Back in Ukraine, I loved writing snail mail letters. I had a bunch of fascinating correspondents all over the world, and we exchanged long hand-written letters.
My favorite correspondent was a Native American history professor in his sixties who lived in the Deep South. He was disabled and no longer teaching. And fascinated with post-Soviet countries.
I was very ignorant about American history, and the questions I asked of my correspondent were often very naive. Since he was from the South, I asked him what the official narrative was on the Civil War. Please remember where I was from if you wonder why I believed there needed to be an official party line on everything.
“One would assume that the general feeling would be that the slave-owning South was bad and the North was good,” I wrote. “But I recently saw Gone With the Wind, and it’s very sympathetic to the South. And I know it’s a massively popular movie in the US. How is this possible?”
The Native American history professor actually deeply identified with the Confederacy. And he told me about the whole “The South will rise again” thing, about the resentments of the Southerners that are still very much alive, about the Southern vision of the Civil War and its economic legacy.
When I moved to Canada, I was really looking to meet with my correspondent in person. But when I called him, his son told me that his father had passed away a week earlier. So we never got to meet in person.
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