VI
In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky—her grand old woods—her fertile fields—her beautiful rivers—her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong;
When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten;
That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
—Frederick Douglass
The sun has not yet risen and dew coats the grass with glitter. Liquid diamonds hanging from branches and from leaves drip to the earth as a breeze from the south and from the west whispers warm through the trees. A mockingbird calls the morning to waken. Light appears at the edge of the sky, and acrid fragrances sail aloft. The sulfur smell of gunpowder and rotten eggs rises strangely from the earth, drifting, stinging the senses awake. The scent of pine and damp soil perfumes the morning. Soft moisture bathes the air, a fine mist hangs, light fog floats in stripes across the lake where a lone hawk glides above the water. A fish splashes. The hawk dives and disappears into the fog. Somewhere a propeller plane mutters unseen across the sky, too far away to shatter the stillness. It is a morning so cool and so beautiful, so full of promise, as all mornings are, so delicate and so fine that serenity enters into me as gently as water into sand.
I take a deep breath and hold it. Slowly I let it out and take another. The moist air smells sweet and I can taste it as it warms around me. I can taste it on my tongue.
I fill my lungs. I breathe slowly, easily. For this moment at least, I am at ease.
Now I know why the journey: because I have felt the weight of civilization and have sought relief. I have sought renewal.
You cannot know true satisfaction unless you once have known want, nor hunger until you have tasted plenty, nor serenity until torment has torn at your soul. Until this moment I never knew how tormented I was.
I never knew—or perhaps I did—that my father’s anger has always been my anger, that all black men’s suffering and shame has been my own. What my father and my grandfathers knew, I know. What happened to my brothers happened as well to me, and will descend again to my children yet unborn. We as a people carry these burdens in our genes, pass them from one generation to the next. They are part of who we are.
Beyond the superficial, beyond station and skin and circumstance, there are things shared that make us who we are, something that separates us, distinguishes us—whoever WE are—from the mass of others. Call it collective history. For Black-americans it is, of course, the experience of slavery which marks and demarks us, the shame of it, the pain of it, the bewilderment of it, and the guilt too, perhaps, for having let slavery happen.
I wonder if Jamaican blacks feel as homeless as Blackamericans do. Or Brazilian blacks. I wonder too if they have so little pride that they will look to find their roots generations behind them in a land they never knew and in a people they are not now.
Blackamericans are not unique in their migration to this hemisphere; slavery is a tie that binds all North and South American black men. But others gained their freedom earlier. They outnumbered white men, revolted, and took possession of whole countries. Others made peace with those around them until the various cultures fused. Other black men are Brazilian, Bahamian, Jamaican, Cuban, Haitian. But we in the north, we are neither one thing nor another, a hyphenated people, reminding ourselves of the blatantly obvious, the richest of the lot and the poorest. We know not who we are, nor where we belong.
In Africa black men will tell you this: “From this great distance you seem to have everything. Here in our little villages, very often we have nothing but this, and this is more than wealth: we know who we are. We can look back one hundred years, two hundred years, we can look back forever and we know who our fathers were, where they were born, how they died and where they are buried. But you, American man, you can only look back a few lifetimes and then you are lost. You have everything but this: you do not know who you are.”
Orphaned at an early age and suffering the indignity of a hostile foster home, a Dickensian orphanage, we carry a double burden: this loss of identity and the shame of slavery.
I think I know why white men hate us so—that we were slaves and they were not. Perhaps too that we were slaves and are no longer, for who among men does not long for servants to assure him of his greatness?
But apart from slavery … (And didn’t whites come to America as slaves too? Seventy-five percent of the white immigrants who came to the colonies south of New England between 1620 and 1780 came as indentured servants and bondmen.)
But apart from slavery, are we, black and white, so woefully dissimilar? What the African says about black Americans, couldn’t it just as easily apply to white Americans too? Do they know who they are?
