Chapter 17 Gone with the Wind
“Did I tell you I saw your brother reading Rivals and Lovers in Jackson Square the other day?” Bella Cummings asked her best friend.
“Rivals and Lovers?” For a moment, Isaac Wright couldn’t quite place the title.
Bella grinned at him from her grandma’s front porch swing. “It’s about a gay couple in New York. I remember you checked it out from the library a while back.”
“Right.” Isaac returned to his work. “Unusual choice for Elijah, don’t you think?”
“He was reading it because your parents think that’s the book that turned you gay.”
Isaac looked back up at her. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“Nope,” Bella said and burst out laughing.
For more than a minute, Isaac couldn’t catch his breath he was howling so loud. Finally he rolled up in a ball on the porch, clutching his aching stomach. Of all the books Isaac had read that year—including the gorgeous All Boys Aren’t Blue and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin—his family had decided a silly romance between two bougie Brown boys had lured him to the gay side.
“Elijah read every word of that book, and he did it for you,” Bella said once Isaac dragged himself off the floor and resumed his work. “Have you ever heard of anything so sweet? He was worried you might be going to hell. I think Rivals and Lovers really helped him.”
Isaac chuckled. “Then I’m glad he found it. I love that kid. I don’t know what I’d do without him.” He finished the last few letters on his banner and sat back on his haunches to let the paint dry. “What do you think?”
“You gonna tell your parents what we’re doing?”
The smile slipped off Isaac’s face. “They’ll find out soon enough.”
“So you really haven’t told them anything about your discovery?”
“I shared one secret with them,” Isaac reminded her. “Didn’t do anyone any good.”
“You don’t think this is different?”
They’d had this conversation three times already, and Isaac hoped this would be the last. “You really think they’re going to welcome this news? They didn’t take the last batch very well.”
“Your parents grew up hearing from everyone that gay people were hell-bound. That’s what their parents told them, it’s what the preacher told them. I’m sure they heard it in school. They need to get past forty years of brainwashing. That doesn’t happen overnight.”
Bella may have been right, but she didn’t have to live with James and Betsy.
“I understand they need time,” Isaac said. “That doesn’t mean I have to feel good about it.”
Isaac’s parents wanted to go back to the way things were. He knew this because his mother had told him so every day for the past three weeks. She bawled her eyes out talking about what a perfect child he’d once been. How he’d stayed by her side after Elijah was born and the demon of depression had done its best to kill her. How he’d stunned the preacher by reciting Psalms from memory at the age of four. How he’d won every academic award they gave out in the eighth grade—and how proud she’d been to see him walk up to claim them, looking like a little bitty president in his tan summer suit.
“What happened to my baby boy?” his mother would sob. “Where did I go wrong?”
“You never went wrong,” Isaac assured her. “I had a wonderful childhood.” He wouldn’t have said so if it hadn’t been true. That was the promise Isaac had made to himself—he wasn’t going to lie anymore. Not to himself. Not to anyone else.
When his mother reached to clutch his hands, her fingers were wet with tears. “Why can’t we be like that again?”
“I was always this way, Mama,” he tried to tell her. “What do you want to go back to? The days when I was hiding myself from you? When I was pretending to be someone I’m not?”
“You can’t tell me that tiny boy in that sweet little suit was a homosexual.”
“That little boy didn’t know the first thing about sex. But I promise you, he was the very same person who’s sitting here today.”
When the conversation was over, Isaac’s father had stopped him on the way out the door. James Wright hadn’t spoken directly to his son in ages.
“You’re killing your mother,” he told Isaac, his face a mixture of fury and grief.
It was almost more than Isaac could bear to see his parents suffering. They were good people. They’d spent their lives working to give him and Elijah every advantage they could. Their approval meant everything to their sons. But Isaac couldn’t change who he was to appease them.
“I’m not the one hurting you and Mom,” Isaac told him. That, too, was the truth. He could only hope that one day, they’d see that.
A truck roared by the Cummings porch, a cloud of black smoke billowing from its tailpipe and a Confederate battle flag slapped on its bumper. Everywhere Isaac looked, people wanted to go back. Back to a time when people like him either didn’t exist—or kept their damn mouths shut. Back to a time when there were plenty of confirmed bachelors, but nobody was gay. Back to a time when Black kids didn’t go to school with white children, and if they did, they weren’t valedictorian and they sure as hell weren’t best friends with the prom queen.
