South of Haunted Dreams (15 page)

That corner was linked to this dusty parking lot of sand and gravel by a thread of religious fervor as surely as by the road. But what struck me as odd was that the sign was written in Spanish. I had not expected to find a Latino community in the South.

JESUS HABLA ESCUCHA Y CONTESTA EN ESPANOL.

LLAME
754-2032

Everyone knows the Bible gets banged like a drum in the South, beaten more loudly here than anyplace else in the world. Everyone knows that Jesus's name is invoked at every opportunity here, that everything is done under the veneer of Christianity. Everyone knows too that this is a land where Christian ideals have never been given even half a chance, let alone truly applied.

I was not surprised to see a sign urging religion. But in this neck of the woods, I was not expecting a sign telling me that Jesus speaks, listens, and answers in Spanish. Or in any other language, for that matter. Why would anyone not white, not Anglo-Saxon, want to live in the South?

I kicked the dust from my boots and rode on, deeper and deeper into the South, on and on.

I was bound all right, bound to this place, to this road, bound to this new way of thinking and seeing. This country had seen color for such a long time. I was beginning to see it too, color and nothing else.

The virus was in my blood now, the fever was upon me, thick and heavy. I had to break free. There had to be a way.

IX

Don't look back; something might be gaining on you.

—Satchel Paige

But how can a man not look back? Are we not tied, all of us, to the past?

I was brooding and I was serious, but the big man beside me was laughing. He was howling. In fact he looked like he was baying at the moon up in the sky, the pale moon left over from the night before. He leaned back. His mouth fell open. His face aimed straight up. Then he put his hands on his big jiggling belly to keep himself from shaking apart and he bellowed with laughter.

“What you're saying makes sense,” he said. “But all that stuff you're talking about, none of that stuff ain't never happened to you.”

I was talking to a white man named Andrew, a gas station attendant in Raleigh, North Carolina, telling him all about my wanderings. He had come down, he said, to watch people getting on and off the morning train—the same as he did every day. The train, on its way from Florida to New York, had just pulled out of the depot. Together we watched it shrink away like a distant memory, around the bend and out of sight. Andrew had said how much he wished he could have been on it.

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

Now he was laughing—at me. Earlier when he had first found me, I had been sitting on an old wooden dray, digesting an early lunch I had just eaten at the café around the corner—greasy burger, french fries, a stiff piece of coconut pie. I was resting beside the railroad tracks, staring into deep space and dreaming, watching passengers board the train, when Andrew came up beside me and smashed my brooding with questions about my bike. Now that I had told him about my journey he was mocking me.

“What are you getting so bent out of shape about?” he said. “All that was a long time ago. Ain't none of it happened to you.”

But it did. All of it.

In a most insidious way, didn't Nazi Germany happen to every Jew who has since been born? Isn't it still happening, aren't the effects still being felt—and in a way, by all of us?

The things that have happened—the shadows cast, the footprints that are left in the dust—they alter the landscape of our experience not just for the moment but permanently. From the death camps to slavery to the simplest injustice, can you not see, then, how the world has been formed and how everything reminds us of what we were and what we are and what we will never be? One thing stems from another and leads to still another. All things come together in the moment we call now. And unless we can look beyond the here and now and see what effect our actions will have on the events that follow and on those who will come after us, we will selfishly and foolishly continue to leave chaos for others to decipher and unravel and endure.

These things did not happen to me directly, I said, but they happened. And they are still happening. And as they affect the world, they affect me, the way I see and am seen, the way I act and who I am, the way I think and feel, the things I choose to eat.

Once your consciousness is tapped in a certain way, you see things differently. Everything reminds you, everything becomes significant.

Absolutely everything.

There is a hotel in Asheville, I told him, called the Grove Park Inn. F. Scott Fitzgerald used to stay there when he came to the North Carolina mountains to escape the summer swelter of New York City. All I wanted to do was spend a couple of comfortable nights there, walk in the shadow of Fitzgerald's literary greatness and hope his ghost might still linger on, might breathe on me and infuse me with his spirit and his art.

Is this not why we visit the boyhood homes of our idols, to see how they lived? Yes, but also in the hope that by touching the walls and floors and furniture they had once touched, sitting in the same chairs, seeing the same view from porch or window, breathing the same air, we might somehow touch their shadows and absorb their greatness.

Thomas Wolfe, who wrote
You Can't Go Home Again,
grew up in Asheville. I thought that if I could breathe the air that he inspired, and that inspired him, perhaps that same air could inspire me.

But all I could think of as I walked the grounds of the Grove Park, all I wondered about as I wandered through the rooms of Wolfe's white clapboard house, all that bothered me, was my admiration for men who must on some level have been racists.

Was F. Scott concerned about the things that concern me? Was Wolfe, was Hemingway? Did they ever try to put themselves in my shoes and wonder how it might have been to be black and excluded? Did they even care, or did they and everyone around them merely thank their lucky stars that they had avoided the misery of being black, and then go about business as usual?

Why didn't they fix the world? Why didn't they try?

How can I admire such men and want to be like them? How could I be comfortable in a hotel that I would have been barred from only thirty years ago—within my lifetime!

There used to be a Howard Johnson's on Kingshighway near Natural Bridge in St. Louis, in my old childhood neighborhood. I went to buy an ice cream cone there once when I was little. They refused to serve me. I didn't know why. I had money. I wasn't acting silly. But they told me I couldn't come in.

I was just a kid. What did I know about racism and segregation? How was I to know that being black was bad, that being black made me hateful? My parents and friends loved me. How could someone who didn't even know me despise me?

My parents had always refused to go there. As a child I never knew why. As an adult I can see more clearly. Now that I know, I utterly refuse to spend money in any Howard Johnson's restaurant or hotel.