We are mongrels in this country; we are mongrels all.
So what apart from slavery and suffering and skin makes a black American black? Or are slavery and skin reason enough to bond us all in suffering? Or is it, as Franklyn said in Bowling Green, largely other men who make us?
Black immigrants from Haiti. They will for a time remain Haitian-Americans, maintaining two cultures. But the culture that surrounds them eventually will alter them. They will have drunk the water and breathed the air. They will have learned to walk the walk, to talk the talk. They will have absorbed. They will one day, I think, their sons and grandsons, their great-grandsons continuing to live in New York, no longer be who the parents were. They will no longer be Haitian. They will be American. And what’s more, they will be this new thing. They will be niggers as well. Not because of the color of their skin, but because of the way white men treat them. White men will see color and react to it. And these once-Haitians will have absorbed in two generations the pain of three hundred years. And their way of seeing the world will change.
Slavery’s impact touches more than black, but white as well, the shame of it, the lasting pain of it, the bewilderment of it, and the guilt too for having let slavery happen. It has left all of us less than whole.
As I was about to head south, sometime during the long autumn eve leading to war in the Arabian Desert, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces arrayed against Iraq, appeared on television to prepare his country for war, get us ready to hate, give us permission to kill and cheer slaughter. Referring to the Iraqis, soldiers and civilians alike, Schwarzkopf said that they are not part of the same human race that we are.
When the war was over, and this man was transformed into an American hero, there were parades and celebrations, jubilation in the streets for our victory over the enemy, for our mastery and superiority over them. No one recalled Schwarzkopf’s vocabulary of hatred. No one asked where sentiments like his come from or where they lead.
Not part of the same human race.
Words meant to envelop a country and unify it in the warm glow of patriotism and pride.
Not part of the same human race.
They are just the words of one man, but they have a way of entering the collective psyche, the collective awareness, just as they have been taken from there to get cycled around once again. They become the consent we seek to look at other peoples and to hate them, to see in them profound differences from ourselves, to give them nicknames they never deserved and to make jokes about them, to mark them, to force them into concentration camps and to exterminate them, to enslave them, to annihilate them as a people, to steal their land and corral them onto scrubby reservations that would hardly support a pack of coyotes, to burn their villages, to shut our eyes and close our minds and stand idly by while others do the dirty work. They—these others—called out the dogs and set them loose. They—these others—blasted the children with firehoses. They did the humiliating, the mutilating, the shooting, the maiming, the killing. We are the innocent. We had nothing to do wi
th it at all.
We protest these crimes. We cannot see how we perpetuate them. But the sins of the fathers have a way of staining the souls of the sons, a way of settling into the collective memory of a nation. And they will not go away. They have stolen our innocence. They have damaged us. They linger, much as slavery lingers, and they affect how we see and how we are seen by others. Most importantly, our sins determine how we see ourselves.
We are an old nation now, an old world. The bill has come due. We are now paying the price for the sins and indiscretions of our youth, for the bad choices we made in a long line of history. It can be no other way. The bill always comes due.
Not part of the same human race.
Yes, I know why the journey. Simply this: I seek salvation.
I seek a confrontation with the South and with the past, face to face—a baptism of the spirit, a reconciliation, and, in the end, a salvation. I seek a new way of seeing.
I gaze into the water at the edge of the lake. In the bottom of the pool a dark face stares back at me, a face I hardly recognize anymore, the face of a stranger. It is a tired face, a face that does not smile. In this face there is no serenity. The eyes squint. They have become piercing and hard, not as wide around as I remember them. They have about them the look of fatigue. There are puffy circles beneath and the eyelids too are softly swollen. Perhaps that is from sleeping on the ground, or perhaps they have been crying. Perhaps they are about to.
There are more lines in the brow than before. The lips are clamped shut. The beard is grayer than it ought to be, longer, wilder looking. There is something almost menacing in this face, but still it is a pleasant face, not, I would imagine, a face to fear. If I saw me coming toward myself, I would not run and hide. Nor would I panic if my daughter brought home this face to meet me.
