South of Haunted Dreams

by Eddy L. Harris

  I thought once more of the cop in North Carolina who had given me a ticket, the difference in their ways. I just shook my head. I put him out of my mind, far away. I wanted to remember Ponthiaux.

  And I wanted to remember Doug Elms, a cop in Little Rock two days later. He came up to me as I was getting on my bike. He was on a bike of his own, had been riding as part of a funeral motorcade. He stopped me, we chatted, he asked if he could take my bike for a spin.

  “You can ride mine,” he said.

  I declined. He insisted. We traded bikes and I followed him.

  “I wanted you to see the difference,” he said. “Your sweet machine and this old clunker.”

  We rode out to a café. He bought me lunch. That evening he told me I could go with him when he was on patrol.

  “Not on bikes, though,” he said. “In a police car.”

  I was simply astounded.

  I did not know what to make of any of this. Maybe some conspiracy was afoot to make me love the South and report back to the real world how everything was right and getting better.

  But then there was Greg Davis. And there was Michael Grissom, a failed songwriter turned author in Nashville, Tennessee.

  I had ridden up the Natchez Trace from Jackson, where I had met the governor of Mississippi.

  Oh yes! I met Ray Mabus, governor of Mississippi. Martha Gabler somehow arranged it. And though I was not very excited about it I went, left Martha’s house just after breakfast, and sped south to Jackson. I had to be there at 11:30. The governor, I was warned, was a busy man.

  At faster-than-normal speeds it would have been more than a two-hour trip. I had less time than that. I drove like a maniac, thinking I could explain my speed by saying to any cop who stopped me, “I have a date with the governor. Radio ahead if you don’t believe me.”

  I didn’t find out until later that the Mississippi State Patrol are not great supporters of the governor.

  Luckily, I was not stopped.

  The meeting lasted all of thirty seconds. It was a waste of time for me, nothing but a photo opportunity for Mabus.

  Anne Sapp, the governor’s director of policy management, tried to console me.

  “What was that all about?” I asked. “I thought I was going to get an interview. Does he think I came all this way just to shake his hand and get my picture taken? Believe me, it’s not that big a deal to say I was in the capitol with the governor of Mississippi.”

  “Well,” she said. “There was a time when it would have been a very big deal indeed for a black person just to set foot inside this building. Let alone get photographed with the governor.”

  We went to a black neighborhood, she and I, for a huge lunch of greens and ham and beans and corn bread and sweet potatoes. The place was packed. No wonder there were no cops on the highway to stop me. They were all in here. Black cops sitting with white cops.

  “Not long ago,” Anne said, “there were no black state troopers. We’re inching along in Mississippi. It’s not a bad place.”

  But I couldn’t stay. I had made a date to meet Michael Grissom the next afternoon in Nashville. I rode through the night and all the next morning to find him. It started to rain. I stopped for a few hours. I continued on. I really wanted to meet him.

  I knew him only as the author of a book that had grabbed my attention one day. The cover of the book is white, with blue letters, all bordered in red. In the center, the thing that caught my eye was the red-white-and-blue battle flag of the Confederacy. The man in whose shop I found the book was embarrassed even to carry the thing, he said. But it was selling like crazy, he admitted, and this too embarrassed him.

  Southern by the Grace of God. I didn’t want to read it. But I wanted to talk to the man who wrote it.

  I found Grissom through his publisher, phoned him, and made the date. I did not tell him I was black, and he was startled, frightened, in fact, when I crept up behind him and introduced myself. His face, gaunt and ghostly, fell. He had assumed I was a fan. Now he feared I had come to do him harm.

  I let him squirm a minute, then put him at ease.

  “Boy howdy!” he kept saying, as if he couldn’t get over the shock. “You sure didn’t sound black over the phone.”

  “What does black sound like?” I asked.

  “Boy howdy!” he said again.

  We sat in a booth in a fast-food restaurant across from Music Row in the heart of Nashville. And we talked for an hour.

  Here was a man who believed in strict segregation. He had written a book that celebrates, he said, the lasting legacy of being a southerner.

