“It’s so one-sided, so prevalent,” I said, “after a while you get the feeling somebody is trying to tell you something.”
Just across the river from Washington I had gone to Anacostia where abolitionist Frederick Douglass had lived. His home is a national monument, and that says something, but the day I was there, all the visitors were black.
Benvisti backwards: Symbols are indivisible; if it’s yours, it can’t be mine.
Andrew looked at me sadly and said, “Kudzu.”
I thought he had sneezed.
“Kudzu,” he said again, and I looked at him like he was crazy.
“Kudzu?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’ve seen that plant that grows wild all over the place. I think it only grows in the South, but it comes from Japan, I believe. And it just takes over everything, covers everything. You see it growing in the valleys, at the side of the road, up the trunks of trees, across telephone wires. It consumes everything. It’s kind of like racism. It’s kind of like being obsessed.”
I nodded.
“I guess it’s true,” he said. “If you want to get to the soul of the South, you do have to touch the dark heart of our racist past. Just like you said. But still, something about that ain’t right.”
Andrew was looking at me with his eyes round like saucers, but he kept shaking his head. He wasn’t shaking it as if to say “no,” he wasn’t disagreeing with me, and he wasn’t saying he didn’t understand. He was saying: “Um-mm. That ain’t entirely right.”
Every time he shook his head he said, “Um-mm.” He was telling me that the way I was seeing things was simply wrong.
“Don’t you know?” he said. “Don’t you know you ain’t never going to be able to enjoy this magnificent machine and this trip if you don’t stop acting like a fool? Just get on with it. ‘Cause if you don’t, you ain’t never going to see the South. You’re going see this thing you think is the South. And I guess in a crazy way, you’ll be just like the racists you’re screaming about. You won’t be seeing what’s really there, you’ll only see what you want to see.
“The South is not that bad. We’re just a race of people trying to hold on to our pride, that’s all. If we had never fought the Civil War, who knows where we might be. I think the end of slavery would have come. I think it would have been more peaceful. But we had everything rammed down our throats. We had to push back. We had to find a way to form our own society along lines that weren’t too unfamiliar to us. We already had a system of separation. We just exaggerated it. We had a wounded pride, and we were looking for a simple way to take away the sting. Nobody was thinking about the future. Nobody ever does.”
He spoke softly and very slowly. Before he had said that he never thought about such things. Now he was telling me that all southerners think about such things.
“How could we not?” he said. “Even when we’re not thinking about it, we’re thinking about it. Just like you are. It’s going to tear us all apart.”
He gazed longingly up the tracks. He still wanted to be on that train. I could tell.
“Don’t you wish you could fly away from here?” I said.
“Yeah, I do. But not to the North like you might be thinking. I never saw the North as some kind of haven where everything would be wonderful and different. I expect it’s all pretty much the same. You look at the TV, and the things that are tearing us up down here are tearing you all to pieces up there. I never wanted to go north, I just wanted to go anywhere. It doesn’t matter where.
“That train is going somewhere and I’m not,” he said. “When the sun comes up in the morning, I’m going to be right here. I’m going to be the same old man in the same old place. And nothing is ever really going to change for me. I’ve spent my whole life around here. Just like everybody I know. I know the same people I’ve always known. I’m the same man I was twenty years ago.”
He patted his belly.
“A little fatter,” he said. He offered a smile that was not filled with mirth. “But the same man.”
And the smile went away.
“I think the same as I always did,” he said. “And I think the same as everybody around me. I don’t want to go away and stay away. I just want to go and be somebody else for a while. When I come back, and sure enough I’d come back, maybe I’d see this place a little different. And everything else too. But I don’t hate the South, and you shouldn’t either. When you do, what you’re saying is that you hate me. You hate my family and all my friends. And you don’t even know us.”
Now Andrew grew very quiet and very serious. He took off his cap and wiped his brow with his left forearm. He ran his hand over his balding head.
“You know,” he said, “I once thought—and this was some years ago—that in twenty more years we would have this problem licked, somehow all sorted out and all together. Twenty more years. That’s all it would take, I thought. Maybe it’ll be twenty more years from now.”
“Only if we’re lucky,” I said. “And only if we work really hard at it.”
He was thinking. He had started to frown and now I could feel how my own face had wrenched tightly into almost a scowl.
“What can I do?” he said. “This is the way I am, this is the way we are. You can’t expect us to change overnight and all of a sudden deny everything that we have ever been and be something completely new.”
His question made me think of a man—Dan Jordan—I had met a short while back as I was riding up the Shenandoah Valley. I had stopped off in Charlottesville, Virginia, to send a postcard to a friend who had graduated from the university there.
It was a wet afternoon. I had been strolling along the downtown mall that runs the length of Main Street. I had eaten breakfast and browsed the book shops and as I was going back to the bike I met Eugene Williams. He was coming out of his office and was about to get into his car, which was parked next to my bike.
