“You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to further understanding. Last night I heard the ‘Ode for the Daughters of Dixie.’ I had a bad time listening to that.”
“Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army reunions, and your ‘Marching through Georgia,’ and your ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our heroes and our glories and sing our songs?”
She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary—we could agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality—but an understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along. This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu didn’t understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just this moment become clear to myself.
“Many of us,” I began, “who have watched the soiling touch of politics make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world to sing its songs and draw its pensions.”
She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had turned past heroism.
“But,” I continued, “we haven’t any Daughters of the Union banded together and handing it down.”
“It?” she echoed. “Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred trust to you, don’t invite us, please, to resemble you.”
I waited for more, and a little more came.
“We consider Northerners foreigners, you know.”
Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out; and I knew she didn’t mean quite all that—didn’t mean it every day, at least—and that my speech had driven her to saying it.