Cruel Awakening
The South, too, was an earthly paradise. Not of course at all times, for all its inhabitants. There were the slaves. Yet the South, before the War between the States, had this of paradise left to it: it had the wholeness that embraced white and black in an apparent unity, even though the relationship was out of order. This unified feudal society was nevertheless conceived as a realistic possibility that did not conflict with the living and efficacious paradise myth. For the South, on the contrary, it was paradise, in which the benevolent and cultured planters paternally loved and protected the joyous, singing “darkies,” etc.
The brutal national trauma of that war destroyed the myth for the South, and in doing so (though no one realized it at the time) destroyed it for everybody.
Since the Civil War the whole nation has been “in sin,” and the sin has been inescapable. The pioneer child, or the plantation child if you prefer, had been cruelly awakened. And he has faced in himself the cruelty that he did not realize was there: the meanness, the injustice, the greed, the hypocrisy, the inhumanity! He knows there is a mark on his forehead, and is afraid to recognize it—it might turn out to be the mark of Cain.
Rather he has consistently refused to accept his expulsion from “Paradise.” He has insisted that he is what he has always dreamed he was—gentle, kind, fair, noble, courteous, yet simple, with the clear-eyed simplicity of the frontiersman—or the noble directness of the Confederate gentleman: the frankness of General Lee.
At this point, the myth becomes an evasion. The refusal is culpable. The beautiful story we are telling ourselves is no longer much more than an ordinary lie.
—-excerpt Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
