Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs LeeAnna Keith Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War. By Cody Marrs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 226. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-3665-4.) Cody Marrs serves up a feast of Civil War stories in his timely, compact, and entertaining new analysis, Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the [End Page 528] Civil War. The book identifies four narratives, or "plots," that have recurred continually in literature and public remembrances of the American Civil War: "A Family Squabble," "A Dark and Cruel War," "The Lost Cause," and "The Great Emancipation." Considering a long range of history—from war's end to the sharp edge of the present—and taking a wonderfully broad set of texts and manifestations into account, Not Even Past presents the Civil War as "an unsettled conflict that will continue to be refought as long as American civilization exists" (p. 10). The "lack of an ending fuel[ed] these plots," Marrs argues, calling the Civil War the source of "unaccomplished, and perhaps unaccomplishable," goals (pp. 8, 171). Marrs's history unfolds in the world of belles lettres, the visual arts, films, maps, statuary, published alternative histories, television, and children's literature, although street demonstrations such as Bree Newsome's removing the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse in 2015 and recent incidents of white supremacist violence are also included. The canon of Civil War and American literature favorites receives full consideration here, as evoked by the title's use of William Faulkner's quotable assessment that in the South, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Requiem for a Nun [1951]). Indeed, the book holds a special appeal for genealogists, self-identifying southerners, and other Civil War aficionados, whose familiarity with the texts creates a rich synergy. This frisson is especially available to white readers who are Generation X and older—old enough to have experienced Roots (1976) and Gone With the Wind (1939) without considering the context, but now educated in the critical perspectives that Not Even Past brings to bear. Alongside the establishment Marrs showcases Black and previously marginalized nineteenth-century voices such as memoirists William Wells Brown and Elizabeth Keckley and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. He develops W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) as a key text in the theme of Great Emancipation, the source of the most binding commentary about the idea that the war would not be complete until all barriers between classes and races had been overcome, and he finds echoes of that argument in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Natasha Trethewey. The book's narratives also draw out the shades of those whose retrograde ideas caused them to be forgotten or banished from the canon: Jefferson Davis as memoirist; the novelists Thomas Dixon Jr. and Margaret Mitchell; and the writer Shelby Foote. Best of all in some passages, Marrs finds Civil War mainstays in offbeat and niche expressions: among the wrongheaded Literary Agrarians, for example, and in alternative and science fiction accounts in which Confederates did not lose the Civil War but abolished slavery anyway, fulfilling some contemporary Lost Cause fantasies. In a scene that was too perfect to omit, Marrs describes a character embedded in a fictional inversion of U.S. history after the war who finds a "true" counterfactual history that showed the Union as the victor. Because the Civil War is not even past, Marrs finds cause to consider the lessons of his plots and memes for the turbulent present. Literature "aids us in creating stories for the world to come and figuring out how to live within it," he argues, envisioning a dawning equality when "the Civil War will finally come to a close and another story will emerge" (pp. 183, 185). [End Page 529] LeeAnna Keith Collegiate School, New York City Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association