Unfortunately, I don't have many Intercourse, PA jokes to tell. You know the kind ("Nate took me out for dinner, then insisted we go straight to Intercourse") and I apologize to anyone who looking forward to them (You know who you are, ahem, Kristi ;) ). But we did stop there on our way out of Lancaster, hoping to find some souvenir item to take home. Other than some very lovely Amish furniture, almost everything was country kitsch--more 80's kitchen, than 1800s. And don't get me started on Kitchen Kettle Village which featured an embarrassing assortment of Amish-style fakery that would make even Jakey from the BBQ place tear his beard off.
So, instead, we headed east on Hwy. 30 toward Gettysburg. I'm not much of a Civil War buff, though I heard enough stories and watched enough documentaries with my dad when I was growing up to know the basic layout of the war. I know that Gettysburg was the turning point, that up until then Lee had been stomping his way to victory all over the backs of the union soldiers and that President Lincoln had been firing general after general as each one failed to bring about any change in the war's course. In school, I had seen such frothy period dramas as "North and South" and "The Blue and the Grey" and I'll admit that one of my all-time favorite films is "Gone with the Wind". I have to say if your heart doesn't burn a little with Atlanta during the penultimate first disc scene, then you probably don't have one.
But like I said, this is frothy history. The idea of the Civil War has taken on a certain romantic nobility--the gallant charges, the courageous last stands, the angelic ideals of the abolitionists, and the devil's cloud on the slave owners--it does make for a good miniseries. Unlike the rural Pennsylvania we passed through to get there, Gettysburg and its like have yet to grow derelict. From the somber battlefield memorials to the Central Park statue of Sherman in New York City, we seem recall the Civil War as a beacon on our nation's path to righteousness and regard its turn from confederate to union victory as inevitable, a collective wrestling with our souls that we had to win. Certainly, I have no regrets about it and have always thought of the Union army a bit like a favorite sports team--the fact that I have cheered them on means somehow I helped a little, right?
Anyway, the whole set-up is so familiar to me now that I wasn't quite prepared for how Thomas was going to take it.
First of all, the idea that someone might not like someone else simply because of the melanin count in their skin is so anathema to Thomas, it was difficult even explaining it. He's been very lucky to grow up in pretty ethnically diverse areas, from NYC to Ithaca to here and to him, kids are kids. I don't think he's pointed, stared, or even blinked at anyone who looked different from him because there's such a wide variety of people around him at all times, it hasn't even occured to him that someone could think that odd.
Moreover, for Thomas at this stage of his young life, the world is divided into good guys and bad guys. Everybody is on one team or the other and there is no moral middle. We've explained to him before, usually around Independence Day, that he is an American. Therefore to him, Americans are the good guy team because Thomas would never want to be on a bad guy team. Trying, then, to tell him that some Americans enslaved blacks for financial gain...well, that's a hard idea to swallow in the first place, but Thomas kept wondering, outloud no less, what the slaves had done to deserve it. Were they bad guys? Saying to him, no, no, they weren't bad guys and they hadn't done anything and these Americans had done it anyway...
Well, at some point, we just stopped trying to explain it because, thankfully, such bald-faced cruelty simply isn't part of his consciousness.
As we moved through the museum at Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Park, Thomas grew more and more quiet. We watched the History channel videos explaining each day of battle, stroked the muzzles of ancient cannons, looked at displays of guns, ammunitions, uniforms, and more. We used interactive displays to show him where the Confederate lines had attempted to overcome the Union road blocks into town and he stood before the wall of pictures of some of the nearly 50,000 men who died in just those three days of war.
Over and over again, he quietly asked, were those the good guys or the bad guys? Again, we tried to explain that while the Confederate cause--keeping slavery legal--was a terrible, wrongful thing, that didn't mean that all the men fighting for the Confederacy were bad men. He struggled very much with that, holding on to us and walking slowly and thoughtfully through the museum (anyone who knows Thomas should see the "slowly" and "thoughtfully" and say, "What?").
We did eventually get outside to tour the battlefield itself and while I thought that might settle on him even harder, it actually lightened his load quite a bit. Even with the monuments and old artillery scattered around, the out of doors is the out of doors and so he went running through the fields, chasing Sethie and letting himself be chased. I was relieved actually. He's too little to be so burdened by someone else's evil. Unfortunately, he has his whole life ahead of him to experience that.
*Tourism exploitation sidenote: In the museum gift shop, I was, frankly, shocked at some of the children's things they had there. They had t-shirts with both Union and Confederate uniforms emblazoned on them: the Confederate one said "Johnny Reb" on it and plenty of grey confederate caps to round out the outfits. Maybe this is just some version of "cops and robbers", but I couldn't imagine letting my kids run around in fake blue and grey, shooting at each other, even though I'm pretty liberal in the play-fighting area ("Thomas, you can pretend to whack your brother...just don't actually whack him"). And the confederate flag has always struck me as a middle finger to the country we pulled together and eradication of slavery by the blood of millions of Americans. Now it's a souvenir? Like I said...some things just aren't for sale.
Here are pictures from Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Park:
Another shot off Emmitsburg Road
Sethie sits atop a cannon on Emmitsburg Road
Thomas on top the same cannon, looking thoughtful
Thomas and I walking the pathway that marks Pickett's Charge
Thomas and Sethie playing in the fields near Pickett's Charge
1 comment:
I remember when Matt was about 4 and he was looking out the window and said - look at that black woman out there. I thought, when did he learn that? I looked outside and saw the neighbors teenage daughter dressed completely in black (goth-like) and Matt, being 4, saw her as a woman - and she was black (even though her skin was white - really white with the makeup). Another time he pointed out the purple woman to me...I laughed.
This is actually the only complaint we have about where we live, it is too non-diverse - but we still love it here.
Post a Comment