South of Haunted Dreams

by Eddy L. Harris

  Along the eastern shore of North Carolina there is a strip of land—several strips, really, a chain of sand islands called the Outer Banks where the wind blows meanly off the sea. There are few trees and only the bare shrubs to block the wind. The land is flat. Only the dunes that rise seem to offer any variety. The wind blows the sand and deposits it elsewhere. The dunes are forever shifting, but slowly. One hundred years from now a dune that looks as solid as the earth will have moved many feet. Another may have disappeared altogether.

  I have walked to the edge of the sea. The wind blows. The sand stings my eyes. The ocean roars. It is the cold gray color of loneliness.

  A liquid eeriness hangs in the mist and settles all around.

  I walk along the line where the dry sand meets the wet. At the edge of the surf there are footprints, deep impressions in the sand. There is no one else around, but someone has been walking here, a lonely ghost, an unseen companion whose footsteps parallel my own.

  The wind blows and a howling sound adds to the desolation. The islands seem almost haunted, barren and scary. A wet chill rips right through the skin and into the marrow of the bone. If this were a castle on the moors, it would be the scene of murderous encounters, a place where restless souls walk the night. Their wailing would awaken the winds. This isolation would be their hell. And these dunes … these dunes are the shoulders of giants upon which the next generation must stand.

  I would guess that something momentous had happened here—if I didn’t already know it.

  Here on these dunes, some of which are quite high, a young man and his brother came to encounter destiny. They hauled a contraption up these sand hills again and again and again. And each time they would push the thing off the hill. These dunes and this wind were perfect.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright set up shop here at Kitty Hawk. From 1900 to 1902 they built glider after glider and shoved each one off Kill Devil Hills until they had mastered the principles of controlled glider flight.

  They were learning to fly.

  They affixed a motor to their aeroplane and in mid-December 1903, the Wright brothers became the first to achieve and sustain powered flight.

  It wasn’t much of a flight. Only twelve seconds. But look where those twelve seconds have brought us.

  So it is with a life well lived, all too brief in the grand scheme of things, all too imperfect, but full of consequence.

  I have always admired the Wright brothers, not quite as heroes but as men who were told it couldn’t be done, as men who then did it. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to fly, to soar—not just in an airplane, but into the magical realm of the barely possible. I wanted to dream and then to turn the dreams into reality and then into myth. I wanted to touch the stars.

  I wanted to discover cures to incurable diseases, to invent something, anything. I wanted to rob from the rich and give to the poor, perform miracles, save the world. I wanted to be president.

  I, who couldn’t then and cannot now turn on a good fastball, wanted to hit sixty homers in a season.

  In the same classroom where I used to get myself in trouble sword fighting with pencils against Charles Reynolds, a small hand-painted sign was posted on the wall over the blackboard in the back of the room. AIM FOR THE STARS, it said. And I did.

  If I failed the stars and reached the moon—well, better than missing the moon and hitting the dull ground.

  When I was a kid, a bookwormish runt, an invalid first with casts and then heavy braces on my legs, I spent my early reading years surrounded by biographies of great men and women. I imagined myself to be Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, George Washington Carver and Thomas Alva Edison, Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Joaquin Murietta. I was Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright on alternate days, I was Marie Curie. I was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, I was Christopher Columbus. A time or two I was even Jesus.

  It didn’t occur to me to be a great black man, nor even a great American. I just wanted to be great.

  I was young and stupid. I did not see limitations because of my race or my sex or my nationality. I didn’t see limitations at all. Kids never do until they learn them.

  But there are limitations to greatness—even to other people’s greatness, tarnished now when seen through my prism of racial obsession, and I wondered if I ought to have any of these men and women as my heroes. I wondered if children ought to have heroes at all. The men and women we worship are as flawed as the men and women we don’t.

  Think of the indignities, the many nonheroic moments my hero Joseph endured just to survive; think how my father had to play the coward, hang his head and let himself be run out of town by men in sheets. Lives all too marred, yet full of merit.

  When Wilbur Wright died of typhoid in 1912, his father honored him with a worshipful eulogy. He did not remember the little boy who played hooky from school, who swiped candy from the general store, who disobeyed and found trouble as easily as any man’s son. He remembered Wilbur not entirely as Wilbur was, but with admiring eyes that did not question, that did not see the blemishes. It is the way heroes must always be seen.

  The eulogy was this:

  A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty. Seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.

  It is the way every son dreams of one day being seen by his father. And I have often wished that my own father would finally come to understand and appreciate me with similar words of praise—the way I have finally come to understand and appreciate him.

  Seeing the right clearly and pursuing it steadily.

  But if Wilbur—or any other hero—had truly seen the right clearly, if he had spent as much time dreaming of justice as he spent dreaming of flight, if Babe Ruth had spent as much time championing Negro baseball as he spent being a champion baseball player, if Henry Ford had hired blacks as something other than janitors, if … if … if …

  If our heroes had been truly heroic, had seen the right clearly and pursued it, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in. We could all be a lot farther along the road. If they had only had a little more vision.

