File:Jefferson Davis is still alive - Jackson, Mississippi.jpg

English: I have seen him. He is kept in a cage in Jackson, Mississippi, next to the Old State Capitol, which was built twenty years before the Civil War. You can see him in these photographs. He is steely gray with the bloodlessness of all heartless men.

When I got close to photograph him, he stared at me with a cold hatred. He knew who I was. I was glad he was in the cage. The cage is in an odd little house that sits directly in front of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The message of this house is clear. It is the Confederacy’s reign of terror that Mississippi wants to remember. Or, as Faulkner put it, the past is never dead. It’s not even past.

I grew up in Mississippi. Like many who share my heritage, the deep racism of the place tore at me then, and tears at me still. (I am not naïve, though. I live in Connecticut now, where the same hatreds and fears abide. They are just not quite so much in evidence here. Maybe as some have said the difference in numbers gives we yankees a false sense of security. It’s a reasonable point.)

We are a troubled, and troubling, land.