Jim Grimsley

Many of my southern friends and relatives are upset at the removal of the Confederate battle flag from its appointed flagpole in Columbia, South Carolina, and are defending it once again as a symbol of southern heritage. The Stars and Bars, they say, is meant to stand for the Southern way of life, its ease and graciousness, its courtesy, and the love of the region itself. The flag is a symbol of a war that was about northern imperialism, not about slavery. It reminds us of an ideal time in which a group of states stood up to oppose the idea of a large federal government taking away the rights of the individual states who had agreed upon a union that was voluntary, not compulsory.

Nearly all of the people talking along these lines are white, of course, and the argument they are making is one that has been made for a long time to defend nostalgia and even reverence for this flag. But it is an argument that is empty at this point, and the statement ignores the fact that there are other people in the South who would have to be in agreement with any symbol of our joint heritage. What defines the South is a matter for all the people who live here to decide in common; the process by which such a commonality is determined is not a matter for the majority race to impose on the rest.

While I have read a good deal of rhetoric about what makes the south different, I cannot agree with much of it. The notion that our people were more gracious or polite in the old South, that they were more genteel, and that nobility and honor were paramount, is a self-serving notion. I would prefer that others tell me that I am noble and honorable; it is empty to make the claim for myself or for my ancestors. The history of the South does not bear out any idea of gracious, genteel living, unless one narrows the focus to the old and fabled planter class, and it is hard to see what is so genteel about making a living by forcing labor out of one’s slaves.

As for that other idea, that the Civil War was not about slavery but was about state’s rights, it seems to me that this argument will never be settled to the satisfaction of all parties. In the case of the Confederate flag, the very fact that so many southerners oppose the public display of the flag – black, white, and brown southerners – settles the issue. While you can hold the flag to be dear to yourself and your idea of history, you cannot insist that others do so. White people cannot dictate to black people that they should agree with our idea of history; to do so would be simply another act of white supremacy. If you are a person who does believe in grace or gentility, then the way forward is clear: move beyond the need to fly this flag in public. Do this for the sake of your fellow human beings. They are more important than your idea of the past.

The debate will continue, of course, and even as I write this, Confederate monuments are being defaced in many southern states. This issue of what to do with monuments for those who died on the southern side of that war will be more painful than the flag debate. We will be discussing this issue for a long time. For myself, I am willing to see the monuments pulled down and the flag tucked away. The dead have long forgotten that war and that moment in history. It is the living who must now learn to let go.

I think it interesting that we define privacy as related to what the government does with information about our lives, when it is increasingly the case that privacy is something we have squandered in our insistence on constant connection. One cannot be a private person and at the same time use the internet in all its permutations; electronic devices are designed to share data, not to protect or conceal it. But we make heroes of the people who tell us that the government is watching us as if that is extraordinary, and we celebrate laws that limit spying agencies from performing certain kinds of actions on the great world database when we know that spying agencies rarely limit their actions to what the law allows.

Soon enough we will have smart houses, which means that those who watch us will not only know what we do in secret, they will know what lamps we burn and what doors we lock during our secretive moments. We already have smart cars, but when they begin to drive themselves we will not only be making an electronic record of our activities that is even more complete than it is now, we will be putting ourselves in the position of allowing the great machine to hijack us wherever it wants us to go.

The great machine is sometimes the government, sometimes corporate entities, sometimes entities that are more shadowy; the great machine is the manifestation of the world database that can move beyond recording our transactions to predicting and manipulating our transactions at any time it chooses. We are drowning ourselves in the great machine every day; we are dissolving into it.

And yet we celebrate a court telling the government it cannot look down at our feet where we have spilled all the data about ourselves into a puddle in which we are standing. We pretend that this court ruling or that law means we have more privacy today than we did yesterday.

I am more bemused by this than paranoid, maybe because I am old enough to see the end of the tunnel from which I will exit into whatever comes after this life of absurdity. I am aware that I have ceded any real privacy to the ether, and that I am as diligent about recording my movements into the world database as anyone. Whatever real privacy I have comes not from the ability of the government to spy on me but rather on its indifference to me. As long as the great machine does not care what I do, I am as private as I can be. If I want more than that, I can try to unplug myself from the database, to live without smart devices, to recreate a paper life rather than a digital one. But I am not likely to do that. I am more likely to remain a part of the data stream and to rely on the fact that nobody cares to find out what I do. For if anyone wants to know about who I really am, the truth is out there.

Privacy exists, but it is something a person has to earn. We want to think of it as a right, and perhaps it is, but if that’s true,  it is a right that we long ago allowed to erode into something that is nearly meaningless. Information, like water, runs downhill and pools.

When I was visiting New Orleans in March, having been invited to the Tennessee Williams Festival and the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, I was seated in the lobby of the Hotel Monteleone, awaiting my first event. I was scheduled  to discuss the presentation of the self in memoir on a panel with a very fine moderator and some strong fellow writers. Since I had arrived at the hotel a bit early, I was attempting to contemplate what it meant to present the self, one of those terms that could be deadening if discussed in purely academic terms in front of an audience of general readers. Nevertheless I found the idea to be intriguing, since our life in this modern world of constant media is a performance in so many ways.

