How in the world did a black man, a former slave, acquire wealth enough to leave behind at the time of his death five pages of final will and testament and 317 acres of land: 50 acres each to his daughter Martha and son Cornelius, 50 acres each to his daughters Mary and Lettie, 30 acres to his wife, Milly. The remaining 87 acres to be sold at public out-cry for one-third cash, the balance due in one and two years with interest and approved security. Where did a black man, former slave, gain such financial shrewdness?
Joseph ordered that the cash be doled out in equal shares among his children—except to his son James, to whom he willed ten dollars and nothing more.
Perhaps James was a bit of a goof-off. Perhaps he was a man, not unlike his father, with wanderlust in his soul. His father wanted James to settle down, be a farmer or a businessman, be respectable. James had different ideas. They fought.
Certain that James would only squander his share and amount to little, Joseph left him little.
James was the man who fathered Samuel, the man who fathered Melvin, the man who fathered another Samuel—my father. His blood is in my veins, and perhaps I am like him.
(My father also worried about me and my place in the world. For a long time he expected little from me, a writer, a dreamer, the one with different ideas. And we too have argued. But that is another story.)
James’s brother Peter must have danced with uncommon visions as well. He left the hill and set off to find his own way in the world. Along the way he settled in the area known as the Delta in western Mississippi. He was a founding father of an all-black town called Mound Bayou.
It was a long way from the Harris plantation in Virginia to Harris Hill in Tennessee, and beyond; a long way from being a slave to being a landowner to founding a town. A long way to now. But here I stand, many generations and many fortunes hence. The torch has been passed. I carry Joseph’s flame.
The mist recedes further from the mirror. The darkness brightens. I can see a bit clearer.
In all the kingdoms of the biological world, the instinct to survive surpasses every other. There is in mankind an intense instinct to survive. Joseph with his head bowed and his back bent was surviving. My father, when it was his turn, his eyes averted and his voice trembling, he was surviving. At the same time, it was more than survival of self. It had to be.
When Joseph stepped a free man out of the Goochland County Courthouse that September afternoon the day was very warm. It was a partly overcast sky, the clouds billowing up from dark bottoms to threaten rain. But the tops of the clouds boiled into the heavens and the sun struck them there and they gleamed almost golden. The light that late afternoon had such an amber quality that Joseph’s skin darkened and seemed almost tan.
John went home without him. Joseph wanted to be alone. It was one of those moments best savored in quiet solitude.
Joseph did not shout his joy. He took his pleasure quietly, almost portentously, as he looked backward and forward at the same time. He stood on the hill of the courthouse and remembered. And then he looked forward and thought about his children and his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, the same as he had thought about them every day of his captive life. He had been thinking about me.
I was the reason Joseph endured, the reason he could not stand up and say, “No, I refuse, I will do your bidding no more and you will just have to kill me.” He would have died, and the future would have died with him.
“The struggle of today is not altogether for today,” as Abraham Lincoln said in 1862. “It is for a vast future also.”
I like to think that if I had been a slave, if slavery had rested on my shoulders and the shoulders of others like me, then slavery would have ended early. There can be no slavery without the complicity of the slave. I would rather have died. But then, I am not very forward-looking. I cannot see much farther than next week. I cannot see six generations from now, as Joseph and the others could, do not seem to care about the future as much as Joseph and the others did, would not sacrifice even half as much.
I turn to face the whispering wind, turn to thank my great-grandfather for what he endured for my sake. I turn to ask his forgiveness for not knowing sooner. And for not holding the torch higher or carrying it farther, for not having more to show for the pains he endured for my sake.
I’m sorry, Joseph.
There is no sound in the trees, no noise in the air, but I feel his gentle caress upon my face.
Joseph. I call out and wonder if he can hear the love in my voice.
I climb on the bike and ride west out of Richmond. Joseph rides with me. Along Monument Avenue the statues of Lee and Stuart and Jefferson Davis do not seem so chilling as before, not so frightening in their symbolism, for now I have a symbol of my own. I have a champion.
XI
Do not wish to be anything but what you are—but be that perfectly.
—Francis de Sales
I settled into the saddle of my bike and rode, taking my time, going slowly for a change. I did not guide the bike. I did not know the way. Nor did I need to. I went where the wind blew me.
From Monument Avenue it is a left turn onto Glenside Drive, and then a right onto Patterson, which is Virginia Highway 6. This is the road that runs from Richmond to Goochland.
At the crest of a hill not very high I stopped the bike and got off. I wanted to lie for a moment in the grass. I wanted to feel its coolness against my back before the sun dried the earth and heated the air. I wanted to watch the cloud formations before the sun cleared them away.
It was going to be a hot day. I took off my jacket and strapped it to the back of the bike. Then I lay back and looked up. Something very magical and reassuring was suddenly in the air. I no longer felt alone.