So what is it about this face, these hands, these arms, that makes white men fear me, that makes me so repugnant to them? Not long enough ago they would have refused me a seat beside them at a lunch counter. They would have gouged out my eyes for using the same toilet. They would not have wanted to fight beside me, die beside me, live beside me. What is it that makes them even now refuse me a place at table, begrudge me a decent job, a happy existence, a home in the neighborhood, membership at the country club?
Perhaps this, now I begin to see it, is how it is to be black in America, what it really means to be black, to live always with these questions branded, like a slave owner’s markings, on your being, on the back of your mind, on your memory. To look in the mirror and see a face that is hated and feared by men and women who have never laid eyes upon it.
But no. Not this face. Not this gentle, peaceful face. It can’t be me. It can only be the idea of me they hate, for they do not know me really. I hardly know myself.
The wind catches the water, and the water laps gently against the edge of the lake, its sound soothing and inviting, luring me close. The face blurs in the ripples and vanishes.
I scoop my hand into the cold water and rinse my face. I wash the sleep out of my eyes. Another scoop and I taste the water. I rinse my face again. I touch my hand cold to the back of my neck and then, still not quenched, I rise. And the water beckons.
Like baptism.
Swiftly then. Like a child. Before fear prevents me.
A lightning-quick and crazy dip naked into the lake, frigid, heart-stopping madness. Startled awake and then suddenly numb, I am intensely alive one minute, dead the next. Resurrection in reverse. Goose bumps riddle my flesh, clothe my nakedness. Arms flapping, hands clutching, fingers squeezing, I rub sensation back into my body. Hands grope frantically for skin, for legs, arms and shoulders. I am alive again and as happy as Lazarus. Giggling, screaming, freezing, arms wrapped tightly around my ribs, I hop barefoot over stones and sticks, dashing wildly uphill to the stalls and a shower, praying with the fervor of a religious fanatic that I will find hot water.
Oh, the joys of solitude!
When I am alone I am not black. I am not tall. I am not deformed. I am not ugly. When I am alone I am nothing more than a voice whispering, a mind wandering, a spirit soaring. There is just a hint of brown at the inner corners of my sight. If I move my eyes down I can see the brown skin of my nose. I can see the black shadow of my mustache. But unless I lift my arms or move my head and look down at myself, I am colorless, shapeless, two eyes looking out, and yet utterly whole and perfect. An abstraction. A thought. An idea. When I am alone, without other men’s opinions of me, without their eyes attempting to define me, without the ways they treat me, their reactions to me, their fear and their loathing and their disgust, even their kindness, without other men I am simply me.
I wish I could stay in these woods forever, escape this civilization we hold so dear. For if men and women are civilized, I think I should prefer the trees and the remote company of animals.
The dreamer in me searches from time to time for escape from civilization, and I seek renewal in a new skill, a new place, a stranger’s face. It is, perhaps, why I drive fast, why I seek the thrill of danger—a reminder of my mortality and a momentary escape from it as well. To float in the clouds, to plunge into an icy lake, to race down a ribbon of road. Time suspends, elongates, has no meaning. The clock dies and for the briefest moment that seems to last and last, I am alone with only my thoughts, with only myself. It is why I have come south. To find myself.
Will I surrender to hatred? Or will I find peace? The roots of our discord lie buried in the soil of the South, this place that makes us who we are. If the seeds of brotherhood could be planted there, would they not grow alongside the weeds of hatred and choke them out?
The thrill of not knowing. This is my addiction. The wondering what lies beyond the trees, around the bend, over the next hill. The hoping one day to stumble into a miracle.
Over the mountains of the moon you ride, and into the valley of shadows. Along the way you acquire some things, you lose some things. Someone you once held dear has died. Someone you used to be is no more.
