South of Haunted Dreams Read online

  “What makes you think you can buy candy on credit, boy? You sure you got your daddy’s permission?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “He’s my daddy, ain’t he? I can buy what I want. Just like the other boys.”

  They didn’t like his attitude.

  “You ain’t like the other boys,” he was told. They said he was a sassy little nigger and they chased him that day through the town.

  The black folks in Eads were afraid to help him. Every door he passed was suddenly shut to him. The black folks said, “God help you, son, but please don’t stop here.” They were that afraid.

  When the white folks caught up with Jesse they threw one end of a rope over the limb of an apple tree, the other end they tied around his neck. Maybe they just wanted to scare him. Maybe they wanted to warn him what happens to smart niggers. Maybe they hadn’t intended to and went a bit too far, but they lynched him just the same and left him hanging there. He was sixteen years old. He was my father’s cousin. And this was another story, not so funny, my father used to tell.

  No wonder my father drinks as much whiskey as he does.

  No wonder black men fear the South.

  I too am afraid, for I too carry the curse of dark skin, but my fear is different.

  Can you imagine how it is to waken every morning and know your father and relatives had to act the coward, had to act the “good Negro” instead of the “bad nigger,” had to adopt attitudes of subservience? When Blackamericans look at themselves and at their history, this in part is what we see: this violence, these constant reminders of being unwanted and unloved, of being treated as if we were less than human, these shadows of indignation, indignity and shame. Black men and women have had to bear them like crosses and there have been too few Simons (from Cyrene) to help with the load.

  Forgive me if I rant, but you cannot know how I have cried and despaired and nearly given myself over to the dark gods of bitterness and frustration. You cannot know, unless I now tell you, how the anger often wells up in me lately and I am driven to the edges of violence and hate and I want insanely to fight men bigger than myself and burn buildings down, set fire to their homes, their happiness, their way of life. They and I alike pretend not to know whence comes this anger, for it seems in my case to be especially unfounded, to make little sense. I was not born into slavery or into abject circumstance. Luckily, for me and for those around me, the gods in whose laps we sit saw fit that I should not be so cursed, for then surely I would have been a murderer, indeed a butcher.

  Instead, I travel to the South to confront the source of my anger. I am half hoping to hurt someone. At the same time I am longing to find a new South, a new America, hoping with heart and soul that all is not hopelessness and despair. For if nothing has changed in these thirty years, then we as a people are living a great lie and are no different from other nations that now are crumbling in the crucible of disunity and ethnic discord. Then we are not a nation wholly joined by a common culture, but instead are separated by color and class and religion and judged by them and by them alone. How easy then it will be to surrender to the viler angels of my nature. How easy it will be to break the arm of anyone calling me “boy,” or the neck of someone who calls me “nigger.”

  Afraid? Yes. And my fear is indeed different from my father’s fear, different perhaps from the fears of other black men too, for I am afraid not only for the things that might happen to me as I wander south. I fear as well for the things I might do.

  I am not my father, not of my father’s generation. I was not tempered in the kiln of Jim Crow. I was instead forged in a new furnace, hammered out of a new tradition—wholly connected to the old, as all tradition must be, but so utterly different. I do not come to the South with hat in hand, head bowed, timid and humble. I stand tall and firmly planted. I am not small. I take up plenty of space. I am proud of who and what I am, as arrogant as my father ever was. And I burn with an anger that is rightfully his, but that is anger nonetheless. And I am afraid, am almost certain in fact, that before this trip ends someone will have died.

  Slowly I come to realize that I am not the man I once was, not the man who once believed he was who he was from the inside out, that the blackness of my skin is merely a physical attribute like being bearded or being tall.

  No. I am different now. I have awakened from my slumber.

  DAVIESS COUNTY COON HUNTERS’ CLUB. The sign helps to awaken me. The sign helps me remember. I am black, and being black matters.

