AiRMail 8/13/24

 
                   Tobacco Traders’ Tales at the Antiques Roadshow
  
Geez, I thought if I got here this early the lines wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe because it’s their first time coming to West Virginia. Kind of exciting, isn’t it? All these hidden treasures and who knows who’s been sitting on a gold mine. What did you bring? Looks like a banjo, well sorta. That’s sweet, your great-great grandpa made it. Can you play it? Sorry, a stupid question. I brought these cigarette booklets. I know they’re kind of weird. But I already know they’re worth something, I’ve been looking around online. See what they are, they’re more than 100 years old, and they’re sorta like baseball trading cards. Not exactly because they aren’t cards. And they’re not baseball players obviously, haha. But back in the day, when they first invented machines to  produce massive amounts of cigarettes real cheap, they thought the country was so tobacco crazy, these little cigarette packs would sell like flapjacks. But you know, it didn’t catch on right away. Products don’t sell themselves, my Daddy always used to say. Right? So cigarettes didn’t sell themselves back in the day either. Surprising, huh? So anyway, somebody got the great idea, this was just like 25 years after the Civil War, that what sells is heroes. Okay, so they put these little pamphlets with generals’ pictures and biographies in packs of cigs, and whaddya know, people started buying them. My great-granddaddy was a collector. He liked to trade for the heroes from Virginia and West Virginia. Well it was all Virginia when the war started. I brought a bunch of them, mostly Confederate generals, Southern heroes. Sorry, I know it’s not “woke” to call them heroes these days, but honestly, that’s what they were. Fighting for their home state. Every bit as brave as the Union generals. Braver, mostly. If they weren’t heroes, I mean, how could we cash in? And these are worth some little bit of money, I’m sure of it. Just because these men came from the South doesn’t make them evil. I mean, most of them didn’t even own slaves, or practice slavery, or however you’re supposed to say it now. And the ones that did, yeah slavery was bad, I mean very bad, but it was the times, you know?
 
I do know, having taken just a glance at the cigarette packets in her hands, something about these men she calls heroes. The men who went to war to preserve slavery. Some who “owned” other humans, some who owned very little of anything. But people did not themselves have to enslave other people to secure the benefits. The entire US economy, North and South, was supported by human trafficking and the free labor system. But I don’t say anything. We’ve come to the front of the War Memorabilia line, the lady with the cigarette packets, and I and my friend Lucy just behind her. Lucy and I hang back on the sidelines while the appraiser asks what the lady knows about her treasure and she says, “These are generals who fought for the South in the Civil War. For Virginia.” The appraiser confirms that and adds that some of them, like Jubal Early and Albert Jenkins, owned some of the biggest tobacco plantations in the state. Right. I could add that Early was a lifelong white supremacist and proponent of the Lost Cause. But now the appraiser is pointing out that one of the generals in her collection, Nathan Forrest, was not actually a Virginian. Also true, and I could add that he made a fortune as a slave trader and was the original Grand Wizard of the KKK. As if reading my mind, the appraiser mentions that, and then says years after the war, Forrest changed positions and advocated for Blacks’ civil rights. The cigarette packet lady smiles and nods. Well, they’ve moved on to the prize in her collection, Stonewall Jackson. Not plantation-born, but a small-time slave holder, from the northwestern Virginian wilderness that after Jackson’s death was part of West Virginia. “A fervently religious man, Jackson,” the appraiser is saying. “His belief in God’s providence sustained him in battle.” Yes, and I could add his religion also sustained him in his belief that slavery was sanctioned by God.
 
Later, Lucy asked me what it says about the human race that we can engage in cruelty on a mass scale and assume that it’s “just the times.” “I was wondering, too,” she said, “why is it this country’s heroes all seem to rise from doing the job of killing?” Because, as  she pointed out, the lady was right about her Confederate general trading booklets being worth “some little bit of money.” Their value was assessed at many thousands of dollars, more than ten times the figure given to the hand-made dulcimer I brought. “It’s a nice story behind that little piece,” the Musical Instruments appraiser told me. “The story, that’s worth a great deal,” he said by way of apologizing for the low valuation. He assumed I wasn’t seriously thinking of putting the dulcimer up for sale. Lucy got told pretty much the same about her family’s three campaign buttons with the short-lived 35-star flag on them. 1864 originals, manufactured between the time West Virginia became its own state in 1863 and Nevada entered the union little more than a year later. But according to the War Memorabilia appraiser those buttons aren’t worth but maybe two or three hundred bucks. What was it the lady said about how goods don’t sell themselves? Well, how creatively we package cruelty, how cleverly war is sold.