South of Haunted Dreams (12 page)

Not part of the same human race.

Words meant to envelop a country and unify it in the warm glow of patriotism and pride.

Not part of the same human race.

They are just the words of one man, but they have a way of entering the collective psyche, the collective awareness, just as they have been taken from there to get cycled around once again. They become the consent we seek to look at other peoples and to hate them, to see in them profound differences from ourselves, to give them nicknames they never deserved and to make jokes about them, to mark them, to force them into concentration camps and to exterminate them, to enslave them, to annihilate them as a people, to steal their land and corral them onto scrubby reservations that would hardly support a pack of coyotes, to burn their villages, to shut our eyes and close our minds and stand idly by while others do the dirty work.
They
—these others—called out the dogs and set them loose.
They
—these others—blasted the children with firehoses.
They
did the humiliating, the mutilating, the shooting, the maiming, the killing.
We
are the innocent.
We
had nothing to do with it at all.

We protest these crimes. We cannot see how we perpetuate them. But the sins of the fathers have a way of staining the souls of the sons, a way of settling into the collective memory of a nation. And they will not go away. They have stolen our innocence. They have damaged us. They linger, much as slavery lingers, and they affect how we see and how we are seen by others. Most importantly, our sins determine how we see ourselves.

We are an old nation now, an old world. The bill has come due. We are now paying the price for the sins and indiscretions of our youth, for the bad choices we made in a long line of history. It can be no other way. The bill always comes due.

Not part of the same human race.

Yes, I know why the journey. Simply this: I seek salvation.

I seek a confrontation with the South and with the past, face to face—a baptism of the spirit, a reconciliation, and, in the end, a salvation. I seek a new way of seeing.

I gaze into the water at the edge of the lake. In the bottom of the pool a dark face stares back at me, a face I hardly recognize anymore, the face of a stranger. It is a tired face, a face that does not smile. In this face there is no serenity. The eyes squint. They have become piercing and hard, not as wide around as I remember them. They have about them the look of fatigue. There are puffy circles beneath and the eyelids too are softly swollen. Perhaps that is from sleeping on the ground, or perhaps they have been crying. Perhaps they are about to.

There are more lines in the brow than before. The lips are clamped shut. The beard is grayer than it ought to be, longer, wilder looking. There is something almost menacing in this face, but still it is a pleasant face, not, I would imagine, a face to fear. If I saw me coming toward myself, I would not run and hide. Nor would I panic if my daughter brought home this face to meet me.

So what is it about this face, these hands, these arms, that makes white men fear me, that makes me so repugnant to them? Not long enough ago they would have refused me a seat beside them at a lunch counter. They would have gouged out my eyes for using the same toilet. They would not have wanted to fight beside me, die beside me, live beside me. What is it that makes them even now refuse me a place at table, begrudge me a decent job, a happy existence, a home in the neighborhood, membership at the country club?

Perhaps this, now I begin to see it, is how it is to be black in America, what it really means to be black, to live always with these questions branded, like a slave owner's markings, on your being, on the back of your mind, on your memory. To look in the mirror and see a face that is hated and feared by men and women who have never laid eyes upon it.

But no. Not this face. Not this gentle, peaceful face. It can't be me. It can only be the idea of me they hate, for they do not know me really. I hardly know myself.

The wind catches the water, and the water laps gently against the edge of the lake, its sound soothing and inviting, luring me close. The face blurs in the ripples and vanishes.

I scoop my hand into the cold water and rinse my face. I wash the sleep out of my eyes. Another scoop and I taste the water. I rinse my face again. I touch my hand cold to the back of my neck and then, still not quenched, I rise. And the water beckons.

Like baptism.

Swiftly then. Like a child. Before fear prevents me.