Overhead the clouds struggled to conspire. A little more moisture in the air, a little less warmth, and they would have swelled together into large thunderheads. But the sun was too strong. The clouds surged upward instead of out, gathered the warm light into their white fleecy folds and then dissipated. Light now flooded the hills. The temperature rose.
In the sudden warmth a hatch of gnats and midges and small moths burst forth in great swarms. They hovered in ever moving clouds, frantic to fulfill their destiny, to survive this short while before death, to mate and lay eggs. For a year they had lain dormant waiting for this moment. Now it was upon them. The air was charged with new life.
Above, a sparrow fluttered by. In its beak it held dried grass and something that looked like a chewing gum wrapper. The sparrow darted into the trees. It had a nest to build.
In the distance, pine trees huddled against the now cloudless horizon. Houses dotted the hills, and kudzu covered the earth. The broad leafy plant filled the gullies along the side of the road. It clung to the bases of trees. It climbed telephone poles and stretched along the power lines that hung over the highway. It grew thick and lush and the air smelled of its growing.
It was like a dream, a very hot day, nothing but the flies moving, no sound but the chirping of distant birds.
From this hill, a hill that Great-Grandfather might have stopped to rest upon before heading to Richmond and then south toward his future—from this hill, all of a sudden the South didn’t look so bad. I relaxed, crossed my legs at the ankle, folded my arms behind my head. I closed my eyes and drifted into a dreamlike state. I didn’t want to sleep. I just wanted to dream. Serenity was overtaking me. I wanted to slide into it gradually, wanted to feel it fully.
Now the almost unthinkable, having taken shape once before in the clouds, was forming in my mind and reaching my lips.
What if I ended up liking this place?
There was magic in the air, all right. Suddenly I was at ease, more than comfortable. Even after all that has been—and how could this be possible?—I no longer hated the South. I no longer feared it.
But then, why should I?
There have been more fearsome times than these. Others faced them. Others survived them. Others with more reason than I will
ever have to fear and to flee braved it out and stayed when the prudent course would seem to have been to turn away from the South and make a start somewhere else.
The prudent course might well have been for Joseph, as light-skinned as he was, to try to pass, if he could, for white. But there is no sense denying who you are. There is, in fact, something evil about it.
Even in those hateful days, Joseph couldn’t bring himself to do it. Long before black was beautiful there must have been something wonderful about it, about the color, about the skin, about the experience, some joy that was not worth losing or doing without, some hope, some sense of faithfulness, duty, and debt to the ones who had gone before, maybe even to the ones who would come after. Not everything after all can be measured in terms of comfort and self.
And there must have been something too about this place. After all that has been, how else to explain that there is even a single black person remaining in the South?
Why, for example, did Joseph not go north to make his fortune? Would it not have been easier there to find a better life for himself and for the ones who would come after? Why did he stay in the South?
What did he feel about this place that I don’t feel, what did he know that I know not?
Of course it might have been not the South that held him, but the North that repelled him.
I was thinking of Roger Taney. Born in Maryland, educated in Pennsylvania, he became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In 1857 while deciding the Dred Scott case, Taney wrote that a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect.
I was thinking of the great race riots in New York (1864) and Chicago (1917), in Boston and Philadelphia and Cleveland. I was thinking of the intense racial hatred that exploded in Boston when public schools were ordered desegregated in the 1970s. I was thinking of present-day Boston, and present-day Chicago, two of the most racially tense places in the world. I was thinking of a cocktail party in Connecticut.
And I was remembering that Malcolm X once noted that the South is anywhere south of the Canadian border.
The rest of the world points an angry finger at the South. The rest of the world sees the cinders only in the eyes of southerners. The rest of the world refuses to see the soot in its own eyes.
The South, in attitude and in effect, is probably not much worse than the North—only in degree and display. It’s simply that the South has always been honest about its hatred and its prejudice. Northern intolerance has been subtle, therefore more pernicious and snaring.
Perhaps, as most of us do, Joseph simply preferred what was familiar, even if what was familiar was painful. Perhaps he preferred the devil he knew to the devil he didn’t, preferred hatred and despotism pure, and not, as Abraham Lincoln put it, mingled with the base alloy of hypocrisy.
As I find myself inexplicably now doing, perhaps Joseph found himself getting defensive about the South, the way many white southerners are, the way any man will defend his home, his family, and his ideas against outside criticism.
It was Joseph’s home, after all. Like any Virginian he would have considered the South—and this state especially—as sacred soil.
When he departed, surely he left a bit of himself here. Just as surely he took a bit of Virginia with him and passed it along. My grandfather’s middle name was Virginia.
What irrational love of sacred Virginia and of the South in general have I inherited, do I harbor and long to admit? In what weird ways is the South not just an ancestral home, but my home as well? How much of this place is within me?
In the workings of psychiatry, revealed secrets can suddenly unlock the gates to a flood of emotions and admissions. One little secret is all it sometimes takes.
