Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact. Every family plays host to its own histories, neuroses, feuds, foibles, tragedies, traumas, triggers, pains, pet peeves, and dysfunctional patterns. Literature has long borne witness to humanity’s enormous diversity of potential interpersonal horrors, all of which seem to become accentuated during stressful periods—such as the holiday season. According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping nine out of 10 U.S. adults experience stress at the end of the year, in part because they are “anticipating family conflict.”

The web is full of tips for how to deal with challenging relatives in these months. But if you’re a bookworm, your first recourse might be to turn to reading: Other people’s emotional conflagrations, fictional or not, may help you feel better about any you’re currently living out with your own family. Anyone in need of an escape can turn to this list of books. Each serves as a reminder that although your own kin may be difficult, you at least aren't related to the ones below.

Penguin Books

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

The patriarchs of two insular, upper-middle-class families, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, have been at each other’s throats, academically speaking, for years. Their intellectual feud centers on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, but their disagreements run much deeper: Howard is white and liberal, an atheist, and a supporter of affirmative action, whereas Monty is Black and conservative, a devout Christian, and believes that affirmative action is insulting to minorities. Jerome, Howard’s eldest, interns with Monty in England and falls in love with his family, and particularly his daughter, Vee—an affair that ends embarrassingly for all. When the Kippses then move to Wellington, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks away from the Belseys, and Monty begins teaching at the same university where Howard is a professor, things get more complicated. The men butt heads over university policies even as their wives become friends, and their daughters eye each other suspiciously while taking similar classes. Although each family has tender moments and elements of happiness too, you may well be relieved that you are part of neither.

[Read: Why families fight during holidays]

Mariner

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

In Bechdel’s genre-defining graphic memoir, she richly illustrates the beautiful Gothic Revival house she grew up in, complete with gas chandeliers, ornate lamps, and Chippendale furniture. Bechdel’s father restored this house with great devotion throughout her childhood, often enlisting her and her siblings’ reluctant help. The care he displayed wasn’t usually directed at his actual family, however. As Bechdel writes early in the book, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” He dies in an apparent suicide when Bechdel is in college, and in light of his death, the building he so lovingly worked on seems to have been a shallow front for his internal unhappiness. Fun Home’s pages reanimate Bechdel’s own coming-of-age alongside her growing understanding of her father, whose memory looms large over every scene—especially the ones where she visits home after he dies. When she does, it’s clear that “his shame,” Bechdel writes, “inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany.”

Penguin Books

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

The Richardsons are perfect. They have a huge house and four cars (one for each parent, one for each child old enough to have a license), and live in an idyllic neighborhood (Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of the earliest American planned communities, where lawns cannot be higher than six inches). Yet Ng’s second novel opens with destruction: The Richardson home is burning, and the cause is quickly determined to be arson. The narrative then rewinds to the previous summer, when Mia, a single mother, and her daughter, Pearl, moved into the Richardsons’ rental property at the edge of town. Pearl succumbs to the Richardsons’ charms, but Mia, an artist who has moved her child from place to place, is more cautious. Throwing further drama into the mix is the feud over Mirabelle, a baby adopted by friends of the Richardsons’ but whose birth mother is a Chinese-immigrant co-worker of Mia’s. As Mia’s, Pearl’s, and the Richardsons’ various opinions on the custody case become heightened, their worst sides quickly become apparent, and the reader can see how money and its attendant superiority complex have created a festering emptiness beneath the Richardsons’ immaculate exterior.   

[Read: How to enjoy the holidays your way]

Simon & Schuster

I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy

Everyone wants to be famous, right? Ask a former child star that question and you might get a resounding denial. In her memoir, McCurdy, who first became known for her role in the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly, writes from the perspective of her child self to great effect, introducing readers to the cutthroat world of auditions, casting directors, and bodily expectations thrust upon her as early as age 6. Her mom, Debra, always made it clear that she was vicariously carrying out her own desire to be an actor through her daughter—and McCurdy, for her part, deeply wished to fulfill her mother’s dream. Despite the book’s title, McCurdy movingly writes about how much she loved Debra amid her mom’s mood swings, overbearing expectations, and manipulative behavior, which included introducing McCurdy to calorie restriction at age 11 and insisting on showering her up through her adolescence. The result is an emotionally complex portrait of painful, abusive family dynamics, paired with an adult’s journey of recognizing, grieving, and ultimately coming to terms with them.

