What I have found instead has been my own black soul. I have learned in some small way what it is to be black, what it is to live in this cocoon of insecurity. The journey has been all inside my head and in my soul, hardly on the road at all. I have traveled my black self, but I have missed the South.
Before my tour of the South is over, I will have seen much that I won’t remember. I will have zigzagged countless miles and endless times back and forth across the South, but I will have lost the South in an addict’s dreams, and in the telling of the story.
If I came to learn about the South, to know it, to understand it, then I have failed. I have not explored the nooks and crannies where the South gets its lore and color and charm. I have not crept into any backwoods hollows, have not been to any hillbilly bars. “King” Oliver, Basin Street, the blues and jazz seem far away and unattainable. I will have to leave those flavors for another trip—or another traveler.
You cannot see every tree in a forest. Even if you see every tree you cannot remember each one or describe each one, but only those trees that somehow strike you, that have meaning, trees that mark the path into the deep wood and out again, trees that bear fruit for you to eat, trees especially beautiful, exceptionally deformed, trees whose leaves you already know. In fact certain trees you won’t even see, no matter if they stand right in front of you.
And so it is with the road. You cannot go everywhere, see everything, talk to everyone. And you cannot tell every detail of what you have seen and done. You pick your route and your stories of the road—or they pick you, it seems—by the way they add color and fill in detail to the tableau being painted inside your frame of mind. (I never saw so many motorcycles on the road, for example, until I bought one; now I see them everywhere.)
You seek to prove your assumptions, at all cost if you are a propagandist, or to disprove them. But have them you will, and everything you see and do will seem to pertain directly to what has been going on in your head and what for the moment at least is important. It is nearly impossible to just go, to be an observer only.
So when the road passed me like a relay baton from one place to the next, one person to the next, it was with a purpose.
In South Carolina, I did not see the coastal swamps or the beach resorts.
In Charleston, I nearly ignored the lady squatting on the sidewalk in her floppy red hat.
In Andersonville, Georgia, I hardly heard Willie Ann Towns when she told me she liked to eat dirt.
The simple stories that people like to tell to strangers and that make traveling such a joy were hidden behind the veil of my racist agenda.
I saw everything in terms of race. (Perhaps for a little while longer it will still be necessary to see the world this way.) And I was drawn to people for whom race was an issue and who at least were willing to talk about it.
* * *
Eleanor Tate writes children’s books whose central characters are always black. Her goal seems to be giving black kids a positive self-image.
“Because it’s necessary,” she said. “They’re not getting much from anywhere else these days.”
She was about my age, wore a very close-cut Afro. She was thin, almost petite. I met her on a street corner in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We talked for a minute and then she decided to show me around. I climbed into her car and we toured the black neighborhood where she lived. It is not a very pretty place, dusty streets with no sidewalks. The grass at the edge of the roads has been worn completely away. Broken bottles in the streets, debris in the yards, trash strewn all over. Too many broken-down cars, bars on the windows of houses, people hanging around with no place to go and nothing to do, their loud voices and laughter trying to hide the despair in their eyes.
“Drugs have taken over here the same as they have taken over everywhere else. People steal, people get drunk, people hurt other people. It’s what we have come to be,” she said.
But it wasn’t always like that. Her eyes lit up briefly while she remembered.
“Maybe it could be that way again,” she said. “But we need to remember what we used to have, the way we used to be.”
She told me to go back to North Myrtle Beach and have a look at a little town nestled along the oceanfront.
“It used to be a big black resort,” she said. “Now it’s all decay. That’s what we have allowed to happen to ourselves.”
Atlantic Beach has been hit by hard times. Its rich history has been eroded, forgotten by all but the few who care.
In the 1930s a black man named George Tyson bought the land but couldn’t hold on to it. He sold some of it, mortgaged the rest, and when he couldn’t make payments on the mortgage, a group of black doctors, lawyers, and teachers purchased the land and formed the Atlantic Beach Company to save the area and develop the property. They subdivided it into lots and sold them. In 1966 Atlantic Beach elected a mayor and a town council and was issued a charter by the state of South Carolina. It was a comfortable little black community.
But there’s more to it than that. Time and circumstance allowed Atlantic Beach to prosper. It became a beach resort for black people.
Blacks were prohibited by law from setting foot on practically every beach in the state. South Carolina was viciously segregated, and any amenity that catered to whites—hotels, housing, public schools, even the ocean—was by and large off-limits to blacks, except those who served whites in some capacity or other.
Atlantic Beach became their haven. When they wanted a day at the beach, they could come here and enjoy the ocean and the beach without being arrested. They could relax and vacation without insult or racial harassment.
From the 1940s to the 1970s and the end of rigid segregation, Atlantic Beach drew blacks from all over the country: professionals on vacation lived in relative luxury, nationally known entertainers performed, locals needing a day in the sun and a dip in the ocean basked in the glory of black wealth.
Atlantic Beach thrived.
But now the roads are rutted. The houses look more like shacks. Shop windows are boarded up. The area looks almost bombed out, deserted except for a few out-of-work men loitering in the shade.