I lie darkening in the sun. I close my eyes and shut off the outside world. I am alone, isolated, my thoughts humming inside my head like a mantra. I am completely relaxed. There is no sound now but the deep rhythmic breathing of meditation. My thoughts drift in front of me, unaided and unimpeded, floating in and out of focus like images in a dream. I acknowledge them, and they become real. Finally I admit to myself what I, a black man, would never admit to anyone else.
Of all the men who emerged heroic from battlefields in the Civil War to capture my imagination, only one wore a Yankee uniform. All the rest were Confederates. They were the same men glorified in the statues along Monument Avenue. They were Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
Forget for a moment the cause for which they fought. They were romantic figures to me. They were outmanned and outgunned and still they managed to avoid defeat during four long years of war. At times they seemed on the edge of victory. They were bold and flamboyant, they were brave and they were lucky. They were passionate about a cause, albeit an unworthy cause, and they had a valor about them that the inept Northern soldiers seemed to lack.
If you can separate the nobility of effort from the nobleness of the desired result, then these men and their Confederates deserve enormous praise for their bravery and for their devotion to duty.
Think of Pickett’s charge during the battle at Gettysburg. It was obvious folly from the start.
Quietly General George Pickett urged his men: “Up, men, and to your posts. Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia.”
Thirteen thousand brave men marched across an open field toward the waiting Union lines. It was failure for sure. But they marched on.
“Do not hurry, men,” a Union general ordered his troops. “Let them come up close before you fire. And then aim slow.”
It was impossible to miss. When the Union soldiers finally fired upon the advancing line of Confederates, entire regiments disappeared. By the end of battle, half of the thirteen thousand had fallen or were captured.
Think of Robert E. Lee. He was offered command of the entire Union Army. But his sense of honor and duty, his loyalty to his native country—Virginia—bound him to a lost cause.
We root for the underdog. We praise loyalty. We applaud patriotism. (In those days you were a Virginian, you were a Georgian. Your state was your country.) We honor devotion to duty. Why, then, can we not hold these men in esteem? They were fighting for what they thought was right—personal liberty, self-determination, right to property. But for the slavery issue and a way of thinking which is abhorrent to us today, their principles and ours are not that far apart. Why, then, are we not able to separate what they did from the way they were, their viler side from their nobler natures?
If that separation cannot be made, then we need to exclude from our list of heroes anyone who was born in a time and place whose sensibilities were different from our own, anyone whose ways of thinking were less perfect than our own.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.
George Washington owned slaves.
If their philosophies were so wonderful, why didn’t they extend into the arena of human justice and equality?
How many great Americans hated Jews?
President after president has dodged the path to heroism, has preferred instead the politically expedient status quo.
Even the U.S. Constitution, so nearly humanly perfect, compromised in the end by declaring that blacks were not citizens, they were nothing more than property, and for the purposes of census-taking they were to be counted as only three-fifths of a whole person—a whole white person.
Does this thinking which is faulty to us now—I hope—tarnish their achievements?
Does their skill at one thing make it irrelevant that their feet were made of clay? Can clay feet keep our heads from rising into the clouds?
Babe Ruth played professional baseball at a time when blacks were not allowed to play in the same leagues with whites.
Babe himself admitted how great the players were in the old Negro Leagues. He could have protested against the color line, could have complained that in order for him to be great he would have to play against the very best, no matter what color. He chose instead to keep his mouth shut. And just by playing he gave legi
timacy to the segregation. But it was the world he knew.
It’s not a very good excuse, but it’s an excuse.
We are formed by the world around us. It forms us, and we form it. We push the edges a little at a time. It is never fast enough for some, too fast for others, but in time we change and we grow, and the world changes with us.
We all have our sins. Not many of us are truly heroic. We all have our viler sides.
And so we grant to our heroes dispensations, the same as we grant to ourselves. Not a single one of us is completely and perfectly heroic.
If we are to have heroes at all we must separate the nobility that is in them from that which makes them just like us. We must pluck the flowers from the weeds and treasure the flowers.
A black man can admire Robert E. Lee for his valor and honor, for his bravery. A black man can love the South for its beauty and charm, and value it for its place—not a good place, but a place—in our history.
I awoke with a start. I awoke with a headache. And I awoke hungry.
It was time to continue on to Goochland and find a place to eat.
When I set out from Richmond I had had another purpose in mind. In the Library and Archives I had seen only photocopies of the documents pertaining to Joseph. In the Goochland County Courthouse I expected I would find the originals. I had wanted to see them, put my hands on them, feel their tangible evidence of Joseph and John Harris. I thought I would feel some great link to them, proof that I was really here.
I was thinking of Joseph as I put my helmet on and climbed back on the bike, as I turned the ignition key and pushed the starter button, as I put the bike in gear and got back on the road. I was thinking of Joseph and of the things he must have seen along his way that might have urged him on, that might have seduced him to stay, the people he met who would have shown him kindness, the towns where every door was closed to him. He would not have wanted the dust of those towns to remain on his boots. He would have knocked it from his shoes and moved on.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 15