  I expect too much.

  I want more from men than ought to be asked.

  I should like my heroes flawless, brave and true and larger than life, and I wonder how a person could reasonably have as his hero someone who had moments of weakness. I wonder how a black man can have as his hero someone who had at his core a racist heart.

  A hero is someone you want to emulate. A hero is someone who is heroic. And racism—my main concern for the moment, but not my only concern—is antiheroic.

  So it seems we would need to strike from the list of our heroes all those who were imperfect. While we’re at it, we might as well strike from the list anyone who doesn’t think as we do, who doesn’t have as his main concern those things which are most important to us, who doesn’t think like us, look like us, or is not like us at all.

  Because of the racist language he used, am I forbidden to admire Mark Twain? Because of how they thought and not for what they did, do I ignore Huey Long or George Wallace? Because he did not speak out, because he fought for the wrong side, because he did not do enough, because he did not see the right clearly enough nor pursue it steadily enough—must I refuse to admit and admire the greatness, the genius, the skill, the efforts of … of just about anyone you can think of?

  Does it matter? Does racism, inadvertent or otherwise, negate everything else a person is or tries or achieves? And can there really be such a thing as inadvertent racism?

  Does silent participation in an unjust system turn heroes into cowards instead?

  Do time and circumstance and great achievements mitigate? Or should we hold our heroes accountable—or even more than accountable—for all that is and all that has been?

  The nation—and the world—could have been a lot farther along if the ones we admire had had the necessary courage, if we all did. But we ar
e, all of us, victims of the times we live in. And none of us is completely innocent. None of us.

  Living as they did, when they did, and products of a racist society, isn’t it probable the Wright brothers—and their heroic brethren—were racists? Does this spoil, limit, or diminish their achievements?

  Even the most heroic among us cannot help but be influenced by the surrounding environment, by the culture that raised him, by the milieu in which he finds himself.

  What, then, does this say about me?

  Until I came south to awaken these feelings and thoughts of racism, I would have said I was different, that these things have not affected me. Now I see, in the way I think, that I have been as affected as anyone else. And if I had not come south, these feelings may have lain dormant forever.

  Environment does influence us—even if we can’t see the effect. It makes us who we are.

  I am black. I can be nothing else. In this country I am forced—I know now—to see the world not through the eyes of a man or citizen or a human being but through the narrow-focused eyes of a black man. Every thought, every experience is focused through the funnel viewpoint of being black.

  At the same time I am American. I can lay claim to no place else. There is no way out for me. I am caught.

  But which am I more—black or American?

  In 1915 Theodore Roosevelt wrote that there is no room in this country for “hyphenated Americanism.” Maybe he had a point. In or out, fish or fowl, be one thing or another, but get off that fence.

  “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country,” he said. “There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

  This is the land that made me. Its history and its heritage are mine. Its various cultures live within me. Each achievement is mine. I own every dream. Each fulfillment belongs to me. And I am responsible for every promise that has not been kept.

  We all bear that responsibility. None of us is blameless. None of us.

  The trouble is, too many of us attempt to exclude instead of include. We narrow the definition of what it means to be American, or what it takes to be black, and we want to leave out the rest, especially those who are different from us, whose thinking, whose experience varies from our own. We limit our families carefully.

  All men are not created equal.

  “Goddamn it! I was born in this country! My children were born in this country! What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?”

  —Joseph Kennedy.

  All men are not created equal, not even rich powerful ones. Joseph Kennedy had turned his family into a political and financial dynasty. It was not enough. Even Joseph Kennedy felt the sting of discrimination. He was a Catholic.

  “As a nation we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it: All men are created equal except Negroes. Soon it will read: All men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.”

  —Abraham Lincoln.

  If Thomas Jefferson or Robert E. Lee, Babe Ruth or Wilbur Wright had as their excuse that they were victims of the times in which they lived, what excuse for racism do we have in our more enlightened age?

  It’s simple: we have no excuse. We ought to know better.

  I spent the night on the beach near Kitty Hawk. I woke up stiff. The early morning air was chilling, so I tossed on the Confederate soldier’s cap I had bought at Gettysburg and walked across the highway to a small restaurant for breakfast. I had taken my cap off when I went in, but now I put it back on. I sat at a table next to a burly fellow wearing a baseball cap. The emblem sewn onto the crown of his cap was a rebel flag.

  I clenched my fists and shoved them into my pockets. I resisted my impulse to smack him or tell him off. It was enough that I made him uncomfortable.

  He sneered at me. I sneered back. He looked away and every time his eyes sneaked back around for a glance at me, I was still there, staring at him. I hoped he would get up and say something to me. I was trying to provoke him into provoking me. But all he did was stare.

  He didn’t like that I sat near him. He didn’t like that I was there at all. But what he hated more than anything else was that I was wearing a symbol of the old Confederacy on my head. After all, Benvisti had said, “Symbols are indivisible. If it’s mine, it can’t be yours.”

  I was co-opting this man’s symbol and corrupting it, defiling it.

