South of Haunted Dreams

by Eddy L. Harris

  So much for the docile black who did not resist his captivity.

  And so much for the image of lazy trifling blacks. Black labor built this city, and yet there is no monument to their efforts, certainly no monument to slavery, no reminders at all.

  It is as if the city in its guilt or shame is trying to pretend that slavery never existed. But here in Charleston of all places there ought to be some kind of shrine.

  “Here was a thin neck in the hourglass of the Afro-American past, a place where individual grains from all along the West African coast had been funneled together, only to be fanned out across the American landscape with the passage of time.”

  —Peter H. Wood.

  Nearly all the slaves brought into the country from Africa and the West Indies, if they did not come through New Orleans, came through Charleston. In the same way that European immigrants to America were quarantined at Ellis Island in New York, newly arrived slaves were quarantined at Sullivan Island just north of the city. Sullivan Island now is a mostly black community, a quiet place where people live and not much else. If you didn’t already know the history, you’d never know it. There is no Ellis Island–type museum. There are no reminders.

  On the corner of Meeting Street and St. Michael’s Alley, in the shade of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, an old woman in a red floppy hat squats on the pavement. She has but a few teeth in her head, she never smiles. But in her hands and in her face are centuries of patience and hard work. Her name is Miss Stokes and she sits here all day every day, she said, and weaves baskets. Palm fronds, they looked like to me, but she said they were blades of sweetgrass.

  “Hard work?”

  “What isn’t?” she replied. “A lot of work, a lot of patience.”

  I almost missed her. I actually ignored her at first, passed her by and came back to her, this link to the deep past. She was a Gullah woman, she said, a vestige of African culture kept alive. She weaves baskets, she speaks another language, one that I cannot understand—a mixture of English, American and Creole. She sits all day doing what her ancestors did. She is a monument to slavery.

  I walked over to Chalmers Street where the old slave market used to be. The market is closed now, all boarded up. For a time it was a tourist attraction. People came to see where and how slave auctions took place. Now it’s nothing but an empty shell of memories, a low brick building, twice as long as it is wide, not many windows, and no way for air to circulate. It’s dark inside, must have seemed even darker in 1820 when it was built. It must have been hot. In summer it must have been an inferno.

  The city is crawling with tourists. But they do not come to the old slave market. They have nothing to do with it; it has nothing to do with them. They are on holiday, after all.

  Instead they take expensive carriage rides along the old streets. They spend hours on the USS Yorktown, a permanently moored aircraft carrier that sits in the harbor. They ride the ferries out into the harbor where the Cooper River flows into the sea and Fort Sumter rises above the waves. The Civil War officially began here with the bombardment of Sumter. Those were painful days in American history, but they were days of honor, glorious days, romantic. The tourists don’t seem to mind being reminded of it.

  Along the north face of Washington Square there is a little monument to General Pierre Gustave Beauregard, the Confederate brigadier who ordered the assault on Sumter.

  In the center of the square there is a large marble obelisk, another monument to the war. The names of great battles and campaigns are etched on its sides: Richmond, Petersburg, Drury’s Bluff, Sumter, Manassas, Battery Wagner. Shrines to the effort to keep blacks enslaved.

  But nowhere in the city is there a shrine to any effort to free the slaves, or even to the contribution blacks have made to the city.

  When I walked out of the square and turned up Queen Street, a young woman approached. As we walked toward each other, very subtly she removed her purse from the shoulder nearest me and put it over her other arm. She clutched it close.

  I wanted to scream at her for her stupidity.

  “Lady, do you think I couldn’t have that thing if I wanted it, the purse and you too?”

  But there was no rage inside. I just laughed. This is the monument to black people I have been looking for, her attitude and her behavior.

  On one side of Calhoun Street, the houses are old and beautiful. On the other side of Calhoun Street the houses are old and falling down. There is a black side of town, of course, and the people who live here seem to have missed out on the prosperity boom in the main part of town. Their front porches are collapsing. Paint peels off the walls. Young people sit on the front stoops and drink liquor concealed in brown paper bags.

