With all the compromise of Southern Heritage by the Museum, my first thought was…
‘Oh, Boy, how are they going to spin this one?’
We started the tour and after our first stop, our tour guide turned to the only young black man it the group and with a smile on his face said, “I bet you are not here because you want to be.”
The young man chuckled uncomfortably and replied, “I am doing this for extra credit in a college course I’m taking.”
The old black gentleman knowingly smiled and said
“Pretty soon I’ll tell you why I am here.”
After several stops we stood in the study of Jefferson Davis. Then our tour guide pointed towards the young black man and said,
“Now I am going to tell you why I’m here, young man. I was just a little boy when the museum next door was being built. I lived nearby and every day I would walk by it wondering what it was all about. Then one day it was finally finished and I decided I was going to save up money to buy a ticket to go inside and see for myself.
“When I told folks I was saving my money for a tour of the Museum of the Confederacy, they thought I was crazy. But, I really wanted to see for myself. One day I finally had saved enough. So with my money in my hand, I walked through the front doors and met a very old white lady sitting behind the desk.
She asked me,
‘What are you doing here?’
“I told her I had watched this museum being built and I wanted to see for myself what it was all about. She smiled at me and when I handed her the money; she told me to put my money back in my pocket. Then she said to me,
‘Come on. I am going to take you on a tour myself.’
“After we left the newly built museum, she gave me a tour of the building you’re in now. When we stopped right here… where we’re standing… she said to me, ‘around this very table sat three of the greatest men of the Confederacy: Jefferson Davis, JEB Stuart and Robert E. Lee.’
And then she reached down and touched this chair.” The old black man laid a hand on the back of the chair in front of him and continued with his story. “Then this old lady said to me, ‘This is the very chair Robert E. Lee sat in. And he was my granddaddy.’
“Then every weekend I would come to the museum and volunteer. Well, I got to know that lady very well and I will never forget what she said to me before I went off to college.
She said, ‘You are going to run into a lot of people that won’t be kind to you for no good reason, but do the right thing anyway.’ And I always keep what she told me in the back of my mine and applied it to my life.”
Then the old man continued, “I went off to school and didn’t see her as much. But, finally graduation day arrived. And guess who was sitting in a front row seat at my graduation? That right… You guess it. The grand daughter of Robert E Lee.”
The room was silent. I discreetly wiped a tear from the corner of my eye so no one would see. Well, you can imagine how I was feeling by then. Yep… very inspired and very ashamed of my initial thought. . I don’t think any other tour guide could have provided a better tour of the White House of the Confederacy than that old, black gentleman.
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