Waking the Grand Wizard

Part II

Between 2010 and 2011, I was the Staff Judge Advocate at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The base’s legal headquarters was located on Forrest Road, named after famed Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. This, to understate it, rubbed me the wrong way. I attempted to change the road’s name, and was unsuccessful. My successor, one of my best friends and a black man, attempted to change the road’s name as well. I thought, shamelessly, there’s no way he will be denied. He too was unsuccessful. America, over the last few years, has dealt with our adulation of Confederate leaders, something that has always been an incongruity to me. How did we not see the dissonance in minority service members walking on parade fields, driving on roads, sleeping in barracks, and serving on bases named after men who would have them enslaved? The removal, tearing down, and defacing of Confederate statues was polarizing. Some saw it as long-overdue; some saw it as “woke” culture gone too far. That the latter would rarely seek to understand how these base names and statues came to be in the first place was, for me, frustratingly ignorant: Their construction rarely had to do with culture, heritage, or history. Rather, they were built and named in an attempt to pander to the Southern population and its politicians – most of the statues glorifying confederate leaders, or bases named to honor them, were in backlash to the Jim Crow era of segregation; in response to the Civil Rights movement; a barter to get cheap land for new military bases or more recruits from Southern states in the time period around our two world wars. History is not a monolith but a shapeshifter, and its true form often reveals itself simply when asked.

Two days ago, the Department of Defense released a list of more than 750 names at US installations around the world, all of which memorialized the Confederacy in some way, and all of which are under consideration for renaming or removal. Among them: Forrest Road at Fort Campbell Kentucky.

The below essay was originally posted February 1, 2010. It is reposted today in edited form.

Waking the Grand Wizard (Part I)

One hundred and ninety years ago, in a battered shack in a central Tennessee basin splotched by canebrake and bluestemmed barrens and teeming with dogwood, red oak, and poplar-treed expanses, young Marian, wife to blacksmith and subsistence farmer William Forrest, gave birth to twins. The couple named the second of the two children Fanny. The first, a boy, they called Nathan. Ten more offspring would follow, with an equal amount of tragedy not far behind.

William was unsuited for working both metal and earth. After spoiling his own father’s riches, William took his young flock to Mississippi to be closer to family, trying to alchemist his way from poor son to prodigal. He did not succeed. Nathan, now a thirteen-year-old, quickly found himself paterfamilias, his father dead from the residual effects of tuberculosis or scarlet fever. Or maybe the yellow kind. The color of one’s demon doesn’t matter much when everyone nearby is dying. Nathan contracted the disease as well, but survived. Five of his eleven siblings, his twin sister Fanny included, would not be so lucky. Possessing only a rudimentary education but already a sturdy lad, Nathan quit school and went to work to support his winnowed family.

Nathan was a resourceful, aggressive kid. At six feet two inches and a lean one hundred eighty pounds, he was also big for the times. A target, perhaps. At twenty he laid foundation for his future fable when he shot and killed two men and injured two others, all the brothers Matlock. Word spread that Nathan killed two of the brothers with a single bullet each from his two-shot pistol; he injured the other two after a bystander tossed him a knife. Apocryphal or not, Nathan was quite obviously a man of action. He took over his uncle’s livery and livestock business, married, moved to Memphis, and built an empire through dealing cotton, livestock, real estate, and slaves. By 1859, Nathan was retired and had in his possession well over one million dollars. Using the Consumer Price Index, that’s twenty-seven million dollars in 2010 money. Under the more bourgeois “Relative Share of Gross Domestic Product” scale, Mr. Forrest was worth a cool three billion, putting him just south of Misters Gates and Buffett on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

In November of 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln its sixteenth president. Barely a month and a half later South Carolina, fearing the abolition of slavery, seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas quickly followed, and by April 12, 1861, relations between the Union and the seven Confederate states had degenerated to an armed stand-off at Charleston. Mr. Edmund Ruffin, a scholarly 67-year-old farmer from Virginia, attempted to speed things along by pulling a lanyard that lit a fuse which then lobbed a mortar round from Fort Johnson, over Charleston Harbor, and into the Union-occupied Fort Sumter. The stalemate thus resolved, the Civil War began.