Vintage

Meaty, by Samantha Irby

Irby is a fan of lists, which are used to great, and hilarious, effect in her first essay collection. Meaty confronts its reader with these facts: First, the author is comfortable plumbing the most intimate depths, dents, divots, and dimples of her body for comedy. Second, she’s happy to provide some seriously easy recipes that you can make even while you’re up to your elbows in family time. Third, in her youth, Irby was the caretaker for her mom, who had multiple sclerosis. Fourth, Irby’s big sisters had moved out already, while her father was in and (mostly) out of their home, and she had to deal with normal high-school woes while also hiding the severity of her mother’s illness from teachers and social-service workers. The author writes poignantly (and also hysterically) about their role reversal: The prepubescent Irby “didn’t yet understand the difference between God and the president,” but she knew “which pills went with breakfast and which ones were taken after dinner.” Once her mother was put into a nursing home, Irby took three buses to tell her mom about the “boys I had crushes on, the chemistry teacher I hated with the fire of a thousand suns,” while also worrying about the nurses hitting her mother when she wasn’t around. The precision and humor with which she conjures her life—without glossing over the hard parts—provides much-needed distraction for the reader.

[Dear Therapist: I don’t want to see my mom this Christmas]

Penguin Classics

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Mary Katherine Blackwood, known as Merricat, and her sister, Constance, live in a mansion on a large plot of land with their uncle, Julian, who is physically ill and forgetful. The Blackwoods are a small family, but there used to be more of them, Merricat helpfully explains; soon readers learn that everyone else died after a single dinner where the sugar bowl was poisoned with arsenic. Constance was the prime suspect, and despite her acquittal on murder charges, everyone in the village near the Blackwood estate is still suspicious and hateful to the point that Constance never leaves the house’s grounds. In response, Merricat, protective of her sister to a fault, harbors cheerful fantasies about the villagers’ bloody deaths. Still, the two sisters and their uncle are rather happy in their small routines: Merricat goes to get groceries twice a week; Constance finds joy in her bright kitchen; Julian is forever at work on a historical account of the day the other Blackwoods died, at times turning to Constance to confirm that it actually happened. When distant, snobbish Cousin Charles comes to visit, Merricat immediately distrusts him, and his presence throws their tightly calibrated lives into tremendous chaos. Many families have relations whose personalities mix poorly—take pleasure in yours (hopefully) not having a combination this explosive.

For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas. We’d listen to good music: Black R&B standards, Soul Train dance lines, and traditional djembe performed live. We’d eat familiar food, like collard greens and red beans and rice. And we’d speak unfamiliar words such as umoja and ujima. The mood was festive, but with a focus on giving everyone, children especially, time to speak about how the principles of Kwanzaa applied to their lives.

Then it all just kind of stopped. My family participated in this big Kwanzaa tradition, and then we didn’t. But, as fringe and out of style as Kwanzaa may be, I wish we’d take it up again.

Kwanzaa, which begins on December 26, is a seven-day, nonreligious holiday inspired by African “first fruits” festivals that focus on appreciation for what the earth provides. There’s a candleholder, or kinara—Swahili is the chosen language of the holiday—with seven candles representing the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. The holiday had a moment in the ’70s, and then again in the ’90s. But by the time my family was celebrating, in the 2000s, Kwanzaa was decisively on the decline. The reported numbers of Kwanzaa observers have varied widely since its inception—from half a million to 12 million—with recent reports suggesting that about one-fifth of Black Americans celebrate, which seems like an overestimate.

[Elijah Anderson: Black success, white backlash]

The holiday’s fortunes have tracked broader trends in African American life. Kwanzaa was born in 1966, during the ascendancy of the Black Power movement and the rise of Afrocentricity. Those ideas have since faded within the Black community, and so has the attraction of Kwanzaa. As the Gift of Gab rapped in 1999, “And them red, black, and green medallions / Was all just part of a trend, I guess / Hardly ever seem them around brothers’ necks no more.”

Kwanzaa’s legitimacy also suffered from the reputation of its creator, Maulana Karenga, who conceived of the holiday in the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, where he lived. Five years later, Karenga was convicted of kidnapping and torturing two women within the Black-nationalist organization that he co-founded. He served four years in prison.

When I asked some of my family members why we stopped observing Kwanzaa, nobody brought up Karenga. Instead, the question was met with sighs and shrugs. “I think once the newness of it wears off, you might want to do something else,” my grandma told me. “And with the celebration that they just did for Christmas—by that time, they was all celebrated out.” My mother, who used to display a kinara in our house every December, said that no single moment or event made her drop Kwanzaa cold turkey. She thinks the momentum fizzled out after Cousin Olivia stopped throwing public parties through church, instead hosting them at her home.

