South of Haunted Dreams (16 page)

But now, being in the South, and riding around Virginia, as I had been before I came to North Carolina, I really had the urge to see what man can do when he puts his mind to it. I knew at some point that I would make my way to the coast and ride down the appendix that juts out from the bottom of Maryland, cross over the bay into Norfolk, and then ride back up toward Richmond before making my way to Raleigh and here to Andrew.

So I crossed from Kentucky into western Virginia and camped in the mountains. I ate country ham and red-eye gravy at a dingy diner in Marion. The coconut pie was not good. Then I woke early and rode in the silence of the morning mist.

You know how it is when you drive in the mist to the crest of a high hill or a mountain. When you get to the top suddenly it's very clear and you can see across the whole of creation, down into the valleys where the heavy mist lies, and up to the peaks that are not as high as you are but that rise above the clouds. The clouds and the mist swirl around the tips of the mountains and lie in stripes on the hillsides. The forests drip fleece. The fog feels like rain.

The sun awakens, rises, dries the air and warms the earth. As far as you can see there is green and green and still more green in various shades, striped with gray for a short while longer. And the road winds into the mountains like a wriggling worm that has no end. And sometimes it crosses your mind how ugly highways can be and yet on mornings like this, how simply beautiful.

Such beauty as this that runs along the Blue Ridge Mountains and up through the Shenandoah River Valley steals the breath away and stings the eyes. Such beauty as this brings the eyes to tears.

You would think nothing in this world, past or future, could spoil such absolute splendor.

But in this country Lee's Army of Northern Virginia fought campaign after campaign—to threaten Washington, to invade the North, to defend Southern soil. Up and down this valley and across the whole state, from the Rapidan to the Rappahannock, from Petersburg to Fredericksburg to Richmond and Antietam. The sacred soil of Virginia has been watered with blood and made fertile with corpses.

I rode the valley, I told Andrew, and followed the route of Lee's army into that small town in Pennsylvania. I toured the battlefield there—twice. For kicks I stopped at the souvenir stand and bought a Confederate soldier's gray cap.

I tramped through battlefield after battlefield, the ones they call the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, Antietam in Maryland, Manassas and New Market. My shoes were soaked with blood.

I could not tell how the other tourists thought of the war, the two noble causes, or of slavery itself. All I could think of was the slavery.

Heading ever closer to the coast and to the highway that would lead me to the bridge, I met a man who would become my friend. He lives on the edge of Baltimore. His name is Frank.

There is no nicer man. When my bike was stuck in the mud, he dirtied himself far more than I did to help push it out. I stayed in his home, became friends with his wife and three children, and when I left, the invitation was open to return. “Soon,” he said. “Come back soon.”

But one evening in his study I found my new friend wondering about me what too many strangers have wondered.

He was quite delicate about it, and we talked around it for a long time, but eventually he asked how I found time and money and where I got the interest to travel to faraway places—as if my world rightfully should be so small.

When we talked about the past, and he mentioned that his grandfathers had both been engineers, I saw at once the difference between his expectations for himself and his expectations for me.

All a black person can say when talking about deep ancestry is that his forefathers brought forth on this continent were not conceived in liberty, but were slaves instead, and sons of slaves.

My own great-great-great-grandfather was a slave, and family rumor puts him nearby, in Virginia. I hate him, hate him for not having the courage to die rather than endure the humiliation of slavery. Did he not think what his indignity would lead us to? Did he not care about those who would follow? Could he not imagine what effect his captivity would have on the psyches of the heirs of slavery—slave and slave owner? It would have been better to die.

Everywhere I looked there were monuments to the war to maintain slavery and to the slavers themselves, in the battlefield shrines and the society itself, but nowhere any sign of shame or remorse, instead only reminders that the war is not yet over.

At Appomattox Court House, the site where Lee surrendered his army and the war in the east ended, there is a plaque.