Between April 17 and May 20, Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded. On June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted 2-to-1 to join suit. By mid-July, billionaire Nathan Forrest enlisted as a private in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles. Four years later he was a three-star general, had been directly engaged with and fired upon by enemy forces almost one hundred and eighty times, taken over 31,000 prisoners, cemented his status as World’s Greatest Cavalryman, ordered or condoned the wholesale slaughter of surrendering and defenseless black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and uttered the timeless adage “war means killing, and the way to kill is to get there first with the most men.” Lesser known, but of great importance to this story, are his post-Civil War activities: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here is how I begin each morning in this, the autumn of 2010: I leave my house in Tennessee at 5:30 am, enter Interstate 24 at Exit 1, ensuring I stay left to avoid the tractor-trailers parked overnight in the narrow shoulder. I head west to Exit 86, now crossing into Kentucky, then drive south on Highway 41A amidst the closest thing we have to rush hour traffic as soldiers old and young hurry to morning formation at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Across the street from Jenna’s Toy Box, recently placed on the off-limits list by the Commanding General not for their extensive porn-and-bong collection, but rather for their equally extensive synthetic marijuana offerings, I make a right through Gate 5 and onto the army base. I’m allowed through only after showing my identification card to, more often than not, the contracted security guard and advice-dispensing Mr. Williams (staples: “Stay dry now!”, or “Keep smilin’, you almost made it to Friday!”). From beginning to end, the road at Gate 5 – Forrest Road – is just nine-tenths of a mile.

The nine-tenths is inconsequential. What is deeply troubling is that my office is here, on Forrest Road. The Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, the base’s legal heartbeat, its moral compass, the place where I spend at least sixty hours a week doing my best to lead, guide, and mentor fairness, integrity, and, hopefully, justice. I do so from my desk at about the half-way point of Forrest Road, named after a man who achieved vast wealth on the backs of enslaved black men, women, and children; dedicated four years of his life fighting against America; then headed up a new organization that would spend the next century and a half inciting violence against just about anyone who wasn’t white and Christian.

Aside from this short, nondescript road at Fort Campbell, Nathan Bedford Forrest is memorialized by, at a minimum, a town in Arkansas; a county in Mississippi; high schools in Tennessee and Florida; a park; a university building; monuments in Nashville; Selma, Alabama; and Rome, Georgia; over thirty historical markers throughout the state of Tennessee; and at least one figure in pop culture (run, Forrest). He is a favored Son of Tennessee and of the South, and is remembered accordingly.

What he does not have is any connection to Fort Campbell, nor to any unit ever garrisoned here. The famed Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division owe their lineage to, of all things, a Union unit from Wisconsin. No part of Forrest Road touches Tennessee earth. Nathan Bedford Forrest has no connection to the United States Army, even, other than taking up arms against it.

I want the road name changed. It is an affront, a blaspheme, a slur. A defile. A desecration. Sacrilege. Mumbai was once Bombay; Volgograd Stalingrad; Istanbul Constantinople. Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch; Miley Cyrus, Destiny Hope; Russell Jones (RIP) Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, Joe Bananas, and, fleetingly, the Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant. Entire cities and flesh-and-blood human beings change their names; it should be a minor inconvenience to rename a mile-long stretch of asphalt on an American army base.

I try. I marshal support, rally the troops, compose brilliant, concise, persuasive, outrage-barely-bridled emails. Like I’m a posh Brit: The condescension is there, but no one can specifically pinpoint it. I compose a list of people and places who might better represent our values and the 101st Airborne’s history. Colin Powell Road, Bagram Airfield Road, General Maxwell Taylor Road. I demur in my official memos, writing not what I think – Forrest was a murderer and slave-trading fuck and we should be ashamed we have a road named after him – but rather what I think will work: “The means by which Lieutenant General Forrest accumulated his great wealth is incongruous with the values and moral code of today’s Army.”

I’m told I need the support of the base historian. My previous experience with this gentleman was during a private tour of the museum, where he relayed to our group that the museum’s non-profit foundation used “wives of Special Forces soldiers as models for the female soldier mannequins because we couldn’t find any women heroes”. I present my case to him in his office, his troll cave, his shame attic. When I am finished he all but calls me a commie feminist liberal homosexual. Yesss, I whisper in my head, I am whatever fulfills your repressed, innermost Freudian dreams. Just support this name change. He does not.

I am unsuccessful in changing the road’s name. I submitted an official request. There was a vote, a four-to-four tie, and the garrison commander – the tie-breaking vote, a man who had previously assured me that he supported my efforts – voted against the name change. Forrest Road becomes my white whale. One wit in my office has hung a portrait of the man himself above my desk. Forrest’s goateed chin stares down at me for days before I notice him. I try not to hate him, to find common ground. I try to see him as someone else, someone other than who he was. He is reputation not reality; he is a caricature; he is simply someone fully human. I Hollywoodize him, seeing Billy Connolly from Boondock Saints, Michael O’Keefe from Caddyshack, Michael Keaton with a goatee. Any Michael, really, anyone other than this traitorous racist twit on whose eponymously named road my mail is addressed.