  I turn the bike around and go back—slowly this time—back to the sign and to the arrow pointing down a narrow lane that disappears around a sharp bend.

  The sign is wooden, its painted letters fading in the hot sun, its post rusting. The arrow painted on it shows the way, and down this road I ride.

  The countryside smells faintly of tobacco, the scent borne on a gentle wind that riffles over the fields. Kentucky is tobacco country, just about the northernmost edge, but corn country too, and the fields are green with tall stalks. The corn tops are ripening. Their tassels once flowing gold have dried and turned to brown, dangling now, swaying in the delicate breeze that blows a hush across the valley and leads the eye from wave to wave of stalks bending. Deep into the distance the eye floats over an endless sea of meadows in bloom and corn fields that change color beneath sun and cloud-shadow from gold and green to amber and orange.

  The road winds through these fields on one side; trees, shrubs, and vines on the other. Beyond the trees a creek courses in the valley below. A dilapidated footbridge tries to cross the creek but has rotted with age and is ready to collapse halfway across. On the near edge of these trees there is a small white frame house for sale. Nearby, a shed with a corrugated metal roof waits to fall over. Next to the shed a small greenhouse decays. The roof has caved in, the windows are broken out, not yet boarded up. The house, now a shack, is overgrown with weeds and consumed by the undergrowth. Saplings and vines creep through the walls and climb through the gaps in the roof. Nature has staked its claim on all that once seemed it would last forever. But nothing is permanent. All eventually passes away.

  When the road bends, the trees end. Cultivation runs on from there, the fields owning lines of sight from here to the horizon.

  There ought to be a huge plantation house up on the hill, these fields of corn should be fields of cotton perhaps; old Negro laborers stooped over their hoes and baking in the hot sun should be happily singing their woes in these fields, for this is the South and that is the image, and down this road is the Coon Hunters’ Club.

  I expect that when I arrive there I will find a bunch of big-bellied rednecks sitting around an old wood-burning stove. They will be chewing tobacco and wearing caps advertising seed corn, tractors, and transmission companies. And they will be drinking beer, of course, telling stories and dreaming about the good old days, dreaming about lynching niggers.

  Up on a hill a farmhouse does rise, but a modern one. Big metal silos glimmer in the sunlight. At the foot of the hill there is a sign for a school bus stop.

  A car approaches and passes. The driver throws up a wave, does not stop, but goes on. From the yard surrounding a house on another hill, a child, awed, I suppose, by this big blue bike I ride, waves and runs down to the edge of the street. And I, not knowing how to take this waving, these friendly gestures, toss up my hand and continue on.

  A couple of miles farther on, there is a right turn. One sign on the corner says GOD IS THE ANSWER, another sign promises GOD ANSWERS PRAYER. Just beyond the signs, the Coon Hunters’ Club. Not much of a clubhouse, just a concrete box made of cinder blocks, a squat building only one story tall, four small windows on the front. But there is indeed a wood-burning stove inside, revealed by an exhaust pipe coming through a hole in the wall. An air-conditioner unit sticks out of the opposite wall and promises relief from the intense autumn heat. And perhaps there is beer inside to help with the same relief, but at this I can only guess, for the place is deserted. No one answers my knocking
at the door. I will not this day get to see the inside of the Coon Hunters’ Club, nor talk to any of the coon hunters. I will have to wait until some other time to be glared at, threatened, turned away, called names, and made afraid.

  Some other time, of course, will be soon enough.

  The motorcycle revs to its highest-pitched whine and continues on, following the road over these rolling hills and around every bend, leading me on. I have no idea where the road will go.

  II

  I … turning about in my saddle took a farewell look in the direction from which we came, conscious of having reached the dividing line.

  —William Johnston

  I too turned around in my saddle and long I looked in the direction from which I had come, not knowing then that my backward glance, like William Johnston’s so long before me, also would be a farewell one.