When it was announced that Isaac would be Troy High School’s valedictorian, there had been anonymous calls for a recount. Some parents just couldn’t believe it was possible that a Black kid could come out on top. They blamed everything from affirmative action to BLM. It was the students who’d eventually convinced their elders that there’d been no mistake. No one who’d ever seen Isaac in class would have doubted how hard he worked—or what he was able to accomplish. Still, even those who accepted the truth treated him like some rare bird—a flamingo that had flown off course and landed in their pond. Some were clearly worried that there were more on the way.
Isaac knew what those people saw when he walked down the street. They saw a future that scared them—a future where everyone had a chance (just a chance!) to be their best selves. If you were smart and worked hard, you might rise to the top. You could love who you wanted and dress as you liked. It was hard to argue with any of that in a country that proclaimed everyone to be free. So they had to turn ordinary people into villains. Black folks were criminals, their news channels shouted. Gay men debauched. Feminists were man-haters. Drag queens were groomers. Democrats were pedophiles. And all good Americans should take up arms against them.
Fighting the forces of evil—whether Black, gay, feminist, or fabulous—would take drastic measures, the hate-mongers told their followers. Books would need to be banned and laws broken. Some parts of the Constitution might no longer apply to everyone. And there were sections of the Bible they’d have to ignore, starting with love thy neighbor.
They didn’t care if lives were ruined in the process. People like Mr. Minter, the high school’s musical director, would pay. Since he’d been run out of town for imaginary crimes, the school hadn’t put on a decent production. But for people like Lula Dean, that was a reasonable price. They had to do whatever it took to keep future generations from living lives more fulfilling than their own.
Instead of an equitable future, they preached a return to a glorious past. They walked around with Technicolor pictures in their heads—ideas planted by Hollywood of what the fabled South had been like. They dreamed of a Gone with the Wind Georgia that had never existed. Of white mansions with fluted columns and women in crinolines. Of mint juleps on the verandah and cotillion waltzes. Of happy Black folks tending the fields and benevolent slave masters introducing the heathen to Jesus. Of strapping young white men in gray uniforms marching off to fight for a cause that may have been lost but was no less noble.
The historical reality would have sickened them. Literally. After a month in the old South they would have been suffering from malaria, cholera, or yellow fever. The people they met during their travels would be dystopian versions of the characters from their favorite movies. Real-life Mammy would have spent her fertile years nursing white babies while her own were sold off to the highest bidder. Ashley Wilkes, the ideal Southern gentleman, would own a plantation designed to turn human flesh into dollars. The soldiers nursed by saintly Melanie would reek of gangrene after losing limbs to a cause whose origins eluded them. Pretty Scarlett would do her business in a chamber pot she kept under the bed.
This glorious antebellum South they yearned for never featured any of the ugly realities of the past—body odor, hookworm, rape, cesspools, death, disease, and whippings, not to mention the unrelenting poverty of the folks called white trash. Anyone who tried to open their eyes was ignored or vilified. They made heroes of sadists like Augustus Wainwright. They went around waving a flag they claimed was all about heritage. The flag for which their poor ancestors had fought and died, while the rich slaveholders who’d started the war were exempted from service by Jefferson Davis himself.
But there were uglier truths still—rabbit holes so horrifying even the most intrepid explorers of the past went out of their way to avoid them. Not long after his mind had been blown by The Hemingses of Monticello, Isaac had stumbled across a passage in a Civil War–era diary written by Mary Chesnut, the wife of a high-ranking Confederate in Charleston, South Carolina:
The mulattos one sees in every family... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.
No three lines he’d ever read had left such an indelible mark. Isaac couldn’t help but remember a comment an uncle had made at a cookout years earlier about a rich, white ancestor way back in the past. When Isaac had asked his father, he was told the uncle in question was a prankster who liked to tell tall tales whenever he drank. Now Isaac wondered if the story might not have some truth to it. On a hunch, he had used a bit of Christmas money to purchase a DNA kit. When the results came back, he wasn’t surprised to find that he was of African, European, and Native American ancestry. Then Isaac linked his DNA results to the digital family tree he’d created using names pulled from his family Bible. His parents had both come from large families, and hundreds of matches began to appear—a web of cousins all over the state of Georgia. Some he knew. Others he’d heard of in passing. Most names were completely unfamiliar. One name was Beverly Underwood.