  “That means racist to me,” I said.

  “It isn’t racist to want nothing to do with black people,” he said. “I don’t want to harm them in any way. I just don’t want to be forced to socialize with them. I don’t want to have to do business with them. I wouldn’t want to have to go to school with them or anything else.”

  Which may explain why there is hardly any mention in his book of any black contribution to the South, even very little mention of slavery, except in passing.

  “Slavery was not a bad thing,” he said. “We took a savage race and introduced them to our culture. They were much better off as slaves than they would have been if we had left them in Africa.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked. “Do you think it’s a good thing to steal people from their homes and subject them to pain and anguish? Do you think the South should still have slavery?”

  “It would sure solve the unemployment problem among blacks,” he said. “And most slaves you will find if you look into it were not treated bad. Slaves were valuable property. Nobody wants his property messed up. Yes, I do wish those idyllic days could come back. It was a much more civilized time, chivalrous and honorable.”

  There was a time, and not so long ago, when I would have wanted to grab Grissom by the throat and thrash the life out of him. Now I just wanted to laugh.

  I lie. I did want to hurt him. I wanted to slap him silly, wanted to take hold of his arm and break it, wanted to strangle him by his skinny neck. There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have done it. But now I felt sorry for this man who yearned for what used to be, for a past not even as it really was, but as he wished it had been. I felt sorry that his life was so wretched that he had to live deeply in an imagined past. I sat on my hands and pitied him.

  Grissom embodied for me all that the old South stands for, the way it clings to the past and wallows in it, revels in it, and wears blinders to block out the truth. He was the South that refuses to see its guilty hand, and in that refusal holds us back, locks us in the past.

  Grissom was the man I most wanted to hate, his the face I wanted to spit upon, the body I most wanted to kick, stab, wound mortally, the neck I most wanted to break. If I needed a face to hang upon the ogres of my nightmares, his was it. In the end there was no hate, only a bemused kind of sadness. It would have been like flogging a child.

  In the old South it was the Negro who was looked upon as a child, helpless in the ways of the world, needing protection from himself. How utterly strange.

  Grissom even looked like a child. He sat there grinning at me.

  I was fleeing Grissom and the violent things I was tempted to do to him when I stopped for gas somewhere east of Knoxville. I had gotten onto the interstate highway and zoomed south toward Chattanooga, then north into the mountains where the air was cool and saving.

  I thought I would head back north into Kentucky, go east over those mountains into coal mining country and watch men move mountains.

  They do that there. They dismantle mountains to get at the coal. Then they miraculously rebuild them. If you did not know exactly how it had once been, you would never know.

  I was drawn there, to see this miracle, to make a certain peace with a place I had left in an uneasy state of mind. I got off the Blue Ridge Parkway and retraced my route through Hampton and Elizabethton, Johnson City and Morristown, Tazewell and up toward the Cum
berland Gap. There in the mountains, before I crossed up into Kentucky, Greg Davis came up behind me.

  “So what’s it going to be?” I said. “A battle of wits? You haven’t got a chance.”

  He started to frown, took a step forward.

  “Or are we just going to fight?” I asked. “I am old, my back is tired from spending too much time on that bike, I’m probably not as strong you. But I have been through too much to let you beat me.”

  I didn’t really want to fight him. But I would if I had to, fight him until one of us died, if necessary.

  “You’re a hardheaded nigger,” he said. “You don’t know when to leave well enough alone. We have ways of dealing with the likes of you.”

  “Sounds like the Klan talking,” I said. “You better call all your friends. Because no way would I let a man like you beat me at anything.”

  “You talk tough,” he said.

  “I’m not tough,” I said. “I only know there’s no way you can win this fight. There’s nothing you can do that will make you better than me. Nothing you can do that can make me afraid of you. You can get a gun and wave it in front of my face, any child can do that. You can blow my brains out, you can get your pals and beat me senseless, maybe you can beat me senseless all by yourself. I doubt it. Anyway in the end it’s your loss. I feel sorry for you. You can’t see how you’re cheating yourself. You think you’re holding me back, but you’re only hurting yourself. At home you’re preparing your children to deal with a white world, but I’m in the world. Black people are here. We’ve been here and we’re going to be here. And if you can’t deal with that—after all we’ve been through together, you and me and all of us—then you’re just a poor dumb son of a bitch and I hope you do try to hurt me so I can kill your stupid ass and save somebody else the trouble.”

