The sturdiest shafts of my roots are anchored solidly here in this land of my creation, this place whose history and various cultures are mine. And mine is its heritage. Its dreams and broken promises, its lies and its defeats. Each fulfillment is mine and every achievement. Every failing likewise belongs to me. And with each failure and broken promise I die a little.
Slowly the mist recedes from a steamed-up bathroom mirror. The mission becomes clearer.
I would travel this country for the first time in my life as a racist, with color and race always on my mind. Spoken or merely implied, my battle cry to every black person I meet would be: “How are the white folks treating you?”—because I have seen what the white folks, the Europeans, have done to Africa, to black folks like me. And I know what the white folks, the Americans, have felt about black folks here. I wanted to experience it myself, as a way of connection.
How could I not have been drawn to the South, magnetized as my bones were, the dreaded South? The South which defines us, the South which has done so much to make black people who they are, the South that has been the cause of so much suffering. The South that has been saturated in fear and in monumental hatefulness white toward black.
White people have never suffered the brunt of such hatred. They have never known it. Nor can they ever know it.
In 1959 a white man named John Howard Griffin tried to know it. He chemically treated his skin so it would darken enough to pass as the skin of a black man. He shaved his head. He traveled the South to taste the fear and the degradation for a time, and to know what it was to be black. He told about it in his book Black Like Me. But he could never really know it. He could never be black like me. His heart might have been heroic and in the right place, but always in the back of his mind was the safety net. He could always go home. He could be white once more—as if he weren’t always white anyway, white in his thinking, white in his outlook, white in the range of his possibilities. When the chemicals and the sunlamp treatments wore off, there was a way out. He could awaken from the nightmare.
For black people there is no escape, no way out for me, I know that now and know it perhaps for the very first time in my life, no way to shun this blackness. Not by being ashamed of my race and color, not with skin bleaches and lighteners, not with hair straighteners and not with plastic surgery. Not by immersion in things white and European, nor by education, nor by pretending. Not even by wishing that when you see me you see first of all who I am, that you see above all a person and not a black person, for that wish too is denial.
When you look at me, you see before anything else the color of my skin. That, I have decided, is not a bad thing. It is how you react to the color that offends me. If what you see is someone—some-thing—strange and terrible, utterly different from yourself, something inferior, something criminal and evil, something to be avoided, then that is what pisses me off, what brings me to the point of rage and violence.
On the road from New England I stopped to spend the afternoon and maybe a few days in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was coming down the Hudson River valley from Canada, had ridden along the edge of Lake Champlain. I had been on the bike for too many hours without stopping and my legs were stiff. Before finding a place to have lunch, I took a stroll through town.
It was a chilly late summer afternoon. I wore a puffy red riding suit to cut the wind and keep me warm. When I got off the bike I did not remove the suit. If anything, I must have looked ridiculous, certainly not dangerous, certainly not like someone about to commit a crime, certainly not grabbing a purse and trying to run with it.
“Can you identify the man, lady?”
“Well, he was wearing a big red snowsuit, and he walked kind of stiff-legged like Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
A man in a big red snowsuit, carrying a motorcycle helmet. In broad daylight. In plain view. Walking slow and stiff. I would have to have been an idiot to even think about snatching some lady’s purse.
And yet …
I turned off the main road and took a short tour among the turn-of-the-century homes that had been restored. A woman came toward me. She looked up. When she saw me coming toward her she panicked. Either she saw Frankenstein’s monster, or else she saw something much much worse.
We were walking toward each other on the same side of the street. She strolled casually, her dress swaying in the slight breeze, her handbag swinging as she moved her arms. She saw me when she was still a good distance away. She stumbled and nearly froze. Then she clutched her purse and quickened her pace. She crossed the street and hurried away almost running.
Certainly there could have been other reasons for the fear in her face, the sudden panic. But the most obvious one was this: she had seen a black man and had been alone on a street with him. Alone on a deserted street. A white woman with a purse. Even a white woman without a purse. A black man coming toward her. Someone to be feared. Someone to be avoided. A drug addict. A thief. A rapist.
I wanted to laugh but suddenly could not. I wanted to take a deep breath and feel this sudden new power, wanted to be proud like a bully, proud of this ability to have people notice me, fear me, run from me. But I found no pride.
I have never before had a chip on my shoulder. I wonder now why I didn’t. It doesn’t take much reflection to figure out that something is very wrong.
Can you possibly know what it is to stand at a street corner and be made to feel so instantly and so absolutely vile, to be categorized at a glance and found guilty of some atrocity?
You’re waiting for the light to change so you can cross the street. A car pulls up and stops. The white lady at the wheel looks over. She sees you there. Click! She flips the switch and all the car doors lock. You want to laugh, but you can’t. You want to make a face at her, but she won’t even look at you. She stares straight ahead, anxious, doesn’t want to know you are still there.
How different things were in Africa, how easy to be black, how comfortable! No one was afraid of me because of my blackness. No one hated me.