“Where are you from?” he wanted to know. I wanted to know how it was that everyone recognized me as a stranger.
He just shrugged, and we went back to his office to talk.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Home,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. It just slipped out.
“Home?”
I nodded. “Some place where I can find peace and feel at ease,” I said.
“Home is not some place you find,” he told me. “Home is where you find yourself. No mythical promised land that you can dream about. You’ve got to sink your bucket where you are, dig a well, plant a little garden, and make the best of where you are. That’s what we’re trying to do around here. Trying to make things better right here, right now.”
His organization, Dogwood Housing, is trying to help poor people buy their own homes. He sends out a newsletter encouraging people to face up to the problems of the community and take charge of their own lives and make things better. He points out problems. He offers solutions. He gives advice. He guides young people.
Eugene Williams is my hero.
“It’s not all about the white man,” he said. “We need to take care of ourselves a little bit better. You’d be surprised how many of us start to make it and then just abandon the rest of us. We are part of our own problem.”
He invited me to his house for dinner that evening and his wife stuffed me until I couldn’t walk. The next morning I went to see the man Andrew in Raleigh made me think of, Dan Jordan, who is the executive director of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s old estate. Eugene had given me Dan Jordan’s name and told me he would be an interesting man to talk to. I phoned him and we made an appointment. Then I went to interview him.
We talked formally a little while. He told me how they were actively engaged in trying to include blacks into the history of Monticello. After all, Jefferson had owned slaves his whole life. He freed only seven of them, all of them skilled workers and artisans Jefferson expected to prosper as free men. Jordan seemed to want that side of the story told. He wanted it known that Mo
nticello would not have been the great place it was without the help of black men and women.
But the interview degenerated quickly into a friendly chat. I wasn’t so interested in Jefferson and the past as I was in Jordan and the future. And I asked him point blank, “If a man grows up in a racist society and is a product of it, even with the best of intentions, do you think he can ever stop being a racist?”
He answered the question quickly and just as matter-of-factly as I had asked it.
“He will always be a racist,” he said. “I don’t see how you can take out what’s been bred in you, not in the society we live in. All you can do is pretend. You may not be able to change those inherent attitudes, but if you try real hard, and pretend real hard, you can, I think, change your behavior. And that will help change the attitudes of the next generation.”
He told me just a little about his daughter.
“She lives in New York,” he said. “And I’m sure she’s dated black men. I’m not real comfortable with that, but it’s a new world and I’ve got to get used to it. You can’t keep holding people back.”
Dan Jordan is also my hero.
“Maybe I can’t change,” he said. “But I can keep from forcing my racist attitudes on my daughter and let her make up her own mind. If we all did just that, and stopped teaching hate, maybe the world would sort itself out. But it’s a struggle. It won’t happen overnight.”
* * *
“You can’t expect us to change overnight,” Andrew, the gas station attendant in Raleigh, later said.
“Not overnight,” I said. “I can want it, but you’re right, I can’t expect it. But what you can do is open your mind. Try to see in a different way. Try for just a little while to see the world the way I see it. Then maybe you and I can share some kind of understanding.”
He was nodding. His frown softened, but only a little.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll meet you halfway. You have to open your mind too. Try not to hate the South so much. We might surprise you. Some of us are, but most of us are not bad people. You might even find that you like it here. And wouldn’t that be something?”
“It would,” I said.
I reached out my hand and he took it. He held it and said, “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Stop looking back so much,” he said. “You’ve got to get on with it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He let go of my hand.
“Do you know why I really come down here every day? I come down here,” he said, “to look at the pretty girls getting on and off the train. They remind me what it was like to be young and not have a care and have at my fingertips all the world’s possibilities. When you get old, and I’m not very old, you begin to see how all your possibilities have disappeared and how much time you’ve wasted. All those things you thought were so important aren’t really such a big deal after all. And you start to see how all those dreams you had are never going to come true.”
He took my hand once more and squeezed it.
“Everything is not ugliness and suffering,” he said. “You can find some goodness if you look for it, and you can find a bit of happiness and you can find success if you don’t let yourself get sucked under. For the sake of that great-grandfather you were telling me about, the one who was a slave, and all your ancestors who were slaves, don’t waste too much time. Just get on with it.”
He slapped me on the back.
“Promise me,” he said.
I promised him I would try.
“And don’t hate your ancestors,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a very healthy thing. People will do almost anything to survive. That’s why we have been fighting so hard to hang on to a way of life.”
Then he walked me to my bike. I got on it and rode away.
X
The head must bow and the back will have to bend, wherever the darkey may go.
—“My Old Kentucky Home”
This is what I know about my great-great-great-grandfather.
He was a slave. His name was Joseph. He made and mended harnesses. Born in 1795, he was owned—inasmuch as one man can own any other—by a man named John—John Harris of Goochland, Virginia.
