled me, for example: are we really a little Cherokee? (Spoiler, we are not. But we are connected through kinship with the Lumbee, Waccamaw, and other coastal Carolina tribes.) Tyrone encouraged me to come to the reunion, so we could finally meet in person. 

While meeting Tyrone and at least a hundred of my distant cousins of color in person for the first time, what struck me most was their kindness. It was a crowded party, but people tended to their elders and disabled. They played with their children. They were loving towards one another, and to me, and they meant it. There were all shades of skin there. Our interconnected families have been mixed for generations, from way back to precolonial days in Virginia and North Carolina: white, African, and Native. 

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for the Portfire Crew, with gratitude

For the past several years, I’ve talked about writing a memoir a lot. I’m embarrassed to admit this: for all my talking about it, it should be written by now. I also think about writing a memoir constantly, composing sentence after sentence in my head, but never writing anything down. My resistance is strong. It makes lists of reasons for me to stay schtum.

At the top of all the lists: I’ve lived, and continue to live, a messy life. I’m reluctant to share all the shameful bits let alone remember them. People close to me understand that I often play the fool. They’ve seen me create little hells for myself, with my good but naive intentions. I also have quite an index of personality flaws. Nobody but me knows about all my flaws and foolishness, and it’s better that way. I’m intimate with my shadow, but we’re on the down low.

I imagine some potential readers as my high school English teachers, who must be protected from my past and ongoing shenanigans. Other potential readers are my Gen-X peers from Mystic, Connecticut who are connected to Portfire. They already know too much about me, good and bad, so I don’t feel protective of them, especially the ones who find my writing “depressing” and “morbid” etc. If it’s depressing to read about, try living it!

Researching my family history has revealed truly Gothic levels of dysfunction going back generations. It is an ongoing revelation into my own trauma: the context of my messiness, the intergenerational aspects of it. If I’m going to write honestly, I can’t worry about readers who find it “too dark”.  I find it “too dark”. It’s incredibly hard to sit with and write about because of its darkness.

I can’t write a memoir. But I can write pieces of memoir…

***

Some context for readers who are not my high school English teachers or fellow Mystic Gen Xers:

• My father, Ben Jones, became famous during my childhood
• He played Cooter Davenport on the hit television series Dukes of Hazzard
• He then served two terms as a Congressman from Atlanta, Georgia
• He is probably one of the largest, if not the top, retailers of Confederate flags
• My father had a rough childhood; he is traumatized and traumatizing 
• We are estranged; it is not the first round of estrangement, but it is the final one.

***

Last summer, I made a trip to Portsmouth, Virginia, a small city where both my father and his mother grew up. I found the house that the family owned before the Depression. 732 Broad Street was in an old neighborhood crowded with Victorians. Our house wasn’t Victorian. It was grim and plain and squat. There were fake flowers and faded flags on the front porch. I drove past it a few times, then parked briefly across the street. I wasn’t brave enough to cross the street, to knock on the door. 

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