And suddenly a jostling mass of mostly men poured into the streets. I grabbed interviews where I could amid the chaos, finding an 18-year-old self-described white nationalist who told me, “We need someplace that can be a white homeland or we will be bred out.”
I wondered, What happened in this young man’s life to make him so afraid and full of hate?
Many of the protesters were waving the Stars and Bars; some carried Nazi flags, some had AK-47s strapped to their backs. Confrontations turned violent—I remember the sound of screaming, the smell of smoke. And then, out of nowhere, a car came roaring into a crowd of counter-protesters, mowing some down, badly injuring several, and killing one—a 32-year-old paralegal named Heather Heyer. Sickening. Tragic.
So many people of my generation in the part of the country where I grew up were raised on the good-ol’-boy archetype and the romantic atmospherics of Gone with the Wind—the gentility, punch bowls, and picnics, Scarlett O’Hara flirting with the Tarleton twins, and the “happy slave” roles of Mammy and Prissy.
In our own home, I treated Jay’s passion for the Confederacy with amused tolerance, seeing it as a benign hobby. For his 40th birthday, I threw him a party with an Old South theme. The invitation read:
Please come to a Very Civil Gathering to mark the birthday of Bugler Jay Monahan. WARNING: Anyone divulging this information will be considered a traitor and will be hanged! （In other words, it’s a SURPRISE!!!）
Virginia ham and biscuits, gas lamps, a Christmas tree decorated with blue and gray glass ornaments and toy soldiers, topped with a Scarlett O’Hara Barbie doll. Jay loved it.
I always told Ellie and Carrie that their dad was a history buff, which explained the Civil War memorabilia. As for the reenactments, he was an equestrian who relished the outdoors and enjoyed being with a cross-section of people of the type you found at these events—slipping off his jacket and tie and getting down and dirty with plumbers, dentists, and contractors who loved history as much as he did. I told them the wallpaper in his boyhood bedroom, covered with the faces of U.S. presidents, had sparked that passion, while his time at Washington and Lee had stoked an interest in 19th-century politics.
But now that script was wearing thin. With the culture fixated on historic wrongs in need of righting, with my brilliant daughters bearing down, I wondered if a reassessment was in order.
In her Stanford thesis, Carrie wrote: “Aside from his petulance and rigid jawline, he seemed to have left me nothing but artifacts—remnants of a life that wasn’t even his.”
Carrie’s family research was unsparing. She excavated forgotten documents, letters, photographs, and a speech her dad had written that crushed her.
It was a reaction to the United Daughters of the Confederacy being denied the renewal of a patent for their logo, which featured the Confederate flag. Freshman senator Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman to serve in the Senate, had called the insignia “an outrage. It is an insult. It is absolutely unacceptable to me and to millions of Americans, Black or white, that we would put the imprimatur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea.”
Jay was incensed. He later delivered a nine-page single-spaced speech to the Daughters, vilifying Moseley Braun’s comments as “venomous” and the press as being “obsessed with appearing politically correct.” He also shared how he’d come to love the South:
To make a long story longer, I married a native Virginian—indeed a University of Virginia graduate—who is the direct descendant of two Confederate veterans: one, a member of the Eufaula, Alabama Rifles, and the other, a member of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Cavalry. That means, by the way, that both of my daughters will be eligible to join the Mary Mildred Sullivan Chapter some day.
He was laying it on pretty thick. And he left out the fact that Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the KKK, an ancestral association that disgusts me.
It’s all a bit mysterious to me. Jay’s parents, good Catholics, were liberal Democrats who cared deeply about civil rights and school integration, which started to happen when Jay was in third or fourth grade. They invited Black families to dinner and encouraged playdates （back before they were called that） with Black children. For their trouble, the Monahans had “n— lover” hurled at them more than once. Not that it kept them from doing what they felt was right, which included inviting their Black housekeeper’s great-niece to live with them for several years until she went off to the University of Michigan. Jay’s dad was so proud of her.