South of Haunted Dreams

by Eddy L. Harris

  There he settled, in Tennessee, and there he established his line.

  Others would come behind him, others would cross the river and push on farther west. From somewhere to the river they would need transportation. Joseph, with one eye surely on the past and the other eye squarely on the future, supplied travelers with speedier transport and so found his own future.

  I wonder what they called Joseph. Mister? Sir? Uncle Joe? I wonder if they knew he was black. I wonder if it would have mattered. Instead of riding a creaky old wagon over a rutted road, they could ride a stagecoach and drastically shorten their travel time. Efficiency, that’s all that mattered. Time saved was money earned. They were in a hurry. Even then Americans were always in a hurry.

  Despite the speed of stagecoach and railroad, however, they could not do in a month what I on the bike could do in a day. I was in a hurry too, putting miles between me and the past, in a hurry to taste as much of the South as I could, flying with not much rhyme or reason, other than to ride on. On and on. This day, I had ridden forever.

  Now with a cold soda I washed the heat and dust from my mouth. I strolled to stretch my legs. I crunched ice as I walked. I went back to the bike and suited up.

  The man in the window was still there, not moving, still staring. He raised his eyebrows. I smiled. And then, once broken, I couldn’t help myself. I grinned. The tough guy laughed.

  Quickly then he came running out.

  “If you hadn’t smiled,” he said, “I never would have come out.”

  I wanted to tell him he was the one who had prompted my smile. I kept it to myself.

  “But then you laughed,” he said. “Then I knew it was all right to come out and talk to you. I wanted to see your bike.”

  Always the bike.

  We talked. He invited me to his little farm. He had a room where I could take a nap, he said. I could spend some days there if I wanted to. I told him I was in a hurry, but I could use the nap, I said. I followed him home. His girlfriend made iced tea. I took a five-minute nap. That was enough. The rest of my time there I spent walking with him—his name was Bob—down by the river and making promises that I would return one day and that we’d go fishing together.

  I don’t even remember where Bob lives. I was just on the road somewhere and a stranger offered me a spot in his shade. How could I have refused?

  “I found Christ when I was ten,” he said. “That has made all the difference. Now I’m color-blind.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good thing,” I said. “It takes more than blindness. It takes awareness. We don’t have to stop seeing our differences. We shouldn’t have to stop being different, shouldn’t even have to worry about it. We just have to stop making it a crime to be different.”

  “I’m doing my best,” he said. “I’m trying to raise my kid right, anyway. It starts at home, the good and the bad, don’t you think? Even so, you never know what’s going to influence somebody.”

  He told me the story of his young son in school.

  “There is a new kid in class, a black kid,” he said. “All the kids in class have been calling him nigger. Every time they talked about him they called him nigger. My son had never heard that word before. He thought nigger was the boy’s name. He went up to this new kid and introduced himself, just as the teacher was coming over to where they were. ‘Hello, Nigger,’ my son said. The teacher heard him and he was in big trouble. Now he’s confused. He’s only six. He’s in trouble at school for trying to be friendly to a black kid. I wonder what all this will do to him, now that he’s eaten from the tree—if you know what I mean.”

  He picked up a long branch and pretended to fish with it.

  “What do I tell him?” he asked. “What do we do?”

  I shrugged.

  “Kids learn to be heartless and hateful at home,” he said.

  “But then it quickly spreads,” I said. “A kid hears his father say something, the kid passes it to another kid, pretty soon all the kids have picked up some evil idea. It’s like a disease. It’s infectious.”

  “Maybe the good can be too,” he said. “My father was prejudiced and I was raised to be prejudiced. But my father had a change of heart. He was in the hospital and all his best nurses were black. That opened his eyes. But even before that, he worked with black men and had black friends. It’s funny. He was a racist but there were black men he trusted more than white ones.”

  “Did the black men ever come to his house?”

  “Yes,” he said. “He invited them home. But I’m sure around his white friends he said things and acted just like they did, just like he was supposed to do. But something good must have happened. It rubbed off on me, I think. Maybe it will rub off on somebody else. Maybe we can all have a change of heart.”

  Maybe, I said. But with all this goodness rubbing off, why has it taken so long?

  * * *

  “Don’t ask me,” George Brett told me. This was at a roadside hamburger bar in Demopolis, Alabama. It was raining. I had stopped to grab something to eat while I waited for the roads to dry. I sat at a splintery picnic table beneath the shelter and ate a greasy grilled chicken sandwich. There were other tables, plenty of places George could have chosen to sit. But he sat next to me.

  He didn’t sit beside me for any reason. He didn’t start talking to me, didn’t mention the bike, didn’t even say hello. He nodded at me, but that was all. He wasn’t sitting with me so much as he simply wasn’t avoiding me. I was sitting near the walk-up window where he had placed his order and paid for it. Now that he had gotten his burger he sat beside me to eat it. I felt compelled to speak to him.

  “I’m not a good one to ask,” he said. “We couldn’t afford none of that being prejudiced stuff. My daddy was a school principal. It just never made any sense in my house.”

