A Day In Gettysburg-‘They’ and Civil War Memory

A few days before Baltimore we visit Gettysburg, an unbelievably neat and tidy giant diadorama, with straight lines, wide avenues in parts, cute awnings and clean streets that stirred my urban chaotic psyche. I invariably look for some crazy energy, the institutional ‘madness’ of the ‘Afro-modern’ space, ‘natives’ and their ‘life-energy’ and its dominance of the architectural and the material. Gettysburg refuses to indulge me. Between older spruced up buildings that have metal plates that say ‘Civil War History’, stand T-shirt and Civil War paraphernalia shops and possibly the biggest commercial game in town, ghost-tour offices.

Next to this Disney-like apparition lies the memorial Gettysburg battlefield, green sweeping lawns dotted with all sorts, shapes and sizes of monuments like uneven dragon’s teeth. Giant grand figures on horse, small and large headstones with memorabilia dot this grand static vista open to the multitude of possible interpretations and re-enactments of America’s ‘Great War’, that continues to be narratively, and in places, politically contested. American history seems addicted to the epic form, and I feel its pull here. Standing before the sweeping physicality of the actual battle-field, I expect hordes of old soldiers to appear before my eyes, horses to start galloping and the noise, heat and dust that re-enacters try and summon every year, that ghosts spotters claim to see every night, to come to life. Later that evening, I enter a tavern with waitresses dressed like 19^th Century maids, dead strips of ermine and mink decorate the walls. I want to ask for ‘porridge’ on the menu but one of my fellow writers tells me that it is mere soup. There is little heat, noise and dust and present-day Gettysburg as some wit described the whole American Civil War - but the present tries to pulls all the stops to try and re-live whatever is both possible and can be transacted. At least for the 1 million visitors that come here every year.

In a place where a ‘nasty, untidy, brutal’, as described by our guide, war was fought, everything is anaesthesicised. Gettysburg College is all green lawns, brick buildings with high ceilings, and pretty co-eds. Spring though delayed comes through in the afternoons. I attend a senior creative non-fiction workshop and encounter the largest possibly indifferent social group in Gettysburg to the grand ‘history’ they are immersed in - college students from elsewhere in America.  

One female student says the general attitude on campus is that the whole present ‘Civil War’ scene in the town is ‘cheesy’. As we discuss relativity in ‘point of view’ in non-fiction and fiction, a male student says that there is such a surfeit of knowledge of the Civil War in present-day Gettysburg that it is ‘nutty’, and intimidating. This body of knowledge is held by what the student describes as an anonymous ‘they’. ‘They’, he say, know where every single body is buried. Someone adds that the Civil War seems to change for each student once they come to Gettysburg, a lot of information is imbibed from ‘they’ and many go back home to correct the relative positions that family and friends hold. During the session, the Civil War narrative seems to be the one subject that these students of creative non-fiction are least interested in during the discussion. And what myself and the writer’s group that I am part of are here for. We will move on and they will receive another group like us who will invariably want to talk about it.

When I explain a piece that I sent before-hand to the students, it seems to me later that the session is a particularly fruitful, an excellent conversational exercise in cross-purposes. I tell the students, somewhat facetiously, that I come from a place where the difference between fiction and non-fiction is that I can be sued for the latter. That, the ‘truths’ of fiction and ‘facts’ of non-fiction can be used inter-changeably to say what I need to say about where I come from. When I think about this in light of the part of the discussion on contemporary Gettysburg and the Civil War, I realize that this might be of little significance to these students. I leave feeling from that class that the seemingly overt historical weight of the American Civil War, a huge American institution, might ultimately satiate natural curiosity to a point, blur against one’s own ‘individual’ narrative concerns in non-fiction. And then that the material fact of Gettysburg with its T-shirts shops, ghost tours further robs what they could take seriously in narratives of other forms unless they took to satire or comic art. Somebody in our group fortuitously reminds us at the end of the Gettysburg visit that being in one place for a day can produce a novel, being there for a week, a short story and that it becomes impossible to write anything about a place after one has been there for a year.

The War Anew In Baltimore

The War Anew In Baltimore

I first travelled to Baltimore through the ‘The Wire’. This was a Baltimore, somewhat of the ‘popular’, safe from afar because of its mediated dangers and shared by hundreds who had never actually visited or will visit the city. It was a Baltimore of certain frames, T.V sets: the gritty docks, boarded-up street exteriors and corners, a canvas that became the larger inner city – universe of ‘The Wire’. So I ‘know’ the Wire’s battle-weary cynical but ever-intense cops, sociopathic well-rounded gang-banger ‘street outdoor’ types, aggressive bureaucrats, and slick-drawl politicians in heavily carpeted ‘jungle’ interiors.

