"First, it should big - the plaque. Not necessarily because
there's so much to say, though there *is* so much to say. It should be big
enough to be noticed on the side of this rather grand monument, after they move
it and the bodies beneath it across town to the cemetery. Not just big for the
sake of bigness. It needs to stick out as something "off."
Something that disrupts the admirable bounce of the statue,
currently so tasteful - regal even.
This bronze man on this bronze horse: goatee, square jaw,
you get it. You've seen it before, even if you haven't seen it before. The
statue faces north, the sculptor wanted Forrest to face south to better catch
the light, but people complained. They said it would imply the general was
retreating and he wasn't a man who retreated. He surrendered once, but if the
sculpture faced north, maybe people would forget that part, I guess.
So anyway, the plaque has to be big enough to catch your eye
when you're checking your cell phone or walking your dog or eating your chicken caesar
salad from a plastic box on a bench - whatever people are doing there in the cemetery, and whatever they might do in the future, because that's why we make these
things, right?
Plaques. Bronze men on bronze horses. We want people in the
future to remember, but first we want them to notice.
So let’s think about material for this imagined plaque.
Maybe the plaque should be garish. Not intentionally ugly, not necessarily - titanium, maybe: a patch of Frank Gehry-inspired futurism on this staid,
stately old thing. It would catch the light and catch the eye, in contrast to
the northward-facing, brown-green man on his brown-green horse, or a great
pigeon a-lit on his brown-green epaulet.
I like that the 'Gehry' of it all, the futurism is not at
all futuristic. It's millennial. A decade from now it'll be dated - literally
dated. Bilbao or Disney Hall or wherever, will seem so late 90s, so 2000s, and
you'll scoff and I want that. I want this plaque to be fixed in time, to let
people know when it went up. Let people know what was up at the time, because
that is the point here. The point of this plaque is to make sure these future people
realize that this lovely old statue wasn't always old and wasn't always here in
this cemetery and moreover I want the reader, standing there in the shadow cast
by the late, somehow still lamented, Nathan Bedford Forrest, on some future
summer Sunday to know why it wound up in some park on the other side of town in
the first place.
Memorials aren't memories. They don't just appear upon
death.
A letter of surrender, signed in some farmhouse at the edge
of some battlefield, doesn't come complete with some historic marker affixed to
the door.
The monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest was put in that park downtown
for a reason, at a specific moment in time. At that time, General Forrest and
Mrs. Forrest were already buried in Elmwood cemetery, the same place the city
council recently voted to put them. His body and her body were originally dug up
from the ground because a group of prominent Memphians thought they were better
off somewhere else. That was 1905, 40 years after the war, 30 years after
Forrest's death.
They felt the city needed Nathan Bedford Forrest then, because they had seen that city fall from great heights. Memphis had been
left relatively unscathed by the war, but not by its outcome - not by the end
of the slave trade that had been one of the economic and cultural pillars of
the city; without the slave markets selling men and women and children; and without
the riverboats and crews and suppliers and dockworkers, sending them up and
down the river.
Memphis was hardly Memphis anymore.
Then there was the
Yellow Fever that swept through the city years before and killed so many and
drove many more away - people who never returned after mandatory evacuation.
Now it was the turn of the next century and the city was
increasingly, let's just say it, let's just stop not saying things:
increasingly Black and increasingly tense.
White businesses didn't like competing with Black
businesses. Black people didn't like being lynched. This move to move Forrest
started not long after Ida B. Wells, a Memphian too, had started writing,
rabble-rousing, boldly and bravely, against lynching. After her friend Thomas
Moss was improperly imprisoned. After a fight between children over a game of
marbles escalated until adults were threatening to burn down a store. After
Moss wound up being pulled from that prison and strung from a tree. After Wells
was threatened so much and so often that she moved away. After the paper she
wrote for burned to the ground.
Wealthy, white Memphis at the beginning of the 1900s found
all of this unpleasant. So, they raised money: $33,000.