  He stared at me as if to let me know I didn’t belong. I stared at him to let him know I did. I sat back and relaxed. I stuck my long legs out. And then I smirked at him. He seethed.

  My breakfast that morning, country ham and two eggs on toast, tasted especially fine. I wondered how his food tasted.

  * * *

  In a little while the sun came up. The morning mist and fog drifted out to sea and hung in a thick indecisive line until quite suddenly it vanished. One minute it was there, the next minute, after I had given full attention to the road, the fog was gone. I was riding south toward Hatteras on Highway 12. The wind was gusting and sand had blown across the road. I was picking my way carefully.

  The islands are very narrow. The ocean is almost always in view. And there is no protection from the wind. When it blows, you feel it. The bike leans into the wind to compensate. But still every now and again the bike slides sideways. When you hit a patch of sand, the bike skids and for a second or two you lose control.

  But the sun is full on your face and warm. The wind is alive and cooling. The day is streaked with color.

  At Cape Hatteras the road bends sharply to the west. In a few minutes the road abruptly ends. There is no more island.

  A ferry takes you to the next one, Ocracoke, a short ride in a small boat.

  At the far end of Ocracoke there is a little village where the next ferry waits. On the edge of the village there is an inn owned by Jacob, a young man who rode the ferry with me, and his younger brother, Peter. Jacob had been admiring my bike, and as we talked and I told him where I was going, he offered me a room for the night.

  “The house is completely booked up,” he told me. “But you can be our guest.” He was telling me I wouldn’t have to pay.

  “You may have to pitch your tent in the yard,” he said, “but we’ll find a place for you. In the attic or in the yard, but somewhere. If anybody cancels, we’ll give you the nicest room.”

  When the ferry landed, I followed Jacob to the house that sits across the road from the general store. Clapboard, white, built from the timbers of a wrecked sailing ship, the old two-story house sits deep in the yard. The driveway is unpaved and covered with big rocks. I left my bike close to the road and walked. Jacob got out of his car, Peter came from the house. They both received me as warmly as if they knew me. Peter went to fetch cool drinks. Jacob gave me a tour of the place, upstairs and down, and out back to the garage that was big enough to be a barn. Then we sat in the rocking chairs in the shade of the front porch and lingered a long time there, sipping iced tea, munching on snacks and talking.

  But in the end I didn’t stay the night. I don’t know why. It wasn’t at all like me to decline a kindness or refuse hospitality. But something seemed to beckon. It might have been the way the late afternoon sun caught the tips of waves in the sound and streaked them silver, sparkling on the water. The sea breeze smelled of exotic worlds, foreign ports. It carried aloft excitement and the promise of something new, some magic on the other side of the horizon. I wanted to travel on. I had the urge to ride in the cool of the evening and deep into the night.

  I caught the last ferry to Cedar Island and rode until darkness slipped around me. Then night fell with the suddenness of fatigue. In Morehead City I quit for the evening and carried on the next morning.

  I will never know what I missed by not staying the night with Jacob and Peter. But I know that the slightest wind can blow a ship drastically off course. The history of the world has been formed by the seemingly insignificant decisions as well by t
he important ones. The future is decided by every little thing we do. Everything that happens, each moment well spent, each wasted minute, every smile or hello, becomes a paving stone on the path. Change one thing and you change the shape of tomorrow.

  I chose to ride on that night. And that would make all the difference.

  In the morning I got on the road early. I was in a tremendous hurry—I realize it now—but told myself I merely wanted to beat the heat. I wanted to ride as long as possible in the continuation of yesterday, but the cool that lingered since evening was warming rapidly. The sun had come up quickly. The blue had been scorched from the sky. The soft morning mist thickened into haze. It was going to be a hot day.

  My haste, however, had nothing to do with heat.

  Looking back now I see that not only was I eager to reach Charleston, my next significant destination, but I was impatient to reach my rendezvous with the evil in the haze. The evil spirit of the South. It was out there—somewhere—dressed in white, streaked with red, covered with blood, waiting for me. And I wanted to find it. I wanted to see it for myself, wanted to feel it. I did not know if my sword would fall from my hand and I might turn coward. Or I might turn violent. Though it might easily kill me, I doubted I could kill it. But I had to find the evil, confront it and spit in its eye. If ever I was going to put it fully behind me, I had to touch it, admit it was there, and move past it.

  It was a Saturday morning. I was headed toward Wrightsville Beach, a place that people from Raleigh and Greensboro and Fayetteville flock to on warm weekends. Traffic was heavy. To escape it, I drove like a maniac from Morehead City to Jacksonville. From there I slowed down and took my time.

  It was a nice morning to be out riding on a bike. I was not the only one who thought so. I passed several bikers coming from the opposite direction. Each one in turn threw up his hand to wave.

  There is a special camaraderie among motorcyclists. You are part of a family. You will be waved at each time you pass. You will be talked to about your bike. You will be offered help when you need it. The kinship crosses the barriers we normally erect. You are a motorcyclist whether man or woman, black or white or brown, local or foreign. You pass a cyclist and he will wave. You stop nearby and he will have a chat.