4-year-old Dent Myers stands outside his Wildman’s Civil War Surplus and Herb Shop.OMAR EL AKKAD
In a small city outside Atlanta, Georgia, there lives a strange little store called Wildman's Civil War Surplus and Herb Shop. Packed to the rafters with Confederate-era miscellany – much of it overtly racist – the store has become an infamous landmark in a part of the U.S. where the polarizing currents of southern history, free speech and racism often collide.
Kennesaw, Georgia is a city of about 32,000, located roughly a half-hour's drive northwest of downtown Atlanta. Like so many towns in this part of the country, it is studded with Civil War-era history. The battle of Kennesaw Mountain, fought not far from here in 1864, was one of the last Union setbacks before General William Tecumseh Sherman finally took Atlanta. There are monuments to these and other Civil War milestones in and around Kennesaw. The city also has a museum in the centre of town that treats the war with little bias or sentimentality, making no effort to conceal, for example, the many wildly racist uses of the Confederate flag over the years.
But just across the street from that museum is an even more iconic Kennesaw landmark – a run-down, Old West saloon-looking building whose ground-floor porch is draped with myriad flags of the Confederacy. This is Wildman's place: part store, part "museum."
Inside, the cramped, dusty enclosure looks like someone's overstuffed attic. Massive, multivolume sets of Civil War history sit alongside bizarre, self-published diatribes detailing the grand plans of the Illuminati. There's a flimsy, plastic clock designed to count down to President Barack Obama's last day in office; there's a big sign above the cluttered hovel of a cash register that reads: "White Trash."
But move further into the store – to the very back, into an area described as a museum – and you'll find something far more sinister. The walls and shelves are lined with grotesquely racist depictions of black people, complete with all the usual tropes – big lips, watermelons, the works. There's shrines to the Klan, to white power.
Even the argument that all this is some kind of objective preservation of both good and bad elements of Southern history, rather than an overtly racist display – an incredibly weak argument on its face – does little to explain why the store also has extensive Nazi-themed items. Near the front of the store, there is a bizarre collage, composed entirely of photos of African-Americans who've visited. It appears to be a kind of pre-emptive retort to accusations of racism – "See, black people come here too!" – but it has almost the exact opposite impact.
The "wildman" who runs the place is an 84-year-old sharecropper's son named Dent Myers. Had Mr. Myers shown up as a character in an Old West farce, he'd be dismissed as too cartoonish – a Yosemite Sam, funhouse-mirror exaggeration of the stubborn Confederate holdout. Shuffling slowly through the cluttered hoarder's wonderland that is his store, a pistol holstered on either hip, he looks like a cross between Willie Nelson and the patriarch from Duck Dynasty. He speaks in a glacial, ironic drawl and throws racial epithets around like pronouns.
On the afternoon a reporter arrives at his store, Mr. Myers is chatting happily with a gaggle of British tourists – Civil War reenactment buffs who can't believe their luck. They ask the old man to pose for a photo, and he obliges. He happily chats with everyone who walks in and is more than happy to discuss his myriad theories on the war, the South and just about anything else.
"The South's been a whipping boy since 1830," he says, standing near a pile of clippings of newspaper and magazine articles – dozens of them, over the years – featuring himself and his store. "Always the bad boys, always doing something."
Listening to Mr. Myers speak, it's easy to dismiss him as a caricature. But there exists a strange depth to him – a sense that, in 84 years of living, he has come to believe in the conspiratorial, often plainly racist things he says with a kind of ironclad certainty most people can only dream of.
Not everyone here is thrilled that the man and his store exist. In an interview, Kennesaw's mayor Mark Mathews is quick to paint Mr. Myers as a one-off, representative of nobody but himself. He also notes that, technically, Mr. Myers doesn't actually live within Kennesaw city limits, even though his store is smack-dab in the city's downtown drag. Clearly, many of the people who run Kennesaw would much rather the city's Smithsonian-affiliated Civil War museum serve as Kennesaw's central landmark.
But Mr. Myers undoubtedly has his supporters, and in a part of the country where (certain) personal liberties are sacred, few are willing to order the octogenarian to tone down the store he's run for the past 40-some years.
And so Wildman's Civil War Surplus goes on, an increasingly anomalous anachronism in a place that has become more and more of an Atlanta suburb than a standalone town. Whatever novelty value it holds for passing tourists, it is perhaps most useful as a signpost, somewhere on the more extreme ends of the spectrum that covers the many different ways one can address a troubled and troubling history.