The Battle of Franklin, pt. 2

Now, for those of you who've been to visit me, you know that Faulkner is right when he says that the past down here isn't even past. So, the Professor and I had some misgivings about going to an enormous reenactment of a Civil War battle. As we drove down the dirt lane towards the parking field, we developed a cover story that we thought would keep us from getting harassed, if this were to be some strange Southern Pride event. I forget what all it involved, but I was going to have some kids named Billy and Owen. The first thing that struck us was just the magnitude of people who were directing this thing. We saw, I'd guess, ever Columbia cop, every Maury County sheriff's deputy, all the Spring Hill police, many of the Tennessee State Guard, all the area Boy Scouts, and hundreds of event staff, and that was just to make sure that we got to where we were going smoothly and parked in a timely manner. Once we got out of the car, we had to walk a long way to the front gate. As we were walking, we saw a young woman giving a young man in a halo (not the holy kind, the "I broke my neck" kind) a piggyback ride. We briefly wondered if we should have worked up some kind of "Peole you migth see" scavenger hunt to make the day more interesting. Then we paid and went in. I think that, as one goes through the gate, she is confronted by a kind of psychic dissonance that made me, at least, wonder if we'd made a grave mistake. On the one hand, there was the kind of stuff you'd expect at a historical reenactment: places to buy homemade rootbeer,or old-fashioned clothing and hats, lanterns, and candles. Then, of course, there were plenty of places to buy Confederate flags. And there were lots of places to buy food, including funnel cakes, that were covered in bumperstickers that said the expected things like "Heritage, not hate" and "The South is Going to Rise Again" and the more unexpected things like "Fighting Terrorism Since 1861" (with a Confederate Battle Flag) and another one that encouraged us to love all Confederates, White, Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow, equally. Stranger still was the tent that contained framed pictures of trick photographs in which a war widow dressed all in black could be seen weeping at the grave of her soldier who's ghostly presence seemed to be trying to comfort her. There was a whole series of weeping widows with ghostly husbands. And, I still wonder what I would do if I walked into someone's home and saw that they had even one of these, let alone the whole series. I think that, after about an hour, the Professor and I were still undecided as to whether we'd made a grave mistake or not. But we decided to get something to drink and a funnel cake and head on over to the battlefield and eat and drink and chat. It was at this point that the afternoon went from mildly scary and troubling, to all out interesting.