In 1832 Joseph was legally manumitted. The reasons are not clear. Family rumor has it that Joe might have been—even must have been—John’s son. What other reason could there have been for the emancipation, for Joe’s light complexion, and for the fact that Joe, a slave, had been taught to read and knew how to write? His master John Harris could do neither.
I had seen the last will and testament that Joseph recorded in Shelby County, Tennessee—written in Joe’s own hand and signed by him. It is a document that has floated around the family for years.
A copy of the emancipation deed I found in Richmond, Virginia, in the State Library and Archives. It was not signed by John Harris. He could only make his mark—a small but steady X.
Know all men by these presents that I John Harris serv. of the County of Goochland and State of Virginia, have manumitted, emancipated and set free, and by these presents do manumit, emancipate and set free, a negro man slave named Joseph and sometimes called Joseph Harris, who was born my property, and I do hereby declare the said Joseph Harris to be entirely liberated from slavery, and entitled to all the rights and privileges of a free person with which it is in my power to vest him. He the said Joseph Harris hereby emancipated is a man of yellow complexion about five feet seven inches high and was thirty seven years of age on the 12th day of July last.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed my seal this 5th day of September Eighteen hundred and thirty two.
Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of NW Miller
In Goochland County Clerks Office 5th September 1832
This Deed of Emancipation was this day presented to me in the said Office and acknowledged by John Harris serv to be his act and deed, and admitted to records
Teste, NW Miller
The language of the deed suggests that Joseph had already been granted his freedom. He might have bought it. He might have been given it. But he seems already to have had it. For some reason now he was being given it explicitly, perhaps because he had earned it, and like a son with his inheritance, wanted to leave with it.
Of course everything was subject to the discretion of the slave-holder. John’s son or not, Joseph remained legally a slave. And even if Joseph had earned his freedom, or saved up money to buy his freedom, still he would have been hostage to the kindness of the man whose property he was. After all, the property of a man’s property, his time and the fruits of his labor, is that man’s possession as well.
But often slaves were allowed to earn and keep extra pay for doing extra jobs or for growing and selling crops on their own time. Many slaves were hired out—to work on other farms, in other homes, in factories. Many were given Saturday afternoons and Sundays off. What money they might have earned working these extra hours, many would have been allowed to keep. That money, earned and squirreled away behind a loose board or beneath a few rocks, could have bought freedom.
As a skilled laborer Joseph might very well have been hired out—and often. John might have kept part of the wages, the rest he should have given to Joe.
Perhaps John was an honorable man, setting a price and then living up to his word, letting Joseph buy his freedom with the money saved. Perhaps he then let Joseph stay on, working for the lower wages that a black harness maker would charge. Working for John and for others in the county, Joseph could save still more money before setting off down the road to find whatever adventures awaited.
And now with enough money saved, Joseph wanted to leave. He wanted to find his place and his fortune in the wide world. He wanted his freedom. And John, true to his word, let Joseph have it.
But in the deed there is no mention of the price of Joe’s freedom. If this had been a cash transaction, the price should have been r
ecorded.
But it doesn’t matter. Whatever the case, whether he bought his freedom or was given it as some sort of birthright, before leaving the land that had been his home Joseph needed an official document to prove he was no longer a slave.
Patrollers roamed the countryside and lurked in the cities looking for runaway slaves. They made sure you were who you said you were, where you were allowed to be, doing what you were supposed to be doing. They stopped blacks routinely. Any slave caught without a pass was likely to be arrested and whipped.
Free blacks if challenged had to prove their freedom, either that they had been emancipated or—since freedom could only be inherited maternally—that either mother or grandmother had been born free. They lived, after all, in a society that equated black skin with slavery.
Free blacks were not entirely free, were slaves without masters, limited by what they could and could not do, where they could and could not go. In many southern cities they had to register their names and occupations. Often they had to wear badges. Free blacks arrested in faraway places without proof of freedom were apt to be forced back into slavery. Sometimes, proof was not enough.
But the allure of the city was worth the risk, worth the insult and subordination. The allure of the city was obvious. There was opportunity there. There were jobs and money there. And there was freedom.
Not every runaway slave went north. Many escaped simply to anonymity in the closest southern city.
Cities like Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina swarmed with black faces. The air was alive with black sounds—music, laughter, voices.
Away from the city, free blacks continuing to work on the farm were not much better than slaves. Some whites assumed that any black they saw was a slave, and dealt with him accordingly.
But in the city every black was not a slave and was not treated as one; nor was every black unskilled or unambitious. In the city there were blacks of every stripe.
In the city a black man could get lost in the crowd. In the city, free blacks and black slaves hustled along the sidewalks, bought and sold, shoved and shouted along with whites. The city was a more cheerful place. It was, perhaps, enough to know that slavery did not have to be a permanent condition. There was hope.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 13