  The road behind bent in the distance and disappeared in the trees; ahead it ran straight like a time-line into the haze of future. It ran to the horizon and got lost in the glare, shrank near the faraway limits of my sight and was gone. I faced forward on the machine, toward tomorrow, toward the unknown. I put the bike in gear. Spurning the fear and apprehension that vibrated through me, I rode on, into the labyrinth of time, the ultimate purpose of my mission and its final significance as hidden from me as the future, as unknown to me then as William Johnston’s was to him.

  William Johnston was an overlander with the Lewis and Clark expedition who in 1804 left St. Louis to explore the upper reaches of the Missouri River and the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. Their mission was to learn about the land, to make peace with the native tribes they encountered, and to add still one more jigsaw section that would help make this puzzle one indivisible nation from sea to shining sea.

  Perhaps William Johnston and the others saw their lives as insignificant compared to the task before them. Perhaps they surrendered their fates to Providence, the same as I surrendered mine, to chance, to Providence, to the wind.

  They went west; I left my home in St. Louis and headed south.

  For William Johnston and for the other explorers with him the dividing line was a range of mountains that split the nation and the continent east and west. On one side of the great divide the rivers all flow into the Pacific Ocean; on the other side they run ultimately down to the Gulf of Mexico, out to the Atlantic.

  But there are other partitions, not all of them physical, other continental divides, and one of them, just an imaginary line—as imaginary and arbitrary as all man-made boundaries are—has divided the land as no physical barrier could ever have done.

  Originally it was no more than the southern border of Pennsylvania, a line named for the two surveyors who had laid it out, Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason, a mere marking on a map, a red line on some engineer’s drawing. But not for long. The line began to grow and soon it stretched across the eastern half of the nation, which at that time was nearly the entire nation, and as the line grew it gained in significance both actual and symbolic. It extended west following the very real line of the Ohio River and itself became as real as a river, as plain and obvious as any rail fence of the day, separating neighbor from neighbor along a thousand-mile frontier reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, as formidable in many ways and as insurmountable as any mountain range. Mason and Dixon’s line separated the slave states to the south from the free states to the north. And that has made all the difference.

  To the north of this not-so-imaginary line and to the south of it men and women speak the same language. They share a common history, and for the most part they claim the same heroes, ancestors, lands of origin. But the perception, upon crossing the Mason-Dixon, is of entering another country, a land whose customs, whose pace, whose traditions make it altogether different from the land next-door. And the one tradition that sets the South cleanly apart has always been, and remains to this day, slavery and its lingering legacy. Its shadow still hangs over the South, hangs still over us all. And we are all complicit.

  The southern climate is temperate, mild winters, searing summers, the heat lending itself to laze, to slow movement and long naps in the afternoon, to sipping iced tea in the shade, to long visits and great hospitality, to the romantic images of the South that naturally spring to mind. Lives of leisure and of indolence.

  But still the work had to be done, fields had to be plowed, cows milked, crops harvested. And the work was done by hand.

  Bent backs, straining sinew, sweat and song.

  The Industrial Revolution came late to the South. There were no factories, no mills. The economy was all in the soil. Cheap labor was a necessity. A way of life hinged on it.

  The South did not invent slavery. But as with God, had slavery not existed, the South would have had to create it. The South needed it. The South worshipped it. The South insisted on it. Without it there would have been no union—nor disunion—no thirteen original states, no Manifest Destiny, no Civil War. It was acceptance of slavery that kept the country whole. Yet it was slavery, its absence on one side of the line, its existence on the other, that divided this nation into North and South, slavery that turned the one country into two.

  When the war forced slavery’s end, the South clung to its racist ways, its separateness. The Civil War in spirit went on. The ways of the South continued to divide.

  Among Blackamericans who have not forgotten old times in the land of cotton, crossing into the South revisits upon them the shadows of a culture that regarded their forebears as second-class citizens at best, certainly as inferior, often as less than human.