  This is another monument to black people.

  I walked among the old magnificent homes. Some had been preserved, others restored. Hundreds of houses remain from the early 1800s, dozens more are even older. They are beautiful houses. It’s a beautiful city. The shady tree-lined streets, the old churches, these houses—the entire town is a link to the past. And I realized that none of this would be here if not for the labor of black women and men.

  A crew was rehabbing one of the homes, and at the top of a ladder a black man was perched. In his hands he held hammer and chisel. He waved down at me as I passed. I made a fist and gave him a black power salute. He looked at me like he didn’t understand, like I was crazy. He went back to work.

  I told this to a man named Phillip Carter as we stood waiting in line for ice cream cones at one of the food shops in the old market, now another tourist trap full of junk food and souvenirs. The market runs all the way from Meeting to East Bay Street.

  “I get sick watching these out-of-towners eating all this silly stuff,” he said. But he was about to eat an ice cream just the same.

  We talked awhile and when I told him about the worker on the ladder, Phillip shook his head. I thought he was as incredulous as I was. I was wrong.

  “Fists waving in the air and fancy handshakes,” he said. “These things we do not need. We need to find a way to get on with it. We need to know what’s important and what’s not.”

  Women like Miss Stokes know, he said. He didn’t know her, didn’t call her by name, but he knew that women like her sat near the church and weaved baskets.

  “They live down on the islands,” he said. “They are keepers of the past for us.”

  We took our cones outside. Tourists crowded the streets. They stopped traffic to take pictures. They hurried on to the next site.

  “To these tourists the past is just a place to visit,” he said. “But it lives inside those old basket weavers. They are our monuments. These beautiful homes are our monuments. None of this would be here if not for us. Not the city, not the whole damned country. We have a lot to be proud of. No matter what you or anybody else can do, we are here. And we have been here. And we are going to be here. None of that stuff that happened a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago is going to stop us or help us, but we shouldn’t forget it. If anything, we need longer memories. We’ve been measuring ourselves by how far we’ve advanced since slavery, and how far from it we are, how many generations and all that. But me, I wish I were closer to it. I wish my grandfather had been a slave. I want to be able to feel it, to hear his old stories and know how it was. What’s happened has happened and we shouldn’t be ashamed of it. We need to touch it from time to time, then set it aside and just get on with it. We owe it to ourselves; nobody else owes us a damned thing.”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head—not at what he was saying, but that he was saying it at all.

  I wanted to ask him one more question, but I never did. I wanted to know why he was here.

  Eleanor Tate had already given me the answer. Ron White tomorrow would give me the answer again. And then a man named Gopher.

  Ron White is a retired Marine Corps sergeant who put his life savings into an empty building just outside Beaufort, South Carolina. He turned the building into a
restaurant. A Marine Corps flag waves in the wind. The sign out front says: REAL HOME COOKING. I stopped there for lunch on my way south toward the coastal islands and Gullah country.

  Inside, the place was packed. Black men, white men, not many women. Soldiers from the base across the road. Two local policemen. A table crowded with men whose bellies were so big they could not see their feet. I pointed to one as he was leaving.

  “That guy was skinny when he came in here,” I said. “You’re going to kill these white people. You’re feeding them too much.”

  Fried chicken, greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread, grits, stew, barbecue. And massive portions. And oh it was good. These are things I used to eat when I was a kid. My childhood came flooding back to me in wave after wave of soul food delight.

  I had a plate piled high with just about everything. It’s a wonder my belly wasn’t as huge as the other men’s when I left. The only disappointment was the pie. It was pecan. They didn’t have coconut.

  Sergeant White came from Memphis, was stationed here by the Marines and decided to stay.

  “And it’s been all right?”

  “It seems to work,” he said. “I stay busy, and that’s what it’s all about. Trying to do what I can to get on with it. If you’re not moving forward you’re standing still. And that’s the same as going backwards.”