Whatever the reason for its decline, today Kwanzaa feels like a punch line: a Black Nationalist pseudo-holiday, a pastiche of Christmas and Hanukkah in which Black Americans with flimsy cultural connections to West Africa play dress-up in the generalized attire of a vast and diverse region. It isn’t taken seriously as an annual ritual in the way that Thanksgiving and even Valentine’s Day are. From a national perspective, Kwanzaa seems to have become an eccentric and slightly corny footnote. The viral fame of Sandra Lee’s infamously unappetizing Kwanzaa cake—which featured canned apple-pie filling and, inexplicably, a hefty sprinkle of corn nuts—might be the last time the holiday had any national relevance.  

But Kwanzaa still has so much to offer. It’s the only holiday that attempts to create and sustain a sense of shared Black identity. True, the “Black community” is not monolithic—but neither is the Catholic or Jewish or Mexican or Irish American community. And that’s kind of the point: A cultural holiday can help forge common bonds among the heterogeneous members of the same group. That’s especially important for Black Americans, whose ancestral knowledge was violently stolen from us for hundreds of years.

[Peniel E. Joseph: How Black Americans kept reconstruction alive]

Does it feel a little strange, as a third generation Baltimorean, to put on a kente tunic once a year and light some multicolored candles? Yeah. But there’s a deeper meaning to it. Seeing a bunch of Black people packed snugly in a church basement, talking about Africa and building a strong community, had a real effect on me as a kid, and I want more Black people to have that feeling. Kwanzaa helps us acknowledge where we came from, and reminds us that our history didn’t start in the hulls of slave ships or on the banks of Virginia. As welcome as the recent spike in interest in fighting anti-Black racism has been, Blackness involves much more than that struggle. Kwanzaa’s principles of self-determination and collective responsibility emphasize that we are more than just the victims of oppression; while knowing our past is vital, our identity doesn’t revolve around white folk and the many sins they’ve committed against us.

I can understand why so many Black people feel uncomfortable with the overt Afrocentricity of Kwanzaa. Why should Black diasporans with European names who have never set foot on African soil have any reason to “reaffirm and restore African heritage and culture,” as Karenga put it? As Robbyn Mitchell wrote for the Tampa Bay Times in 2015, “My history is America’s history. Africa is an ocean away, and I feel no need to look there for inspiration.”

To me, this is a false choice. Black people can celebrate our Africanness without diminishing our Americanness. In fact, our understanding of the latter is incomplete if we lose sight of the former. The drum patterns that West African slaves used to communicate with one another when they were first taken to North America became the foundations of jazz—one of the crowning artistic achievements of American culture, not just Black culture—and later of hip-hop. We still taste the influence of West African cooking in the traditional dishes we eat today. Yes, it’s fair to criticize people who celebrate Kwanzaa for conflating different West African traditions and being hazy on their African history. But a people that has no real way to specify its origins needs to work with what it has. Nor should Black Americans feel embarrassed because they can’t pinpoint the precise region their ancestors were stolen from.

So this year, among my friends and family, Kwanzaa is coming back. We may not come close to duplicating my cousin Olivia’s old events, and we may not even observe all seven days of Kwanzaa. But, while working on this article, I pestered my mother so much that she decided to bring the kinara out of storage, and that’s a good start. Next year, who knows—maybe we’ll rock the kente cloth, too.

The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of the more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried beneath. Workers in white construction hats and highlighter-yellow vests moved about while security officers in dark sunglasses and black uniforms stood along the fence’s edge. To my left was a massive yellow crane whose engine rumbled steadily as it sat staring at the bronze memorial before it.

I had come to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington on Monday in anticipation of the statue’s removal. Following a review from the Department of Defense’s Naming Commission, the memorial had been scheduled to come down this week, but as I arrived, I received an alert on my phone that a federal judge had just issued a temporary restraining order at the request of a group named Defend Arlington. The group argued that the decision to take down the monument had been too hurried, that it would damage the surrounding tombstones, and that the DOD had failed to comply with federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. What would happen next was unclear.

The limbo of the situation was evident in the bodies of the workers. Many of them stood in conversation or sat on the ground, leaning back against the fence. I walked over to a group of them chatting around a large stack of wooden planks. I asked when they thought the statue would be coming down. They turned to one another, exchanging skeptical glances, before one of them looked at me and said, “To be determined.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of April 2023, nearly 500 Confederate symbols have been removed, renamed, or relocated since Dylann Roof massacred nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. The Confederate memorial here, in one of the nation’s largest cemeteries, surrounded by the graves of some 400,000 people, is perhaps the most significant to face the possibility of removal.

