New Orleans Journal (2004)

Wanted to visit, and then did, the Lee Memorial.

Lee stands atop a Doric column.  His hands are folded over his chest, his left foot forward and the front tip of his shoe extends—in a sort of trompe-l’oeil, breaking-the-frame effect for sculpture—over the edge of his bronze plinth.

At the base of the monument, around the platform on which the memorial was erected, stood four bronze urns, each filled with a sago palm.  The memorial was decently if unimaginatively planted and maintained, though the statue was clearly in need of cleaning, a neglect not unique to New Orleans.  Much public sculpture in America is semi-derelict.  (Is it a symptom of our century-long shift away from civic pride and expenditure?)

Lee looked grim and funereal in the dreary November light.  It was overcast and there was a stiff, cold breeze.

The inscription was very simple, giving his dates: 1807 to 1870 and was put up by the “Julia Jackson Chapter No. 4, Daughters of the Confederacy” in the 1890’s I think.

When I walked around to the back of the statue, which the Rough Guide claims offers its backside to the north in a symbolic gesture, there was a black kid sitting at the base of column.  He was wearing headphones and tapping his sneaker to a beat only he could hear.

And then I was really struck by the realization I was standing at the South Pole to my own North Pole, that this monument was both opposed and similar to where I lived near Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn (which commemorates the Northern army in the Civil War), even down to the fact that both are in the middle of big traffic circles.

I felt a zing of electricity, an attraction and repulsion, the stab of an historical bowie knife or bayonet…

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Click here for earlier New Orleans Journal (2004) excerpt.