All the Sinners Bleed

In the years prior to the novel’s publication, some Southern communities in the United States began removing Confederate statues and replacing Confederate memorials and imagery with other symbols. Additionally, states like Mississippi amended the state flag to remove the former Confederate flag from the design. This trend was part of a larger cultural conversation about the legacy of enslavement and the continued structural racism that permeates American society, particularly in the South. The responses to that conversation highlighted the deep divisions in how American society perceives its own past. Many Americans celebrated the efforts to eliminate false narratives glorifying the Confederacy and the inexcusable practices of enslavement that it upheld, often pointing out that the monuments were constructed as part of the broader Lost Cause narrative in the early 1900s that sought to present an ahistorical image of the antebellum South and the institution of slavery; others criticized the removal of historic images, however controversial they may be, as a form of censorship. As a result of the debate and despite efforts to remove Confederate propaganda from public spaces and media, monuments to the Confederacy remain pervasive in the South, and some state and local governments have passed laws preventing their removal.

In All the Sinners Bleed, Cosby incorporates this issue into the framework of the story, for one particular Confederate statue attracts considerable attention due to its location in a high-traffic area in the center of town. Additionally, another prominent Confederate reference exists in the very name of the local high school, Jefferson Davis, which is designed to honor the Confederate president. In modern-day America, this omnipresence of Confederate imagery and symbolism has attracted recent criticism because many Confederate statues and symbols present a false historical narrative of a “righteous” and “brave” Confederate rebellion, while erasing the true historical narrative of violence, human rights violations, enslavement, greed, and murder, not to mention the weaponization of Christianity and the ripping apart of families. Celebrating Confederate “heroes” while making no mention of the enslavement and other crimes they perpetrated ultimately glorifies a past whose historical reality encompassed many atrocities. By including references to this controversy in the fabric of the narrative, Cosby implies that this sort of historical erasure is arguably what leads to history repeating itself and violence begetting violence.

As S. A. Cosby explains through the character of Titus in All the Sinners Bleed, many Confederate statues and monuments that are still standing today were not actually built during the short years of the Confederacy. Instead, they were built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy after World War I as part of a campaign to portray the false narrative that the Confederacy was an idyllic period of history, during which its founders and defenders acted as brave and brilliant entrepreneurs. This campaign caused a great deal of harm, particularly because many Black veterans returned home after fighting in World War I to discover statues that represented what they saw as a brutal, racist era in American history.

As time passes and the actual historical past becomes lost to living memory, it becomes imperative to examine textual evidence, historical artifacts, museum displays, public monuments, and the like to learn about history. The Daughters of the Confederacy erected many monuments during the time period when generations of formerly enslaved people were passing way, replacing the lived narratives of emancipated men and women with a false narrative based on a desire to promote white supremacy. The Daughters thus created a new narrative that ignored the brutal, dehumanizing practices of the transatlantic slave trade. This is why Titus in All the Sinners Bleed, as well as many people in real life, believe that these monuments are ahistorical Confederate propaganda that should be taken down and replaced with more balanced, accurate portrayals of American history.