South of Haunted Dreams
Page 4
It is seventy-odd miles from Owensboro to Bowling Green, seventy miles from the Coon Hunters’ Club. If time mattered, it would be little over an hour’s journey. But time has warped. Time has vanished. Today seems like yesterday, seems like tomorrow.
Time as time has become meaningless, has become like the road, merely a means of getting from one place to another, from now to some moment hence. Time is the road I’m on. No more than that.
Distance too has lost its meaning. If I go ten miles or ten thousand, it’s all the same to me.
The tunnel of green all around envelops me, transports me in time, backward and forward all at once, a time tunnel, the present blurring into the past into the future, the green fields eerily liquefying into visions of occasions yet to come, giving way then to remembrances of events that never happened to me—but that happened. What is real can hardly be distinguished from what is not. It is like a dream. It must be the heat. I must be hallucinating.
Specters of the past loom in the clouds. The South is as the South was—and always will be, though nothing is forever. The past and the present coexist here as nowhere on earth, side by side, as though the one cannot live without the other, the way evil sustains good, the same too as white and black in the South are inextricably linked. You can hardly think of the South without thinking of blacks, could not have one without the other. And how can you think of blacks and their predicament without considering their links to the South?
The distant past is as fresh in the South as yesterday. History is a living thing still played out, forever battled, the future at stake, the past winning at least as often as the present. The effects of history and the effects of the battle are evident in the many angry eyes, the suspicious glares, the friendly smiles, in a man’s hands and in his thoughts.
It is a very hot day. The wind blows slowly. Dust spirals in the fields. Heat swirls all around. The wispy clouds that had been hanging on the horizon are now thunderheads roiling together and threatening an autumn electrical storm. They billow in the sky’s high breeze. I run inexorably on, toward those clouds as if toward the future. They slide overhead and all around, suggesting shapes that my imagination can play with, but not playful ones, no swans, no elephants upside-down, no faces of dead presidents.
In the clouds before me I see hooded men dressed like angels in flowing white robes. They are burning the symbol of their Christianity, and at the same time incinerating Christianity itself.
And in the clouds behind me, as real as any hallucination, lurks the fat-bellied figure of Bull Connor, surrounded in the clouds by policemen and dogs.
How can it be real? How could it ever have been real?
May 1963. Birmingham, Alabama. A hot day in a very hot week. The streets are crowded with young blacks protesting against racism, against not being able to sit at a lunch counter or swim in a public pool, demonstrating with no weapon, defenseless hands, nonviolence.
And then comes Bull Connor. The man whose given name, Eugene, is so genteel, but whose nickname speaks of the fury and violence that pervades the South.
Bull Connor is a fleshy man with a soft puffy face, large ears, and a glass eye. His belly hangs over the top of his belt. He looks like a hick gas station attendant, a good old boy at the Coon Hunters’ Club. But he is the Commissioner of Public Safety, in effect the sheriff of Birmingham. He controls the police. He controls the police dogs. The fire department belongs to him as well. It is on his orders that these weapons, the police, the dogs, and the hoses, are loosed on the black crowd.
Most of them are high school and college students. Most of them do not resist.
The dogs attack and bite them. The water from the hoses slams into them with force enough to take the bark off trees.
Day after day they are repulsed back to the black sections of town. They are beaten and bloodied. Others are arrested, more than two thousand in a five-day stretch. And for the time being Connor’s edict holds: “We ain’t going to segregate [he means integrate] no niggers and whites together in this town.” He doesn’t want blacks and whites eating at the same lunch counters, or using the same toilet, or doing anything else together either.
Whatever was this man named Bull thinking, that he and his dogs could hold back the swelling tide of the past surging into future’s momentum suddenly upon him? Did he not care how history would remember him? Or did he think what he was doing would be too small for history to remember? Did he think his name would go down in the book of heroes? Or do men not think of such things? Did he think he was doing what was good, what was morally right? Or was he not thinking at all, just reacting the way his daddy would have reacted, the way his daddy would have wanted Bull to react?
Bull Connor’s face still hangs in the clouds.
It is a dream. It is a very hot day. I need a break, but I speed on as if in a hurry, as if time will save me. I am afraid to stop. I worry that fear and anger will overcome me. (I am afraid too of this almost unthinkable other thing taking shape in the clouds, an impossibility that shall for now remain nameless.)
And so I hurry, trying to outrun the fear and the anger. But I cannot escape them. Time puts no distance between me and my nightmares. They travel with me. The South is my nightmare. Time, it seems, has healed no wounds. The old sores open. The past is indeed as fresh as yesterday, my own past awakening in me just by my being in the South.
The sun is high overhead. I have on a black leather jacket and it’s hot. Even at eighty miles an hour, the wind rushing by me is not enough to cool me. I stop the bike when I come to Hartford, Kentucky, stop to stretch my legs, to cool off, to clear my head.
