Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 31, 1993 TAG: 9301280200
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WRITER HAS DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE OF HISTORY
You know how it is. You're sitting there in the doctor's office, the magazine rack beckons.The September issue of Southern Outdoors stood out, with its cover story on deer season.
Waiting, waiting. The article on deer-hunting rifles blended into the dove-hunting I.Q. quiz that led to the back page and an essay on "The Unusual World of the Dove."
A bland headline, but the story started off promisingly. I didn't know that more mourning doves are killed each year than any other game bird.
Then the author begins to describe the history of dove hunting in the South.
A pre-Civil War dove hunt was a big deal. Invited to a plantation, "Neighbors arrived by wagon, buggy and horseback from miles away. There might be a hundred or more shooters, with families and domestics in addition."
With what? Domestics? Sure, there were some non-black domestic servants in the pre-Civil War South, but aren't we talking about slaves here?
I guess the article couldn't take the tone of "Yes, those were the good old days when we could kill a few hundred doves on a fall afternoon and have the slaves clean and cook 'em up for us."
Somehow, "domestics" is more palatable.
Perhaps the "domestics" cooked the "mountains of baked goods that had been prepared." Perhaps they played the "Fiddles, mouth organs and banjos [that] furnished music for dancing on the spacious lawns."
It's a fair bet that they didn't share the "long-handled dipper for communal drinking" from the "kegs of homemade whiskey."
This is the worst kind of revisionist history, the kind that doesn't outright deny the horrors of slavery but glosses over its existence as if there were no difference between involuntary servitude and paid service.
It's the kind of "history" that makes it necessary to have a Black History Month every February to counter the distortions it spreads.
Of course, the author of this particular article demonstrates later that he has no sense of history whatsoever.
He writes about "The Christian story of the dove released from the Ark."
If we are in a charitable mood, we might figure this guy missed a few Sunday school lessons and is simply ignorant of the fact that the story of Noah and the Ark predates Christianity.
If we want to see darker motives we might wonder if he refuses to credit Jews with coming up with such a good story.
Unfortunately, we cannot conclude that this kind of rewriting of history is limited to a few ignorant or careless or thoughtless individuals who have access to a printing press.
Intelligent, thoughtful people are likely to downplay the evils of slavery and to question the necessity of a Black History Month. We're all Americans, they argue. Why not just have American history month?
Perhaps we could if we didn't still have people writing and reading "history" that describes slaves as "domestics"; that transforms Noah into a Christian; that contends that most slaves didn't have it all that bad.
The truth is that even if slaves had lived in gilded cages, they still would have been slaves in cages. Black men and women were property, things, that white men and women owned.
Because they had cash value, most might have been fed enough to maintain their strength, just like the horses in the stable. Most might have had serious illnesses tended to because their owners had an investment to protect. Most might not have been forced to work literally to death, which would have been bad business.
But they were still slaves, not simply "domestics."
Maybe the editors of Southern Outdoors expected that their audience of mostly white males would never question - maybe not even notice - the disquieting new history their magazine has published.
Or maybe the article just slipped past editors who gave no thought to its implications.
In either case, we should pray that the magazine's editors and readers will take advantage of Black History Month to get another perspective on the history of dove hunting in the South.
Lowe Cody Lowe reports on religious issues for this newspaper.