Ghosts Of The South

(5 of 5)

"We've taken a few digs at the N.A.A.C.P.," he acknowledges. "Is the N.A. really for the A.C.P.?" Several years ago, he says, a series on racism began with the argument that in order to move on, the South had to reject racism. In a later installment, a writer took issue with that. Sullivan remembered the gist of the article being, "Why I will not condemn Southern racism: we've got nothing to be ashamed of."

Over my lunch of Confederate fried steak, I ask Sullivan if he would run such an article today, or one that defended slavery. He has to think a little too long before answering. The Ashcroft backlash has had a chilling effect, he says, so if such an article ran, it would run with an opposing companion article. Later, he changes the answer to no. He would not run such an article. In a subsequent telephone interview, he says he wants to make it absolutely clear that he does not and would not ever defend slavery as an institution. But he could conceive of running an article in which "we might talk about how slavery was different from the public perception of it."

My guess is that Sullivan isn't talking about the kind of viewpoint I'd seen at an art exhibit the day before I visited him. In "Confederate Currency: The Color of Money," at the Avery Research Center in Charleston, an African-American artist named John W. Jones took the romanticized slave-labor scenes from Confederate currency and reproduced them in oil paintings paired with the bills. The effect is to punctuate the exploitation of blacks for profit. One scene depicts a sun-lit goddess of good fortune in repose, counting her gold as slaves toil in the fields behind her.

But back to Chris Sullivan's America. The South is becoming too much like the rest of the country, he tells me, listing immigration and the homogenizing, obliterating effects of commercial development among the culprits. Many Asians are settling in the South, he says. And "Chamber of Commerce types are turning the South into one big subdivision." The problem isn't the Asians so much as the development, he clarifies, and the idea that if you were dropped blindfolded into the South, you might think you were anywhere else in America.

What the North doesn't understand about the South, he claims, is that these same issues have guided its political thought for 200 years. In the spirit of states' rights and sovereignty, the South doesn't want the North telling it what to do. That's what the war was about, he says, that's what the flag represents, and that's why, in every issue of Southern Partisan, there's a "Confederate States of America Today" news roundup. In one issue, Missouri gets a dart because a hotel tried to have rebel flags removed during a Sons of Confederate Veterans shindig. And Trent Lott gets a nudge to enact a strong, committed, antigay agenda.

"There's some truth to the argument that the [Confederate] flag represents the idea of resistance to tyranny," Sullivan says. "While it might be unglamorous in modern-day politics to say this, I don't want to integrate the schools simply because the Federal Government wants us to do it."

If the magazine is so in touch with Southern politics and values, I ask him, why is its circulation a measly 8,000? You can't blame that on the North too. Sullivan suggests it is because the magazine hasn't been marketed well, but that's about to change.

After leaving his office, I flip open the second-quarter 2000 issue, with slave shackles on the cover and the headline DID SLAVERY CAUSE THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES? The magazine fell open to a two-page ad for a book called The God of War. The book is about the same Civil War hero and Klan co-founder celebrated on the wall of the Confederate Presbyterian Church in Wiggins, Miss., the same man memorialized by that monument in Selma. The clip-out order form for the book said, "Yes, I want to ride with General Nathan Bedford Forrest!" It has been too long a ride, and the travelers seem pretty well exhausted.