Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Sun, 12 Apr 1992 08:13:22 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Jeff Davis's hijra to Danville

   Excuse me, forgot to respond to the person who asked what happened to Jeff
Davis, who evanescently remained President of the CSA though its armed forces
had been surrendered by Lee at Appomatox.
   In 1963 this writer had planned to spend the summer as a white victim for
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, at that time as nonviolent as
its name indicated, discountenancing as yet what later became known as Black
Nationalism, and not motivated to expel its white members, supporters, allies,
and sources of funds except for the vaguest inchoate get impulses of a
factional character said faction having been in the minority.
   At that time my coordination while subnormal was not as etiolated as now
and I was headed by car toward Albany GA where a nice safe secure
integrationist community project was underway. Everything was well-domesticated
and as it turned out that summer there was one and only one rather pro forma
ritualistic mass arrest of the staff and white volunteers. I set out from New
York City whence I'd just got in the previous day from school in Waltham MA.
   First I forgot about making Albany GA that night, then about making Atlanta,
site of the SNCC national office. I called the latter, told them I'd got to
what's known in Virginia as Southside, got told to head west to crash at an
address they gave me where "they might be able to use you for a few days," and
arrived thence at 4am.
   "Wuz happenin' <yawn>?"
   "<mumble> mass demonstration, man..."
   "zzzz"
   ************
   Iconic and logocnetric signification all over the place, such little as I
saw between 10am and noon, laid it heavily and thickly on that I was in THE
LAST CAPITAL OF THE CONFEDERACY; the white public library was the Confederate
Library; and so on.
   As luck would have it I'd been put up in the home of Ms Beatrice Hairston,
eminent local historian whose history of Danville was required for each of the
two local school systems notwithstanding as a "Negro" she'd been required to do
all her research at the Confederate Library *standing up*. Notwithstanding her
absolute commitment to Christian Love she was a leader of the Danville
Christian Progressive Association whose less spiritual members would slip into
reveries as to how they were going to love the white power structure to the
point of eliciting excruciating pain from the power of love alone.
   ****
   Jefferson Davis - my memory fades in my old age - left Richmond by train[?]
on the night of April 9-10, 1865. After several failed quests for a halting
place he finally arrived at Danville on April 11, and for the ensuing ten days
Danville VA was THE LAST CAPITAL OF THE CONFEDERACY the implications of which,
in terms of Southern Gentility, proved impossible to keep up given the
proximity of the town to the falls on the Dan River. These provided first water
power, then hydroelectric; chief customer having been almost throughout the two
large cotton mills of Dan River Mills, Incorporated, still one of the US's
largest manufacturers of sheets, pillowcases, and fluffitowels. Though I won't
even think about where the manufacturing takes place now.
   Absentee ownership coexisted with local racism; black people need not apply.
   Corporate HQ was local but the Board of Directors met in New York City. Just
another grubby, grimy, beastly mill town, "That's all you are in the goddam
cotton mill is a goddam slave," as a white millworker told me in the City Jail.
The veneer of Southern Gentility, as I was saying, was thin and unconvincing.
   ******
   The Yankees captured Danville on June 21 and, the legend has it, Jefferson
Davis was caught hiding in a barrel. I can't say.
   ******
   Other memorable millstones [that's not a mistake] of Danville VA history:
   1873: Danville Riots. 7 dead, 4 on one side, 3 on the other. Funders vs
Readjusters. When I was on a heavy Reconstruction trip I could have explained
this in tedious detail, but I was so much younger then I'm older than that now.
   1893 or one of those years in there: The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven. 1st
line of song goes, "It's a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville...."
   And in those days, who knows, maybe till this very day, you could tell you
crossed the state line from VA to NC by the sudden, dramatic improvement in the
infrastructure.
   ****
   Whitevictimwise, it was a wildly successful summer. Five arrests, charges I
lost count of for violating laws abrogating the entire Bill of Rights, nearly
shot on arrest #3 by speedfreak cop hallucinating that my pocketcomb & wallet
were a firearm (arrest was on indictment for inciting a slave revolt under 1858
"John Brown Law"), between arrests paradiscal atmosphere for a Paranoid what
with uniformed thugs following me everywhere and announcing - as did the papers
- that they were gonna get me because I caused everything in the 2 waking hours
prior to first arrest, at the demonstration initiating what went down in local
history as Bloody Week. Made front page of The New York Times, I think it was
Sunday, July 14, 1963 but I forgot, really. Also made either The Nation or the
New Republic. Also two weeks in hospital from retinal detachment surgery; left
eye technically operational but not really; computer finished it off. Continue
to get drivers' licences because America was and still is ENGINEERED TO SELL
CARS TO ITSELF though it never occurred to them what wanted it that way that
the cars wuz gonna come from SOMEPLACE ELSE.
   For me the moral was, at certain times and places someone whose greatest
talents lie in the realm of doing nothing-at-all can attain to muchness on
behalf of humanity.
   Jefferson Davis in some ways was a bit like that, so by doing not much of
anything he did a great service to the reunited United States of America.

Daniel A. Foss
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