South of Haunted Dreams (11 page)

The road south carried me through New York City to Coney Island, out into the harbor beneath Miss Liberty's blind eye, out to Ellis Island.

I hadn't been to Coney Island in fifteen years. I had never been to Ellis Island.

How different Coney Island seemed to me now. The gauzy curtain of time throws a soft haze over old memories, and everything is colored by newly darkened bifocals.

I walked along the beach and remembered my first roller coaster, how I had adored it and how after each ride I had stood in the long line waiting for the thrill to repeat. But with each ride the thrill lessened, wide eyes narrowed, innocence receded as innocence does, like an aging man's hairline. It was never the same.

Nor was I, as I walked in the shadow of the Cyclone, the name for that old roller coaster, and could not conjure up that long-ago rush of excitement. Too many years had gone by, too many other emotions barred the way, too many ghosts had come between.

The ghosts that haunt the cold stone halls of Ellis Island are not black ghosts. They whisper only part of the story. Photos on the walls, old tables and chairs left neatly in place, the past echoes quietly as if the fury of the world passed through these rooms and left nothing but serenity.

Ellis Island is a national monument, but where is the black person's Ellis Island, where the monument, however rusted over in the shame of chains and slavery, to immigrants from Africa? No reminders that blacks are, have been, and will always be part of the history.

Perhaps because the reminders would be too filled with shame and pain. For all.

And so, no reminders here in the North, the liberal and urban North, no reminders of the riots in 1864 New York or in 1917 Chicago in which blacks were picked out for slaughter, the thirty-nine dead blacks, the thousands left homeless after race riots that same year, 1917, in East St. Louis.

Life in the South was a horror that many blacks fled, the flight from Egypt. But what of this place they fled to, this promised land? Better? Or did they find that the South truly begins at the Canadian border?

When I am in church—on the road or in my hometown—why is my pew always the last to fill? I know how Catholics like to sit alone with their God, how they will always take an unoccupied pew. I prefer an unoccupied pew myself, and that's usually where I find myself. Unless mass is absolutely packed, Christmas or Easter, or unless I'm in a black church, I am always the only one in my row, always the last one anybody wants to sit next to. I am forever sniffing my armpits in church to see what's the matter.

No wonder my hair is falling out.

No matter what I do, good, bad, or indifferent, always it seems I am reminded just how black I am.

No wonder that the links in this chain are wrapped tight around my neck and yanking me south.

I do not believe in predestination, nor really that the gods in whose hands our lives lie have some carefully designed strategy. But from all quarters the South had been singing to me the song of the Sirens. If there are these gods, perhaps they from time to time shift the winds to see what we will do next with the new circumstance of our lives. If there is a destiny, perhaps it is a constantly shifting one, and it is up to us not merely to live it but to discover it based on all we have seen and heard and felt.

Our human hearts are like bits of sponge soaking up memory and experience, swollen with a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a small taste of some other thing: a small child afraid in the darkness, a little boy crying in the back of a classroom. We either surrender to our anxieties, to our shame, or we fight them and redefine ourselves. Otherwise we are not masters of our fate, not much better than the choiceless animals, mere hostages to circumstance, more amoebae than men.

We may be the sum total of all we have seen and heard and felt, but we are not hostages to that past, not unless we choose to be. We are connected to our past selves the same as we are connected to our ancient ancestors and to history, by a time line that has run since always, a road winding through mountains and ending just in front of us. The road ahead must be blazed, through the trees and over the mountains, by each of us. It is a road that has touched time and all that time has ever tasted.

With one eye on the past we look ahead, emptying ourselves to leave the layer of rocks upon which we stand and reach above, shinnying up to the next level, one foot remaining on the level below to steady us until we can hoist ourselves higher. We climb. Perhaps from there, from the next level, we can find a better view.

*   *   *

And so with these thoughts and memories I came to the shores of Lake Cumberland in Kentucky to pitch my little one-man tent. The sun was going down. The fire at the horizon slowly died out. The sky had taken on the quiet colors of late evening, steel gray in the east, palest blue overhead, misty rose in the place where the sun had last smiled. Most of the boaters had surrendered to the coming darkness, had driven their boats to the landing and were winching them onto trailers. A few grasped at the last straws of daylight and stayed out on the water just a little while longer. Some sped across the lake, back and forth, dragging skiers behind, trying to roar the evening awake. The loud motors of their boats spoiled the stillness. The water swelled into mini-tides and sloshed heavily against the shore. Others fished. It was the best time for that. The evening had taken away the heat. Insects settled on the water. Hungry fish were splashing after them. A fisher could hardly miss at a time like this. Only the darkness falling swiftly, and the motorboaters, could send them to shore.

When all had left the water and the area, I lit a little fire. Up on the hill was a small stall, toilets and showers. I went up to find water.

The boaters had all gone home. I was the only one left, the lone camper. I was alone on the earth.

The water in the lake settled down and smoothed over as if a chill wind had turned the surface to ice. Trees became silhouettes in the fading light, then shadows barely reflecting at all off the water. A star appeared. Then another. The sky lost the last color it would see till morning. The evening tired. So did I.

Crickets awakened one by one and sang their night songs. Birds called their mates to nest. Frogs on the banks croaked a startling sound, bass to the symphony. And at the very instant that all was darkness, the symphony crescendoed to silence.

Then it started again and I fell from my trance. I was in the South.

The smoke from the fire drifted to me. The scents of growing tobacco that had filled my head all day now filled my memory. I sniffed my hand. It still smelled of Franklyn's, still smelled of southern soil. Although I had never smelled it before, it was a familiar smell, like a taste in my memory, like home. The night smelled the way the South ought to smell. Green and dark and smoky.

