was a 12-year-old freshman at the Priory School in Washington, D.C. One day I arrived at the hilltop campus early with a bundle under my coat. I waited behind the hedge until the boy-in-charge had raised the flag on the pole in the grassy circle in front of the school. When he went in for assembly, I dashed from my hiding place to the flag pole. I lowered the American flag, and, unfurling my bundle, I attached a second flag to the line, then raised both flags until they snapped in the wind. I hurried into morning assembly. No one had seen me.
That is how I raised the Confederate flag at my high school, 44 years ago last week, on Robert E. Lee's birthday. I lived in Alexandria, Va., which was still an Old South town in those days, and Lee's birthday was a state holiday. My neighborhood chums had razzed me mercilessly that I had to go to school that day, an implicit charge that I was a Yankee.
They had made me ashamed of coming from Chicago. These were boys with whom I had saddled up as Mosby's Raiders. Lee was their god, and I was trying to make him mine. Lee was to be the god of my acceptance. I raised the Confederate flag on his birthday at my Washington school so that I could tell my friends in Virginia I had done so.
No one at Priory School knew or cared about any of this. In the crowded assembly hall, Father Austin was late, which escalated the low buzz of our talk. We were connoisseurs of the headmaster's mood, and when he finally appeared, our mouths snapped shut as if wired by the same switch.
Father Austin was a small, thin man with a bald pate, which was all we saw, at first, because that morning it was so red. At the podium, he gripped its edges, and we could feel his fingers in our arms. He leaned toward us, enraged.
''Where are you?'' he hissed.
No one in the room knew what he was talking about but me. Finally, I stood.
Austin's arm shot toward the door. ''Get out!'' he ordered. ''Get that thing down, and get out! And don't come back!''
That thing. Austin's instant, absolute rejection utterly transformed my perception. I could not know why yet, but from that moment on, the Confederate flag would be an object of shame. Because my own father later returned to the school to plead for me, Austin repealed the expulsion, but I never passed him in the hallways after that without feeling the blast of his contempt.
Now I understand that he had slapped me into moral awareness, and the Confederate flag remains a marker of my coming of age. I stopped riding with Mosby's Raiders, but also, when I learned the facts of American slavery and Jim Crow, I grasped that this evil had already, for a time, snagged me.
Owning slaves meant buying and selling children, raping women, torturing any man who dared a sullen look. That I, ignorantly and from social pressure, had embraced its symbol means that, ignorantly and from social pressure, I could have embraced its ethos. Like the great-grandfathers of my chums, I could have been a slave owner. Father Austin snatched the illusion of my innocence away.
When I see photos of a Confederate flag over an American public building, say in Columbia, S.C., it registers as ''that thing,'' and my visceral rejection of all ''heritage'' it evokes is complete. But the defenders of the Confederate flag seem stuck in a puerile urge to define themselves by an act of pseudo-rebellion.
Their symbolic claim of white supremacy, of course, is rooted in a degraded sense of inferiority - which does not make it less than dangerous. Yet my own experience of long ago makes me ask what they are responding to. And what, exactly, is my response to them? ''Yankees'' who think such pathetic losers are innately inferior do not disagree with them about the fact that some humans are inferior, only about which ones. The symbol of white supremacy has no place in America, but when it surfaces, it should evoke not the superiority of Yankee morality but the fact that unacknowledged structures of race still have the soul of this whole country in a locked box.
The Johnny Rebs, with their Stars and Bars, do not have the key to that box, unless, perhaps, the key is a question their outrageous behavior puts to all white people, since all white people continue to benefit from racial inequality. What, in our ignorance, are we still doing to impede the coming of a just America? Where, in other words, is a Father Austin to jolt white America from the illusion of its innocence?
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