This is what integration has done. As soon as it was all right to go to the white hotels, who could be bothered with the black ones? White people wouldn’t patronize black establishments, and blacks no longer had to. Black businesses and areas dried up. Money left the black community, and with the money went those who could get out. White businesses and white communities got richer. Black communities went into decline. Only the poor were left behind—for the most part.
Eleanor might not be rich—I couldn’t tell and didn’t ask—but she had accomplished plenty. Five books published and numerous awards, for starters. She has been a newspaper editor and a reporter, has sat on the board of a black storytellers association, helped found the South Carolina Academy of Authors, and was a director of a national festival for black storytelling.
I asked Eleanor why she still lived here. She was insulted by the question—and rightly so.
“It’s my home,” she said. “What would you rather I did, move to some white neighborhood where I won’t be welcomed anyway? There is no reason to leave here. I have my house and my friends. And I like being around black people. I just wish I could do something to uplift them so they could all be better off, spiritually and physically.”
I told her she sounded heroic.
“There are no heroes,” she said. “You are what you are and you do what you do. If you’re lucky enough and you live right, who you are and what you do become heroic. But that’s all. I just do what I can.”
It is easy to forget the strength and tender love that exists among black people. We see the violent images on the television and we forget that all is not selfishness, drugs, death and despair. We forget about the caring that goes on and the gentle hope that holds people together. We forget the sacrifice of those who could save themselves if they were not trying to save others. We forget the real heroe
s. We forget the angels.
XIII
For bigotry, which is unreasoning, can be cured only in death. Yet fear, if honest, can be erased by truth.
—Theodore L. White
A feeling of complete and utter dread fell over me as I drove south into Charleston. I was terrified, nearly shaking with fright, and I didn’t know why.
The next day I would be just as completely, just as utterly redeemed, and then again two days later, and then again later, and later still.
But this night found me on a dark and nearly deserted road. I had taken sort of a wrong turn—only sort of a wrong turn because when you don’t know where you’re headed and you don’t really care, when you’re just going, with no place to be and no itinerary, it doesn’t matter much what road you find yourself on. But I had veered off the main road to Charleston.
I was looking for a place to camp, an isolated meadow amid the trees where I could pull off the road and pitch my tent. I had been taking my time, had been searching for the perfect spot, but darkness had slipped swiftly down around me and caught me unawares. In the heat of the day I had removed my jacket, but the sun’s warmth was no more and I was getting cold. I tried to speed up to end the search sooner, but that only made the wind around me move faster. I grew colder. I had to slow down. The search seemed endless.
Finally I found a spot that looked perfect. I passed it, checked out the surrounding area, and then went back to it.
It was far enough off the road that passing cars wouldn’t see me. It was in a clearing within a grove of palmettos. The earth was soft and sandy. I wanted to turn the bike around to face out in case I needed to make a speedy exit, but I had trouble in the sand. I got stuck for a moment and made an awful racket trying to get the bike on to more solid ground. It was then that a strange dread swept over me.
I had started to remove my camping gear from the bike. Suddenly everything around me went still. The wind stopped. There was no noise. The air was cool. A shadow passed overhead. I was sure an evil spirit was lurking here, some restless ghost; or that something horrible had happened here, or was about to, some blood-curdling, bone-chilling act of violence.
In the woods a twig snapped. My heart skipped a beat.
I held my breath to listen. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to make a sound, didn’t want to reveal my presence. If someone hiding in these trees suddenly appeared toting a shotgun, I was defenseless.
My heart began to pound. I felt my hands tremble and my legs shake.
I’m sure it was nothing, sure it was just the darkness and the quiet and the isolation—simply my imagination running away with me. But I got on my bike and got out of there anyway. I went to find a hotel.
All the way down the road I laughed at my panic. But even as I laughed, I imagined some goon sneaking out in the night. He carried, of course, a long-bladed hunting knife, or a big axe, or maybe a chainsaw. And without even bothering to knock on my tent flap to see who was at home, he started hacking into the tent and into me. He lived in those trees, hiding—from the law, from the world, from the future. I was an intruder he did not trust, a trespasser he wanted gone, and killing me was the only way he knew.
I don’t know where such thoughts came from, but I had the distinct feeling that something horrible had happened in that grove. I wondered if maybe Joseph had been there, or someplace near, and had experienced some pain. I wondered if he was warning me somehow.
I put those thoughts out of my mind, found a hotel on the outskirts of Charleston, and went to sleep.
I slept well, had no bad dreams, and rose late.
The next afternoon, on my way into town, I pulled into a parking lot where a man sitting beside a cart was selling boiled peanuts. A big hand-painted sign lay against the side of the cart. I had seen similar signs all along South Carolina roads but before I came south I had never heard of such a thing as boiled peanuts. I pulled into the lot to grab a bag.
The old man swished around in a huge vat and dug up a ladleful of peanuts. He strained them and dumped them into a brown paper bag. I started eating them right away.
“I’ve never had these before,” I said.
