Reaching the highway, I stopped for coffee at a 7-Eleven. The store was crowded with black shoppers. Several of them stared quizzically—and, I sensed, with some hostility—at my Confederate uniform. Clunking self-consciously to the counter in my hobnailed boots and gray trousers, I felt like blurting out, “I’m just playacting,” or “It’s only a game.” Instead, I returned to my car feeling confused and ashamed. This, too, was an aspect of the twentieth century that reenactors were fleeing: a heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities.