Isaac recognized a single name on Beverly Underwood’s family tree. When he entered that name into a blank space on his own, the DNA matched and the site accepted the man as an ancestor. The forefather he and Beverly Underwood shared was the man who’d “saved” Troy, Confederate general Augustus Wainwright.
Isaac spent hours following the Wainwright branch of his tree back in time—first to Jamestown and Plymouth, then hundreds of years back into Europe and Britain. None of the other branches on his tree went back further than 1830. As much as it amused him that he was now eligible for membership in the Mayflower Society, Sons of the American Revolution, and Sons of the Confederacy, it made Isaac furious to think that so much of his family’s history had been stolen—erased by the very people who had so carefully documented their own. But it was one empty space that haunted Isaac more than the others—the one right beside Augustus Wainwright. The unnamed Black woman who was the matriarch of their family.
Who was she? Where had she been born and where had she gone? How did she come to give birth to a Confederate general’s child? How many more had she had? Isaac thought of Sally Hemings, whose relationship with Thomas Jefferson was often whitewashed as romance. How do you fully consent to sex with a man who owns you? When saying no isn’t an option, how can it ever be anything other than rape? And yet Augustus Wainwright’s blood flowed through his veins. Isaac looked for something to redeem him. Some sign that the man had given the world something other than a gaudy gold courthouse and a statue of himself.
Isaac’s search was in vain. Months of study uncovered nothing to suggest that Augustus Wainwright had been anything but a monster. He found plenty written about Wainwright’s plantation, known as Avalon, with its beautiful big house that some historians argued was the inspiration for Tara. And Wainwright had been a handsome man in his youth—everyone agreed on that. But the rest read like a horror novel. Augustus Wainwright made most of his money trading slaves, not cotton. It was said that many of those slaves were likely his own children. During his time in the Confederate Army, he had personally ordered the massacre of fifty Black Union soldiers who had been forced to surrender. After the war, he’d rebuilt his fortune by exploiting newly freed people who had nowhere to go. At least part of that fortune was used to fund the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. He paid almost nothing for the courthouse that was built in the center of Troy, having cheated his suppliers and forced Black laborers to work for a pittance. By the time he died, most of his money had gone toward gambling and prostitutes. His one legitimate son had hated Wainwright so much that he was known to get sloppy and piss on his father’s statue every year when the old man’s birthday rolled around.
Over time, that piss-stained statue became a touchstone for the town—a monument to a past that had never existed. Just as Wainwright knew it would. The general may have been a sociopath, but he wasn’t stupid. Far from it. He’d learned his history better than most. He knew that the people history remembers are those who build monuments out of marble. And he knew that an image carved into stone would be the only thing later generations would ever see—and the words etched beneath would one day be accepted as fact.
Yet history is full of unintended consequences. When commissioning his statue, Augustus Wainwright inadvertently did one good thing. He stole an inscription for his monument that would inspire a town. Wainwright himself hadn’t lived by it—and he certainly hadn’t died by it. Letters between family members suggest he stumbled drunk into an outhouse behind a brothel and drowned in the cesspit. But long before he knew anything about him, Augustus Wainwright’s great-great-great-great-great-grandson had taken those words to heart. Isaac Wright refused to bow before tyrants.
The day he decided on a course of action was the very same day Isaac told his family he was gay. He’d had no doubts about his sexuality since middle school, but he’d always figured it would be prudent to wait until college to come out. He hadn’t applied to any schools south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He wanted to put some distance between him and Georgia. But whenever he looked at that blank space next to Augustus Wainwright’s name, safe simply didn’t feel like an option. The truth had waited long enough.
“That the banner?” Elijah had just arrived at the Cumming house. Usually he only had eyes for Bella whenever she was near, but this time was different.
“Yep,” Isaac said.
“I can’t believe you just dropped this shit on me today. Is there anything else I need to know?”
“You should know that what we’re about to do could put us both in serious danger,” Isaac informed his brother.
“If you aren’t up for it, I’ll help Isaac with the banner,” Bella offered.
“Nope,” Elijah told her. “My brother and I need to do it.”