top of page

Ravi Howard

Ravi Howard is the author of two books of fiction, Like, Trees, Walking and Driving the King. In addition to being selected as a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Like, Trees, Walking won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He has received fellowships and awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, the Hurston-Wright Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in Salon, The New York Times, Atlanta, and Gravy, and he has recorded commentary and fiction for NPR’s All Things Considered and Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Thacker Mountain Radio. He has taught creative writing with the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Kimbilio, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He currently lives in Florida.

The Lost Cause Minstrels.


It was time to reopen America, they told us. Time to remove the yoke of oppression that had come in the form of social distancing, home stay orders, and cloth masks. What did they want? Freedom. When did they want it? Not now, but right now.


The call apparently went out around the nation for protesters to fill the public squares and state capitals to demand their freedom. When Wisconsin GOP official Brian Westrate contacted his membership in a private group chat, he reminded them to leave their “Confederate flags and/or AR15s” at home.


"I well understand the Confederacy was more about states’ rights than slavery. But that does not change the truth of how we should try to control the optics during the event."


By the time the private group message was leaked, the images had been circulated of white protesters in northern capitals with Confederate flags and long guns.


I was born and raised in Alabama, where the performance of freedom movements wrapped in Confederate romance is an old notion. I have seen and heard the political angles that have reframed a treason int the “Lost Cause” narrative, with the Confederates as men merely fighting for their way of life.


The armed pageantry that preceded the reopening of America had a familiar echo.


Ten years ago, I lived in Mobile, Alabama, where the Sunday before Mardi Gras was called “Joe Cain Day.” As the story goes, Joe Cain, an ex-Confederate private, was protesting the U.S. military control of the city and the cancelling of the Mardi Gras celebration.  As an act of defiance, Cain dressed in indigenous clothing and rode through the streets of the city on a coal wagon.  And the origin story of the Lost Cause Minstrels, who under other names continue the tradition.


To commemorate Joe Cain’s life, women dressed as confederate widows gather at his grave before the parade begins.


Unlike other Mardi Gras parades, the Joe Cain Parade is not run by one of the segregated Krewes that still dominate the local social scene, it’s called the People’s Parade. Whose people? Which People?


Brian Westrate’s charge of controlling the optics is also grounded in the Lost Cause mythology. As men like Cain are portrayed as rebels looking to bring new life to an oppressed South, that story has scrubbed the bloody truth of the white Mardi Gras tradition.


After his military service, Joe Cain moved to New Orleans, a city that would become a major source of anti-black violence during reconstruction.   In Louisiana, the membership of Mardi Krewes overlapped with groups like the Pickwickians and the White League who killed 100 Black militiamen in an 1873 ambush and 40 Black suffrage activists at a convention in 1866.  For these men, rallies with flags and guns were both parade and revised reenactment of the war they lost.


It’s worth noting that before Joseph Stillwell Cain was a Confederate private, this everyman, this people’s champion, was an Alabama cotton broker. I don’t know if he was an owner of the enslaved, but the economy that preserved his station was built on the bondage and labor of those folk from whom I descended.


Consider the patronizing nods to essential workers, whose necessity has never been reflected in wages. Consider those who have shared in the debt and labor of America but never the bounty. I think about everyone essential to the cotton merchant’s chances at fortune but forever beneath him.


Joe Cain and his Lost Cause Minstrels disguised their entitlement as a freedom movement. We are seeing the same from the men who were asked to leave their flags at home. After a few months of lockdown, they were ready to return to normal. Cain’s push for normalcy went beyond his parade, carried on generation after generation, through the black codes, the end of Reconstruction, unrelenting racial violence, economic injustice, and the long legacy of Jim Crow. American memory is gerrymandered around the labor and violence of black people. When the promise of the public square reached equality, or the verge of equality, the story of the white everyman triumphed.


Then and now, the most entitled play the role of underdog as calls from freedom from those who thrived on generations of violent control. The return to normalcy that Joe Cain hoped for in his one-man parade, the life of an antebellum cotton merchant, was a zero-sum normalcy, that required the oppression he pantomimed.


The gathering at the Wisconsin State Capitol, mainly white male and conservative, was meant to be the kind of everyman theater of the Lost Cause. Freedom from a tyrannical government.


It’s an old story in America that’s renewed every so often, in the backlash to Reconstruction, desegregation, voting rights, and the election of a Black president.  I admit I didn’t expect this response to the quarantine. If one calamity didn’t intersect with one of our oldest and most enduring.


The late poet and scholar Jake Adam York researched the style of public discourse called “anamnesis,” or “the collapse of two times into one.” The result of this kind of storytelling is “foundational fiction,” or “a performative description of the nation that acts directly on the nation’s sense of itself, on its citizen’s understanding of the collective identity.”


In his poetry collections, Jake Adam York created elegies for victims of lynching and racial violence in the South, highlighting another truth about America’s “collective identity,” that it was too often built on the exclusion of black citizens through suppression and violence.


Consider the living monument of the protest. They are, in this moment in America, an acknowledgement of injustice and a remembrance of the violent legacies of racial violence in America. We can never forget how differently police and governments treat the gatherings of white and black protest. We can never forget the obvious contrast in stakes.


The Mardi Gras celebration in Mobile ends with a reenactment of the rise of the Confederacy.  A jester “Folly” chases a skeleton, “Death” around a broken column meant to symbolize the old South. When folly triumphs, the column is restored. It is a colossal gaslighting. Death is a warped view of an honest and fair America, where the public square belongs to all of us.


So much of the Trump affection is built on Confederate echoes and the legacy of 2017 Charlottesville, and the language of reopening is no different. The Lost Cause Minstrelsy continues.

bottom of page