  * * *

  The South was trying hard, reaching out to me in such simple, subtle ways, offering me friendship’s hand, showing me its prettiest face.

  Its pretty faces are lovely to look at, sweet and inviting. But the South has an ugly face too. And its ugly face is the face of a nightmare.

  Greg Davis was a nightmare. My path crossed his at a gasoline station in northeast Tennessee. I had filled my tank and absentmindedly took my time moving away from the pump. The car behind me started honking.

  Way back near Sopchoppy, Florida, a car had started honking behind me. I had been taking my time that day too, driving at the speed limit for a change, not racing like a maniac. The car behind was trying to get around me. The driver was in an awful hurry. Oncoming traffic wouldn’t let him pass. And I wouldn’t let him get around me. I wouldn’t speed up either. He started weaving in the lane to get my attention. He never stopped blowing his horn.

  He got my attention all right. I slowed down even more. When he moved left in the lane, I moved left. When he moved to the right, so did I. I made him pay for his impatience.

  About a mile down the road we approached the entrance to a hospital. I went past it. The frantic man behind me turned in. I felt miserable. Beside him in the car a woman seemed to be in agony. Maybe she had had a heart attack. Maybe she was having a baby. Who knows, but I swore I would try to see the other fellow’s point of view and be more considerate.

  But not today. Today in Tennessee I was up to my old tricks. This crazy man wanted me to move at his pace. I forced him to move at mine.

  “Are you going to get that thing out of my way?” he shouted. “Or am I going to have to knock it over?”

  “And me with it, I presume.”

  “Get the hell out of the way.”

  Slowly, very slowly I put on the jacket. Then the gloves. Even in this heat, I dug the gloves out of my gear and put them on. Then my sunglasses. Finally I grabbed the helmet and started to put it on, but first I had to wipe off the visor. The man behind me was burning with rage.

  “What’s your problem?” I said.

  “You’re my fucking problem,” he screamed. “Now get out of my w
ay.”

  “No,” I said gently. “What’s your real problem?”

  “You want me to say it,” the man said to me. “All right, then, I’ll say it. I don’t like niggers.”

  “Simple as that, is it?” I stayed cool and calm.

  “Simple as that. You’re a nigger, and I don’t like you.”

  I waited for him to get out of his car.

  He was about my size, a little heavier maybe, stockier and surely stronger. I couldn’t tell if he was older or younger. But he drove an old car that had a few dents in the door and was beginning to rust around the edges; soon it would need a new muffler. The door creaked when it was opened and closed.

  I thought of all the ways in my life I had deflected racist attacks—subtle and unconscious racism, or overt racism of the most dangerous kind—and how I had protected myself sometimes with laughter, sometimes with kindness, once with a gun. But this time I wasn’t sure I wanted to deflect it. I had been through too much to try to avoid it—too many miles, too many emotions, remembrances, and discoveries. His pride was on the line, and now so was my own.

  “You don’t even know me, mister … mister … What’s your name?”

  He stood up taller.

  “Davis,” he said, as if he were proud of it, as if I should know who he was. “Greg Davis.”

  Funny what people will tell you, even information that can be used against them. No wonder common crooks so often get caught.

  “Well, Greg Davis, you don’t even know me,” I said. “You don’t know anything about me. How can you not like me?”

  “I know enough about you,” he said. “I know all I need to know. You’re a nigger and that’s enough for me.”

  If he had said this to me two weeks ago I would have popped him in the mouth, six weeks ago I would have broken his arm, four months ago and I would be telling this story to my death-row prison mates. Today all I could do was laugh at him.

  All of a crazy sudden, my fear and loathing and most of my rage escaped from me, and the only response I had for Greg Davis was laughter.

  The South is a little child wanting approval, a scared and confused little orphan hiding its self-doubt behind a wall of bluster and self-righteousness.

  But then the South has always been very righteous about its wrongness.

  In Greenwood, Mississippi, Martha Gabler had told me about her mother whose church refused to be integrated. Someone asked the old woman what Jesus would have done in a similar situation. “Wouldn’t Jesus let those black people into his church?” she was asked. She thought for a good while.

  “Of course he would,” she said. Then she thought a little more.

  “But Jesus would have been wrong,” she said.

  That was the old old South, Martha told me. She wanted me to know things were changing.

  This same Martha Gabler who had been raised by a woman who could not see the rightness of acting as Jesus would have done, the living God she prayed to; this same Martha Gabler who was rich and white, the same as her mother; this same Martha Gabler whose household like her mother’s was tended to by an old black woman who washed the clothes, made the beds, scrubbed the floors, and minded the children—this same Martha Gabler invited me to stay in her home, sleep in her guest bedroom, and make myself totally and remarkably at home.

  The next day she organized a luncheon for me to meet her friends and to discuss, I suppose, changes they had all seen in the South over the years. But some things never change. I asked them to notice that the waiters and waitresses in this restaurant, as in many many others, were white. The kitchen help was black.