Don’t look back, the man said. Something might be gaining on you.
But look back we must.
I have not previously explored the South. I do not know it, yet it is not a land altogether unknown to me. How could it be? I feel the place in my bones.
Here is where my people lived and died. Here is where the new breed was born, where denial and fear slowed the rhythms, where suffering slowed the singing, where the wails became blues, where what joy there was became soul, became jazz, where hope was the religion, where warmth, passion and bitterness were the heritage.
The color red flashes, streaks across the corner of my vision, vanishes, and flashes again. A cardinal darts from branch to branch. When it alights, it sings three long slurred whistles, four crisp chirps.
And suddenly that which yesterday was unthinkable takes shape in the trees. I conceive the inconceivable and this time give voice to it. Could I like this place?
But how could I? How could a black man ever like it here in the South, here where it has never been good to be black, never even been all right to be black? How could a black man ever feel comfortable here?
I had this fleeting notion that even if they don’t like blacks in the South, at least they know us, recognize us. They grew up with us. It must be very hard indeed, I thought, for a white person to live in the South without at the very least knowing someone black. Not so in the North. You can pass your entire life in a cloistered suburb and never see, except on television, a black face, never encounter a black person, talk to him, get to know him, shake his hand.
But no, I have hated the South and feared it since long before I can remember, since before I was born. I have inherited the dread as all blacks have, have heard too long the stories linking me to the horrors of the past. I have hated the South for the poison it spread, for the venom that has left black people less than whole. I realize now that I must reconcile myself with that hatred. I must make peace with this place.
The bike is packed
and I have once more found the road. From the top of a rise I look out across a great vale of green glimmering through the mist. Perhaps on some stagecoach a freed slave rode through this valley on the way west to Tennessee. Light-skinned enough that he would have been allowed to ride the coach. Light-skinned enough that his grandson would have discovered arrogance, tested himself, and been forced to flee north.
The sun begins to rise, stark white in the colorless eastern sky. Above the sky is blue.
Bravado aside, rage and anger on hold, I wonder what will happen once I find the soul of the South and touch it.
My hand reaches slowly to touch my forehead, then slowly down to touch my sternum, left shoulder, right shoulder, hands together, and a little prayer.
Oh God, help me on this road. Protect me. Keep me from harm and keep me from anger. Help me to find the peace I seek.
VII
But my pen stubs its toe on this nigger reality which is like cataracts and old men.
—Mbembe Milton Smith
The road under my wheels shines as after a heavy rain, the smell of wet pavement rising with the morning mist and crowding the space inside my helmet. The sun has climbed into the southern Kentucky sky but not very high, the air is warming but not yet warm, the road to Somerset has not yet dried. Above the eastern horizon a line of thick clouds waits to snare the rising sun and hide its shining, to cast the earth in shadow, to play tricks on the eye with shade and with shafts of light. Shapes form, faces and figures, a guessing game for children, a premonition for me. In the clouds looms something ominous and almost familiar, but something I can only vaguely make out, ever changing in the light wind, the clouds drifting in and out of one another. A new shape appears. A face, perhaps. Someone I know. Someone I have yet to meet.
Or perhaps only a storm advancing. Rain and winter on the way.
The air blows softly, crisp and fresh on my face and on my hands. Quickly, though, the bike gets up to speed and the wind whips past me at eighty miles an hour. Now suddenly the air is freezing, and so am I. Cold rushes by me, cold surrounds me, cold enters into me. Cold that has been transferred from the air to the metal of the bike’s gas tank now releases itself into me. My thighs grip firmly around the tank and the cold of the metal creeps into me there, settles around my legs and spreads down to my toes, up into my back and ripples all the way through my body. I find myself shivering. My teeth chatter. Soon the morning will shake away its chill, and the moisture that has settled during the night will shrink away like a distant memory, but for now the air remains very cool. I ride gloveless and the wind numbs my fingers.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 9
