Free Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz Page A

lollipop-colored facades lining “Rainbow Row” and peered through wrought-iron gates at secret gardens and grand side porches called piazzas, a Caribbean import designed to catch sea breezes and offer shade against the summer sun. Even in winter, it was easy to conjure a pair of Charleston aristocrats perched in wicker settees on one of these piazzas, idling away the day over rum, tobacco and whist.
    I finally found the Civil War again at the Market, a former fish and produce mart that was now a tourist bazaar, including a stall devotedto Confederate paraphernalia: rebel flags, Dixie shot glasses, bumper stickers proclaiming, “If at First You Don’t Secede, Try Try Again.” Just beside the stall, a black woman sat weaving coiled baskets from palmetto fronds, pine needles and sweetgrass. She perched in a fold-out chair with a blanket over her legs and cardboard scraps as shields against the breeze. “Can’t bear the cold,” Emily Haynes said of the sixty-degree day. Tucking a windblown wisp of gray hair under a bright green headwrap, she had the worn look of a woman who could be anywhere between forty-five and ninety.
    Haynes was a sharecropper’s daughter and had spent much of her childhood in the fields, using the baskets she now wove for tourists. “You tossed the rice up and down and let the wind blow the chaff away,” she said. “Fan-’em baskets, what we called ’em.” She laughed, exposing a solitary molar. “Now white folks use ’em for fruit and flowers and such.”
    It was in the rice fields that Haynes learned what little she knew about the Civil War. “I forgot the tune but the words went like this.” She cleared her throat and recited:
    Abraham Lincoln, King of the Jews
,
Pinchbeck britches and cowbelly shoes
.
    She resumed her weaving. “Pinchbeck meant funny pants, blown up like a balloon,” she said. “Don’t know about cowbelly shoes. Sounds poor. Abe was a hick, I guess.” I asked why he was known as King of the Jews. “Cause he led slaves to freedom, same as Moses,” she said. “That’s why the gang got him, same’s they got Martin Luther King. The gang didn’t want him to have their chair.”
    The “gang” had also kept poor people down. Blacks once owned much of the farmland around Charleston but they’d been “fooled out of it,” Haynes said. “My daddy always said, ‘White people will out-figure you and take your money.’” This reminded her of another ditty, popular during the Depression:
    A nickel’s worth of sugar, a dime’s worth of lard
,
I would buy more, but times too hard
.
    Times were better now. Haynes sold her baskets for $30 each—more, she reckoned, than her father cleared in a year. I let her fool me out of $30 for one. As I got up to go, I asked how she felt about her neighbor selling rebel trinkets in an adjoining stall.
    Haynes shrugged, gathering fronds in her lap for a fresh basket. “They can remember that war all they want,” she said. “So long’s they remember they lost.”
    C HARLESTON—TOURIST INDUSTRY C HARLESTON —preferred to forget the War altogether. The city’s main museum displayed a few Confederate relics but made no mention of secession or Sumter. Across the street, at Charleston’s huge visitors’ center, the introductory slide show opted for a passive construction of events: “Shots were fired on Fort Sumter and Charleston was plunged into the dark days of the Civil War.” Then the show moved quickly to other calamities in the city’s history: fires, earthquakes, the hurricane Hugo. I asked a woman at the desk about Civil War sites I might visit. Apart from Sumter, she couldn’t name any. “There’s used to be an old museum in the Market, I think,” she said, loading me instead with brochures for carriage rides, garden shows, plantation visits.
    Returning to the Market, I found an antebellum building modeled on the Temple of Nike in Greece. A sign above the portico said “Confederate Museum” but there were