[Read: A memorial at the barn]

The statue was paid for and erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of southern white women who were the wives, widows, and descendants of Confederate soldiers. The organization was responsible for erecting hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was built by the sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a former soldier in the Confederate army, and unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, which was the day after the 106th anniversary of the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The statue’s most dominant image is of a woman—symbolizing the South itself—who wears an olive wreath atop her head. The monument also features depictions of two Black people that reify the subservient positions they occupied under slavery and the Confederacy. Arlington National Cemetery acknowledges:

Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre–Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865–1870) had granted to African Americans.

For decades, southern politicians claimed that the statue was simply a part of a larger project of reconciliation, a way for political leaders to solidify national unity at a time when the wounds of the Civil War were still fresh. In some ways, they were right. It was intended as a symbol of reconciliation and unity. But for whom? Certainly not for Black Americans, who, in the decade leading up to the erection of this statue, had been terrorized by more than 700 lynchings across the country.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy did not conceal what they meant by reconciliation. To them, reconciliation meant demanding that Reconstruction—which is to say, any efforts oriented toward pursuing Black social, political, or economic equality—was acknowledged to have been a mistake. The best way to achieve national unity, they thought, was to allow southern white people to govern themselves, with no repercussions from the federal government for the routine torture, destruction, and murder of Black people. As the Confederate veteran and former secretary of the Navy Hilary A. Herbert wrote on behalf of the UDC when the statue was unveiled in 1914:

In 1867, the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving in the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

According to Samantha Baskind, an art-history professor at Cleveland State University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Ezekiel, the United Daughters of the Confederacy didn’t want just anyone to construct this statue; they specifically wanted him. Ezekiel, the first Jewish student ever to attend the Virginia Military Institute, was a veteran of the famous Battle of New Market. In the battle, 257 institute cadets, some as young as 15 years old, were ordered to help close the Confederate line. They did so, and against the odds, forced Union troops to retreat. So many soldiers lost their boots in the mud caused by days of rain that the battlefield became known as the “Field of Lost Shoes,” and the victory would take on an outsize, mythologized importance in Confederate memory. “Ezekiel is a famous sculptor, a famous southerner, a famous veteran—who could be better in their mind?” Baskind told me.

Whether or not Ezekiel intended it, the particular images he used have come to be understood as Confederate propaganda. The image of the Black servant following his white master into battle, for example, has been used by groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans to perpetuate the myth that Black men served as soldiers for the South during the war. This idea, as the historian Kevin M. Levin writes in his book Searching for Black Confederates, was used to buttress the claim that the Civil War had been fought not over slavery but over states’ rights. If Black people served in the Confederate army, the logic goes, then the war could not have been about their enslavement.

[Tom Nichols: The mysterious return of a Soviet statue in Russia]

“There is no question that Ezekiel used iconography that is unacceptable,” Baskind told me. And in doing so, she believes, he took what could have been a true opportunity to create a meaningful site of national reconciliation and ruined it. “He’s the one who really has doomed the monument in the 21st century,” she said. “It was supposed to be the premier symbol of sectional reunion, but it has white-supremacist origins in its iconography.”

In 2017, following the murder by a white nationalist of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of Ezekiel’s descendants wrote a letter demanding that the Arlington statue come down. “Like most such monuments, this statue intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws. It glorifies the fight to own human beings, and, in its portrayal of African Americans, implies their collusion,” they wrote. “As proud as our family may be of Moses’s artistic prowess, we—some twenty Ezekiels—say remove that statue.”

The statue stayed up—but in 2020 a plaque was placed nearby, explaining to visitors that the memorial contained “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Then, in 2021, Congress created the Naming Commission to devise a framework to effect the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials at military facilities—and as a military cemetery, Arlington was included. After the decision was made to take down the statue, more than 40 Republican congressional representatives sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, urging him to intervene. Nevertheless, the Pentagon said that the statue needed to be removed by January 1, 2024.

Making sense of Arlington’s Confederate Memorial is impossible without understanding the larger history of the land it sits upon. Although many people today think of Arlington National Cemetery as a place to commemorate the lives of fallen American soldiers, that was not its original purpose. Before the land became the national cemetery, it was the plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Prior to the Civil War, about 200 enslaved people lived and worked there.

Lee had come to own the plantation through his wife, Mary Curtis, whose father, George Washington Parke Custis, had built the mansion that sat at the edge of the plantation to memorialize his adoptive grandfather, President George Washington. The marriage of Mary Curtis and Robert E. Lee brought together two of the most powerful families in the South. But in 1861, as the Civil War began, Lee and his family fled from their Arlington plantation, which was soon seized by Union soldiers. The estate served as an important strategic outpost for the Union army throughout the war. Three years into the conflict, in 1864, the first military burial took place, and the land began to evolve into the cemetery it is today. One of the cemetery’s goals, from the beginning, was to establish justice for the Union cause, which, as I looked up at the statue, makes the presence of a memorial glorifying the Lost Cause all the more perplexing.

