How can I admire such men and want to be like them? How could I be comfortable in a hotel that I would have been barred from only thirty years ago—within my lifetime!
There used to be a Howard Johnson’s on Kingshighway near Natural Bridge in St. Louis, in my old childhood neighborhood. I went to buy an ice cream cone there once when I was little. They refused to serve me. I didn’t know why. I had money. I wasn’t acting silly. But they told me I couldn’t come in.
I was just a kid. What did I know about racism and segregation? How was I to know that being black was bad, that being black made me hateful? My parents and friends loved me. How could someone who didn’t even know me despise me?
My parents had always refused to go there. As a child I never knew why. As an adult I can see more clearly. Now that I know, I utterly refuse to spend money in any Howard Johnson’s restaurant or hotel.
“But you’re punishing them for things that happened in the past,” Andrew said.
How else to let them know that they cannot get away with being willfully evil and then later, after the damage has already been done, simply apologize it away by saying they didn’t know any better? How can that be any different from Nazis in the death camps who excused their guilt by saying they were only following orders?
I have Jewish friends who will not visit Germany because they remember what the Nazis did to them there, who will not listen to the music of Wagner because Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite and because the Nazis used his music almost as theme songs of hate.
My friend CooChung Chao’s mother had a fit because CooChung once bought a Japanese car. She remembers what horrors the Japanese committed in China, and she cannot forgive them.
“We all breathe the air of our times,” Andrew said.
That’s too easy, I told him. That just gives us an excuse for everything we do. Howard Johnson’s should have known better. We all should have known better.
I cannot sleep in a Howard Johnson’s hotel, cannot eat in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.
I cannot even look fondly upon that late summer day in 1964 when the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team won the last game of the season against the New York Mets. The victory gave the Cardinals the league championship and sent them into the World Series. I was there that afternoon. And when pandemonium broke out and the fans stormed onto the field after the game to celebrate, my brother and I were right there with them, running and screaming along with everybody else. We thought all the world was fun and laughter.
But I cannot now remember that day with a child’s unmitigated joy, cannot remember old Sportsman’s Park without knowing that St. Louis had the last big league ballpark with segregated seating. I cannot even think of major league baseball without thinking of injustice, without thinking of the great black ballplayers in the old Negro Leagues who because of their color were never given a chance. I can think of very little from this country’s past that does not cause my heart to break.
These things may not have happened to me directly, I told Andrew, but because they happened at all, they happened to me.
“Sounds like you’re pretty outraged,” he said.
“Outraged?” I said, thinking of the Mancinis at the party in Connecticut. “That’s putting it mildly. I’m so far beyond rage I scare myself.”
I don’t see the world in simple ways anymore, I told him. I see everything in terms of history and race and am reminded at every turn, more than anything else, that not now or ever has it been all right to be black. And the question I need answered, the only thing that is going to keep me from losing my mind, is: Will it ever be in the future—can it ever be—all right to be black?
“Of course it’s all right to be black,” Andrew said, but he said it in an offhanded, casual way. “You ride a beautiful motorcycle. You sound educated. You look like you’re doing all right, successful and all that. You’re big, you’re strong. I bet nobody gives you a lot of trouble.”
You don’t understand, I told him. I am an isolated case. Of course there are going to be individual success stories. And you’re right, I don’t have a problem with being black. I like being black. I feel there is nothing I can’t do, nothing that’s too good for me, and nobody better than me. There are better brains and better athletes, but nobody better. And absolutely nobody I’d rather be. The problem is that I am a freak. I am not the norm. Being black for a lot of people is not the picnic it is for me. I am very comfortable being black, yes, so comfortable in fact that I never gave it a second thought until now, hardly even knew I was black until I started feeling these things I now feel. Now being black is all I think about.
I am worried, I told him, for my unborn children.
A cop pulled me over for speeding in Henderson, I told Andrew. It was about an hour from Raleigh. He was a white cop who didn’t give me any trouble, but he didn’t make it easier either. He was gruff and serious, didn’t make small talk, didn’t smile. He just unpleasantly wrote out a ticket and gave it to me. I couldn’t help think that if I had been white he would have been a little more congenial.
“But maybe he would not have,” Andrew said. “Maybe he was just mean, or having a rotten day.”
Maybe. But because racism exists, I have to wonder.
“I don’t want to think like this,” I said. “I never used to, but now I can’t help it. I’m trapped.”
So I went to the batting cage just outside Henderson and vented my frustration. I must have taken a hundred badly timed swings at pitches a little leaguer could have pulverized. I missed most of them.
Andrew had stopped laughing now and was listening intently as I ranted. Although he seemed very concerned, he did look a little confused.
“I’m not an educated man,” he said. “I just work in a gas station, for God’s sake. I don’t think about these things. All I do is put a little gas in cars for people who don’t want to do it for themselves. The big event of my work day is when I come down here and watch the trains pull in and out of the station.”
“And dream,” I said, finishing his thought the way I was sure he was going to, the way I wanted him to. “And dream of getting out of here.”
He looked sharply at me.
“I never said that.” He almost barked at me.
