Unflagging devotion
The redneck dream dies hard
When journalists are looking for someone who represents the “Old South” as a Spanish-moss-covered repository of racial paranoia, they tend to trot out Dent “Wildman” Myers, the 70-year-old proprietor of “Wildman’s” in downtown Kennesaw.
Myers, whose store sells real Civil War artifacts and replicas of Civil War artifacts, never actually admits to being a Ku Klux Klansman, but he also doesn’t deny it.
“I couldn’t say whether I am or not,” he says. “The Klan’s a paper tiger. The Klan’s not what it used to be. Anytime you got 20 Klansmen together, 10 of ‘em are federal agents. We’re trying to keep our presence mild and unobtrusive.”
He doesn’t elaborate on which “we” is his. It seems unlikely that Myers is a federal agent, but then again, he proudly unfurls the banner of names he’s been called like one who’s successfully created a leak-proof identity.
“They say I’m a racist, redneck, honky bigot,” he says. “That’s what they say.”
That image has doubtless been helped along by Myers’ penchant for paraphrasing black leaders in a clumsy kind of Steppin Fetchit-speak. He explains Gov. Roy Barnes’ changing the state flag like this: “It’s because Mahtin Lutha King Junyah say he dohn like dat, yew know.”
The day after the Georgia House of Representatives voted to shrink the Confederate battle emblem to a footnote on the state flag, Myers was admiring an effigy of “Benedict Barnes, that hypocrite” that he and some cohorts had made and hung in front of his store. Myers says he’ll keep the present flag with its dominant St. Andrew’s Cross, whether the General Assembly officially changes it or not. Even if he didn’t feel so protective of fellow whites, he still wouldn’t fly the new flag. The new design by architect Cecil Alexander features the state seal against a field of navy blue underscored by a bar of several small former state flags — the present one among them — that looks very much like a K-Swiss logo. The design offends Myers’ aesthetic sensibilities.
“It’s atrocious,” he sniffs. “It’s tacky. It belongs in an amusement park.”
Myers won’t be ordering the proposed new flag for his store, but he may stock up on the present one before it’s replaced, something that flag distributors expect lots of Southerners to do.
“There are just too many die-hard Southerners who don’t want to see it go,” says Joe Parrish, president of Capitol Flags in Houston, Texas. His company sells about $650,000 worth of flags each year. The favorite size, the “residential” size, is a 3-by-5-foot that sells for $32. Most are sold locally, so the Texas flag is by far the best seller. The Confederate flag doesn’t sell in huge volumes, he says, but sells steadily and he expects to sell more of it and of the present Georgia flag. “The more they talk about it going away, the more people are going to get interested in it.”
Parrish recalls the South African flag, which was changed in 1994 following the end of state-sanctioned apartheid.
“People ordered the old flag because they thought it would be a collector’s item.”
“Big Annie” Mason, a vendor at Big Shanty Antiques and Flea Market in Kennesaw, says she couldn’t think of making money off the flag that’s been Georgia’s official banner since 1956. It’s too dear to hear — regardless of who it offends.
“Black people can have all the fits they want,” she says, referring to the Civil War and slavery that the Confederate battle emblem calls to mind. “That doesn’t change the fact that it happened.”
Carol Touhy, another vendor at the market, says she believes discarding the flag will take away a reminder that could prevent the same thing from happening again.
“It’s like when my husband and I visited Pearl Harbor,” she says. “There were some Japanese tourists there and I thought they were just there to gloat, but the tour guide took me aside and said, ‘They’re here to do the same thing you are — they’re here to remember.’ The flag’s like that. We shouldn’t forget what happened. It was all about states’ rights.”
Across the street from the market, Pat Cates, the great-great grandson of a Confederate veteran, is the archivist for the Big Shanty Museum. He’s a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans and is a Civil War re-enactor. Cates isn’t upset about the flag change.
“I have always liked the pre-1956 flag,” says Cates. “It just had a red stripe and a white stripe and a red stripe. I don’t know why we didn’t just go back to that one.”