I never gave a second thought to the motorcyclists who waved; only to the ones who didn’t.
Then I noticed that more than motorcyclists were waving at me. Drivers in oncoming lanes were throwing up their hands to me, often when I was not expecting it. I would see the hand fly up and think the driver was scratching his nose. When I realized it was a wave, it was too late to wave back. We had already passed.
Not everybody waved, of course, but enough to make me wonder if it was some kind of signal. Was there a cop ahead? Were they telling me to slow down?
I slowed. And it gave me more time to react to the waving. And it was infectious. I started waving first.
And then I wondered why they were waving back. Could they not see that I was black? With my arms covered by the sleeves of my jacket and my face partly hidden by the visor of my helmet, maybe they couldn’t tell.
I leaned to the side to look at myself in the mirror. I thought maybe only my eyes and nose could be seen, but the mask is big enough that you can see almost the whole face. Nothing was hidden. They were waving at me anyway. And not only people on the road.
I passed through Hampstead. An elderly man with no shirt on was mowing his lawn. He walked deliberately, almost frailly. He pushed the mower carefully. When the car in front of me passed him, the old man stopped mowing. He took one hand off the mower handle and waved. When I got close enough, he did the same to me.
If he waved at everyone who passed, it would take him all day to cut his grass.
I wondered if this is what Great-Grandfather Joseph would have found.
When Virginia started enforcing laws requiring freed blacks to leave the state, Joseph almost certainly would have come into North Carolina. I don’t know if he would have made his way along the coast, but having been a slave who had never seen the sea, it would have been on his mind. The whole wide world would have been on his mind. He would have wanted to explore it.
He was thirty-seven years old when he gained his freedom. There was so much that he had missed. So much that he would never get a chance to do. So many people he would never meet. So many places he would never see. Not knowing when he might die, he would have wanted to see and do it all. Even if it meant his sampling of the world would be brief and his exposure limited. A little of a lot would have suited him fine.
Perhaps his mission was like mine: to get out and about, see the lay of the land, meet some folks, and put the evil behind him.
The heat caught up with me in Wrightsville Beach and I pulled into the parking lot of a little strip mall to rest. I thought I might find a cold drink here. But it was too early. The shops were still closed. I got off the bike and found a narrow band of shade. I leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the pavement. No one else was around. No other cars were in the parking lot. The bike was alone, its blue skin gleaming in the bright sun. And I was all alone, sitting, pondering, wondering, dreaming. I took out my notebook and started to write but felt lazy. I took a little nap.
When I awoke, a teenaged boy was standing over me. The shops were open and he had just come out of the video store. He was leaning on his bicycle.
“Is that your motorcycle?” he said.
He was standing against the bright sky. I squinted up at him and couldn’t make him out, but I could see that he pointed and I followed the line of his arm out to the parking lot where my bike sat. Another young man, older than this one, was walking around the bike and looking it over carefully.
“It’s a beauty,” the kid said. He introduced himself and told me his name. Joseph.
The guy walking around my bike had my attention now. I shook Joseph’s hand, but only halfheartedly.
“What are you doing?”
“I was taking a nap,” I said.
“No,” he said. “What are you doing here? You don’t live around here, do you?”
“Just passing through.”
Joseph leaned his bicycle against the wall. He sat down beside me.
The guy inspecting my motorcycle came over now.
“That’s a great-looking machine,” he said. “I never saw one like it before.”
Then he sat down on the curb near me.
“My name is Jack.”
We shook hands.
Jack was a young man about twenty-three years old. He was tall and strong-looking, blond and tan. He looked like a sailor, or at the very least a surfer. He worked at the end of the mall in a shop that sold small sailboats and beach gear.
We fell into a chat about riding around the country on a bike, and he told me he wished he could be doing the same thing. It seems every man I’ve met has at one time or another dreamed of it. “To be free as the wind,” he said.
We talked a little about the South. We did not talk about race. We talked about where I had been and where I was going. We did not talk about why.
“You must be very tired,” he said.
“And hot,” I added.
He nodded. “It’s going to be a scorcher today,” he said. “It’s not even ten o’clock yet.”
He had to work all day, he said, but if I wanted a place to nap for a few hours, or maybe a cold beer, he told me I could use his house. He gave me directions.
“It’s on the peninsula,” he said. “Close to the beach, in fact almost right on it. And the front of the house faces the estuary. You can watch the boats going in and out of the harbor. When a cool breeze blows and when the sun goes down in the late afternoon there’s no better spot than on our balcony.”
He had a roommate.
“He should still be there,” he said. “But if he’s not, just go on up the steps to the second floor and make yourself at home. We usually leave the door unlocked.”
Just then his roommate pulled up in a white sporty car. He parked in front of the boat shop, saw us, and came down to where we were sitting.
He was about the same age as Jack, a little taller, less muscular, not quite as blond. When Jack explained that he had just opened the doors of their home to me, Greg did not look immediately pleased.
