"What is that?” my wife exploded. She’d found my old “Rebel” jacket I didn’t think still existed. It must have been in that plaid suitcase I had never unpacked, but dragged with me from Queens to the Village, to the Lower East Side, to the Upper West Side, to the Bowery, to the Upper East Side, and now in Brooklyn a quarter century or so later, I was trying to explain the symbolic meaning to a teenager in the Borough of Queens, New York City, in the early 1950s of a Confederate battle flag sewn onto a satin jacket, as compared with other, possibly more obvious symbolisms.
Roller hockey was a common kid’s sport in Queens, though not so popular in my section. But I captained a series of teams (it seems I always had to captain them) from the Rangers who had neither uniforms nor equipment and played on a wide smooth sidewalk outside the telephone building in Forest Hills, to the Shamrocks (a very Hockey-like name, and would fit maybe half the team’s ethnic backgrounds). By this time I was well entrenched at ,my first job, at the Forest Hills Sports Center, and got good discounts for green and white jerseys and Kelly green satin jackets all appropriately named and numbered.
Then we became “The Rebels.” I designed the jacket. Grey and maroon shiny satin. On the back of each, the Confederate battle flag.
Rebels. That was us. That was the Rebel Flag, our flag.
“I’m a rebel, man” says Jack Micheline ignoring all suggestions he conclude his over-reading so we wouldn’t overstay our welcome at the Cedar Tavern. What was he rebelling against? Me? For trying to keep from losing a good venue for poetry readings? I guess that was something like our teenage rebellion.
“OK,” I told my wife. It was a long time ago and I wouldn’t wear it now.
The jacket disappeared, and I possibly spent the rest of our married lives on probation. Perhaps the relative sense of gravity in which we each perceived the issue stemmed from her parents having been Party members while mine were only union members. But I have come to understand how a citizen might feel some discomfort whose state chooses to fly a flag representing that citizen’s forbears’ slavery and is defended by many who might well wish for that citizen’s enslavement as well.
Although it isn’t as though it were a swastika, is it?
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Donald Lev is a poet and publisher of Home Planet News, the newsprint literary magazine he and his late wife Enid Dame launched in 1979. He lives in High Falls, NY.