Reclaiming: Visiting the Confederate Cemetery with a Chattanooga Activist
Author’s note: Let’s move outside into summer and away from our screens! In an attempt to balance the exigencies of the pandemic with a bad case of stir-crazies, I’m shifting this series up to focus on Chattanooga’s outdoor spaces. If you’ve got a space you’d like to walk through with me, let me know!
I’d decided to switch things up and write about outdoor spaces, but I sure bumbled into this particular space. Maybe it’s not a great time to write about anything Confederate? Heck, maybe it’s never a great time to write about anything Confederate?
On the other hand, what’s the point of writing if we can’t tell true stories, frailties and happenstances and all?
While we were spit balling this outdoor series, Maddie (activist and minister Maddie Boyd Nix, of Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center) agreed to go with me on some outdoor adventures. I’d take notes, while Maddie, who’s an excellent photographer, would take pictures. We sort of thought we’d start in a state park somewhere.
But last Tuesday, we didn’t have her digital camera and we hadn’t planned that we’d be strolling through Fort Wood, checking out the house where she grew up, looking for places to shoot.
We were looking to shoot photos that day because we were in makeup, and we were in makeup because we’d been gifted a few hours at SPOT Venue to do some video capture — various projects for us, an audition tape for me.
Our time at SPOT was over but our makeup was still good — especially Maddie’s — so we decided not to waste the opportunity. We looked for somewhere shady close by (it was wicked humid) and happened upon Fort Wood. Then we were roaming up Alumni Drive and saw the steps leading up to the cemetery and just wandered in.
I can’t tell you what it looked like, exactly, that warm, gray day in June. There were oak trees — black oak, I think — and some big old magnolias and several acres of sparse turf, moss, and acorn shells. We stepped past graves scattered sporadically, some marked with older stones, some newer. Likely the unmarked dead were under our feet.
The cemetery feels forlorn and creepy to me; not so to Maddie. She remembers it before the restoration efforts of the mid-1990s. During her girlhood in Fort Wood in the 1970s, the cemetery was truly overgrown, but it never bothered her then either.
“There was a predominately African-American school by the cemetery called Clara Carpenter Elementary,” she recalls. “I attended school there. The students who lived in Fort Wood had to walk by the cemetery to get home.”
As a teenager, she walked through the cemetery herself, and in the 1990s she took a series of photos showing the place as a tree-filled wilderness.
Maddie showed me the stones of two of her relatives, a Confederate officer and his wife. The wife’s last name was Wisdom. She was born after her husband and he outlived her, the whole of her life contained within his.
I have Confederate dead, too, at other cemeteries. And I doubt anyone in the Tennessee River Valley can take a breath without inhaling the dust of Maddie’s Cherokee ancestors.
Just a month ago, maybe less, the Sons of Confederate Veterans held ceremony in the cemetery to commemorate their dead; Maddie attended as part of a group of activists protesting the ceremony.
Commemoration and protest, it seems to me, are both correct and appropriate things to do in a cemetery. Being caught in the middle isn’t easy, though; Maddie had to ask for a roundabout ride home so none of the SCV would follow her to her house.
But the dead don’t care what we’re up to either way. The dead don’t notice.
We saw a few people in the Confederate Cemetery that Tuesday. One or two were walking around. A couple of young people lay on a blanket. Maybe they were students studying. We didn’t go too close.
Maddie walked ahead of me and I began to make a video of her as she traversed the sluggish air, the living grass, the dead humans and dead roots.
She performed a dance as she walked, swaying and curtseying, ploughing her weight against the side of a tree, releasing the trunk and tripping on again as bells chimed in the distance.
I’ve got that dance on video. Maddie made a second dance, too, and performed an extemporaneous spoken word poem, but I accidentally captured only a photo. These moments are perfect and they don’t stay. Even the video I have now isn’t what happened.
As we’re leaving, Maddie tells me the story of a Black servant to Confederate soldiers who was buried in the cemetery, down in the south-west corner.
“They didn’t want to bury him there,” she chuckles. “But he insisted. He had the last laugh on them!”
Looking him up, I find that the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ page has a tribute to him:
Shadrick Searcy is one buried here, who started the war as a body servant to two brothers named Searcy from Talbotton, GA…William was killed at Kennesaw and James was killed at Franklin. Shadrick stayed with the Army of Tennessee until the surrender in Greensboro, NC, in April of 1865. He settled in Chattanooga and received a Tennessee State Confederate Pension until his death in 1936.
However, Kevin M. Levin, author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, argues that the Black Confederate myth was created long after the war as a way to undermine civil rights progress and perpetrate Confederate nostalgia.
I tend to believe Levin. The Black Confederate, like the “happy slave”, are surely lies. Maddie disagrees, arguing that Searcy deserves the dignity afforded any veteran.
One thing’s sure. The dead aren’t talking.
Maddie and I walk back out of the cemetery, holding hands. The gray sky hangs heavier. It starts to rain.
In the dank heat of the car we crank up the stale-smelling air conditioner and look at the video we created. We watch Maddie dancing across the grass to the sound of bells that no longer chime.
That video exists now. It’s magical. We love it.
The moment it captured is gone.