Traveling Africa altered my vision, made me acutely aware of being black, surrounded as I was by black, and made me possibly even more at ease with being black, for I had ignored it so long. For the longest time in my life I quite strangely and honestly didn’t know what it meant to be black or even in some weird sense that I was black, or that the color of my skin should make a difference. I thought I simply was. Simply me. Just a tall guy with dark skin. A peculiar misfortune, this lack of awareness, from the perspective of good fortune.
When I, in a more innocent age, was a little squirt surrounded by blacks in my childhood neighborhood, there was nothing special, nothing different about being black, nothing different about me, not much reason for a kid to give deep thought to the color of his skin.
Not deep thought, but some, for the big insult in those days was to comment on the shade of someone else’s skin; degrees of darkness mattered. To call someone black was almost worse than using the word nigger, which among black people was perversely and still is a bantering term of familiarity and even endearment. So when the neighbor boy Charles Reynolds hollered in anger at me that I was stupid and ugly and black, I ignored the stupid and ugly and dwelt on the black. I shouted back an insult of my own based on color.
“Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” I stammered, trying to think of something to counter with. “Well, you’re white,” I said because his skin was very light, so almost white that his eyelids were like old paintings cracking with blue veins. “And white people stink,” I screamed. I was eight years old.
There was a family that lived in our parish and went to our school. They were white and poor and lacking in common standards of personal hygiene. No one ever wanted to play with them. They were the butt of our jokes. Their house was a dilapidated shack and their front yard a clutter of two rusted stoves and an old wringer washing machine. Clothes and diapers hung on a line from the porch to a sapling dying in the middle of the yar
d. The tree was surrounded by a mound of trash that had killed all the grass and left only a bare patch of clay and dust. Their clothes were always dirty. They never combed their hair. They never bathed. They stank. To us who made jokes about them, it stood to reason that all white people stank. Our exposure to whites was limited, our derision not very deep-seated. Our prejudices were shallow. But we had our stereotypes too.
Yes, but nothing so bitter as crossing the street just because a white person happened to be on the same sidewalk. No, nothing so bitter as that, nothing so permanent, nothing so ingrained or filled with hatred and disdain.
For along with my deep love for Lisa Thomas, along with what I thought was a budding romance with Sherril Douglas, along with my silent and unrequited yearning for Vicki Foxwell, I harbored as well a warm and secret kindergarten crush on Cheryl Neroda, and she was white. My crush on her was color-blind and lasted, along with all those other youthful affairs of my heart, until I was ten. Then we moved away.
Away from the city, away from the neighborhood, away from so many black people. The neighborhood had changed. Crime was on the increase. Property was falling into disrepair. The whites by then had all moved out. And then, as if we too felt there were something wrong with being stuck in a community that was all black, something dangerous, more isolated and limiting, something not quite as good as living in a white or mixed neighborhood, my family moved out too, caught in the swelling tide of flight from inner city to suburb—escape for those who could afford to, abandonment for those who could not—and to the sudden realization that white, if not better, was certainly richer and certainly smarter.
At my former school I had been the brightest kid in class, so smart in fact that one of the nuns, Sister Deckland, to shame her eighth-grade class, would send for me, haul me out of fifth grade to solve problems on the blackboard in front of her math class and explain the solutions to them. Suddenly, in my new school—and I noticed it—I was the only black kid in the smart kids’ class, put there because of my record but light-years behind the rest of that class and struggling to keep up. Tim Casselli was assigned to help me. He would turn his desk around to face mine, the same as I used to do in second grade with Charles Reynolds, but instead of playing games as Charles and I had done, sword-fighting with our pencils, Tim tried over and over to explain math concepts and solutions to problems I had trouble grasping. For the first time in my life I felt this racial difference and knew inadequacy. When no one was with me and no one was looking I would sit in the back of the class and acid tears would fill my eyes and spill down my cheeks. My skin burned with shame. I would turn away and stare out the window, dreamily recalling big-fish days in a small pond.
After a year and a half the crying stopped. I caught up and moved beyond that class, beyond that school. White wasn’t better, it turned out, or smarter. Just richer. Still richer. Always richer.
There is a difference between richer and better. I was lucky enough to learn early. But somewhere in the deep recesses of Blackamerican memory, built on a history of inhuman treatment that turned into shame and into guilt, the opposite lesson has been learned: that richer is better, and that white means richer and better. And conversely that black means poor and inferior. It is from this almost bottomless well that are drawn such feelings of inferiority on the one hand, superiority on the other hand, and resentment on both hands.
And so I headed south.
I did not travel across Africa to find my roots. I traveled the South to find them. For the South, not Africa, is home to Blackamericans, and Blackamericans as a race are essentially southerners. Only in the South could I discover where my beginnings as a Blackamerican have gone. Without realizing it at the time, I was going home.
Alaska would have to wait.
I crossed into the South and looked back. I knew without knowing that I would never be the same again. I had crossed the divide.
III
You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs a psychiatrist.
