This is the life I had been prepared for, a life of ease and comfort, gentility and good taste.
But suddenly that decorous life no longer appealed to me. It seemed somehow so inadequate, as if something terribly important was missing. It did not reflect the world I had recently come to know. It lacked truth.
The house had all the worldly signs of refinement, all the comforts one could reasonably want. But it lacked realness and grit. It was sterile.
A house full of affluent, intelligent people and they didn’t have a clue about the real world. It was like a cartoon, not real at all. The conversations were carried on in hushed murmurs, static noise.
And on the patio a man was advocating war for the sole purpose of testing an army. Killing people as if it were some sort of game.
No wonder the world is in the shape it’s in.
My head was spinning. My vision blurred. I felt sick to my stomach. I tried to resist but found at last that I could not control myself. After Africa, who can? Suddenly I was back at the checkpoints with soldiers’ rifles stuck in my ribs, with beggars and starving children swarming at my side, with illness and utter powerlessness at my throat.
In the course of a lifetime there are experiences so powerful that they become part of us. A place we’ve been, a thing we’ve seen, something heard or read or done. These events are more than mere memory. They shape us. They define us. They alter the way we think and feel, and the way we see the world. Ernest Hemingway said it of Paris, that if you have the good fortune of living there in your youth, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it will always stay with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
Africa had become my moveable feast.
Africa was with me still. The sufferings of other black men and women would remain with me always.
And then there was my childhood. I could not forget where I had been, how far I had come and the unfairness of fortune. The landscape of my memory was littered with friends who had not escaped. I could not forget them. All of a sudden I was bothered by what it means to be black in this country and to be a man and to be a black man.
I took a deep breath. I looked at my inquisitor, and he looked at me with a smirk that said he knew he had me: that America was paradise, and that I should appreciate living here.
“You just don’t understand, do you?” I said. “You haven’t got a clue.”
I can hardly describe what happened next. From my lips, through no control or desire of my own, all the anger of the ages funneled into me and then spewed out again. I lost half my mind. In the torrent of my venom I reminded him that I was black.
“What do you mean?” he said. “What has that got to do with anything?”
“It means that I understand everything about you,” I said. “I know where you’re coming from and what you’re thinking. I can get inside your head because in so many ways I am like you. I have your same twisted dreams and aspirations. I know what you want and I know what you feel because this culture has taught me to think like you. But you don’t know a thing about me. You don’t know who I am. You don’t have an inkling what it feels like to be black. And what’s more, you don’t even try. You don’t even care.”
He was stunned. He didn’t know what to say. He stared for a second, then stammered, and then he was quiet.
“I care,” he said. “What makes you think I don’t care?”
“Because if you and all the people who claimed to care really cared,” I said, “things wouldn’t be as bad as they still are. Africa is not the only place with inhuman poverty and injustice.”
He wanted to talk to me about New York City.
“The greatest city in the world,” he called it. “It’s got everything, rich and poor, black and white, side by side. People of all races live together and they get along fine. It’s truly a melting pot.”
“What New York City are you talking about?” I shouted. “There’s a hundred thousand homeless people living on the streets there. And blacks and whites and Koreans and Jews killing each other every day. Don’t you read the papers? You can’t be this naive.”
“I spend a lot of time in New York,” he said. “I never have a problem.”
“You think that because you can’t see the problems the problems don’t exist,” I said. “I don’t know what part of New York you’ve been hanging around, but come with me tomorrow. I’ll show you a New York you’ve never seen before. I’ll show you places where you won’t even want to get out of your car. Even in daytime. I’ll show you places where the poverty and suffering will make you sick.”
He stammered, didn’t know what to say.
“I’m almost thirty-five years old,” I said. “I have almost surpassed my life expectancy. According to the statistics, because I am black and because I am a man and because I live in a city, I’ve got a better chance of being dead or at best on drugs or in jail than I have of seeing my next birthday.”
Then the host joined in. He offered that things might not be as bad as they seemed. He said, “Certainly black people are a lot better off than they were in the past.” Bill Cosby, he pointed out, made forty million dollars last year.
I looked at him like he was crazy. Then I lost the other half of my mind.
“Because one black man made a lot of money,” I said, “you think things have gotten so much better? What’s wrong with you people? Are you so blind that you can’t see anything?” Now they were all listening to me.
Climb inside my head, I told them. Climb in and see what it’s like to be black. See what it’s like to always wonder if what happens to you is happening because of your color. See what it’s like to constantly be under suspicion, to always be seen as criminal or deficient. Can you possibly know what that feels like? And if a man as fortunate as I can feel this way, can you imagine how the less fortunate must feel?
