Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell Page A

soldier Boston Corbett or a suicidal Booth himself — but shot, he staggered from the barn and lived long enough to die in Garrett’s living room. His last words, also in dispute, might have been “Tell my mother I died for my country.”
    It was here Booth’s body was wrapped up in a horse blanket to be taken back to Washington, where his autopsy would be performed. Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes, after inspecting Booth’s corpse, ended his report, “Paralysis of the entire body was immediate, and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.” Subtext: You’ll be happy to know he really suffered.
    Klam and I get out of the car and poke around on the side of the road. It’s scratchy, full of brambles, fallen logs, and yellow leaves. We can’t get far, not that we want to. After Klam kicks around an historic plastic bottle of Sprite, we head back to the car. That’s when he notices another sign, a mysterious pictograph of a hand with a finger pointing across the road.
    Following the finger, we come to a small, peaceful clearing. It’s on a wide wooded median between Route 301N and 301S. There, at eye level, hanging above a wreath tied with a black ribbon on an ornate iron gate is a photograph encased in plastic: a mustachioed head shot of John Wilkes Booth. Back in art school we would have called this setup an installation. What it really is is a shrine, a lovely, symmetrical, classical shrine. Two Roman-looking black planters of evergreen trees stand next to two Roman-looking concrete benches. It would be the perfect picnic spot as long as you’re fine with eating under Booth’s smoldering stare.
    I step up to Booth’s photo, yanking it off its perch to get a closer look. I’m so startled by the place that I accidentally drop it on the ground.
    “Careful,” says Klam. “That’s a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.”
    He gestures at a sign prohibiting the “disturbance of artifacts from these lands.”
    Down the road, in Port Royal, we stop for breakfast at a roadside diner cum gas station where we experience both the best (ham and grits) and the worst (Confederate flag crap) the South has to offer. After I polish off my grits I examine the Confederate flag memorabilia for sale — the shot glasses, the baseball caps, “Never Surrender” mugs. I am enthralled with a hideous, huge music box/snow globe of Robert E. Lee that plays “Dixie” when you wind it. I consider adding it to my snow globe collection, but that would involve having it in my house.
    We are near the battlefield at Fredericksburg. I’m going to give this place the benefit of the doubt and decide that that’s why all this stuff’s here and not the proximity to the John Wilkes Booth shrine. However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch — American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.
    Which brings me to the creepiest thing about Booth’s death spot — the sign. The signs were erected by the state of Virginia. Logically, they bear the state’s official seal. And that seal of course features the state motto, inscribed in Latin: Sic semper tyrannis. It is unfair of me to say so, but the slogan Booth shouted from the stage of Ford’s Theatre, the overblown, self-important, pseudo-Shakespearean blather, being etched on the sign marking his death feels like the stamp of approval.
    Klam and I pass other Sic semper ed signs on the way back to D.C., most of them devoted to the