I made my way from the Confederate Memorial to the Robert E. Lee Memorial at Arlington House, the white mansion that sits on a hill and has a panoramic view of Washington, D.C., that I had never encountered. Why this place had become so valuable to the Union during the Civil War was clear: Officers would have been able to see any army approaching the city from miles away.

Behind the home were former slave quarters, spaces that had been transformed into exhibits documenting the lives and stories of those who had been enslaved there. I began to wonder what the families who had once lived in those quarters would think about the Confederate Memorial—its presence, and now its removal.

I called Stephen Hammond, a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey who is a descendant of the Syphax family, one of several families that were enslaved on the plantation. He is a family genealogist and docent at Arlington House, where he tries to ensure that his family’s story and the stories of other Black people who once lived there are preserved.

[From the December 2023 issue: The Confederate general whom all the other Confederates hated]

“I’m conflicted,” Hammond told me, when I asked about the memorial’s removal. “I think it’s important to be able to tell the entire history of a space,” he said, before pausing. “And yet, there are aspects of that memorial that are very offensive to me, and I feel like they don’t represent what our country is about.”

Although the Confederate Memorial did provide an opportunity for historians, docents, and visitors to discuss the wider history of the cemetery, Hammond told me, he does not subscribe to the idea that the statue’s purpose was unity. “On the news this week, I’ve heard people saying we shouldn’t tear it down, because it’s a ‘reconciliation monument,’” he said. “That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

When Hammond walks through the cemetery, he attempts to hold all of its complexities together—the cognitive dissonance of its being the final resting place of the enslavers and the enslaved, a place that tells the story of those who fought for the Union and those who fought to destroy it. Although doing so is not always easy, he told me, he tries to extend empathy and grace to all, in the same way he hopes visitors will extend them to his own ancestors.

“I honor those that have died in that space,” Hammond said of the memorial, “but I also recognize that not more than two or three football fields away, my family members were enslaved, and were forced to labor and serve other people for exactly the reasons that the war was fought.”

“I don’t want history to be lost by the removal of something that creates a gap,” he went on. “But at the same time, what was filling that gap is not reflective of what history really was.”

This is why, for Hammond, the issue of who is commemorated at the cemetery, and how, goes beyond the Confederate Memorial. He is currently leading an effort to remove Robert E. Lee’s name from the Arlington House site. In a 2022 op-ed for The Washington Post, Hammond and Lee Crittenberger Hart, a descendant of Lee, wrote, “Our families realize that the name ‘The Robert E. Lee Memorial’ focuses solely on one side of those who lived at Arlington House and excludes and diminishes the lives and histories of those who were enslaved.”

[Clint Smith: Donald Trump vs. American history]

Earlier this year, Representative Don Beyer and Senator Tim Kaine, both Democrats of Virginia, introduced legislation that would change the name to the Arlington House National Historic Site. Hammond is hopeful that the law will pass. In the meantime, he continues with his personal effort to inform visitors about the full history of Arlington House, giving an account of those whose stories went unacknowledged for so long.

“People get off of the trolley,” he said, referring to the small hop-on-hop-off bus tours that bring people around the cemetery, “and they walk over to see that beautiful view, and they have no idea what that space really is.”

On Tuesday, Judge Rossie Alston, the federal judge who’d earlier issued the stay, visited the site and, saying he “saw no desecration of any graves,” cleared the way for the memorial’s removal. Judge Alston—who is Black and was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump—commented that the memorial contains a depiction of a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?”

In something of a full-circle moment, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who had argued against removing the memorial, announced that the statue would be relocated to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, where Ezekiel and his fellow cadets fought the battle that made them Confederate legends.

On Thursday, I traveled back to Arlington to see the remainder of the memorial taken down before it was packed up and transported to its new home. The crane was now swinging its neck inside the fence. After the workers secured the final section, one of them signaled to the operator, and the bronze was lifted from the memorial’s stone base, floating above our heads like an asteroid caught in a new orbit. Some of the workers pulled out their phone to record the moment.

Before I left, I took one last look at the stone base upon which the statue had stood for more than a century. The space was not conspicuous in its emptiness. I took a photo and turned around to make my way back toward the main road.

The memorial is gone. But the question of how we remember who we’ve been isn’t going anywhere.

Hard-hitting Deontay Wilder - who fights Joseph Parker on Saturday - has boxed fewer than three minutes in two years but remains one of boxing's star attractions.