—Malcolm X
Across the divide, across the Mason-Dixon and back back backward in time. Deeper into the South, deeper into the labyrinth, following the line that connects, searching for the minotaur, the monster to blame for the way things are and have been, looking for someone to hate, wanting something ominous to happen. Deeper I slide into the South whose past owns my nights, owns the darkness of my imaginings, and lurks in the shadows of my dreams, lurks in my memory like the hideous monster of a childhood nightmare. Deeper into the past that the South clings to in a deathlike grip.
Confederate battle flags flutter along my route. They hang from front porches. They dangle in pickup truck rear windows. They are pasted on car bumpers, decorate caps and jackets and shop windows. They color the covers of books. They are a constant reminder.
The South.
I drive the motorcycle with near abandon. By now I, who had never ridden before, am comfortable on the machine after already so many thousands of miles, and so many more to come, comfortable with the bike’s speed and with its power, comfortable with its size and with its heft. I have learned by doing, learned to ride by climbing on and holding on, have seen the beauty in this beast and have learned to love the animal. Now I live constantly with it. I have become one with it and through it have become one with the road. I can feel every rut and every ridge. I anticipate every turn.
I lean far forward and hunker down on the bike. I see clearly, almost presciently. Long before I am upon it I know where the gravel lies and the patches of oil, the slick pavement, the wet spots. I know the bike’s moods, it knows mine and I am safe. It’s like riding a horse. When I breathe, the bike breathes. When I shift my weight, the bike compensates. When I look away from the road to focus on a distant blur, the bike drives itself. The bike reads my thoughts.
The bright sun glimmers off the asphalt. Mirages hover in liquid mist inches above the road. The day sparkles all around, a kaleidoscope. I am alive to the heat pouring down like rain on my back. My senses awaken to the smells of tobacco and growing corn. I speed through a hot tunnel of bright green on either side of me, suspended in a cocoon of rushing wind and vibration, the sound of the wind, the sounds of the engine. My heart pounds loudly inside my helmet.
I run through the gears. Up to fifth. Down to fourth. Around the tractor slowing in the road. Up again to fifth. Seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety miles an hour. When the road clears and straightens, I take the bike to a hundred and ten.
Corn fields surround me. Bean fields and tobacco. Clapboard houses line my route. Dirt farmers and their families look up to watch me speed by. Like flies languid in the dense autumn heat, they sit slow-moving on rickety front porches, the women in soiled gingham, the men in torn undershirts, their bellies swollen from too many beers and from diets designed with little more in mind than to quiet the long night’s hunger. They are poor and they are very tired, even the young ones among them, the babies and the little children in shoes too big that have been handed down from some older relative or bought from a neighbor’s yard sale. There is surrender in the soft smiles of them all, and something akin to resignation. Poor like soil that has played out, tired like overworked mules, fatigue in their faces, they gather in groups and sit on the steps. They watch the cars pass like a parade.
An old man in a rocker sits alone in the shade of a tree. Slowly he waves, but too late. I have passed him before I realize the gesture of his hand is a wave. Too late to throw up a hand in return, I tap two toots on the horn and send them back to him. I speed on as if in a hurry, as if something down this road is waiting for me.
But no one waits for me, only Bowling Green and lunch.
Why Bowling Green?
Why, then, the cop?
Why turn left when the road right seems just as fair? Why the motorcycle, this make and this color?
Why anything?
Five years ago, I canoed down the Mississippi. I saw an Indian canoe as the only suitable vessel for s
uch a journey on such a mythic American river—something about getting closer to the water and to the spirit of the river, something about the canoe’s connection to American history and to others who had gone before me. I see now that I did not choose the canoe, any more than I chose to walk across the Sahara, or to squeeze with eight others into the back of a car built for six and travel Africa, or to steam up the Congo River on an ancient barge held together by magic and spit. No, I did not choose these things. The canoe, the steamer, the camel, and now this motorcycle, I realize all of a sudden, they chose me. And none of it could have happened any other way.
I did not choose Bowling Green. Nor did I choose the South. Bowling Green, the South, the cop down the road: they—or the weaver—chose me.
My life, it often seems, is not my own, its loss the price paid, perhaps, for casting aside map and itinerary without which, as Robert Frost would have said, way leads on to way. The goal blurs and the journey itself becomes the destination. Nothing goes as planned for rarely is there any plan. And control of one’s life seems to lie in the hands of some greater power.
That is why Bowling Green. That is why the South. That is why the cop, and why the turn left instead of right. It could have been no other way.
I ride as if I were, but I am not in a hurry, not going anywhere in particular, just going, traveling in the vague starting patterns a weaver makes, zigzagging back and forth, up and down, the way the wooden block slides back and forth across the weaver’s loom. Not until the cloth is well along can patterns and textures in the weave be discerned, not until the tour is nearly done. The journey will define itself by the woven patterns revealed at a distance, by quite simply what is and what has been, by what the South has been and what the South is. Not by any design I have in mind. Only by what I discover. I surrender myself to the will of the weaver.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 3