The system is stacked, I told them.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “If I were poor and destitute I’d go where the money is, I’d stick up your neighborhood. I’d break into your house. But the way justice works in this country, it doesn’t pay to break into your house. Listen, if a black man kills another black man, he gets a light sentence; if he kills a white man, he gets life in prison at least, the death penalty probably. The same is true for burglars. The system is stacked. If I were a criminal, I wouldn’t steal from some miserable wretch as poor as I am; what am I going to get, a TV, a stereo? I’d steal from somebody who’s got something I can really use. I’d steal from somebody who benefited most from the injustice. And you can bet we’d find a solution pretty quick if all the poor people stopped robbing and stealing from each other and started coming up here to your neighborhood. If they started marching into ritzy white neighborhoods and torching rich people’s houses, you can bet that would shake up some things.”
It went on like this for forty minutes. And it got worse.
“The best thing we can do is to burn it all down and start all over,” I shouted. “Just line up all the people who aren’t trying to make it better, line up all the people teaching hate, and shoot them. In fact, we ought to just line up everybody over the age of thirty and start shooting. Or over the age of twenty. Or even fifteen. Just line them up against the wall and get rid of them all.”
“What good would that do?”
“It would be a start. There wouldn’t be any people left to teach their kids to hate. I would say kill everybody over the age of five, but somebody has to be around to raise the kids.”
“But you’re over twenty,” he said. “You’re over thirty.”
“Start with me,” I said. “I have gained from the way things are. I’m part of the problem. Shoot me first, set fire to my house. I’ll make that sacrifice. What sacrifice will you make?”
The hostess was sobbing now.
“There’s no point going on,” she said weakly, as much to herself as to her husband. “Can’t you see you just can’t get through to some people?”
A young wom
an had pulled my brother into the kitchen. I heard her say, “Why isn’t your brother more like you?”
“More like me?” Tommy said. “I’m the hot-headed one. He’s the one who’s always so polite and quiet.”
“He’s so hostile and malicious!”
“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why should I pity man more than he pities me?… Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.… If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.”
These words of Frankenstein’s creation leapt burning to my ears.
“I guess he’s just seen too much,” my brother was saying.
Once in the car my brother howled out in glee.
“Big Ed!” he shouted. He seemed happy. “Should I call you Mr. X, or will Malcolm be all right? You were a raving madman!”
He started to laugh.
“Did you see their faces?” he said. “They thought you had brought the revolution. They thought it was right outside their front door. They thought you were serious.”
“What makes you think I wasn’t?”
“Right, Malcolm,” he said, and we laughed.
“You’re just a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” he said. “I know it and you know it too.” He laughed until he nearly convulsed.
“But they sure didn’t know it,” he said. “Wait till I call your mother and father. Wait till I tell them how their baby boy was carrying on, shaking up the suburbs and scaring the white folks.”
He was genuinely thrilled. And then he got quiet and a little bit pensive. He slowed the car and looked at me.
“Welcome back,” he said.
We passed under a street lamp and the light caught dimly in his eyes. The laughter had gone. A wrinkle furrowed his brow. It lasted only a second, and then it was dark again.
* * *
I rode on quietly. The South was on my mind. The South was within me. And the prospect of going there left me brooding, for if things were as they were in the North, how bad then would they be in the South?
Africa had become a moveable feast for me because I had been there. The South was a moveable feast long before I even thought of going there—it had begun to affect everything I saw, every person I met, everything I thought and felt, long before I mounted the bike and headed out on the road.
It would not be an easy holiday tour, this much I knew—a journey not only across the South but back in time as well and into the future, and, most importantly, into the mind of a black man.
I wished the Mancinis and their guests could travel with me.
* * *
The road south carried me through New York City to Coney Island, out into the harbor beneath Miss Liberty’s blind eye, out to Ellis Island.
I hadn’t been to Coney Island in fifteen years. I had never been to Ellis Island.
How different Coney Island seemed to me now. The gauzy curtain of time throws a soft haze over old memories, and everything is colored by newly darkened bifocals.
I walked along the beach and remembered my first roller coaster, how I had adored it and how after each ride I had stood in the long line waiting for the thrill to repeat. But with each ride the thrill lessened, wide eyes narrowed, innocence receded as innocence does, like an aging man’s hairline. It was never the same.
Nor was I, as I walked in the shadow of the Cyclone, the name for that old roller coaster, and could not conjure up that long-ago rush of excitement. Too many years had gone by, too many other emotions barred the way, too many ghosts had come between.
The ghosts that haunt the cold stone halls of Ellis Island are not black ghosts. They whisper only part of the story. Photos on the walls, old tables and chairs left neatly in place, the past echoes quietly as if the fury of the world passed through these rooms and left nothing but serenity.