  He left me to talk to another ex-Marine and his wife, and to a colonel from the base. He had to get on with it, had to keep busy.

  * * *

  Spanish moss covers the trees in Carolina, hanging from the branches of the oak trees and creating canopies of shade. Every tree becomes a weeping willow, every lawn invites a picnic.

  Closer to the sea, the tall marsh grass hides meandering backwaters, deadens the sound, quiets the world. This is the low country.

  I had followed Highway 21 through Beaufort, across St. Helena Sound, over a series of islands to one called Fripp, and the end—or beginning—of the road.

  Fripp Island is a private island. It used to be a vacation resort, but now the developers are selling homes for year-round living. There is a guard posted at the gate and you cannot get in without prior invitation. I tried, was refused, and ended up in the sales office. I wanted to have a look around. It was no place I’d want to live anyway—too sterile, too safe, too private. But worst of all it gave me a sense of sudden loss.

  I met Gopher on my way back. He was fishing off a bridge, said he hadn’t caught anything all day. I had stopped to ask him what had happened with the developers.

  “I thought this was all Gullah country,” I said.

  “It is,” he said. “But it’s changing. We’ve been discovered. And somebody has decided this part of the world is valuable real estate.”

  He wore clothes that made him look like a vagrant. He didn’t sound like one.

  He spent the long days fishing, he said, and that gave him plenty of time to think. There wasn’t much else to do. I asked him why he hadn’t left, why he still lived here. In this backwater country, in the South, in the middle of nothing to do.

  “Why not?” he said. “People always sound surprised that a black man either stays in the South or leaves and comes back. This is home, man. It’s not a bad place to be, better than some.”

  But home was under siege.

  “You know,” he said, “General Sherman gave this land to black people after the Civil War. He took it from the former slave owners and gave it to the former slaves. It took them almost a hundred fifty years, but now they’re winning it back. Buying out the ones who’ll sell, taking it from the ones who won’t.”

  “Taking it? They can’t just take your land.”

  “They have their ways,” he said. “They would prefer you to sell it but they ain’t going to try and make you. All they have to do is find a couple people whose kids don’t want to stay here and have no reason to hang on to the property. You get a few people to sell, start developing the land around, and pretty soon property values are up. The tax assessor man says the land around is worth more too so you have to pay more in taxes than you can afford. It’s not long before you either sell out or the state comes to take your land for the back taxes you owe. The developer gets it on the auction block and probably at a cheaper price than he offered you in the first place. Land that has been in your family for a hundred years gets turned into private estates and golf courses that they’ll shoot you for trying to cross. And maybe when all is said and done, you’ve got a pocketful of money, but that’s not going to last you long. And you can’t buy anything like you just lost. It wouldn’t be that much money. So you go from owning your own home and your own land to being poor and begging. It just ain’t fair.”

  “And you can’t see it coming, can you?” I said.

  He looked up and gave me a wry smile.

  “Oh, we saw it coming,” he said. “We always knew the white man would get us sooner or later. If he wants you, one way or another he’ll get you. But we hold out as long as we can. That’s why I’m here. Trying to hold out.”

  He squinted up into the sun and took a deep breath to fill his head with the smell of the marsh. He seemed a little sadder now.

  “The difference between poor black people and poor white people,” he said, “is that poor white people think that because they’re white they have an advantage over us. And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. The game is all about rich against poor. They can’t see it because the color game blinds them. They ought to be on our side but they think the rule of law is in their favor, and that’s a false hope, believe me.”

  “… wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes.”

  —Learned Hand.

  I looked carefully at Gopher, at his sun-darkened young face and at his strong gnarly hands. He looked poor. He wasn’t.

  * * *

  As I rode south along the coast, through Savannah and deeper into Georgia, I tried to remember why I had come to the South in the first place, what I had expected to find. White people shooting at me. Black people bitching and moaning. A reason to hate this place. Or was I looking for a reason to love this place? I didn’t really know anymore. But the South was surprising me. The South was a contradiction, always had been.

