In the dread and desolation of a historic, global pandemic, V. L. Cox built us Watchfires. Watchfires can be beacons, lighting the night sky, helping us to orient ourselves on this planet so that we may find our way home or our escape from it. As a medical and political virus ravaged the country, mornings and nights came and went and blurred the passage of time. In that purgatory, V. L. Cox seems to have panned out so she could see both our Southern past and present simultaneously and all of the connected and tangled pathways that run between them. She could see where white supremacy intersected patriarchy or ran parallel to religious fundamentalism. She could see how far Christian nationalism has veered rightward. She could see the roads of voter suppression and disenfranchisement that go nowhere, taking us back to where we started.

Repurposing relics from our whitewashed history, Cox builds us watchfires and sets them aflame so that by their light, we too might see the contours of this maze. By her hands, the robe of a Klansman becomes the canvas of her “Tent Revival;” a handkerchief in a Southern white church lady’s purse in Cox’s “Benevolent Hue” is crafted from a visitor’s discarded Confederate Flag found at Appomattox, where the Lost Cause of Southern secession finally conceded it was lost.

Nineteenth-century poet Julia Ward Howe noted that watchfires can be more than a projection of light, they can also be sites of spiritual truth. In the final weeks of 1861 as the Civil War commenced, Howe penned the lyrics to what became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In the first verse Howe writes, “I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” The “Him” she sees in the watchfires is defined in the song’s opening line, which ultimately became the closing line of the last speech that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave in Memphis the night before his assassination: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” The promised land is in the watchfires.

Watchfires have also served as warnings and tools of protest. After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association, advocating for women’s equality and advancement for the next fifty years. During the decade following her death in 1910, tension over voting rights for women reached a fevered pitch. The more radical activists in the National Women’s Party blamed President Woodrow Wilson for stalling their progress, and, in turn, launched their “Watchfires of Freedom” campaign, burning Wilson’s speeches outside the White House and in nearby Lafayette Park. An accompanying banner at the White House protest condemned Wilson directly for his inaction, promising “We in America know this, and the world will find out.” Theirs was a truth-illuminating, protest watchfire, and it surely served as a beacon to other women who knew that democracy was both sacred and incomplete without them—without any of us.

V. L. Cox’s Watchfires lights our way to a spiritual and political reckoning of the American past and issues a call to arms that we do not repeat it.

Angie Maxwell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science
Diane D. Blair Professor of Southern StudieS
Director, Blair Center of Southern Politics & Society
University of Arkansas