There is a sameness to American small towns. As you approach the town, the houses get closer and closer together. Sidewalks appear. Trees lining the road at the outskirts give way to utility poles. Buildings crop up. Cars are parked roadside. Suddenly you are in the center of town.
So too with Hartford. One minute you are on the outskirts, the next minute you’re in it. Only the houses closer together to warn you.
I pull to the curb and stop at the corner. I shut off the engine, get off the bike, and have a look around.
The buildings are low, none over two stories high, old and made of brick. A few shops, a courthouse across the street, a tiny library halfway down the next block. Right here on the corner where I stand is a bank. I can see my reflection in its big glass windows. Standing here with my helmet on, my black jacket shining in the sun, gathering heat, I look like a road warrior hell-bent on finding trouble. Beyond my reflection I can see the bankers and their customers regarding me with small town curiosity, the recognition and suspicion of strangers. When they see me watching them watching me, they look nervously away.
I peel off jacket and gloves and finally the helmet. I drop everything right on the ground. I stretch and flex. There is a phone booth on the other side of the street. I walk over toward it.
And of course here comes the cop, down the steps of the courthouse and right toward me.
He is the spitting image of Bull Connor to me. But then all cops are Bull Connor to me.
I prepare myself for trouble.
I have not been very lucky with the police. Every encounter with a cop on duty has been disaster, and I long ago lost my every-kid’s desire to be one of them, long ago lost my respect for them as a profession. Not a single encounter has been friendly.
As a seventeen-year-old kid, just beginning my wandering ways, traveling the country by bus, I sprinted across a busy street in downtown Houston. A motorcycle cop spotted the crime, hurried up behind me, screeched to a sudden stop.
“Boy!” he shouted at me. (I was young, yes, but why do they always have to call you “boy”?)
“Boy,” he said. “You better have some ID.”
I handed over my driver’s license.
“You ain’t up north, boy,” he said. “And down here we take jaywalking serious.” He kept calling me “boy” and my heart was beginning to pound. I didn’t know why.
“Pardon me?”
“Pardon me, sir,” he corrected, but I didn’t oblige. Looking back on it now, I suppose he wanted me to lower my eyes, bow my head, and apologize. I looked him in the eye instead and frowned seriously. I wondered what jail would be like. He stared back.
Eventually he let me go.
“You be careful, boy,” he said finally. “And from now on cross the street like you’re supposed to—at the light.”
I had forgotten about the entire incident until now, repressed it, the psychologists would say.
Five years later, another situation that I did not so easily forget. The Los Angeles police were not so easygoing.
Once more I was traveling by bus, in the station and trying to buy a ticket to San Francisco. Twelve people stood in line ahead of me and my bus’s departure had just been announced over the PA. In a panic I asked each person in front of me if I could skip ahead. But even with their permission the ticket agent refused to sell me a ticket.
“Why not?”
“Because you jumped in line,” he said. But no, that couldn’t have been it.
“I asked first. You saw me. And everybody agreed.”
I turned to them all for confirmation. They still agreed.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Now get back at the end of the line or I’ll call security.”
“Go ahead and call security, you jerk. I’m not moving until I get my ticket.”
Security came, but what could they do? I still wouldn’t budge. But then the police were called. One tough cop kept fiddling, as tough cops like to do, with the pistol in his holster. I thought it might be a good idea to get back in line, but not before I told them all, cops included, what jerks they were.
The line moved quickly—of course. Without the panic and without the fuss I would have had my ticket by now, been on the bus and gone. And that made the entire incident all the more frustrating.
The cops stayed right beside me. They gloated now about how easy it could have all been if I had just stayed in line in the first place.
“That didn’t take long,” one cop said. “Now did it?”
But I was still angry.
“You see?” he said. “We’re not such jerks, are we? We’re just doing our jobs.”
I saw red.
“Calling it your job doesn’t make it right,” I said. “But no, you’re not a jerk. You’re very little more than a pea-brained penis-head.”
Now he was the one who saw red. Before I could finish insulting his mother, he grabbed me by the wrist and yanked my arm hard behind my back. He twisted my wrist until the skin burned. I struggled. Together the two cops slammed me to the floor and while one of them held my head against the filthy tile, the other cop handcuffed me. Then they dragged me off and threw me into a little holding room with a couple of drunken vagrants trying to sleep off their DT’s. The room reeked of vomit and urine, the odor of stale alcohol and sweat. The two cops pushed me in and bounced me off the walls a couple of times. They punched me and one of them kicked me hard in the stomach. He had been trying to kick me lower, but I sidestepped and he missed.
They didn’t book me. They merely harassed me, held me there just long enough that I missed my bus.
I brooded about this incident for a long time then, but put it behind me. Never funny to begin with, it is now even less amusing, almost absurd, slightly sad, and, when I think of the returning black soldier who had his eyes gouged out at the bus station in 1945, infuriating.
Like my father’s old stories, over time my own remembrances take on new shapes, gain in significance, alter my outlook. What’s most important, they connect me to my father in ways I had never considered. They connect me to so many others.
