We Won’t Be Meeting in Hilton Head

Every three years, my mother’s father’s family has a reunion. People come from as near as down the street and as far away as New Zealand (long story) for a weekend that encompasses considerable family history, too much food and a lot of old-fashioned visiting. The next gathering is in 2001, and we’d planned to do it at Hilton Head, S.C.--we’d been before and had had a great visit--but it doesn’t look as if that will be happening this time around.

The reason, of course, is the debate over whether the Confederate flag should be allowed to fly above the Statehouse in Columbia. It was raised in 1962, in what probably was a visceral reaction to the ascendancy of the civil rights movement, and it’s been flapping in the breeze ever since, to the satisfaction of some people and the growing consternation of others.

What all that means is up for debate, and it has been debated hotly for several months. Many black South Carolinians feel strongly that the continued presence of the flag the South flew while it waged its war of secession is a slap in the emotional face, a reminder that certain people would rather leave the Union and preserve their cherished way of life, which happened to have been heavily dependent on slave labor. Many nonblack South Carolinians who had ancestors who fought and perhaps died in the War Between the States feel that the flag is an acknowledgment of their forebears’ sacrifice and should remain a reminder of the pride they have in their heritage.

Even presidential hopefuls, mindful of the upcoming South Carolina caucus, have weighed in. Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley, who have been engaging in an occasionally contentious debate about race, both feel that the Stars and Bars should come down. Republican George W. Bush says he’s a “proud Southerner” and maintains the flag issue is something South Carolinians should decide for themselves. Neither is a particularly courageous moral stand: Gore and Bradley have everything to gain from agreeing with their African American constituents who are an important segment of their vote; and Bush, having few, loses nothing by antagonizing people who aren’t going to vote for him anyway.

Academics have weighed in with technical arguments: the Confederate flag does not, some insist, represent a legitimate government and so should not be allowed the same position as the state or national flag.

Meanwhile, South Carolina business people are pressing the state to remove the flag because they’re hurting. They may be as proud and as Southern as their flag-supporting colleagues, but they’re watching all those lovely lost dollars wafting over the border to North Carolina and maybe even Georgia. Although Georgia may be next for boycott consideration because the Peach state incorporates--you guessed it--the Stars and Bars into its state flag.

That’s a lot of fuss for a flag that flew, originally, about four years in total. Yet flags are more than the material of which they’re made; they’re symbols, and symbols are open to anybody’s interpretation. What one person perceives as a homage to his sainted ancestors, another sees as a thinly veiled reminder of an agonizingly bad time.

My mother is one of the latter. She grew up in segregated North Carolina, left it and returned decades later to a now-integrated home state. She looks at the Confederate flag and thinks of the Rebel yell, “Dixie” and bumper stickers that read “The South Shall Rise Again” and “If Your Heart Isn’t in Dixie, Then Get You’re A-- Out!” And she shudders.

And because she--along with a lot of others--does, there continues to be a lot of debate about that damn flag. Which is a pity, because Hilton Head would have been a great place for about 100 Grigsbys to meet. Maybe things will be resolved in time for the 2004 reunion, and that option will be ours again.

In the meanwhile, Maui is starting to sound awfully good.