“But you're punishing them for things that happened in the past,” Andrew said.

How else to let them know that they cannot get away with being willfully evil and then later, after the damage has already been done, simply apologize it away by saying they didn't know any better? How can that be any different from Nazis in the death camps who excused their guilt by saying they were only following orders?

I have Jewish friends who will not visit Germany because they remember what the Nazis did to them there, who will not listen to the music of Wagner because Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite and because the Nazis used his music almost as theme songs of hate.

My friend CooChung Chao's mother had a fit because CooChung once bought a Japanese car. She remembers what horrors the Japanese committed in China, and she cannot forgive them.

“We all breathe the air of our times,” Andrew said.

That's too easy, I told him. That just gives us an excuse for everything we do. Howard Johnson's should have known better. We all should have known better.

I cannot sleep in a Howard Johnson's hotel, cannot eat in a Howard Johnson's restaurant.

I cannot even look fondly upon that late summer day in 1964 when the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team won the last game of the season against the New York Mets. The victory gave the Cardinals the league championship and sent them into the World Series. I was there that afternoon. And when pandemonium broke out and the fans stormed onto the field after the game to celebrate, my brother and I were right there with them, running and screaming along with everybody else. We thought all the world was fun and laughter.

But I cannot now remember that day with a child's unmitigated joy, cannot remember old Sportsman's Park without knowing that St. Louis had the last big league ballpark with segregated seating. I cannot even think of major league baseball without thinking of injustice, without thinking of the great black ballplayers in the old Negro Leagues who because of their color were never given a chance. I can think of very little from this country's past that does not cause my heart to break.

These things may not have happened to me directly, I told Andrew, but because they happened at all, they happened to me.

“Sounds like you're pretty outraged,” he said.

“Outraged?” I said, thinking of the Mancinis at the party in Connecticut. “That's putting it mildly. I'm so far beyond rage I scare myself.”

I don't see the world in simple ways anymore, I told him. I see everything in terms of history and race and am reminded at every turn, more than anything else, that not now or ever has it been all right to be black. And the question I need answered, the only thing that is going to keep me from losing my mind, is: Will it ever be in the future—can it ever be—all right to be black?

“Of course it's all right to be black,” Andrew said, but he said it in an offhanded, casual way. “You ride a beautiful motorcycle. You sound educated. You look like you're doing all right, successful and all that. You're big, you're strong. I bet nobody gives you a lot of trouble.”

You don't understand, I told him. I am an isolated case. Of course there are going to be individual success stories. And you're right, I don't have a problem with being black. I like being black. I feel there is nothing I can't do, nothing that's too good for me, and nobody better than me. There are better brains and better athletes, but nobody better. And absolutely nobody I'd rather be. The problem is that I am a freak. I am not the norm. Being black for a lot of people is not the picnic it is for me. I am very comfortable being black, yes, so comfortable in fact that I never gave it a second thought until now, hardly even knew I was black until I started feeling these things I now feel. Now being black is all I think about.

I am worried, I told him, for my unborn children.

A cop pulled me over for speeding in Henderson, I told Andrew. It was about an hour from Raleigh. He was a white cop who didn't give me any trouble, but he didn't make it easier either. He was gruff and serious, didn't make small talk, didn't smile. He just unpleasantly wrote out a ticket and gave it to me. I couldn't help think that if I had been white he would have been a little more congenial.

“But maybe he would not have,” Andrew said. “Maybe he was just mean, or having a rotten day.”

Maybe. But because racism exists, I have to wonder.

“I don't want to think like this,” I said. “I never used to, but now I can't help it. I'm trapped.”

So I went to the batting cage just outside Henderson and vented my frustration. I must have taken a hundred badly timed swings at pitches a little leaguer could have pulverized. I missed most of them.

Andrew had stopped laughing now and was listening intently as I ranted. Although he seemed very concerned, he did look a little confused.

“I'm not an educated man,” he said. “I just work in a gas station, for God's sake. I don't think about these things. All I do is put a little gas in cars for people who don't want to do it for themselves. The big event of my work day is when I come down here and watch the trains pull in and out of the station.”

“And dream,” I said, finishing his thought the way I was sure he was going to, the way I wanted him to. “And dream of getting out of here.”

He looked sharply at me.

“I never said that.” He almost barked at me.

“What did you say, then?” I asked. “When the train pulled out you told me you wished you could be on it.”

“Yep, I did tell you that,” he said. “But you didn't hear it the way I meant it. I don't hate the South the way you do. I don't even know the South that you know. And you sure don't know the South the way I do.”

“All I know about the South is its history,” I said. “Its hatred and its injustice. And every day on this road I see how the South is doing all it can to hold on to its racist past. Rebel flags and little reminders all over the place. And I know too that if I'm going to get to the soul of the South, first I have to encounter the dark heart of this racist past. And that's what I'm doing.”

Andrew was shaking his head.

“But why?” he said. “You're missing so much more.”

“It wasn't my choice,” I said. “Believe me. All I wanted to do was go across that bridge.”

*   *   *

There is a bridge in Virginia that's seventeen miles long. It's actually part bridge and part tunnel. It skims so low over the choppy water at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay that I started to feel seasick as I crossed it. Then it dips under the surface of the sea—twice—so that naval warships based at Newport News and cargo vessels can slide in and out of the bay. It is a marvel.

Some years ago I lived in Dover, Delaware. Highway 13 passes through the center of town. Just about at the end of that highway, which goes through Maryland, then Virginia, is the bridge. Many times I promised myself that I would take the two-and-a-half-hour drive and cross that bridge, and then come back. But the bridge was too close, always there. And because I could do it anytime I wanted, I never felt compelled to do it. So I never did.