  He didn’t know what to say. Neither did I.

  A small crowd had gathered. They watched and listened in utter silence.

  By now my legs had started to shake. I hoped no one could tell.

  There was more I could have said, maybe more I should have said, but he hesitated, and while he was thinking I guessed it might be a good time to clear out.

  I hopped on the bike and didn’t look back.

  * * *

  Up over the mountains to Kentucky, back through Pineville and Barbourville, through Corbin and all the way back to the crossroads, where at last the road I had wanted to travel and the road I had found myself on, roads which up to now had diverged, became the same road. I was led no longer by the voice of addiction nor by the soft whispering voices of travel muses or the ghosts of those who had gone before, but this time by my own volition and desire.

  I was on my way home.

  I returned to this crossroads near London, Kentucky, where my path had turned, to this same small restaurant on the south side of the road. I entered the parking lot. There were only two cars in the lot. I stopped the bike and looked around. It was the same place, still made of brick and wood, still attached to a small hotel, still without charm. But something was different.

  I was full of misgivings this second time around. If those same two women were here this day, I knew I would seem a fool to them. They would still be standing at the front counter, no doubt still gabbing about Cliff. Although they had made me feel invisible the last time, they would recognize me today and laugh. They would know that they had driven me out, that their discourtesy had been my ruin. They would feel they had won some small battle. I was looking for an excuse not to have to go in, but couldn’t find one. Same as before, the hunger in my belly led the way.

  There were a couple of chain restaurants nearby I noticed, but that hardly mattered. There was an entire town just down the road, but that didn’t matter either. This was the place I had to come to. This was the place where I wanted to eat.

  I pulled open the door slowly, apprehensively, wondering as I walked inside if my treatment would be the same, or if it would be worse.

  Right away I noticed that the place seemed redecorated. It was much brighter than before. The glass counter wasn’t there. A big buffet wagon stood in the middle of the dining room. I hadn’t noticed that before. I wondered if it was the same restaurant.

  A harried waitress working alone hustled up to seat me. Her name was Alice, and she smiled at me. She called me sugar. I was in the South all right, and suddenly once more, it really and truly felt like home.

  “They’ve got me working like a six-legged mule,” she said. “I’m slow but I won’t forget you.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “I’m not in a hurry.”

  “Thanks, sugar. What can I bring you to drink? Cold glass of iced tea?”

  She pulled a pencil from her hair and scratched her head with it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Something cool. Iced tea will be fine.”

  She was about to dash away but something stopped her. She turned back, and stared at me just for a second.

  “You know what, sugar? I’ve got a feeling I know you from somewhere. You got people around here? Maybe I know some of your people.”

  Yeah. The South. It felt like home.

  “You never know,” I said. “You never know.”

  ALSO BY EDDY L. HARRIS:

  Mississippi Solo

  Native Stranger

  Still Life in Harlem

  The author of four critically acclaimed books, Mississippi Solo, Native Stranger, South of Haunted Dreams, and Still Life in Harlem, Eddy L. Harris has generated the kind of attention and praise that attends to the rise of only the finest talents. As America’s premier African-American memoirist and travel writer, he writes with emotional depth and courage about the Mississippi River, Africa, the South, and Harlem respectively in these books. A graduate of Stanford University, he also studied in London and has been a screenwriter and a journalist. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

  Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Publishers since 1866

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  New York, New York 10011

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Copyright © 1993 by Eddy L. Harris

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd., 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.

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  ISBN 0-8050-5574-6

  First published in hardcover in 1993 by Simon & Schuster

  First Owl Book Edition—1997

  Some names have been changed to protect the identities of some of the people portrayed herein.

  eISBN 9781466885714

  First eBook edition: October 2014