Free Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz Page B

boards over the windows; the building had been closed since Hugo damaged it in 1989. It was only by chance, at a shop down the street, that I noticed a handwritten flyer saying that the museum had set up temporary digs on a back street and was open for a few hours each weekend.
    The location turned out to be a kindergarten, and the museum’s curator a Daughter of the Confederacy who taught there during the week. “The kindergarten said it was okay if we put a few of our things here for the time being,” June Wells said, gesturing at a small, dimly lit room cluttered with dusty cases.
    The “things” included the first rebel flag to fly over Fort Sumter and wooden wheels from the first Confederate-made cannon—crammed, for lack of space, in one of the kindergarten’s toddlersizedtoilet stalls. “We’re not politically correct, you see,” Wells said of the museum’s circumstances. “The city says it can’t fix our building downtown because of money. But they’ve built a new park, a new school, a new aquarium and have fixed all the other buildings damaged by the storm.”
    Wells told me this without rancor. She was about seventy, with delicate features and an hourglass figure. I found myself wondering what she had looked like as a young woman. It wasn’t just her appearance. It was also her gentle laughter and direct, almost coquettish gaze. “You’re from Virginia? Oh, we’re deeply flattered,” she said as I signed the guest book. Mine was the first name on a blank page labeled January.
    I told her about my travels so far, and the impressions I’d begun forming about Civil War remembrance. “What a wonderful project,” she said. “May I offer you a few of my own thoughts?”
    “Of course, m’am. I’d be grateful to hear them.” The best thing about Southern manners was that they seemed to improve my own, at least temporarily.
    “We’re a different sort of people in Charleston, then and now, and I’m sure that’s why we started it all,” she said of the War. “We were a well-educated city that cared about issues and had never been through the poverty stage of colonization.”
    Wells’s own family arrived on the “first ship” and had stayed in the city ever since. She knew dozens of families with similar pedigrees. “We’re not a migrating people,” she said. “We live in our old houses and eat on our old dishes and use the old silverware every day. We’re close to the past and comfortable with it. We’ve surrounded our lives with the pictures of all these relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things a personality beyond just the material they’re made of.”
    She stood up and smoothed her paisley dress. “May I show you what I mean?” She gently grasped my wrist and led me to a glass case with a punch bowl inside. The woman who donated it, she said, was the daughter of the chief Confederate engineer at Fort Sumter. At a Confederate reunion in the 1890s, the woman served punch from the bowl to hundreds of distinguished veterans.
    “Although she was a young woman, she had false teeth,” Wells said. “As she leaned over to pour the punch, her teeth fell in the bowl. She looked at the line of people waiting to be served, and she looked at the punch. The dentures had sunk to the bottom. So she decided to go ahead serving until she could discreetly remove her teeth.” Wells laughed. “She told me that forty years ago, but I still can’t look at that punch bowl without thinking of those teeth.”
    She moved on to another glass case and another strange story. “A woman I’d never heard of in my life calls the museum one day and says, ‘I’m going to die before tomorrow. I have a uniform. If you want it you have to come and get it.’” When Wells arrived, the woman served her sherry in a silver goblet and talked for two hours. “Then she said, ‘I’m dying now, so if you want my granddaddy’s uniform it’s upstairs in a