“That is a lovely way to grow up,” a young friend wrote after reading my column about riding to the mill with my grandfather in a horse and wagon.

We are talking about the mid-twentieth century. Some of my family had cars by then, but there were still so new to the family that Fortson Sorrow had never learned to drive, so when he needed to go to the mill he took the horse and wagon. No one in the community thought a thing about it.

You see, many people my age from Madison County were the children of share croppers. By the economic standards of the nation, we were among the poorest of the poor. We were made that way by the massive economic disruption of the South by the War for Southern Independence, and the ten years of rape and plunder the Yankees called “reconstruction.”

Georgia was particularly hard hit. Sherman chose to make war on all southerners as he burned everything between Atlanta and Savannah, leaving old men, women and children to starve along the roadside. Madison County was lucky to be north of Sherman’s march, but her economy, like the rest of the South, was in shambles.

When I was born 65 years after “reconstruction” ended, we had made only marginal recovery. We were still in deep poverty. But it was still a lovely way to grow up. Because we were among the most wealthy Americans in another area. We had a family who taught us about our culture and heritage. That is the one thing the Yankees were unable to take from us.

On that wagon trip and many other occasions, grandfather told us about the family history. He told us about one of our ancestors who refused a large inheritance because it had been earned with slave labor. He told us about his grandmother who rode a mule from Danielsville to Virginia to convince the Confederate Army that her forty one year old husband with an arthritic back would never be able to do those long forced marches that General Lee used so effectively to gain the advantage of surprise against his Northern foes.

I learned the shame of living on charity from my family. I learned the value of good neighbors, the importance of the Church. I learned how they used whatever they could find, dig up or grow to provide food and shelter for their families. I learned the satisfaction of building my own toys, of growing my own little vegetable garden and finding wild fruit and berries in the woods around our house.

We were truly made rich by our Southern Culture; the respect and honor of our ancestors, the history of their struggle for personal freedom, the value of remaining independent of government welfare programs while teaming up with neighbors to solve community problems. We learned to love the symbols of that culture such as the flags, the music, the tall tales and fables.

We embraced our Southern culture fiercely because that is all we had. We were economically poor but culturally rich. We chose to embrace that wealth and make it the key factor in our lives.

Today our Yankee friends do not understand why we fight so hard to protect our statues, our songs and our flags. Those icons are the symbols of our heritage, our culture, our only source of true wealth. Long live Dixie!