It was bizarre. I felt suddenly and strangely at ease.

I stumbled down the hill with the water and found my way. I opened a sack of rice.

Rice, I think, is a miracle.

VI

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky—her grand old woods—her fertile fields—her beautiful rivers—her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong;

When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten;

That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.

—Frederick Douglass

The sun has not yet risen and dew coats the grass with glitter. Liquid diamonds hanging from branches and from leaves drip to the earth as a breeze from the south and from the west whispers warm through the trees. A mockingbird calls the morning to waken. Light appears at the edge of the sky, and acrid fragrances sail aloft. The sulfur smell of gunpowder and rotten eggs rises strangely from the earth, drifting, stinging the senses awake. The scent of pine and damp soil perfumes the morning. Soft moisture bathes the air, a fine mist hangs, light fog floats in stripes across the lake where a lone hawk glides above the water. A fish splashes. The hawk dives and disappears into the fog. Somewhere a propeller plane mutters unseen across the sky, too far away to shatter the stillness. It is a morning so cool and so beautiful, so full of promise, as all mornings are, so delicate and so fine that serenity enters into me as gently as water into sand.

I take a deep breath and hold it. Slowly I let it out and take another. The moist air smells sweet and I can taste it as it warms around me. I can taste it on my tongue.

I fill my lungs. I breathe slowly, easily. For this moment at least, I am at ease.

Now I know why the journey: because I have felt the weight of civilization and have sought relief. I have sought renewal.

You cannot know true satisfaction unless you once have known want, nor hunger until you have tasted plenty, nor serenity until torment has torn at your soul. Until this moment I never knew how tormented I was.

I never knew—or perhaps I did—that my father's anger has always been my anger, that all black men's suffering and shame has been my own. What my father and my grandfathers knew, I know. What happened to my brothers happened as well to me, and will descend again to my children yet unborn. We as a people carry these burdens in our genes, pass them from one generation to the next. They are part of who we are.

Beyond the superficial, beyond station and skin and circumstance, there are things shared that make us who we are, something that separates us, distinguishes us—whoever WE are—from the mass of others. Call it collective history. For Black-americans it is, of course, the experience of slavery which marks and demarks us, the shame of it, the pain of it, the bewilderment of it, and the guilt too, perhaps, for having let slavery happen.

I wonder if Jamaican blacks feel as homeless as Blackamericans do. Or Brazilian blacks. I wonder too if they have so little pride that they will look to find their roots generations behind them in a land they never knew and in a people they are not now.

Blackamericans are not unique in their migration to this hemisphere; slavery is a tie that binds all North and South American black men. But others gained their freedom earlier. They outnumbered white men, revolted, and took possession of whole countries. Others made peace with those around them until the various cultures fused. Other black men are Brazilian, Bahamian, Jamaican, Cuban, Haitian. But we in the north, we are neither one thing nor another, a hyphenated people, reminding ourselves of the blatantly obvious, the richest of the lot and the poorest. We know not who we are, nor where we belong.

In Africa black men will tell you this: “From this great distance you seem to have everything. Here in our little villages, very often we have nothing but this, and this is more than wealth: we know who we are. We can look back one hundred years, two hundred years, we can look back forever and we know who our fathers were, where they were born, how they died and where they are buried. But you, American man, you can only look back a few lifetimes and then you are lost. You have everything but this: you do not know who you are.”

Orphaned at an early age and suffering the indignity of a hostile foster home, a Dickensian orphanage, we carry a double burden: this loss of identity and the shame of slavery.

I think I know why white men hate us so—that we were slaves and they were not. Perhaps too that we were slaves and are no longer, for who among men does not long for servants to assure him of his greatness?

But apart from slavery … (And didn't whites come to America as slaves too? Seventy-five percent of the white immigrants who came to the colonies south of New England between 1620 and 1780 came as indentured servants and bondmen.)

But apart from slavery, are we, black and white, so woefully dissimilar? What the African says about black Americans, couldn't it just as easily apply to white Americans too? Do they know who they are?

We are mongrels in this country; we are mongrels all.

So what apart from slavery and suffering and skin makes a black American black? Or are slavery and skin reason enough to bond us all in suffering? Or is it, as Franklyn said in Bowling Green, largely other men who make us?

Black immigrants from Haiti. They will for a time remain Haitian-Americans, maintaining two cultures. But the culture that surrounds them eventually will alter them. They will have drunk the water and breathed the air. They will have learned to walk the walk, to talk the talk. They will have absorbed. They will one day, I think, their sons and grandsons, their great-grandsons continuing to live in New York, no longer be who the parents were. They will no longer be Haitian. They will be American. And what's more, they will be this new thing. They will be niggers as well. Not because of the color of their skin, but because of the way white men treat them. White men will see color and react to it. And these once-Haitians will have absorbed in two generations the pain of three hundred years. And their way of seeing the world will change.

Slavery's impact touches more than black, but white as well, the shame of it, the lasting pain of it, the bewilderment of it, and the guilt too for having let slavery happen. It has left all of us less than whole.

As I was about to head south, sometime during the long autumn eve leading to war in the Arabian Desert, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces arrayed against Iraq, appeared on television to prepare his country for war, get us ready to hate, give us permission to kill and cheer slaughter. Referring to the Iraqis, soldiers and civilians alike, Schwarzkopf said that they are not part of the same human race that we are.

When the war was over, and this man was transformed into an American hero, there were parades and celebrations, jubilation in the streets for our victory over the enemy, for our mastery and superiority over them. No one recalled Schwarzkopf's vocabulary of hatred. No one asked where sentiments like his come from or where they lead.