What If the Statue Could Talk?
A Look Into What the Confederate Soldiers “See”
Colleen and the Statue is Volume 5 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle. It’s apropos for the times we’re in. May-June 2020 will be remembered as times of protests, marches, and questioning of the fundamental values of American culture and society—brought on by the senseless murder of yet another black man at the hands of heartless white police officers. Usually, opinions on the matter are divided into two distinct camps: white and black, with each side giving an opposing, contradictory version of what happened and its meaning. But what if there were a third opinion? What if what took place in Baltimore to George Floyd had taken place under a statue of Robert E. Lee, and the statue could talk?
The premise of my latest novel is that the Confederate statue in Mackenzie Central Park is alive—with the spirit of a Rebel soldier who was killed at Gettysburg in 1863 and who wakes up in his statue in 1913 at its dedication on the battle’s fiftieth anniversary. During the decades that follow, he witnesses events taking place around him in the park, unable to speak, unable to fathom why his spirit is here, and clueless as to how long he will have to stand here. Among the events, he witnesses is a Ku Klux Klan rally, in which two young black men are tortured and castrated for the offense of passing through this park and speaking to several young white women.
Finally, after four decades, a young Irish immigrant girl shows up at the park and can talk to him. They talk and talk. She realizes that she was sent to help him. She causes the soldier, who died a hero serving in the Confederate States Army, to reexamine why he had been fighting. She helps him see that until he accepts that he was in the wrong army—an army dedicated to preserving the enslavement of black Americans—he will continue to stand here. She makes him question the thirty-five years of his life as a slave owner and heir to a large Texas slave plantation.
Returning to the murder of George Floyd and the statue of Robert E. Lee, suppose Lee’s spirit was there in his statue, trapped until he reexamined his entire life as slave owner and commander of the main Rebel army. Suppose a young black woman, who lived in Baltimore and was a friend of the Floyd family, was able to talk to General Lee about what he had just witnessed. Could she help him see that his spirit was trapped there until he saw that he should have accepted President Lincoln’s offer to command the Union Army—to put an end to the rebellion and bring about the end of slavery? … Right now, it’s a time of questioning: “Is there systemic racism/slavery in America today?” ... If so, it’s time to put an end to it.