As I was driving in New Jersey the police pulled me over one evening, searched me, searched my car. My offense? I had changed lanes without signaling.
“With all the maniacs out here driving a hundred miles an hour, since when,” I wanted to know, “do you pull people over and search their cars for changing lanes without signaling?”
In Delaware, another cop, another search, another lie.
“Come on,” I said. “Why’d you really pull me over?”
I was smiling. I wanted a good laugh and would have gone along with this joke if only they had guts enough to tell the truth. But what could they say?
“You were speeding. We clocked you doing seventy-five.”
I had just gone through a toll booth. It couldn’t have been more than five seconds from a dead stop.
“Does this look like a race car to you?” I said. “It doesn’t to me.”
They looked through the car and told me to open the trunk.
“Have you guys got probable cause?” I asked.
They looked up then, paid me more serious attention.
“Are you a lawyer?”
Now it was my turn to lie.
“You got it,” I said. “I sure am.”
They left me alone.
The police and I just don’t get along.
I was arrested once simply for walking down the street in a high-income—white—neighborhood.
“Somebody called in and said there was a black man walking in the neighborhood.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said in a panic. “Where? I didn’t see him.”
The cop didn’t find me amusing. When I refused to show him my ID, he hauled me off to the police station.
And then this last unfortunate encounter that came just before I left St. Louis on this motorcycle.
I had ridden the bike down to the Central West End to meet a friend for lunch. As usual, I was late.
The West End is described as a fashionable part of the city, crowded with chic little shops and cafés. In spring and summer when the weather is sunny and warm, people sit outside at these cafés and enjoy the open air and watch the goings-on. At one of them my friend sat and watched the entire happening.
I had parked my bike down the street. I was late and was walking quickly. As I crossed the street in front of the café, a tan car turned sharply across my path and into the alley. Two men jumped out, one black, the other one white. They were not in uniform. They never flashed a badge. But I knew right away they were cops. Their haircuts. The car. The way they swaggered when they walked toward me. They made sure I saw the guns hanging from their belts. The one cop kept a hand on his pistol.
The black cop hurried to me and yanked away the helmet I carried.
“We need to have a word with you,” he said and shoved me toward the car. “Let’s see some ID.”
“What for?”
“You match the description of a man shoplifting up the street.”
“Was he on a motorcycle? Was he carrying a helmet?”
“He was carrying something. Could have been a briefcase, could have been a helmet. Let me see some ID.”
I refused. He threw me against the car and searched me anyway. He yanked my jacket off my back and went through it. He found nothing. He took the wallet from my pants pocket and went through that too.
“I think we’re going to run you in,” he said. “How would you like that?”
I had to think about it. I didn’t want it, but I wasn’t about to give in to them and cooperate. Finally I raised a finger to the woman waiting for me, just to make sure she knew it was me, and to tell her I’d be a moment or two. If they dragged me off to jail, I didn’t want her to think I had stood her up.
“Is she waiting for you?” the black cop asked, as if that made a difference, as if a shoplifter wouldn’t have a friend waiting, wouldn’t want to break for lunch.
I didn’t answer.
The white cop got a brainstorm. He decided to call in the information from my driver’s license. In a second he came back.
“I think we can let you go,” he said.
“Why? Did some bozo cop
catch the real thief?”
“No,” he said. “It turns out that you don’t match the description after all. The guy we’re looking for is five foot three.”
“Five foot three,” I shouted. “Does he have a beard at least?”
“Well, no. But he is black,” he said, as if that justified everything. “Sorry, but hey, you understand how it is.”
“Well you can just kiss my ass,” I said. “Because no, I don’t know how it is.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” the black cop said, trying to calm me down. “You don’t have to make a scene.”
“You pull up, snatch away my helmet, rip the jacket off my back, search me like I’m some sort of a criminal and I’m the one making a scene? You must be out of your mind.” I was shouting, going crazy.
“Don’t make this any worse than it already is,” he said.
“It can’t get any worse than it already is,” I said.
I put my finger in the black cop’s face. “You especially,” I said through gritted teeth. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Being black is still the crime. And every cop, black or white, is Bull Connor to me. Every cop is a southerner at heart.
And now here in Hartford was another one. A southern one.
He had a slight paunch that hung over his belt, but otherwise was lean. He wore a clean white shirt, sweat stains at the armpits, collar buttoned to the last button but one. Clipped to his belt was his pistol. I waited for him to touch it, was sure he would before long.
Hartford is the county seat. The courthouse sits up on a grassy hill. At the base of the hill is a retaining wall. On the very corner is the phone booth. That’s where I was when the cop, a deputy sheriff, came to me.
I was thumbing through the little phone book hanging from a small chain. You hardly ever find directories hanging in phone booths anymore. People rip pages out of them. People steal them.
I was trying to find a phone number for the Coon Hunters’ Club. It wasn’t listed. When I dialed directory assistance, they didn’t have a number for them either. So I stepped out of the booth and leaned against the wall. The cop was waiting for me.