A lightning-quick and crazy dip naked into the lake, frigid, heart-stopping madness. Startled awake and then suddenly numb, I am intensely alive one minute, dead the next. Resurrection in reverse. Goose bumps riddle my flesh, clothe my nakedness. Arms flapping, hands clutching, fingers squeezing, I rub sensation back into my body. Hands grope frantically for skin, for legs, arms and shoulders. I am alive again and as happy as Lazarus. Giggling, screaming, freezing, arms wrapped tightly around my ribs, I hop barefoot over stones and sticks, dashing wildly uphill to the stalls and a shower, praying with the fervor of a religious fanatic that I will find hot water.

Oh, the joys of solitude!

When I am alone I am not black. I am not tall. I am not deformed. I am not ugly. When I am alone I am nothing more than a voice whispering, a mind wandering, a spirit soaring. There is just a hint of brown at the inner corners of my sight. If I move my eyes down I can see the brown skin of my nose. I can see the black shadow of my mustache. But unless I lift my arms or move my head and look down at myself, I am colorless, shapeless, two eyes looking out, and yet utterly whole and perfect. An abstraction. A thought. An idea. When I am alone, without other men's opinions of me, without their eyes attempting to define me, without the ways they treat me, their reactions to me, their fear and their loathing and their disgust, even their kindness, without other men I am simply me.

I wish I could stay in these woods forever, escape this civilization we hold so dear. For if men and women are civilized, I think I should prefer the trees and the remote company of animals.

The dreamer in me searches from time to time for escape from civilization, and I seek renewal in a new skill, a new place, a stranger's face. It is, perhaps, why I drive fast, why I seek the thrill of danger—a reminder of my mortality and a momentary escape from it as well. To float in the clouds, to plunge into an icy lake, to race down a ribbon of road. Time suspends, elongates, has no meaning. The clock dies and for the briefest moment that seems to last and last, I am alone with only my thoughts, with only myself. It is why I have come south. To find myself.

Will I surrender to hatred? Or will I find peace? The roots of our discord lie buried in the soil of the South, this place that makes us who we are. If the seeds of brotherhood could be planted there, would they not grow alongside the weeds of hatred and choke them out?

The thrill of not knowing. This is my addiction. The wondering what lies beyond the trees, around the bend, over the next hill. The hoping one day to stumble into a miracle.

Over the mountains of the moon you ride, and into the valley of shadows. Along the way you acquire some things, you lose some things. Someone you once held dear has died. Someone you used to be is no more.

Don't look back, the man said. Something might be gaining on you.

But look back we must.

I have not previously explored the South. I do not know it, yet it is not a land altogether unknown to me. How could it be? I feel the place in my bones.

Here is where my people lived and died. Here is where the new breed was born, where denial and fear slowed the rhythms, where suffering slowed the singing, where the wails became blues, where what joy there was became soul, became jazz, where hope was the religion, where warmth, passion and bitterness were the heritage.

The color red flashes, streaks across the corner of my vision, vanishes, and flashes again. A cardinal darts from branch to branch. When it alights, it sings three long slurred whistles, four crisp chirps.

And suddenly that which yesterday was unthinkable takes shape in the trees. I conceive the inconceivable and this time give voice to it. Could I like this place?

But how could I? How could a black man ever like it here in the South, here where it has never been good to be black, never even been all right to be black? How could a black man ever feel comfortable here?

I had this fleeting notion that even if they don't like blacks in the South, at least they know us, recognize us. They grew up with us. It must be very hard indeed, I thought, for a white person to live in the South without at the very least knowing someone black. Not so in the North. You can pass your entire life in a cloistered suburb and never see, except on television, a black face, never encounter a black person, talk to him, get to know him, shake his hand.

But no, I have hated the South and feared it since long before I can remember, since before I was born. I have inherited the dread as all blacks have, have heard too long the stories linking me to the horrors of the past. I have hated the South for the poison it spread, for the venom that has left black people less than whole. I realize now that I must reconcile myself with that hatred. I must make peace with this place.