“Actually,” he said, “I have some things to do.”
“That’s okay,” Jack said. He turned to me. “Look, the door’s open, there are beers in the fridge, there’s a hammock swinging on the balcony. Just go and make yourself at home. One of us will be along later this afternoon to check on you, to see if you need anything.”
Greg and I looked at each other. I was wondering what was going on. Greg was probably wondering the same. He studied me, wondering perhaps what his response should be. It took him a moment to see the rightness of Jack’s invitation. Finally he gave in.
“I don’t know how many beers there are,” he said. “I could go to the store and buy some more. What kind do you like?”
“Beer is beer,” I said. “Any wildly expensive imported dark beer from Germany will do.”
Greg smiled and frowned at the same time. Jack laughed. Greg said, “I’ll see what I can find.”
Jack went back to work, arranging the sailboats in the parking lot and then hosing them down, hoisting the sails and making everything look neat and new and desirable. Greg and I watched him for a few minutes. We talked a little more. Then, satisfied, I suppose, that I was not a murderer or a thief, Greg got up to run his errands. He invited me to go along with him. He tried to be casual. He didn’t want the invitation to look like he didn’t want to leave me alone in his house. I turned him down.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
Slowly he walked to the car. He stuck his head inside the boat shop and said something to Jack. Then he got into his car and drove away.
Joseph just sat quietly through it all. He was looking dreamily at me and at the bike. Finally, now that we were alone, he spoke.
We talked about the bike a little, but that wasn’t what he really wanted to talk about. He was doing badly in school. His parents were divorced. He didn’t get along well with his mother’s new boyfriend. His father had moved away. He j
ust wanted to spend some time talking to an adult male.
“I don’t get to do it much,” he said.
He wanted to get some things off his chest. It didn’t matter that he was white and I was black.
We talked about a minister he had gotten close to. Joseph said he liked the guy but wasn’t sure why. The minister was helping to keep him out of trouble.
We talked about how much he hated school. I told him I had always hated school too.
“It’s not just that,” he said. “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really stupid. People are always telling me that. I’m beginning to believe it.”
“Well, don’t,” I said. “That just gives you an excuse to fail. When you start to believe it, you’ll always have an easy reason for why things aren’t working. Pretty cowardly, don’t you think?”
He thought for a long moment, then nodded.
He told me about a book his grandmother had given him.
“It’s about a man who canoed down the Mississippi River,” he said. I raised my eyebrows.
“It was his big dream,” he told me. “His friends told him it was a stupid idea. Nobody believed he could do it. But he did it anyway.”
“That sounds pretty interesting,” I said. “Is it any good?”
“I haven’t started it yet. My grandmother liked it a lot, though. She thought I should read it. She said it might inspire me to try harder and do better and not give up and all that stuff. Sometimes it’s very easy to give up, you know.”
“Yeah, sometimes,” I said.
I could feel myself beginning to frown. I stared out at my shiny blue bike. I looked at Joseph. He was smiling vaguely. I wondered where this boy had come from and who was counseling whom.
Many were the ways in which I myself had given up. It is so much easier to believe in racist ways of thinking. I could see how through my surrender I had come to affirm and legitimize racism. I had lost myself to its addiction. I had let myself be controlled by it, defined by it. I was no longer acting, only reacting.
I changed the subject.
“What are you going to do all day?” I asked.
“There’s nothing to do,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go home and read that book.”
For the next two minutes Joseph sat quietly staring at me. Finally I asked him if anything was wrong.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just that you look sort of familiar. Not like I’ve seen you before or anything. But just kind of familiar.”
He tightened his lips and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He got up.
“I guess I’d better go,” he said. “But I’ll see you later. I know where they live. Maybe I’ll come by.”
I sat for a few minutes after Joseph had left and wondered what to do. I wondered what was going on. Something out of my control, something warm and surprising.
I know what Joseph meant when he said I looked somehow familiar. But maybe on a deeper level, a level Joseph had not touched yet, I looked familiar to other southerners too. A prodigal son returned home, recognized and made welcome. Was that why people were waving at me all the time?
Suddenly I knew why I had not stayed the night on Ocracoke with Peter and Jacob.
The South had always meant only one miserable thing to me. The possibility of anything else had never been entertained. My mind had already been made up and I had not wanted to be shown another way of seeing. I had not been willing to give the South a chance. I wanted to hate it still.
It’s easier when you have an enemy, something to blame for the way things are, something to galvanize your disparate fears and inadequacies. You get so mired in a way of thinking that you lose all sight. The deeper you sink the darker it is, the easier on the eyes. The darkness becomes familiar, comfortable. It hides you, and you are safe. You can’t see, but neither can you be seen. The darkness is your protector.
The South hated me, this I was sure of; and I hated the South doubly. Even after my outrageous eruption of joy at a sense of belonging here, even as serenity washed over me and I recognized the South as home, and even as I had come home to make peace, still I was looking for reasons to hate the place. I had been looking for coon hunters and Klansmen. I should have been looking for angels of mercy.