  When I left my home, when I loaded my motorcycle and hit the road that wet August morning, I had no desire, no intention whatsoever, to travel the Deep South.

  It was ten o’clock on a cloudy Tuesday morning. The air was electric with rumbled threats of thunder and rain and with the unspoken promise of excitement. The smell of moisture crowded the air. It was one of those heavily humid summer days when the moisture hangs like haze in the air, denser than fog but not quite a drizzle. Already the day was hot and steamy, the sky overcast, and the sun less than a hint in the tops of the trees. Rain was on the way. A light wind gathered. Fallen leaves drifted in the yard, paper danced in the street, but little else was moved by the wind. Overhead, a jet plane glided across the sky. Far behind, the plane’s rumble got lost in the clouds and was swallowed up by the thunderstorm stirring in the southwest, growling like a grizzly bear and lumbering toward me. Soft rain like tears began to fall.

  I had in mind to spend some time on the road, aiming perhaps for Alaska—the long way round, of course: via New England and the Canadian maritime provinces. Winter would catch up with me somewhere along the way and force me toward the southwest, toward California. Then the following spring I would go up the coast and on to the frozen north. If it took me a year, what did it matter? I just wanted to hit the road and go.

  In Africa, where I spent nearly a year traversing that continent, I promised myself I would do just that: come home, hit the road, and go.

  In Africa I came face to face with the bitterest suffering. The hunger and starvation are relentless. The bribery, the corruption and suspicion so widespread they are a way of life. The simple act of getting from one place to another was so complicated with roadblock after roadblock and checkpoint after checkpoint that even a minor journey was an ordeal. Getting enough to eat was a miracle. I hungered for things easy and American, for cheeseburgers and fried chicken, for well-paved roads, for a comfortable bed. So much, in fact, that at the bottom of a letter to a friend I wrote that when I returned home I was going to head for the open road and ride as far as my imagination would take me.

  I’m going to buy for myself a car, a convertible, of course, or a motorcycle, and head for the open road where I will eat greasy roadside food and think for some crazy reason that I’m in heaven. It will be impossible, I know, because nobody in this world makes a coconut cream pie like my mother’s, meringue piled high and
golden and slightly chewy, sweet and creamy and always more coconut than any recipe ever called for, but I’m going to search and search until I find the best coconut cream pie in the country, and with it, the best cheeseburger. And thick strawberry milkshakes to wash the taste of dust and loneliness from my mouth. I will celebrate the joys of freedom and plenty. With the wind in my face and bugs in my teeth I will fly down that open road going everywhere and nowhere in particular, with thoughts all my own and—wonder of wonders—no roadblocks, no checkpoints, no bribes to pay.

  Why? Hell! Why not? Or better still: because I wanted to and because I could. No golden fleece, apart from the coconut pie, no grand yearnings except to travel freely and easily in this land where I was born, my real homeland, and to rediscover it, to take to the road for no real reason but to go.

  It was wanderlust that took me to Africa.

  I did not travel to Africa to find my roots. My roots are here. The thinnest tips that branch deep deep deep into the earth to suck sustenance from the soil might indeed extend all the way to Africa, but those are the roots of my blackness. They affect the color of my skin, the texture of my hair. But I am not African. The soil from which I draw my strength, my pride, and my happiness is American soil.

  I cannot speak for those of French descent, or Irish or Lithuanian or Chinese—or even other blacks—but here is the land I love, the land I long for. Here is where I belong. Because here is where I am.

  So much of a Blackamerican’s Africanness was stolen away or lost that a new breed has been born, of African stock but not African, a new race almost, born out of warm love, roiling passions, and long suffering. Born out of the jungle rhythms of Africa but even more out of the pains of slavery and persecution, we are a people bred in fear and with freedom always out of reach, schooled in long-term denial and everlasting patience. A new race born of the blues, a hybrid strain, resilient, resistant, forgiving. And strong.