HERE ON SUNDAY APRIL
9,1865,

AFTER FOUR YEARS OF HEROIC STRUGGLE IN DEFENSE OF

PRINCIPLES BELIEVED FUNDAMENTAL TO THE EXISTENCE OF OUR

GOVERNMENT, LEE SURRENDERED
9000
MEN, THE REMNANT OF AN

ARMY STILL UNCONQUERED IN SPIRIT

“And that spirit is racist,” I was telling Andrew in Raleigh. “The war is not over. Nor the spirit that led to it.”

“Of course it is,” Andrew said.

I disagreed.

Our
government, the plaque says.
Whose
government, I wanted to know.

Over the capitol buildings of nearly half the states in the South flies a flag, I explained, that proclaims loud and clear how utterly unconcerned the South is about its black citizens—the same now as it was forty, sixty, one hundred, two hundred years ago.

“How do you expect a black person to feel,” I said, “in a society that so blatantly reminds him how emotionally tied his government still is to a system that fought to keep his ancestors in slavery?”

Almost every state flag in the South takes its design from the flags of the Confederacy.

(Remember that there were four Confederate flags, all of them retaining the red-white-and-blue of the old federal flag, displaying their roots: the Stars and Bars, a blue canton with seven stars in a circle, three broad horizontal stripes red on white on red; the Battle Flag, a red field crossed by a blue and white X holding the thirteen stars of the original colonies; the Stainless Banner, a stark white field with the battle flag in the upper left-hand corner. The last Confederate flag was like the Stainless Banner but with a broad vertical red band.)

The state flag of Florida is a white field crossed by a broad red X; the state seal lies in the center. The state flag of Mississippi has the battle flag in the canton corner with three broad stripes of blue, white, and red. The state flag of North Carolina has a blue canton corner beside one red and one white stripe. The state flag of Georgia has a blue band holding the state seal alongside the Confederate battle flag. The state flag of Texas, a lone star in a blue field beside one red and one white stripe. The state flag of Alabama is a big red X on a white field. And right beneath this flag as it flies over the state capitol waves a taunting Confederate battle flag, right where George Wallace put it, symbol of hate, symbol of segregation, symbol of pride—for southern whites only.

Symbols are indivisible, Benvisti said. If it's mine, it can't be yours.

And this is exactly what the South seems to be saying: “We don't care if our symbols are hateful to you and upset you or remind you of our inhuman treatment toward you. We don't care because these are the sources of our pride and we do not concern ourselves with your pride. These are our symbols and not yours. And you do not share in what is ours.”

It's as if in all this time we have learned nothing about sensitivity to others.

Those flags hark back to a struggle to hang on to an institution that denied humanity to a people. They glorify a tradition that excludes blacks. And if you want to start a fight, there is no quicker way than to suggest that the rebel flag ought never fly, or that the state flags of the South ought all to be changed.

“Well, you're right about that,” Andrew said. “I sure don't want to see nothing changed. It's our history.”

“And how do you think Jews in Germany would feel if the Nazi flag were still the official flag in that country?”

He rubbed his chin. I could hear the scratching sound his hand made as it ran over his razor stubble.

“Not very good, I guess.”

“They would feel somebody was trying to tell them something,” I said. “Symbols aren't everything but they go a long way toward maintaining or changing attitudes.”

Everywhere, hardly anything to even suggest that blacks are part of this country and played a role in this history and its shaping.

In an old cemetery in Boston, Crispus Attucks lies in a grave. But if you didn't know who Attucks was, you would never suspect that a black man had fought in the American Revolution. Black men fought on both sides in the revolution. The English promised freedom to those black slaves who fought for the crown. And when that war was over, the English would not abandon them to a fate worse than slavery, but took them home to England. But are there monuments there to the blacks who fought and died for the empire?

It's as if black men and women have been erased from history.

Right here in Raleigh, I told Andrew—as if he didn't already know—the capitol is surrounded by statues and monuments.

A woman sits with a book, a boy with a sword kneels at her side. This is the monument to the women of the Confederacy.