Ellis Island is a national monument, but where is the black person’s Ellis Island, where the monument, however rusted over in the shame of chains and slavery, to immigrants from Africa? No reminders that blacks are, have been, and will always be part of the history.
Perhaps because the reminders would be too filled with shame and pain. For all.
And so, no reminders here in the North, the liberal and urban North, no reminders of the riots in 1864 New York or in 1917 Chicago in which blacks were picked out for slaughter, the thirty-nine dead blacks, the thousands left homeless after race riots that same year, 1917, in East St. Louis.
Life in the South was a horror that many blacks fled, the flight from Egypt. But what of this place they fled to, this promised land? Better? Or did they find that the South truly begins at the Canadian border?
When I am in church—on the road or in my hometown—why is my pew always the last to fill? I know how Catholics like to sit alone with their God, how they will always take an unoccupied pew. I prefer an unoccupied pew myself, and that’s usually where I find myself. Unless mass is absolutely packed, Christmas or Easter, or unless I’m in a black church, I am always the only one in my row, always the last one anybody wants to sit next to. I am forever sniffing my armpits in church to see what’s the matter.
No wonder my hair is falling out.
No matter what I do, good, bad, or indifferent, always it seems I am reminded just how black I am.
No wonder that the links in this chain are wrapped tight around my neck and yanking me south.
I do not believe in predestination, nor really that the gods in whose hands our lives lie have some carefully designed strategy. But from all quarters the South had been singing to me the song of the Sirens. If there are these gods, perhaps they from time to time shift the winds to see what we will do next with the new circumstance of our lives. If there is a destiny, perhaps it is a constantly shifting one, and it is up to us not merely to live it but to discover it based on all we have seen and heard and felt.
Our human hearts are like bits of sponge soaking up memory and experience, swollen with a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a small taste of some other thing: a small child afraid in the darkness, a little boy crying in the back of a classroom. We either surrender to our anxieties, to our shame, or we fight them and redefine ourselves. Otherwise we are not masters of our fate, not much better than the choiceless animals, mere hostages to circumstance, more amoebae than men.
We may be the sum total of all we have seen and heard and felt, but we are not hostages to that past, not unless we choose to be. We are connected to our past selves the same as we are connected to our ancient ancestors and to history, by a time line that has run since always, a road winding through mountains and ending just in front of us. The road ahead must be blazed, through the trees and over the mountains, by each of us. It is a road that has touched time and all that time has ever tasted.
With one eye on the past we look ahead, emptying ourselves to leave the layer of rocks upon which we stand and reach above, shinnying up to the next level, one foot remaining on the level below to steady us until we can hoist ourselves higher. We climb. Perhaps from there, from the next level, we can find a better view.
* * *
And so with these thoughts and memories I came to the shores of Lake Cumberland in Kentucky to pitch my little one-man tent. The sun was going down. The fire at the horizon slowly died out. The sky had taken on the quiet colors of late evening, steel gray in the east, palest blue overhead, misty rose in the place where the sun had last smiled. Most of the boaters had surrendered to the coming darkness, had driven their boats to the landing and were winching them onto trailers. A few grasped at the last straws of daylight and stayed out on the
water just a little while longer. Some sped across the lake, back and forth, dragging skiers behind, trying to roar the evening awake. The loud motors of their boats spoiled the stillness. The water swelled into mini-tides and sloshed heavily against the shore. Others fished. It was the best time for that. The evening had taken away the heat. Insects settled on the water. Hungry fish were splashing after them. A fisher could hardly miss at a time like this. Only the darkness falling swiftly, and the motorboaters, could send them to shore.
When all had left the water and the area, I lit a little fire. Up on the hill was a small stall, toilets and showers. I went up to find water.
The boaters had all gone home. I was the only one left, the lone camper. I was alone on the earth.
The water in the lake settled down and smoothed over as if a chill wind had turned the surface to ice. Trees became silhouettes in the fading light, then shadows barely reflecting at all off the water. A star appeared. Then another. The sky lost the last color it would see till morning. The evening tired. So did I.
Crickets awakened one by one and sang their night songs. Birds called their mates to nest. Frogs on the banks croaked a startling sound, bass to the symphony. And at the very instant that all was darkness, the symphony crescendoed to silence.
Then it started again and I fell from my trance. I was in the South.
The smoke from the fire drifted to me. The scents of growing tobacco that had filled my head all day now filled my memory. I sniffed my hand. It still smelled of Franklyn’s, still smelled of southern soil. Although I had never smelled it before, it was a familiar smell, like a taste in my memory, like home. The night smelled the way the South ought to smell. Green and dark and smoky.
It was bizarre. I felt suddenly and strangely at ease.
I stumbled down the hill with the water and found my way. I opened a sack of rice.
Rice, I think, is a miracle.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 8