  Many if not most of the country’s greatest forefathers were slave-holding southerners preaching liberty and the rights of man. James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia, was vehemently against slavery.

  A southern state—Virginia—elected the first black governor in the U.S. More blacks were hired on to state payrolls during the reign of George Wallace—“Segregation now, segregation forever”—than ever before. And while Mississippi is synonymous with racial hatred, there are more elected black officials in Mississippi than in any other state.

  I no longer knew what to make of anything.

  I walked the dark streets of Savannah and breathed in the night air. A street called Bull cuts through the center of town. Quiet neighborhoods extend on either side of it. The houses are old, some are large, most are lovely. Every few blocks there is a little square. A little to the east, the pavement is chipped and the yards are weeds if anything green, but mostly dirt. The houses are not in good shape. You can always tell when you reach the poor black neighborhood. But there is a street sign that read E. HARRIS, and that made me smile.

  I rode on like some lonesome cowboy looking for a place to call home. But the dusty roads keep calling him, something keeps beckoning him. One more place to see, one more stranger to talk to. He rides restlessly from town to town, has a look around, then rides on again.

  Somewhere near Valdosta, Georgia, I stopped for gas. Then I pulled my bike over to the edge of the parking lot and lay in the grass. Three men approached me. They were dressed alike, all three, in blue jeans and light blue shirts and bright orange safety vests. They had been working on the road. A bus was waiting for them, and beside the bus a man stood holding a shotgun
. This was part of a prison chain gang.

  They had come over to talk about the bike. They looked it over and praised it, and then I said, “So how are the white folks treating you all down here?”

  Right away two of them left, as if it was some trap and there might be trouble. But the third stayed and talked until he got the signal from the guard that it was time to move on.

  The light in his eyes flashed. He was like a little boy about to say something naughty and delighting in it. He laughed boisterously.

  “About like white folks treat niggers anyplace else,” he said. “You know how they are.”

  The light in his eyes dimmed while he thought. His broad smile of crooked teeth relaxed and reformed itself, tensing again in a pursing of his lips. First his eyes narrowed into a frown of thoughtfulness, then into one of anger. The light that had been a twinkle in his eyes now became like fire.

  “It’s a good thing I’m in jail,” he said. “If I had stayed in Detroit, where I’m from, I think I’d be dead by now, killed either by some junkie or killed by the police. If I had stayed in Detroit I’d have been stealing and robbing and killing folks just to get by.”

  “What have you been doing down here?”

  “Stealing and robbing just to get by,” he said. “But not killing, anyway.” He laughed.

  He had come south to be with his family.

  “There ain’t nothing left in Detroit. There ain’t nothing nowhere else in this country either for black people. No jobs. No way to get no money. Nothing in the cities but dope killers and angry white people who don’t want you around nohow. They got the whole loaf and they got the nerve to hate you ’cause you’re asking for a few crumbs. At least here I got me some family.”

  “Is it different? The South, I mean.”

  “Oh, it’s different,” he said. “But it ain’t better. White folks is white folks, that’s all there is to it. But you know what I mean. My people went up north fifty, sixty years ago, and here I am coming back south to the same old shit they were trying to get away from. Not much has changed. When a white man looks at you, he still ain’t really looking at you. He might be trying to be your friend, he might even be your friend, I mean really think he’s your friend, but when he looks at you he’s looking right past you at something else. He don’t see you. He sees some make-believe image of you. He sees how you fit in with what he thinks black people are or how we ought to be. He’s built up such a mind thing about black people that he thinks he knows all about you and your whole damned family before you say word one. And deep down inside, he hates you. He wants to know why you can’t settle down and be a good little nigger and be happy with his leavings, the shit work he’s going let you do, the little shack he’s going let you live in. He’d be a damned sight happier if you just disappeared and quit wasting time and taking up space on HIS land, in HIS country that he stole fair and square. You ain’t never going to mean nothing to him. You don’t mean nothing to anybody white. And it don’t matter if you’re up north or down here somewhere. Our life is a war, man. You hear what I’m saying?”