“What did you say, then?” I asked. “When the train pulled out you told me you wished you could be on it.”
“Yep, I did tell you that,” he said. “But you didn’t hear it the way I meant it. I don’t hate the South the way you do. I don’t even know the South that you know. And you sure don’t know the South the way I do.”
“All I know about the South is its history,” I said. “Its hatred and its injustice. And every day on this road I see how the South is doing all it can to hold on to its racist past. Rebel flags and little reminders all over the place. And I know too that if I’m going to get to the soul of the South, first I have to encounter the dark heart of this racist past. And that’s what I’m doing.”
Andrew was shaking his head.
“But why?” he said. “You’re missing so much more.”
“It wasn’t my choice,” I said. “Believe me. All I wanted to do was go across that bridge.”
* * *
There is a bridge in Virginia that’s seventeen miles long. It’s actually part bridge and part tunnel. It skims so low over the choppy water at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay that I started to feel seasick as I crossed it. Then it dips under the surface of the sea—twice—so that naval warships based at Newport News and cargo vessels can slide in and out of the bay. It is a marvel.
Some years ago I lived in Dover, Delaware. Highway 13 passes through the center of town. Just about at the end of that highway, which goes through Maryland, then Virginia, is the bridge. Many times I promised myself that I would take the two-and-a-half-hour drive and cross that bridge, and then come back. But the bridge was too close, always there. And because I could do it anytime I wanted, I never felt compelled to do it. So I never did.
But now, being in the South, and riding around Virginia, as I had been before I came to North Carolina, I really had the urge to see what man can do when he puts his mind to it. I knew at some point that I would make my way to the coast and ride down the appendix that juts out from the bottom of Maryland, cross over the bay into Norfolk, and then ride back up toward Richmond before making my way to Raleigh and here to Andrew.
So I crossed from Kentucky into western Virginia and camped in the mountains. I ate country ham and red-eye gravy at a dingy diner in Marion. The coconut pie was not good. Then I woke early and rode in the silence of the morning mist.
You know how it is when you drive in the mist to the crest of a high hill or a mountain. When you get to the top suddenly it’s very clear and you can see across the whole of creation, down into the valleys where the heavy mist lies, and up to the peaks that are not as high as you are but that rise above the clouds. The clouds and the mist swirl around the tips of the mountains and lie in stripes on the hillsides. The forests drip fleece. The fog feels like rain.
The sun awakens, rises, dries the air and warms the earth. As far as you can see there is green and green and still more green in various shades, striped with gray for a short while longer. And the road winds into the mountains like a wriggling worm that has no end. And sometimes it crosses your mind how ugly highways can be and yet on mornings like this, how simply beautiful.
Such beauty as this that runs along the Blue Ridge Mountains and up through the Shenandoah River Valley steals the breath away and stings the eyes. Such beauty as this brings the eyes to tears.
You would think nothing in this world, past or future, could spoil such absolute splendor.
But in this country Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fought campaign after campaign—to threaten Washington, to invade the North, to defend Southern soil. Up and down this valley and across the whole state, from the Rapidan to the Rappahannock, from Petersburg to Fredericksburg to Richmond and Antietam. The sacred soil of Virginia has been watered with blood and made fertile with corpses.
I rode the valley, I told Andrew, and followed the route of Lee’s army into that small town in Pennsylvania. I toured the battlefield there—twice. For kicks I stopped at the souvenir stand and bought a Confederate soldier’s gray cap.
I tramped through battlefield after battlefield, the ones they call the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, Antietam in Maryland, Manassas and New Market. My shoes were soaked with blood.
I could not tell how the other tourists thought of the war, the two noble causes, or of slavery itself. All I could think of was the slavery.
Heading ever closer to the coast and to the highway that would lead me to the bridge, I met a man who would become my friend. He lives on the edge of Baltimore. His name is Frank.
There is no nicer man. When my bike was stuck in the mud, he dirtied himself far more than I did to help push it out. I stayed in his home, became friends with his wife and three children, and when I left, the invitation was open to return. “Soon,” he said. “Come back soon.”
But one evening in his study I found my new friend wondering about me what too many strangers have wondered.
He was quite delicate about it, and we talked around it for a long time, but eventually he asked how I found time and money and where I got the interest to travel to faraway places—as if my world rightfully should be so small.
When we talked about the past, and he mentioned that his grandfathers had both been engineers, I saw at once the difference between his expectations for himself and his expectations for me.
All a black person can say when talking about deep ancestry is that his forefathers brought forth on this continent were not conceived in liberty, but were slaves instead, and sons of slaves.
My own great-great-great-grandfather was a slave, and family rumor puts him nearby, in Virginia. I hate him, hate him for not having the courage to die rather than endure the humiliation of slavery. Did he not think what his indignity would lead us to? Did he not care about those who would follow? Could he not imagine what effect his captivity would have on the psyches of the heirs of slavery—slave and slave owner? It would have been better to die.
Everywhere I looked there were monuments to the war to maintain slavery and to the slavers themselves, in the battlefield shrines and the society itself, but nowhere any sign of shame or remorse, instead only reminders that the war is not yet over.
