“Forrest collapses the distance between past and present so utterly that examining any particular moment… sets off a reverberation that ripples backward and forward.” — Court Carney, Reckoning With the Devil (2024)

The Civil War remains a cultural touchstone for American culture. This is especially pronounced in the South, specifically in regions where the histories of slavery and war remain as scars on its cultural and familial landscapes. Figures from this time persistently arise and spark turmoil, followed by demands to remove such Confederate iconography as white southerners cling to it. This fondness for the iconography tends to arrive in waves as different times and spaces find meaning in the flotsam of memories. Built up over time, such waves found their foundations in myth. While oceanic surface can signify one’s cultural engagement with memory, oceanic depth can signify the myths that give force to those memories. This power of the myth is in its refusal to be consistently defined.

For instance, recollections of his comprehension of the massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where “his men killed over 60 percent of the Black soldiers… [in] wanton butchery post-surrender,” is willfully clouded over by supporters who “pointed out that he never ordered a massacre… [and] did all he could to stop the slaughter.” Events like these create memories, but myth is how people firmly attach themselves to them. This personal and social attachment to Forrest is most readily seen with the 1905 construction of a statue in his image in Memphis: “Memphis in 1905 represents the fulcrum of Forrest’s pubic memory as white southerners replaced the rapidly vanishing experiences of the Civil War with a narrative defined by the needs of the present… Forrest attracted new audiences and enthusiasts as race and racism trumped regional affiliations.” Due to his ostensible leadership connections to the Ku Klux Klan, in 1905, “Forrest served as a blank canvas of white supremacy and the protection of white governance.” In the 1990s, there was another wave for the Forrest myth to ride on: “The [Ken] Burns documentary had shifted the magnetic poles within the Forrest myth. The general materialized as one of the Civil War’s most known and notorious generals.” Even so, historian Shelby Foote, who features prominently in the documentary, “saw Forrest as someone to be venerated despite the fractures and complications embedded in his life and career.” With all these factors that make up a myth, Forrest evades definition.

Reckoning With the Devil addresses the image of Forrest as “an endless loop of transformation.” Harnessing this transformative nature, people engaged in the Forrest narrative captured moments of this perpetual change of character since the Civil War: To both the North and the South during the Civil War, Forrest held an “image of violence”; in the 1990s, people saw him as a complicated but honorable figure; and the demolition of the 1905 Memphis statue of him in 2017 signified a shifting public perspective on his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan since its construction. And these are only a few of the captured moments that span the cultural existence of Forrest. In light of all these transformations, the relatively recent “sea change in how Americans viewed Confederate monuments and iconography” posits the question: What comes next for the Forrest myth and memory in Memphis? In the South? In the United States? From what Carney gleans in Reckoning With the Devil, we can assume that there will surely be more ripples.

Thinking with water is not exclusively about studying the physical substance. Considered from a more symbolic, metaphoric, or theoretical place, the blue humanities is also about how and when we favor using aquatic language to express ourselves and to understand our surroundings. As Steve Mentz puts it in Ocean (2020): “Moving offshore reshapes our vocabulary. The ocean needs new words.” With this sentiment in mind, we have a new perspective of how myth-making and memory function to perpetually recreate narratives of the past for contemporary molds of history.

Discussing with me in an interview regarding how his book connects to the blue humanities, Carney himself elaborates on his thinking of this language in relation to his research. I structured his considerations of three different aquatic terms (Ripple, Tide, and Muddy) that arose in our discussion into individual sections in order to show how aquatic language appears in his research to help us better understand the concepts of myth and memory.

Interactions with a myth create a rippling effect. “This idea of rippling… on a simple level you have a stillness that then, there’s a rippling out… Something that has entered into the environment that is changing the way a known environment is acting within itself.” Ripples also indicate the subjective, individual experience of engaging with a myth. “Objectivity plays such a small role in this. It’s mostly about the subjectivity. And that’s where the rippling I think is an important reminder… That’s the central contradiction, or the central irony, on a very particular level, where you have such an ever-changing, fluid story that is marked by unchanging, concrete, marble statues… The 1905 statue tells us very little about Forrest, but it tells us a lot about 1905 Memphis.”

In contrast to the reverberations of rippling, tides indicate the almost imperceptible movement of memories that create a myth. “The idea of tidal. The idea of that sort of story plays into this too as a sort of myth and memory. And these things have their own current… Even if it appears that there’s nothing moving… there is something moving.”

Muddying as an act accepts the impossibility of recording a clear history. “You can be telling a story so well that what you’re actually doing is blurring, muddying… Is muddying pejorative? The muddying recognizes the fundamental fictions of all history writing. It is itself the historical process. Professional historians do the muddying.” The blue humanities considers this lack of clarity fundamental to the field: “A basic feature of any aqueous environment,” as Mentz writes in Ocean, “is visual distortion… Water-thinking makes distortion a baseline condition.” Mud itself is its own study into the Forrest myth and memory. “The muddy boots go a long way for me… With myth, we clean it all up. We have him on the horse, we have him in a neat uniform [in photographs]… Most of his time was probably in muck.”

Alongside this language, Carney addressed the significance of the Mississippi River as it relates to the massacre at Fort Pillow. The inevitable shifting of a river in this case drastically alters our perceptions of permanence that a memorial site may seem to indicate.

A: What does [the shifting Mississippi River] and the fact that it does shift say about memorial sites where, in this case, Fort Pillow is reliant on that river to tell its story properly?

C: The fort exists because of the river. The reason the fort even exists is because its location, and its geographic location was an important part of the river for the Union. It was a Union built fort and then it was taken over by the Confederacy early in the war. So all of that makes sense within the 1860s, but after the 1860s, the river begins to move as these things do. The course of the river shifts, and now if you go to Fort Pillow, your not looking over water… Every battlefield is hard to reconstruct 150 years later… Especially places like Gettysburg, which are so monumented, and so populated with memorials, it’s almost impossible to sort of imagine what it would be like to go running across that field or whatever. But with Fort Pillow, you have the added issue that it wasn’t a full blown battle as much as it was a siege that turned into a massacre, but also the reason it exists doesn’t really exist there anymore. So it’s kind of a profound sort of layered metaphor in terms of what was the purpose now is no longer the purpose, but even now for you to resurrect the meaning of it is doubly difficult… The river is going to be a river. It’s going to do what it does.

Each Re/View shows how bringing water to the center of research changes how we engage with that research. For Carney, a blue humanities approach is present in our use of aquatic language rather than exclusively pertaining to literal bodies of water.

A: [What have you] been thinking about as you relate myth and memory, Nathan Bedford Forrest to this term, the blue humanities?

C: I think that my very first thought, when we first communicated, was a much more literal take on all of this. And my very first thought, without having read much and without knowing a great deal about it was thinking more in terms of just the literal topic as it pertains to the concept of water and waterways. And I think that I immediately began to realize that, as true as that goes, it’s the other parts that I find… interesting in the way they connect to what I do, and that’s the idea of language: How language reflects a lot of this; how symbolism and metaphor plays so much into this. And I think it made me really… consider the way that I write, the words that I use and the language that I use is very much a part of that story in a way that I would never have thought about earlier than that.