Henry Lawson Wyatt stands nobly on a plinth. He was the first Confederate soldier to fall in the Civil War, at Bethel Church—June 10, 1861.

There are statues of George Washington, a man named Vance, another named Aycock, and a statue of Charles McIver. There is a monument to Samuel A'Court Ashe: patriot, soldier, legislator, Christian, citizen.

There is the great monument to Our Confederate Dead, and one to Worth Bagley, the first to fall in the Spanish-American War.

James Polk, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, three presidents with ties to North Carolina.

But the only hint that blacks ever did anything worth mentioning is a statue to the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Two white soldiers carrying a dead black one.

But monuments everywhere to the warriors who fought to keep slavery.

In Richmond all along Monument Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined street, there are huge statues of Stonewall Jackson, of Jefferson Davis, of Robert E. Lee, of Jeb Stuart.

“It's so one-sided, so prevalent,” I said, “after a while you get the feeling somebody is trying to tell you something.”

Just across the river from Washington I had gone to Anacostia where abolitionist Frederick Douglass had lived. His home is a national monument, and that says something, but the day I was there, all the visitors were black.

Benvisti backwards:
Symbols are indivisible; if it's yours, it can't be mine.

Andrew looked at me sadly and said, “Kudzu.”

I thought he had sneezed.

“Kudzu,” he said again, and I looked at him like he was crazy.

“Kudzu?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You've seen that plant that grows wild all over the place. I think it only grows in the South, but it comes from Japan, I believe. And it just takes over everything, covers everything. You see it growing in the valleys, at the side of the road, up the trunks of trees, across telephone wires. It consumes everything. It's kind of like racism. It's kind of like being obsessed.”

I nodded.

“I guess it's true,” he said. “If you want to get to the soul of the South, you do have to touch the dark heart of our racist past. Just like you said. But still, something about that ain't right.”

Andrew was looking at me with his eyes round like saucers, but he kept shaking his head. He wasn't shaking it as if to say “no,” he wasn't disagreeing with me, and he wasn't saying he didn't understand. He was saying: “Um-mm. That ain't entirely right.”

Every time he shook his head he said, “Um-mm.” He was telling me that the way I was seeing things was simply wrong.

“Don't you know?” he said. “Don't you know you ain't never going to be able to enjoy this magnificent machine and this trip if you don't stop acting like a fool? Just get on with it. ‘Cause if you don't, you ain't never going to see the South. You're going see this thing you think is the South. And I guess in a crazy way, you'll be just like the racists you're screaming about. You won't be seeing what's really there, you'll only see what you want to see.

“The South is not that bad. We're just a race of people trying to hold on to our pride, that's all. If we had never fought the Civil War, who knows where we might be. I think the end of slavery would have come. I think it would have been more peaceful. But we had everything rammed down our throats. We had to push back. We had to find a way to form our own society along lines that weren't too unfamiliar to us. We already had a system of separation. We just exaggerated it. We had a wounded pride, and we were looking for a simple way to take away the sting. Nobody was thinking about the future. Nobody ever does.”

He spoke softly and very slowly. Before he had said that he never thought about such things. Now he was telling me that all southerners think about such things.

“How could we not?” he said. “Even when we're not thinking about it, we're thinking about it. Just like you are. It's going to tear us all apart.”

He gazed longingly up the tracks. He still wanted to be on that train. I could tell.

“Don't you wish you could fly away from here?” I said.

“Yeah, I do. But not to the North like you might be thinking. I never saw the North as some kind of haven where everything would be wonderful and different. I expect it's all pretty much the same. You look at the TV, and the things that are tearing us up down here are tearing you all to pieces up there. I never wanted to go north, I just wanted to go anywhere. It doesn't matter where.

“That train is going somewhere and I'm not,” he said. “When the sun comes up in the morning, I'm going to be right here. I'm going to be the same old man in the same old place. And nothing is ever really going to change for me. I've spent my whole life around here. Just like everybody I know. I know the same people I've always known. I'm the same man I was twenty years ago.”