At Appomattox Court House, the site where Lee surrendered his army and the war in the east ended, there is a plaque.
HERE ON SUNDAY APRIL 9,1865,
AFTER FOUR YEARS OF HEROIC STRUGGLE IN DEFENSE OF
PRINCIPLES BELIEVED FUNDAMENTAL TO THE EXISTENCE OF OUR
GOVERNMENT, LEE SURRENDERED 9000 MEN, THE REMNANT OF AN
ARMY STILL UNCONQUERED IN SPIRIT
“And that spirit is racist,” I was telling Andrew in Raleigh. “The war is not over. Nor the spirit that led to it.”
“Of course it is,” Andrew said.
I disagreed.
Our government, the plaque says. Whose government, I wanted to know.
Over the capitol buildings of nearly half the states in the South flies a flag, I explained, that proclaims loud and clear how utterly unconcerned the South is about its black citizens—the same now as it was forty, sixty, one hundred, two hundred years ago.
“How do you expect a black person to feel,” I said, “in a society that so blatantly reminds him how emotionally tied his government still is to a system that fought to keep his ancestors in slavery?”
Almost every state flag in the South takes its design from the flags of the Confederacy.
(Remember that there were four Confederate flags, all of them retaining the red-white-and-blue of the old federal flag, displaying their roots: the Stars and Bars, a blue canton with seven stars in a circle, three broad horizontal stripes red on white on red; the Battle Flag, a red field crossed by a blue and white X holding the thirteen stars of the original colonies; the Stainless Banner, a stark white field with the battle flag in the upper left-hand corner. The last Confederate flag was like the Stainless Banner but with a broad vertical red band.)
The state flag of Florida is a white field crossed by a broad red X; the state seal lies in the center. The state flag of Mississippi has the battle flag in the canton corner with three broad stripes of blue, white, and red. The state flag of North Carolina has a blue canton corner beside one red and one white stripe. The state flag of Georgia has a blue band holding the state seal alongside the Confederate battle flag. The state flag of Texas, a lone star in a blue field beside one red and one white stripe. The state flag of Alabama is a big red X on a white field. And right beneath this flag as it flies over the state capitol waves a taunting Confederate battle flag, right where George Wallace put it, symbol of hate, symbol of segregation, symbol of pride—for southern whites only.
Symbols are indivisible, Benvisti said. If it’s mine, it can’t be yours.
And this is exactly what the South seems to be saying: “We don’t care if our symbols are hateful to you and upset you or remind you of our inhuman treatment toward you. We don’t care because these are the sources of our pride and we do not concern ourselves with your pride. These are our symbols and not yours. And you do not share in what is ours.”
It’s as if in all this time we have learned nothing about sensitivity to others.
Those flags hark back to a struggle to hang on to an institution that denied humanity to a people. They glorify a tradition that excludes blacks. And if you want to start a fight, there is no quicker way than to suggest that the rebel flag ought never fly, or that the state flags of the South ought all to be changed.
“Well, you’re right about that,” Andrew said. “I sure don’t want to see nothing changed. It’s our history.”
“And how do you think Jews in Germany would feel if the Nazi flag were still the official flag in that country?”
He rubbed his chin. I could hear the scratc
hing sound his hand made as it ran over his razor stubble.
“Not very good, I guess.”
“They would feel somebody was trying to tell them something,” I said. “Symbols aren’t everything but they go a long way toward maintaining or changing attitudes.”
Everywhere, hardly anything to even suggest that blacks are part of this country and played a role in this history and its shaping.
In an old cemetery in Boston, Crispus Attucks lies in a grave. But if you didn’t know who Attucks was, you would never suspect that a black man had fought in the American Revolution. Black men fought on both sides in the revolution. The English promised freedom to those black slaves who fought for the crown. And when that war was over, the English would not abandon them to a fate worse than slavery, but took them home to England. But are there monuments there to the blacks who fought and died for the empire?
It’s as if black men and women have been erased from history.
Right here in Raleigh, I told Andrew—as if he didn’t already know—the capitol is surrounded by statues and monuments.
A woman sits with a book, a boy with a sword kneels at her side. This is the monument to the women of the Confederacy.
Henry Lawson Wyatt stands nobly on a plinth. He was the first Confederate soldier to fall in the Civil War, at Bethel Church—June 10, 1861.
There are statues of George Washington, a man named Vance, another named Aycock, and a statue of Charles McIver. There is a monument to Samuel A’Court Ashe: patriot, soldier, legislator, Christian, citizen.
There is the great monument to Our Confederate Dead, and one to Worth Bagley, the first to fall in the Spanish-American War.
James Polk, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, three presidents with ties to North Carolina.
But the only hint that blacks ever did anything worth mentioning is a statue to the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Two white soldiers carrying a dead black one.
But monuments everywhere to the warriors who fought to keep slavery.
In Richmond all along Monument Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined street, there are huge statues of Stonewall Jackson, of Jefferson Davis, of Robert E. Lee, of Jeb Stuart.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 12
