[Following up
Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American
histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration
Day.]
On the text that
helps us remember a community for whom Decoration Day’s meanings didn’t shift.
In Monday’s
post, I highlighted a brief but important scene in Constance
Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman
the Keeper” (1880). John Rodman, Woolson’s protagonist, is a (Union) Civil
War veteran who has taken a job overseeing a Union cemetery in the South; and
in this brief but important scene, he observes a group of African Americans
(likely former slaves) commemorate Decoration Day by leaving tributes to those
fallen Union soldiers. Woolson’s narrator describes the event in evocative but
somewhat patronizing terms: “They knew dimly that the men who lay beneath those
mounds had done something wonderful for them and for their children; and so
they came bringing their blossoms, with little intelligence but with much
love.” But she gives the last word in this striking scene to one of the
celebrants himself: “we’s kep’ de day now two years, sah, befo’ you came, sah,
an we’s teachin’ de chil’en to keep it, sah.”
“Rodman” is set
sometime during Reconstruction—perhaps in 1870 specifically, since the first
Decoration Day was celebrated in 1868 and the community has been keeping the
day for two years—and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, by the 1876 end of that
historical period the meaning of Decoration Day on the national level had begun
to shift dramatically. But as historian David Blight has frequently noted, such
as in the piece hyperlinked in my intro section above and as
quoted in this article on Blight’s magisterial book Race and Reunion (2002), the holiday always had a different meaning
for African Americans than for other American communities, and that meaning
continued to resonate for that community through those broader national shifts.
Indeed, it’s possible to argue that as the national meaning shifted away from
the kinds of remembrance for which Frederick Douglass argued in his 1871
speech, it became that much more necessary and vital for African Americans to
practice that form of critical commemoration (one, to correct Woolson’s
well-intended but patronizing description, that included just as much
intelligence as love).
In an April 1877
editorial reflecting on the end of Reconstruction, the Nation magazine predicted happily that one effect of that shift
would be that “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics.
Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.”
Besides representing one of the lowest points in that periodical’s long
history, the editorial quite clearly illustrates why the post-Reconstruction
national meaning of Decoration Day seems to have won out over the African
American one (a shift that culminated, it could be argued, in the change
of name to Memorial Day, which began being used as an alternative as
early as 1882): because prominent, often white supremacist national voices
wanted it to be so. Which is to say, it wasn’t inevitable that the shift would
occur or the new meaning would win out—and while we can’t change what happened
in our history, we nonetheless can (as I’ll argue at greater length tomorrow)
push back and remember the original and, for the African American community,
ongoing meaning of Decoration Day.
Last Decoration
Day history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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