My name is Vance. When I was ten years old I lived in Asheville, North Carolina. In the square at the center of town there is an obelisk of impressive dimensions. On its base is carved the single word, “VANCE”. My parents used to kid me that they had erected it when I was born.
Next to the obelisk was a water fountain. No, there were two water fountains : one marked WHITE and the other marked COLORED. I don’t recall paying any particular attention to that as a kid. It was just part of the world that a ten-year-old was learning to navigate. The seats in the trolley that took me to Pack Square from Biltmore were labeled the same way. That’s just the way things were in 1933.
Not until a couple of years later, after several trips to Brooklyn to visit my grandparents, did I begin to really see those labels and think about what they meant. There weren’t any like that in Brooklyn. Everyone in Brooklyn drank from the same too-little burble of tepid water, trying to keep his lips away from the little spout out of which it emerged, which might well harbor any kind of strange germs you could think of, but they were not assumed to be necessarily either black or white. Nobody died from it. I started asking questions.
My displaced Ivy League parents gave me the “When in Rome…” bit, along with the “No point in rocking the boat…” bit, but I found that unsatisfying. A few years on, when I got my chance to cross the Mason-Dixon Line for good, I did. I have never been back, or regretted it. I discovered a world where, at least legally, skin color didn’t matter. Although I saw that none of my physician grandfather’s patients on Hancock Street were black, and no one in my private high-school class was black, and nobody who lived on our block in Bedford-Stuyvesant — this was 1936 — was black, and my very proper grandmother, who happily ate off the dishes washed by her black maid and wore the clothes she washed, would never have dreamed of inviting her to the table. There were no black kids in our neighborhood “gang”, either. The block of Jefferson Avenue directly behind ours marked the sharp dividing line between the white stubborn holdovers and the invading blacks. Our back yards and their backyards touched, and both were visible from our second-floor windows, but a mis-hit ball over the fence was considered as irretrievably lost as though it had flown to the deepest heart of the Congo.
What has this got to do with today’s news?
Well, General Zebulon Vance’s obelisk still stands in Pack Square, and probably most passersby haven’t any idea who he was (a big deal Confederate military hero, extensive slaveholder, and active politician during Reconstruction times). The obelisk was erected during a wave of similar Confederate monuments and statues intended as a 1896 middle finger to the 1865 winners by the 1865 losers who were exploring their states-rights power to continue to celebrate their cause. I will assume that the drinking fountain situation has been set right by now, but as last year’s Charlottesville rebellion vividly demonstrated other symbols are newly under attack, on the grounds that they are offensive to an increasingly black population that feels dissed by this white granite cavalry prancing on its pedestals with their oversized gloves and broad-brimmed hats. After all, much as I disapprove of the man, he has to be right once in a while. “We won; you lost. Live with it.”
There are an awful lot of these (often awful) statues populating the public squares of the Old Confederacy and still remaining to be dealt with. If we are to avoid future Charlottesvilles, it would be nice to have some agreed-on policy for guidance. So I have a suggestion.
There was once prevalent a (perfectly reasonable) myth that colonial portrait painters, who found it difficult to get to their patrons and subjects in the snows of winter, used to spend the cold months snug at home preparing generic bodies and backgrounds that could quickly be fitted out with specific faces when the weather improved. There is, so far as I know, no real evidence for this, but it remains an excellent idea. My suggestion is simply that we apply it to celebrity statuary and edifices of all kinds. The rearing stallions (or geldings in the more DAR dominated locations) and the brandished swords could be easily supplied with alternate (alt-right or alt-left, according to the prevailing political winds) heads and faces. The stones inscribed VANCE around the base of Asheville’s obelisk could be made interchangeable with other blank blocks without the cost of full demolition and reconstruction.
Sensible, but totally impractical, you may say. Well, I have to point out that some of our ancestors didn’t think so. Unless you exclude the ancient Egyptian pharaohs from among our ancestors, they were probably among the first to adopt the practice. Ramses II, who enjoyed one of the longest pharaonic reigns, figured it out early on. He simply had his masons locate the cartouches with which earlier monument-building pharaohs had signed their temples and tombs, and, after erasing their hieroglyphic signatures substitute his own. Presto! He had both acquired an additional monument to his own glory and had dimmed the name of his predecessor at one stroke. I would think this would appeal to our Donald on both counts. And in these times of incipient dictatorship, what the Donald says goes.
As to the actual galloping granite stallions and sword-brandishing heroes, a reconfigured face here and there would be enough to do the job in many cases. Not a difficult assignment for a sculptor. Other identifying accessories could easily be removed or exchanged. The largest of the large monuments (like Napoleon’s Arche de Triomphe) wouldn’t even have to be renamed. Nobody ever calls it that anyway. In Paris it’s L’Étoile. Haven’t heard any complaints from Napoleon.
I wonder how long it will be before New York City’s “Triboro Bridge” and “59th Street Bridge” will be replaced by “The Robert F. Kennedy” and “The Ed Koch”? You can still today hop in a yellow cab and say “Idlewild” and have a good shot at making your flight on time, and that name was officially changed more than fifty years ago. No cost beyond a few overhead signs and some tourist confusion.
So here’s to Ramses’s breakthrough discovery. Prosit!
But now we perhaps need to proceed to a more fraught subject. What about citizens glorified more by their works than their statuary? As scholarship, and the book industry’s pressing need for new sales digs up more and more dirt about famous people, should Michaelangelo’s dalliances with little boys prevent us from admiring his David? Should Wilhelm Furtwängler’s games of footsie with Hitler’s thugs disqualify his recordings of Beethoven? What about Wagner’s unabashed anti-Semitism? Consign the Ring Cycle to the dustbin, a casualty of Dachau? “Michaelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni” was Michaelengelo’s full moniker. Maybe we could just change his signature to “Buonarratti”? After all, Plato owned five slaves when he died. None of our heroes is perfect. Hard as it may be to believe, even Donald is reported to have flaws.
That’s for another time. For now we should concentrate on how to give a generic statue a specific identity on demand. And the associated problem of what to do when a formerly honored honoree falls out of favor? Can we rename Columbus Circle just “the Circle”? Maybe “Santa Maria Square”?
Problems, problems.
Vance Weaver 