Not to rebuild that newspaper office. Not to replace the
police force that would really protect all of its citizens, but to make a
monument to a man who they thought best represented a Memphis they had lost: A
man who had risen from nothing, a blacksmith's boy who became a millionaire and
then believed so strongly in the Confederate cause that he enlisted as a
Private and went on to prove himself the most brilliant military man, born on
American soil, even if he didn't fight for America.
Those are facts. That's a
true story.
They liked what this story said of the American dream, even
if it wasn't technically American. Even if Forrest's millions were made by
buying and selling human beings, and selling cotton raised and picked and
cleaned and packed by enslaved human beings. Even if the cause for which he
employed that military genius was to ensure that men like him could rise up
from nothing and make a million dollars buying and selling human beings, stealing
their lives and their labor in the process.
In 1905, they held a parade at the unveiling of the new
statue and made speeches to honor the northward-facing General. They said nothing
of slavery. They said much about heritage and honor and chivalry. They said
nothing of how Nathan Bedford Forrest had been the first Grand Wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan. Nothing of the terror it had wrought. Nothing of the assassinations
or the lynchings. Nothing of how it sought to undermine and overthrow the
nation's political order, the nation that they celebrated there in Memphis in
1905, when they played the 'Star Spangled Banner' and 'Yankee
Doodle Dandy,' right alongside 'Dixie.'
They might not have mentioned any of it, but they knew it. They
knew about Forrest and the Klan. They'd certainly read The Klansman - it was
flying off the shelf that year: a novel about heroic men, hidden beneath
bedsheets, out to save White Virtue from Black Barbarians. It was a historical
romance. That's how it billed itself, looking back longingly on a time not long before, when people were still chivalrous - would
stand up against barbarism and miscegenation and instability. They would stand
up for order and private property. Who better to represent what they had lost
than Nathan Bedford Forrest?
They talked about his heroism in battle. Though they didn't
talk about the battle of Ft. Pillow, where Forrest ordered the massacre of
hundreds of American troops, attempting to surrender, most of them former
slaves. They talked about his faith instead, his strapping build, and about
their own hopes: that future Memphians would gaze upon Nathan Bedford Forrest
and be inspired. They even raised some extra cash for a skating rink, so that
the White children of Memphis could play nearby in the shadow of this great man
and learn from his shining example.
Though the bronze wouldn't shine for long - it would brown and
green as this symbol of all that was good was exposed to the light of the sun and
washed by the rain.
There is debate. There is always debate - about what the
Klan meant when Forrest was its Wizard, about his intentions at Ft.
Pillow. They say Forrest repented his sins and his crimes on his deathbed.
Should that be on the plaque? Should it note his regret? I say no.
May it have
ruined him. May it have corroded him, like rain on bronze. May it have choked
him, like smoke from the crosses and homes and churches, burnt by men who
revered him decades and decades later. Revered him at least in part, because
some influential Memphians decided they needed to revere him in this way, in
that park, in 1905.
So, the plaque should be big, but it can't be big enough to
say all that. Maybe it should just say. Maybe they should all say, the many many thousands of Confederate memorials and monuments and markers, that...
'The men who
fought and died for the CSA, whatever their personal reasons, whatever was in
their hearts, did so on behalf of a government formed for the express purpose
that men and women and children could be bought and sold and destroyed at will.'
Maybe that should be enough.
But I want people to know about those Memphians in 1905, who
wanted people to remember Forrest and why. Who wanted a symbol to hold up and
revere, to stand for what they valued most. I want people to know that that
statue stood in downtown Memphis for 110 years and to remember that memorials
aren't memories, they have motives, they are historical, and they are not
history itself. And I want them to know why it was moved.
That in 2015, after
Clementa Pinckney and Sharonda Coleman Singleton and Tywanza Sanders and Ethel Lee
Lance and Susie Jackson and Cynthia Hurd and Myra Thompson and Daniel Simmons
Sr. and Depayne Middleton-Doctor were murdered in church in Charleston, South
Carolina, there were people in Memphis who were done with symbols and were
ready to bury Nathan Bedford Forrest for good."
http://thememorypalace.us/2015/08/notes-on-an-imagined-plaque/
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