In the morning we made for Charleston, eager to feel the breeze off the ocean, although Charlotte had cooled off substantially. We went south on I-77 into South Carolina, and the trees along the sides of the road turned to mostly pine.
Just past Columbus, we saw our first Confederate battle flag that did not memorialize a fallen Civil War soldier. This one was much larger than the miniature ones staked next to headstones in the Albemarle cemetery. It was flying high above a medium-sized boutique just off an exit ramp called the Southern Patriot Shop. Inside that store, we saw our second-thru-900th Confederate battle flags.
They were on almost everything: coffee mugs, hip flasks, bumper stickers, beer cozies, t-shirts with the words “If this offends you, you need a history lesson,” women’s underwear with the words “Try taking this down!” There was plenty of literature as well, including Southern Partisan magazine (which Ben bought as a study tool), The Confederate Cookbook, and a children’s book featuring an absurd illustration of a buck-toothed black boy titled Little Black Sambo. I leafed through the pages, which, after an apologia by the publisher explaining its reasons for reissuing the book—to offer a “mirror into our past”—told the story of a black boy, Little Black Sambo, who outfoxes the gang of tigers who are trying steal his clothes before dining on their liquefied flesh with his mother, Big Black Mumbo, and father, Big Black Jumbo. These unsettling caricatures notwithstanding, the most shocking twist was on the inside title page, which revealed that the publisher was headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts—a town over from where I live.
Sensing that I was among folks who would not appreciate being documented like wildlife by a tattling, sanctimonious Northerner, I scribbled these details in my notebook while skulking behind a rack in the back of the store. But after a few minutes I stopped, noting that if anything I looked like I was trying to pocket merchandise without being noticed. Glancing at the rifles, period pistols, inscribed Bowie knives and battle swords mounted on the walls, I guessed that this was not a store that dealt lightly with shoplifters.
Ben was listening to the storekeeper tell a customer an anecdote. I wandered over and caught the end of it. Apparently, some youngsters in Raleigh, North Carolina had gone on a series of rampages where they canvassed area road signs with stickers bearing the Stainless Banner of the Confederacy in honor of Confederate History Month. The stickers, which were the type designed to adhere to fabric, had proven exceedingly difficult to remove. And when city workers finally finished peeling them off, the youths struck again, this time addressing a message to the city council warning that as long as it continued refusing to honor the state’s secessionist heritage, the vandalism would also continue.
“’Cause nothing else seemed to work,” the man behind the counter concluded with a smile.
“Heh heh, that’s a good one, there,” chuckled the customer, a red-faced old man with a cut-off shirt and a Santa Claus beard.
The storekeeper, who introduced himself to us as Tim Manning, wore a beard too, but it was the darker side of gray and fastidiously trimmed in a goatee. He was wearing a Polo shirt, tucked in, with a PDA fastened to his belt. Ben struck up a conversation with him after Tim revealed that his son was an assistant editor at the magazine Ben was buying, which had a picture of Abraham Lincoln above the words, “The Dictators’ Favorite President” on the cover. Neither father nor son approved of the compulsory membership in the Union that Honest Abe and his successors had enforced.
“If you can’t secede from your country, you’re not free,” he explained. “If you’re bound by bayonet, that’s not liberty, that’s dictatorship.”
I nodded and tried to cross my arms high enough against my chest to cover the text on my Decemberists T-shirt, not trusting Tim to know that it referred to the indie rock band and not the Russian communists. When he asked where we were from, Ben, wearing a shirt whose message (“Beer is good”) transcended politics, told him that we were from Massachusetts.
“See now, Massachusetts recognized the legality of secession,” he said. “Massachusetts seceded twice, in 1803, then again in 1812, because they didn’t want to fight the War of 1812.”
“Hey, I guess we aren’t so different after all,” Ben said diplomatically. “Massachusetts and South Carolina, kindred spirits.”
“No,” Tim said, friendly but firm, “they are complete enemy spirits.”
He told us more, about how he knew Ron Paul and Pat Robertson personally (the first of whom he described as a “good man” and the second of whom he described as a “maniac”), how Richard Nixon had George Wallace assassinated because he was too ardent a constitutionalist, and how the Allies had staged Hitler’s suicide in Berlin while he and Eva Braun escaped to Argentina.
Tim spoke calmly but intensely, meeting my eyes with abnormally small pupils that emphasized the blue around them and kept making me find excuses to glance away. He sounded less like the redneck owner of a secessionist souvenir store than a college professor—which, we learned, he was. He said he has taught for 35 years at Columbia Union College, a small college in D.C., during which time he has authored 35 books.
He said that while mainstream politics goes to great lengths to suppress secessionist thought, the movement owns more seats of power than we realize. He claimed to have personally spoken to a number of U.S. senators who believe that less than two decades from now the United States will have broken up into 15 or 16 smaller nations.
“And you see there?” He tapped a book in front of the counter called Radical Islam vs. America. “That’s written by an aide to the governor here in South Carolina, under a pseudonym.”
Posted from the Lake Aire RV Park and Campground, Hollywood, South Carolina.
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