DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION/WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION/GHOSTS

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION (1933)

As the film continues rolling, children play with sheets and scare each other, apparently an eureka moment for the formation of the Klan. This historical distortion disturbs Rommel.

“This film is less than useless,” he barks. “This is not the history I expected at all. Is this not the story of the origins of the Ku Klux Klan? Where is the ‘Wizard of the Saddle?’”

From the stuttering turntable Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries pitch-shifts in full song. Onscreen, Ku Klux Klan vigilantes battle a hapless militia of black men.

After grunts of disapproval, Rommel rises suddenly and walks towards the film projector. A hyper-real superimposition of Klan footage on the Lieutenant, with two hooded horsemen galloping and holding a cross, make the staff officers scrinch their eyes.

“Turn it off!” Rommel fumes and whacks a rostrum with a pointer. The adjutants jump, reach for a light switch and fumble with the film projector.

“Enough of this buffoonery and propaganda. I am unconcerned with cartoonish portrayals of final solutions.”

WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION (2001)

The more I study the collectibles store, the more I realize the place is a shrine to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Despite interrupting their lunch hour, the husband-and-wife antebellum memorabilia merchants spend the better part of the afternoon discussing the myths and folklore of the object of their passion, Forrest.

The stories are legend. One tale after another of Forrest risking his own neck in some daring ill-advised personal assault on enemy positions while his inferior forces triumphed exquisitely over a legion of bamboozled Yankees, each battlefield assault punctuated with pithy, percipient yet cornpone punchlines such as “Get there firstest with the mostest” and “Never stand and take a charge… charge them too,” also “Get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em.”

“This Forrest fellow was epic,” I tell my Cousin.

“Yes, he was,” he agrees, “but these fine folks didn’t tell you about all of his exploits.”

“Really? What did I miss?”

“What they didn’t mention was that Forrest was also the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.”

GHOSTS (1933)

“To know Forrest, I must go to the source,” Rommel cries. “To Brice’s Crossroads, the site of Forrest’s greatest triumph and the battlefield where he exercised his infamous pincer movement, movements to the detriment and annihilation of superior Northern forces. Find me a guide – a survivor… somebody who was there.”

“Herr Rommel,” Burgdorf reasons, “that was seventy years ago. Is there anybody there who is even still alive?”

“If not, we shall be guided by ghosts.” -30-

CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 5: CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

The hand painted sign hanging on the door of Coontail Collectibles reads: “Closed for Lunch.” The store looks deserted. I knock anyway. Inside, a back room door opens, a matronly proprietress emerges, motions with a forefinger for us to wait, makes her way through the aisles and aisles of antebellum-era thockes and then lets us in. We are joined subsequently by her husband.

“Is there anything in specific y’all was interested in?” she coos.

“Naw, just kind of tire kicking,” I answer. “And trying to get a bead on the store’s etymology.”

“Well,” she replies,” we specialize in Suth’n memorabilia, if that’s what you mean.”

“And some Confederate artifacts as well,” her husband chimes in.

“Indeed,” I say. Pointing at a painting of a Rebel officer in a nest of dozens of Yankees who had taken aim with their rifles at point blank rage, I ask: “What’s this then?”

“That is a battlefield portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest taken at Fallen Timbers,” the husband explains.

“He looks like he’s in a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, he made out all right,” the husband says. “Notice how he has hoisted a Yankee soldier as a shield.”

“The damn Blue Bellies shot their own man and Bedford Forrest made it out unscathed,” his wife adds.

“The Yankee died, but Ol’ Forrest lived to fight again… and again,” the husband finishes.

The Fallen Timbers yarn has the elements of proper Civil War folklore: Southern chivalry, Northern ineptitude, replete with tragi-comic results.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in dogshit,” I say. -30-

COONTAIL COLLECTIBLES (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 3: COONTAIL COLLECTIBLES (2001)

“The South has got some sins on its soul that it will never be able to get clear of. But so has the nation. And quite often the attempt to correct these sins leads into still greater sins through the method in which they were corrected.” – esteemed Civil War historian, Shelby Foote (1916-2005)

When Grandma died in 2001, she was to be buried in the same cemetery in Aberdeen, Mississippi that interred Nathan Bedford Forrest’s brother. Before her burial, I left the Episcopalian Church where she lay in state and I gathered my cousin to accompany me on a tour of Aberdeen (a town I lived in briefly as a youth — and as a teenage rebel, one I couldn’t get away from fast enough) … We walked through the downtown area to see what was left of it – to see what hadn’t been usurped by the local Wal-Mart on the outskirts of town. Beyond the machinations of market forces, I also wondered how much of the so-called “New South” and its enlightenment about racial co-existence had taken root there – had rural Mississippi finally followed the societal vicissitudes most of the country had taken for granted a long time ago? During our walk many things were as gothic and languid as they had been twenty years earlier, the last I had visited the place: For example, the diner was still there – the same lunch counter one of my spinster Aunts had picketed in the 1970s when the restaurateurs had belatedly acknowledged the 1965 Civil Rights Act and finally started seating and serving blacks. The local walk-in movie house was still there – the same bijou that as a teenager in the 70s I patronized and watched Joe Don Baker portray Sheriff Buford Pusser in “Walking Tall”; back then what struck me as curious was that the theater owners made negroes sit in the balcony.

Nowadays the theatre is shuttered. My guess is that videotape rentals at Blockbuster had taken care of the actual movie-going experience and had rendered discussions about segregated seating in the local nickelodeon moot.

After marching up and down the Main Street with my cousin, we take a wider orbit into residential area that surrounded downtown. This is not the richest section of town nor the poorest, but here blue and white-collar blacks and white co-exist on streets where antebellum mansions can be scored for $70,000 or so. Encountering sundry slices of life sipping soda pop and swinging on porches or walking down the street, my cousin and I acknowledge that everything seems peaceful if not simpatico.

In our travels, I see a sort of Quonset hut turned into a store. The sign outside reads “Coontail Collectibles” and its iconography featured a raccoon.

I cannot figure out if the semiotics and semantics of the sign are harmless enough or are an outrageous racist caricature. Do folks actually collect coontails around here? Is that a euphemism?

“C’mon, man,” I tell my cousin, pointing at the smiling ‘coon. “We have to deal with this place.” -30-