As I was seated in a nice stiff-backed armchair beside the entrance to the hotel restaurant, a group of women walked past me, decked out in a motif of beige fabrics and leopard prints – scarves, blouses, jackets. My impression of them was that they were very much connected to one another, maybe even family, similarly tall, blonde, with carefully done hair. They carried themselves with an air of the regal, so much so that one could see at a glance that they understood the idea of the presentation of the self, the performance of even so simple a matter as a walk across the hotel lobby. One of them glanced at me and appeared to recognize me, though I decided quickly that I must be imagining this. The women processed into the restaurant and then out again, maintaining their stately grace, moving as if they were aware that people would probably watch them, as I was doing.

A few minutes later, as the panel discussion began, on the front row of the audience sat these singular women who made leopard look like exactly the thing to wear at a morning literary event, and who managed to sit with the same sense of purpose with which they had glided through the hotel. At that point I understood there was something special about these people, though soon enough the business of the conversation on the panel took over and I did what I was supposed to do. I talked about my book and stepped into the conversation with the other writers. From time to time during the hour that followed, I glanced at the row of women and wondered who they were.

Later when I was signing books in one of the side rooms on the Monteleone mezzanine, the leopard group swept into the room and asked me to sign one of my books, and at that point they introduced themselves as representatives of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club, with Kathy Murphy as the queen herself. As I would earn later, hers was the vision to found the book club group, which at present comprises 700 chapters, adventure trips, international reach, good hair maintenance, and a movie deal. Kathy knew of my work from her days as a book sales representative for Algonquin Books, my publisher. We chatted. She told me a bit of her story, which is extraordinary, including her career in the book world, subsequent turbulence both professional and private, the founding of a salon called Beauty and the Book, and her book club empire. At the end of the conversation I was left with the feeling that she was the one who had been on stage that morning, and I was part of her audience. I suspect this is a reaction that people often have when meeting her. She is one of those people who cannot help but change the world wherever she touches it.

So a few weeks later I heard from Kathy that she had chosen my memoir as an official bonus book for June, putting me on the list of authors selected for the worldwide Pulpwood Queens to read, and therefore eligible to attend the Girlfriends Weekend in January. The notion that I am affiliated with the Beauty and the Book movement is a real highlight, and I am grateful to have been taught a lesson in the presentation of the self by one of the masters of the art, Kathy Murphy, book goddess.

The business of publishing is a curious curse. One writes a book and then has to discuss why one has written it, how one came about the whole idea, questions that originate not altogether in passion but more as a kind of formality, because one visits bookstores and book festivals and the people there have to ask something, after all, or else they just sit there and you just sit there and nothing happens. As an author of middling status, one seeks out these settings for conversations about one’s book and especially one seeks out interviewers who are interested in interviewing one about the book because, really, if one stays at home nobody is likely to think twice about the book and the whole business of writing it will pass for nothing. To talk about the writing is as necessary to the life of a book as air to the filling of a balloon. Having written something, one must then inflate it and see whether it will rise.

Having written this book called How I Shed My Skin, I undertake to do what I can to generate interest in it. These words sound tentative as I write them down, and yet the book itself is a thing in which I passionately believe, a story drawn from my childhood, narrating my own journey through bigotry into clarity. In the course of my elementary school education, I lived through school integration in eastern North Carolina, not thinking much about it at the time except that it was something that happened, mysterious as were many events in the world to an eleven-year-old. Black people and white people had been segregated from each other but I barely understood this, and the idea only became clear to me when the segregation was being dismantled. After integration, all children in our tiny community would go to school together, no matter what the color of our skin. That this fact outraged some adults in my little town stuck me as informative, for it told me that I was supposed to have a great opinion in the matter of whether I was black or white. So began a long journey of discovery about race and what it meant. This journey mingled with many others, and my simple child’s life (for so one is supposed to think of it) became muddled and complicated.

The journey I took, becoming friends with children who came into my sixth grade classroom, is told in the book I mentioned above and so I won’t rehearse it again here, though I will note that it is a good book, in my opinion, and you ought to read it. There are, of course, many books you ought to read and you might find you have no time for mine unless I say something about it that makes it more urgent to you. That is the reason for this commotion of blogging and traveling to bookstores and undertaking acts of publicity in order to inflate the book with air, so that it will either grow larger as an image or float up into the sky where it can be more widely seen. The better one sees my book, and the more often one sees it, the more likely one is to buy the book. And there you have the business of publishing in a thimble.

So here is a beginning at another kind of self-inflation, a virtual space called a blog in which I am storing these words in hope that someone might stumble across them, find them oddly interesting, and decide on that basis to buy my book, because it, too, might be oddly interesting. I am here in any case, bright and hopeful, tentative only because I am discussing myself, a subject about which I have very mixed feelings.

On the subject of my book, my feelings are very clear. I have told a story about a time when children were asked to face the bigotry designed into the world by the adults around them; when children were asked to figure out how to occupy the same classroom, the same school buses, with members of a race we had been taught was opposite to us. In living through this time, I learned how deeply the prejudice of my community had been written onto my person, and came to understand that I could change but that it would take a long time. The story was worth telling and is worth reading, and I hope you will find a copy of the book and see what the pages have to offer.