“Where you been?” said he laughing. “Out of the country? Or you just don’t know good eating.”
“Both, I guess. I’m not from around here.”
“Buddy, I can see that,” he said. He shook my hand.
His old hands were long and bony. His face was taut, his legs thin. His trousers were torn. His left shoe had split along one side. He looked frail, almost as if he were ill, but he had a mouthful of healthy teeth, yellowed from tobacco, but all there. He smiled broadly.
“I’m going to let you have those,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I want to pay for them.”
“Man, one bag of goobers ain’t going to break me. You take those peanuts and have a good time. Suck on them before you crack them open, suck all the juice out of them. It’s kind of salty but sweet at the same time. You eat a mess of them and they’ll really fill you up. Good for you too.”
I cracked a few shells. They were soft. The juice, water they had been boiled in, spilled out of each one. The nuts inside were soft too, salty like the juice, and very different from roasted peanuts. And they were hot.
“This is how we eat them around here,” he told me. “Boiled, not roasted. They’re better, don’t you think?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer.
As we were gabbing, a little red car skidded up and two young men got out to buy peanuts from this old man. They were engrossed in conversation.
“You should have seen it,” one fellow said. “This Filipino bumped into my car and then wasn’t going to stop. I had to speed up and cut him off. He pretended he didn’t see me, and you know how they drive, like they can’t see. And this poor white boy beside him was looking all indignant. Can you believe it? A Filipino and a cracker. Now I seen everything. I let them know right away that this warn’t no ignorant nigger they were dealing with. I took care of them real good.”
“Hey,” the other fellow said, “did you hear about that big crash up on 17-A?”
“What? Last night?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Not a crash, really. This big semitruck ran off the road into a clearing, smashed into some palmetto trees, and got stuck in the sand.”
“Whereabouts?”
“About an hour out of town.”
An hour out of town, Highway 17-A. Somewhere in the vicinity of where I had almost pitched my tent.
I took my boiled goobers and rode in a trance toward town. Sitting on the curb at the corner of Cumberland and King streets, I put them in my mouth, one by one.
I was wearing an old torn T-shirt that I had bought the year I graduated from the university. My favorite. On the front was the Stanford University logo, on the back a cartoonish design that commemorated my graduating class—1977. There were holes in it back and front, the sleeves were frayed, the collar had almost separated from the body of the shirt.
Now all of a sudden, I no longer wanted to wear it. I was no longer the young man who had bought it, no longer the man I had been even a few months ago.
When I finished eating the peanuts, I went to my bike and took off the shirt. I put on a different shirt and threw the past away. I wanted no link with it.
When I explored Charleston it was with new eyes. I believe now in ghosts. I believe now that we carry the past with us, not just a personal past but the deep past as well. I believe we have two lives, the one we live for ourselves, and the one we live for others. And perhaps the measure of a man’s worth is the smallness of the gap between the two.
I’m sure Great-Grandfather Joseph would have passed this way, if only to see Charleston, then as well as now one of the most beautiful and charming cities in the country. If he was at all like me, he would have come here to touch the past and then to put it behind him, to remind himself of what he had escaped and what he was no longer, to remind himself that the line between goo
d and bad fortune is thinly drawn, to remind himself that he could never really escape, that he would never be free, that no man ever is.
We are parties to our own lack of freedom, and no matter which side of the gate we are on we are all of us prisoners.
Once again slavery takes center stage, and we see slave and slaver both as prisoners mired in deceit and self-deception: the lies about inferiority and over-sexed savagery, the myths about the inability to learn, the lack of a work ethic, and about the docile, happy-go-lucky slave, the southern falsehood too that whites and blacks cannot live together, that they have been and must remain strangers to one another. Against these lies in particular Charleston gives beautiful and expert testimony.
Charleston was the capital of slavery in America, the country’s primary slave port. Half the city was black, and more whites owned slaves here than in any other city. The beauty of the city, its wealth and its economy were built on slave labor, and on the labor of free blacks. Black men and women worked here, slave and free, and are on the record as butchers and fishermen, seamstresses, laundresses, nurses and midwives, tailors and cap makers, blacksmiths, porters, masons, printers, cabinetmakers, coach makers, shoemakers, locksmiths, sailors, barbers, bookbinders and barrel makers, painters and plasterers. They were a decidedly industrious lot. They did everything that needed doing.
And yet the image passed down is of a docile slave idling in the shade, loitering with nothing to do, without a thought in his head, an image that was comforting to the white population, no doubt. Whites, then as now, were afraid of uncontrolled blacks. Racial stereotypes of lazy blacks were promoted to maintain the myths of superiority and the need for subordination, but if the image had been a true picture, there would have been no need to control blacks so severely.
Remember that Denmark Vesey lived in Charleston. He had won a $1,500 lottery prize and with part of that money he bought his freedom. He educated himself, began preaching to other blacks, and urged them to fight for deliverance. A slave revolt was planned for June 16, 1822. It failed but not before many whites were killed.
South of Haunted Dreams Page 20