I am lucky but more knowing – I will never see ‘The Wire’ only through the eye of a ‘crime reporter’s with a feeling for sociology' again now that I have been in the city over the last two days. I have walked on, been driven and talked through Baltimore’s other key landscapes beyond the ‘The Wire’s camera lens; the pretty chi-chi brick-paved Fell Point waterfront, the oldest Catholic cathedral in America (an uncanny life-like dove flutters in a ceiling reaching the heavens, the gentrified leafy swathes of brick-front Victorian apartments that retain a feel of a London without its grey and low skies.

About 150 years of Baltimore’s ages interlock; 1960’s modern apartments and State government blocks also stray into my mediated lens from The Wire; a Baltimore that is a much slower movie with less project-browns and concrete grays. Not unlike the D.C and New York’s Harlem and Brooklyn, cities that spilled over with immigrant ethnicities and African-Americans over the last hundred years, it is a History Channel whose drama is one of evident tensional temporalities. The Wire’s gritty pixels and brilliant characterization loses the spread of a wider map, the stretch and context of the City’s history.

Mapped and spread out, Baltimore is also the material manifestation of the tug of hundreds of years of capitalism spiked with white superiority till the Civil Rights movement with all its attendant exclusions and inclusions. There are bonsai exercises in aesthetic aspiration, miniature gardens, small parks, and squares just as there are grand continental squares from the City’s European historical roots. There is a 2-mile highway that leads and comes from nowhere, an ill-advised attempt to build escape routes into the suburbs in the 1950s for a white middle-class, with the promise of freedom from racial integration many years after the end of war that had fought for that same exact goal. The Battle Of Gettysburg is just an hour’s drive away – and the Baltimore suburbs are both its hinterland and also the city’s if for different reasons with connotations within America’s racial history. If blood was spilt for Lincoln’s grander multi-racial vision for America on those grand battlefields that include Gettysburg, the city’s center is partially what it is because of a racial hysteria and fleeing from the center by a white middle class between since the 1940s. The automobile also helped ruin Baltimore’s core just as its slow adaptation to a post-industrial world.  

And so I came into Baltimore from Gettysburg where our guide into American Civil history had prepared a thick dossier of military maps that showed strategy, movement, thrust and parry, relative positions of combatant regiments and so on. The dossier also contained letters that have unique individual sketches of those 3 days that were fought there during the American Civil in the month of July 1863.  And after I toured the Baltimore I describe, I felt that I required a 3-dimensional map like the Gettysburg military showcase with letters from Baltimore over time that would tell a bit more of the City’s history denoting things like land tenure and property ownership, inter-ethnic migration, micro-economic patterns within the blocks of the city and macro-economics relative to America’s East. This would help explain Linden Avenue, where 1500 houses were destroyed in 1962 to create a colour barrier, a fire-break as described in public record and that now separates Baltimore as a racial and economic divide. One requires that kind of map too to explain Lafayette Avenue, one of the main streets through the city, both kaleidoscope and vertebrae into all these various historical ages and economic present(s).

West Baltimore is ‘Wire’ territory, if not worse in some parts, the main black district thoroughfare and commercial street holds bailbond offices, cheque-cashing stalls and the odd T-shirt outlet with unrecognisable labels. East Baltimore though is on the up and where most of 'The Wire' was shot too and that says it all, mostly. Only that there are definitely more people on sets the ‘Wire’s streets, I saw only solitary figures float by out in West Baltimore. 

Years ago, a bargain ‘dollar’ sale was held not far from the West, crumbling houses were offered on auction, sold and restored into what is one of Batimore’s finest areas. I attended a neighborhood meeting in up-market residential Baltimore and the minutiae of household/street economies discussed showed glimpses into the process called ‘gentrification’ beyond such emergency interventions. What trashcans to use, how to handle dog-shit was discussed by home-owners amongst other macro-problems. But at the other end, trash is evidently the least of concerns for ‘slum-lords’ who I guess will stall any emergency bargain sales required to save West Baltimore. And so ‘gentrification’ and the slum lord fight over Baltimore in a new separatist war.