The bike is packed and I have once more found the road. From the top of a rise I look out across a great vale of green glimmering through the mist. Perhaps on some stagecoach a freed slave rode through this valley on the way west to Tennessee. Light-skinned enough that he would have been allowed to ride the coach. Light-skinned enough that his grandson would have discovered arrogance, tested himself, and been forced to flee north.

The sun begins to rise, stark white in the colorless eastern sky. Above the sky is blue.

Bravado aside, rage and anger on hold, I wonder what will happen once I find the soul of the South and touch it.

My hand reaches slowly to touch my forehead, then slowly down to touch my sternum, left shoulder, right shoulder, hands together, and a little prayer.

Oh God, help me on this road. Protect me. Keep me from harm and keep me from anger. Help me to find the peace I seek.

VII

But my pen stubs its toe on this nigger reality which is like cataracts and old men.

—Mbembe Milton Smith

The road under my wheels shines as after a heavy rain, the smell of wet pavement rising with the morning mist and crowding the space inside my helmet. The sun has climbed into the southern Kentucky sky but not very high, the air is warming but not yet warm, the road to Somerset has not yet dried. Above the eastern horizon a line of thick clouds waits to snare the rising sun and hide its shining, to cast the earth in shadow, to play tricks on the eye with shade and with shafts of light. Shapes form, faces and figures, a guessing game for children, a premonition for me. In the clouds looms something ominous and almost familiar, but something I can only vaguely make out, ever changing in the light wind, the clouds drifting in and out of one another. A new shape appears. A face, perhaps. Someone I know. Someone I have yet to meet.

Or perhaps only a storm advancing. Rain and winter on the way.

The air blows softly, crisp and fresh on my face and on my hands. Quickly, though, the bike gets up to speed and the wind whips past me at eighty miles an hour. Now suddenly the air is freezing, and so am I. Cold rushes by me, cold surrounds me, cold enters into me. Cold that has been transferred from the air to the metal of the bike's gas tank now releases itself into me. My thighs grip firmly around the tank and the cold of the metal creeps into me there, settles around my legs and spreads down to my toes, up into my back and ripples all the way through my body. I find myself shivering. My teeth chatter. Soon the morning will shake away its chill, and the moisture that has settled during the night will shrink away like a distant memory, but for now the air remains very cool. I ride gloveless and the wind numbs my fingers.

As I come to the top of a high hill the bike slows and stops itself in a patch of bright sunlight that soon fades away. A shadow washes over me. Clouds have come to block the sun and there is no warmth. I am shivering from the cold, yes, but shivering as well from a feeling of dread that suddenly has fallen down upon me. Call me a coward, but fear once more has its hands around my throat. I am at last, completely and utterly, in the South, in a southern state of mind, and fear of this evil place grips me still. I know what the South was once; I do not know what the South has become.

Nor can I tell which comes first, this fear or the anger that goes along with it, but there they are, side by side, and they never quite go away. Nor perhaps can they ever, for once you have experienced racism from the receiving end and have been made aware, once you have felt its sting, thought about the pain of it, the stupidity and the senselessness, brooded about it and obsessed about it, once you have known the shame and the degradation of racism, this fear and this anger both come alive, and they cannot be gotten rid of. Not easily. Nor ever completely.

Yes, I know what has been and I am angry.

I do not know what will come and I am afraid.

I stop to rest, to take a deep breath and to look down across the valley that spreads out before me. The hill I am on falls away abruptly and then flattens out before beginning the gentle undulations that recede like an endless sea rolling to the horizon and beyond. Like the sea these hills seem eternal and unmoving, yet they are alive with ceaseless motion and music. Their shapes and their colors change with the shifting sun, with the coming and the going of light and shadow. The wind blows and the tall grass dances. The pines and the oak trees sway. And if you stand perfectly still holding your breath until silence surrounds you, you can hear the quiet whooshing of their leaves brushing together. The sound sails on the breeze and over the hills, caressing my ears and soothing my thoughts.