  “Why?” I asked.

  One lady offered the country’s poor economy as an answer.

  “Whites have been forced out of the good jobs,” she said. “They’ve had to take jobs black people would normally do. Blacks get forced down even lower.”

  But Martha—dear Martha—was truly astounded.

  “I never honestly paid attention before. To tell you the truth,” she said, “I never even thought about who was a waiter and who always worked in the kitchen. I will from now on.”

  And that was enough for me.

  We spent more than two hours at lunch. We talked about many things, important things, I’m sure. But what I remember most was her promise to watch the world a little more carefully.

  “If we are ever really going to change,” she said, “if things are ever going to get better, we need to look at a lot of things more carefully.”

  Martha Gabler is the South to me. She represents the glorious generosity that all people are capable of.

  Greg Davis is just a throwback to the past, clinging to it the way an old dog clings to life even as it goes into the woods to find a quiet private place to die.

  I looked at Greg Davis with pity. He made a fist. I just laughed at him some more. He looked absurd.

  He watched me quizzically, as if I was crazy. He took half a step back. I thought he was going to get into his car and drive away. I didn’t want that. I had been through too much to let him off that easily.

  I had swung south and now was making my way up through Louisiana, winding my way through Cajun country, listening to a language I could not make heads or tails of. I had crossed the great river at Baton Rouge, headed for Natchitoches. I had heard there was a statue called the Good Negro in the town square, hat in hand, head bowed. I wanted to see the shameful thing. Touch the past.

  That Sunday morning I passed along Jackson Street in Alexandria, passed Emmanuel Baptist Church. All the churchgoers on their way to the service were white. Every single one. Two blocks down the street, the same street, the same side of the road, Good Hope Baptist Church was receiving its black congregation. Nothing, it seemed, had changed in a hundred years.

  I went to a Catholic mass on the other side of the Cape River. As usual I was not paying attention. My mind wandered during readings. What were these people thinking of me, the only black face in their church this morning? But something suddenly caught my ear. I knew, of course, I could not have heard what I thought I had heard.

  “… you must lay aside your former way of life and the old South…”

  I knew he could not have, but I would have sworn he had said “old South.” I picked up my missal and found the chapter in Ephesians the lector had been reading from. It said “old self,” but that was close enough.

  When I left mass that morning, twenty, thirty people greeted me in the friendliest fashion and shook my hand hello.

  Some things do change.

  Some things never do.

  Bernie Moreland stopped me outside a convenience store where I was drinking juice and eating a doughnut.

  “Man, it sure is good to see you,” he said.

  I thought he had mistaken me for somebody else.

  “It’s good to see a black man standing tall and proud,” he said. “These black people in the South are all hangdog tired. I have just got to get out of here.”

  He was a musician from Kansas City. His wife, who was from Alexandria, had dragged him here to live.

  “Not even for love can I take much more of this,” he said.

  “It’s not changing?”

  “Not fast enough for me,” he said. “Not fast enough, not far enough. You be careful on that bike. This is still the South, you know.”

  As Greg Davis was at this moment making very clear.

  But other places, other people were making other gestures, other signs that things were indeed very different.

  The Good Negro had been removed from the square in Natchitoches. In the place where it used to stand, flowers now grow.

  The South was growing on me, little by little, showing me the tiny ways it was trying to make peace. With the past, perhaps. Perhaps with me.

  On my way out of Natchitoches I was flying along the narrow roads at my customary eighty-five, ninety miles an hour, up through the back country, heading toward Arkansas. Just before Winnfield and the left turn that would take me north
, I saw a cop far in the distance ahead of me. I tried to slow down, but at that speed, with him coming toward me, there was no way. As soon as he got close, the red lights were on, the siren squealed for half a moment to get my attention. The police car skidded into a U-turn in the middle of the road. I slowed immediately and stopped.

  The Louisiana trooper who pulled himself from the car was tall and thin. He walked slow. He took long careful strides. As he walked toward me, he started speaking. His drawl was as slow as his walk.

  “How y’all doing today?” he said.

  I just laughed. What else could I do? He had me red-handed.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  But already he was talking. He even smiled. The cop in North Carolina who had given me the speeding ticket had not been pleasant. Why should this man be?

  I took out my license and handed it to him. He went back to the car and talked into the radio a minute. Then he came back.

  “That’s a nice-looking bike,” he said. “But you ought to drive it a little slower.”

  “You’re right,” I said. I was perfectly willing to grovel my way out of a speeding ticket. I would have tried in North Carolina, but that cop wanted nothing friendly to pass between us.

  “We got some nice scenery down here,” he said. “You ought to slow down and take a look at some of it. Stop and go fishing or something. You’re too young to be in a hurry.”

  He handed back the license.

  “I’m not going to give you a ticket,” he said. “Just promise me you’ll slow it up a little bit.”

  “I promise,” I said. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  I tried to read his name tag, Ponthiaux, I think, but he had turned already and was climbing back into his car. He made another U-turn and went on down the road.