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Excerpted Inspirations #218

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • 5 days ago
  • 0 min read
The truck tore a big U through the lot and back out to the highway, flapping its glory from two poles zip-tied to the bed: American, Confederate. A lot of guys around me laughed, some few didn’t. Some looked at Mr. Armstrong that was with us on bus duty, just standing over there in his button shirt, arms crossed, watching the whole yeehaw. Then it got quiet. […] Most if not all of us aware that this flag thing was kind of an oh shit situation. And wanting it to blow over. “All right, let’s start with the obvious here,” Mr. Armstrong said. So, not blowing over. “The Confederacy and the United States were opposing sides in a war.” Still quiet. Among our kind there was stuff not talked about, and stuff not done, including insulting people straight to their faces. We knew of words that were not proper-noun capital Black being used, we definitely heard those, from older guys or parents or whoever, people ticked off over something they’d never met firsthand and knew nothing about. No real person. Which to us in that parking lot, Mr. Armstrong was. We’d all had him in class or as a guidance counselor steering us through the juvenile justice system, and nobody I knew disliked the man. […] “People,” Mr. Armstrong finally kind of yelled, like he did whenever we were ignorant in class. “Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying both those flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the Generals and the Abingdon Falcons in the same game.” Whoah. We were all like, Crap. Because that’s unthinkable. Some guys started mumbling heritage and nothing personal, and Mr. Armstrong took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking as usual somewhere between interested and flat-out flummoxed. “Whose history are we talking about?” he asked. “Because Virginia voted to join the Confederacy, that’s true. To support the plantation owners. But the people in this county were not represented in that vote.” Nobody wanted to tangle with him. Of all of us still out there that hadn’t yet got on buses or edged back into the building, I’m going to say not one person would have taken up a rifle for any plantation fat cats. We were actually glad of what he told us, that the mountain people of Virginia rounded up their own militias to try and fight on the other team, Union. He said we should feel free to pass on this info to certain guys, and we shook our heads like, Those assholes, regardless some of those assholes being brothers or friends or dads. Because that was Mr. Armstrong. Even if you didn’t necessarily want to, you would end up on his side. Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (2022), pp. 266-267

 
 
 

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