Meanwhile, in the Confederacy . . .

Every other month or so, Susan and I make a two-day drive to South Carolina, with our giant dog Elsie in the back seat, to visit our daughter, who has lived there for fifteen years, and our grandson Max, who is a touchingly empathetic six-year-old. It’s an exhausting, thousand-mile-each-way trip for us, but it usually results in a very sweet visit. We’re lucky enough to own a small apartment in Columbia, the state capital, which is a relatively “liberated” blue town within this red state, and apart from playing with Max we take many walks with Elsie on the SC University campus, which is a veritable arboretum, and in our Five Points neighborhood, which is full of mansions and gigantic shade trees.

This time around, however, I’m in the middle of reading a classic history book about the aftermath of slavery in America: Been in the Storm So Long by Leon F. Litwack (1929-2021). A Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner in 1979, the book has brought me deeply into the experience of people liberated by the Civil War from a dozen or more generations of enslavement — that is, from nearly 250 years of harsh labor exploitation, physical torture, sexual exploitation, family separation, enforced illiteracy, enforced isolation, and extreme mental colonization about white superiority and black inferiority. Litwack’s book reveals how, with hardly any federal government support, and with immense forces of violence and racism pushing against them, newly emancipated men and women strove as best they could for economic survival, family reunification, literacy, dignity, and basic legal and civil rights in the years following the defeat of the Confederacy.

Then came the political betrayal that ended Reconstruction, only eleven years after the end of the Civil War . . .

Been in the Storm So Long is a detailed and deeply moving book that maps the oppression that African-Americans suffered throughout their centuries of slavery. Only a reader committed to “blaming the victim” could fail to grasp the enduring impact of that oppression — which was powerfully reinforced by segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, ghettoization, job discrimination, institutional racism, and mass incarceration for another 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation — in keeping black people away from the benefits of life in America.

So here I am in South Carolina, the cradle of the Confederacy and a key capital of the slave trade. In 1860, as the Confederacy rebelled against the United States, enslaved blacks constituted 60 percent of the state’s population and 60 percent of its gross economic wealth. Today, decades after the Great Migration, the state’s population is about 27 percent black. During Reconstruction, South Carolina was the only state in the U.S. with a black-majority state legislature; one century later, Strom Thurmond was entering his fourth of eight terms in the U.S. Senate as an arch-segregationist and white supremacist. (A 9-foot statue of Thurmond stands on the capitol grounds, which surrendered its Confederate flag only in 2015.)

Thanks to my reading, I’m now walking among the mansions and gigantic oak trees thinking about where all this wealth came from. I can’t be self-righteous about it: my own liberal state, New York, also built its wealth upon the backs of enslaved people, delaying abolition until 1827 (more than 40 percent of New York households owned slaves in the early 1700s) and long relying on Southern slavery for cotton and other raw materials. But New York and other northern states have at least pursued policies, in modern times, that reflect an awareness of the sins of history — to some extent — that protect persecuted minorities — to some extent — that lead America towards its future of diversity and choice — to some extent — rather than sustaining the white supremacy and Christian coercion to which the states of the Confederacy (and the border states Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri) are politically, culturally, and emotionally committed.

Even with this knowledge, I want to approach my Southern experience with a heart of reconciliation. I do not want to be a condescending Northerner, especially not when I know how thoroughly racist the North has been in its housing, employment, education, and policing policies throughout my seven decades of life. In truth, I see just as many Confederate flags on pickup trucks in New York’s Adirondacks as I do in the South. Mostly I experience the people I’m moving among in South Carolina as similar to the people I move among in New York: doing the best they can to prosper in a selfish commercial culture, and committed to their own ideas of what is righteous, what is morally uplifting, what is worthy of preservation.

Columbia, in particular, usually helps me forget where I am. The city has a well-organized black community (39 percent of the population of 137.000) and a university population of 35,000 that combine to make the place tolerant and liberal-minded; Joe Biden won Columbia’s vote by 40 percent. My grandson is attending an Episcopal school (while belonging to a Reform synagogue) that is quite progressive. The local artsy movie theater is committed to showing progressive films.

But this time I am reading Litwack’s book, and contemplating the depth of white supremacist ideology that formed the backbone of Southern culture for generations, and the ruthless violence with which that ideology was enforced. I think about how the states of the Confederacy, and the politicians whom they elect, remain energetically committed to the oppression of minority groups and to blame-the-victim policies; to hypocritical preachments about “small government” while they endorse government control of women’s bodies and bedroom morality; to the empowerment of nauseating characters like Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott in the U.S. Senate; to a facile, triumphalist Christianity; and to the dehumanization of liberal and progressive people as unAmerican traitors.

And then I can’t help but feel like a Jew in Germany — only it’s a Germany that has never contemplated or educated its children about its evil past, never paid reparations, never repented, never renounced its racism.