I had asked myself, Suppose that somewhere in the South someone was waiting to offer me a cool drink, to invite me home, to be my friend? Well, there they were, Peter and Jacob, and I had turned my back to them. And now here they were again, Jack and Greg and Joseph. I would not let it happen again.
Evil still lives in the world, it’s true, but evil is not all there is. And evil can be overcome by better angels. Coon hunters and Klansmen have not been able to destroy us in all this time. There are angels among us, heroes in matters that seem so small. It is they who keep the devils at bay. But you’ve got to give them a chance.
If Great-Grandfather Joseph would not have been denied by anything so trivial as a mind made up, neither would I. I would accept every kindness as if I had earned it, and I would offer kindness in return. For a simple kindness shown may bring about a change of heart.
I stayed three days with Jack and Greg in Wrightsville Beach.
The house they lived in was a gray clapboard, two-story building facing the estuary. Steps from the street led to the second-floor balcony. Someone else lived on the first floor.
That first afternoon, before I knew I was going to be invited to stay the night, I left my gear on the bike, went up, and lay in the hammock until Greg returned. He had not yet bought the beer.
I folded one arm for a pillow behind my head. The other arm I laid across my chest. I could feel my heart beating against my palm, slowly, calmly, surely. I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my socks. I wiggled my toes.
One leg dangled over the side of the hammock. My foot could just barely reach the floor, just enough that I could give a little push, and the hammock started to swing slowly from side to side.
A breeze fanned my face, but still the sun was very hot on it. Morning slid into noon. The sun climbed high and crossed the sky, blazed white hot, and crowded the afternoon with light. A glare like a fireball bounced off the water and I had to squint to watch the sailboats and the big cruisers passing through the channel on their way to freedom and the open sea.
My bike was sitting patiently down below. The sun hit against the bright blue and sparkled. It made me think of a horse, lathered up with sweat, glistening in the sun, loaded down with gear, and waiting patiently while some lonesome cowboy stops off in a saloon to have a drink, happy to have these moments of rest before hitting the dusty trail once again. And like the cowboy inside, I was reluctant to move on and impatient at the same time. I had found an uneasy peace.
The hammock swayed. The cool salt-scented breeze crowded the air. The sun beat gently, warmly on my face and arms. I could hardly keep my eyes open. Blindingly bright patches of light reflected off the water. I could not see the boats drifting in the inlet. When they entered the bright patches, they were swallowed up by the light.
I could not keep my eyes open. I wanted to sleep, I wanted to lose myself in the land of dreams, the great dark void where peace and rage do battle while time stands still. If peace wins, it is almost like death. I surrendered to the peace. I closed my eyes and slept.
It was a hallucinating sleep, at once fitful and deep, troubling and confused. The rage that had been stored inside me came pouring out like poison vomited after a long night’s debauchery.
It was like some hideous malarial nightmare. I was hot and cold at the same time, wet and clammy. I tossed in the hammock and could not get comfortable. Finally I fell into a noisy sleep. Eventually my snoring wakened me. When I awoke, drool coated the corners of my mouth and dripped into my beard.
The South had done this to me, turned me into some kind of paranoid schizophrenic, outraged one minute and at peace the next, forever questioning motives, ever on the lookout for evil directed at me and then finding
it, real or imagined, behind every tree, suspicious of every good turn, reminded by every person I talked to and by everything I saw and did and felt that I am black, and that I am hated for it.
This is not how I wanted to live my life, not how I had lived it up till now. Maybe that’s why I had to come. I needed to be reminded. I could no more have stayed away than I could have run rings around the moon. From all sides the South had been tugging at me.
Nor could I long continue to live a kind of raceless existence, and I see now why certain themes are not only expected from black writers, but why black writers themselves feel compelled to explore them. Because no one else explores those themes. And no one else but a black man knows their contours. It doesn’t have to be, but a black man’s point of view—a black writer’s point of view—is different precisely because he is black. And like every black person in this country, when he wakes up each day, being black is on his mind in ways that being white is never on a white person’s mind.
And yet in focusing on this race thing, I have missed the life and world around me. I have seen it, but I have not seen it, have not held the crystal orb up to the light and watched the sparkles dance. I have not appreciated it. I have tasted the world vaguely, never knowing what I was eating. I could have been eating anything at all.
This is not the journey I had planned to make. Even after the road had led me—had almost forced me—into the South, this journey was not at all what I intended. But it was the journey, I suppose, I had to make.
I don’t know what I did intend, if it was anything more than just an excursion on my new toy. I had thought learning to ride would give me an added expertise, and thought I would best learn to ride by putting in hour after hour on the open road—superhighways, back roads, and country lanes. The people I met, the birds and the trees, the earth I smelled and the towns I visited, the flavor of the country I tasted—these, I thought, would make my story. By focusing on them I would find and see and maybe even touch the soul of the South.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 19
