South of Haunted Dreams (19 page)

Not until the 1830s.

On a Sunday night in 1831 Nat Turner stole up to his master's house and took the master's baby and killed it. There were forty men with him. They went to another house, killed a schoolteacher, went on and killed many more. During a month of rampage and rebellion and hiding out, Nat Turner and his followers killed fifty-five white people in southern Virginia, after which the South and black-white interaction changed forever.

William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper,
The Liberator,
had appeared in Boston. Slaves found courage. The rest of the world pointed an angry finger at the institution of slavery. White southerners fell back and insulated themselves. Many had considered slavery an evil institution. They had hoped and assumed it would eventually disappear. Now suddenly they rallied to its defense and praised it as part of what made the South and its way of life different and good and pure.

Upon the shoulders of slavery now rested southern honor and trust and a way of life. Into slavery's palms men and women of the South placed their fortunes and their futures, their lives and eventually the lives of their sons.

Laws that had been on the books for a long time but never enforced were now seen in a different light. South Carolina began executing a law that prohibited the manumission of slaves. Any black person who could not prove he had been free before 1822 was forced back into slavery.

By the late 1830s state legislatures would allow manumission only by judicial decree. By the late 1850s most southern states wouldn't permit manumission at all.

In Richmond the ability of slaves to hire themselves out was eliminated. Blacks could not assemble without white authorities present. Free blacks and slaves both were restricted from entering certain parts of the city. Blacks could not smoke, stand on the sidewalk, or carry canes. Jails, hospitals, cemeteries were now segregated, public schools, restaurants, and hotels were declared off-limits to blacks. The railroads kept separate cars for black travelers. There was even a law in Virginia that all free black men had to leave the state within sixty days of their emancipation.

Segregation had arrived and being black suddenly became a bigger crime. And slavery suddenly became even more hopeless.

This was the backdrop against which Joseph Harris won his fragile freedom in September 1832. And still freedom was valuable enough to him that he left the Harris farm and made his way to the city.

Joseph Harris remained in the area for twelve more years. He showed up on census records from time to time, but the last record I saw of him in Virginia was in 1844, the year John Harris died.

Not including the three hundred twenty-five acres of land, John left an estate valued at $2,965.86. Among his property were beds and furniture, two cultivators and a black bull, thirty head of sheep and an ox cart, a deep red cow, nine hogs and nine slaves. It obviously had not been for humanitarian reasons that John had emancipated Joseph. John died a slave owner.

As best I can make out from the blurred handwriting:

Mahala and 4 children Tom, Louisa,

Rose, and Frances .................... $1125.00

Toryan a Negro Man .................... 400.00

John Ditto .................... 500.00

Bob Ditto .................... 400.00

Sulpha a Negro Woman .................... 150.00

Nothing about them apart from this is noted, no mention of who the people were or what became of them, or of the too many others like them.

As for Joseph, he was not mentioned in the will, and maybe he did or maybe he did not attend his daddy's funeral, but he was there on October 31, 1844, when John's property was sold at auction. County probate records show that for thirty-seven cents Joseph bought horse collars and a harness.

And then what became of him?

Did he go to Richmond and try to lose himself in the city, pass as a white man, take a job at the Tredegar Ironworks? The hours were long and the work was hard, but with bonuses and overtime Joseph could make much more as an ironworker than as a harness mender, maybe close to $100 a year. Maybe Joseph had a plan to make the most of his freedom. To travel the land and find a home. To take the name of his former owner, which was the only name he had, and get on with his life. Not to forget about the past—how could he ever do that?—but to leave it where it belonged, behind him.

When he had saved enough, when he had had enough of Virginia with its sour memories, perhaps he pushed further south toward Raleigh and the Carolina coast. Perhaps he tried his hand as a fisherman, or maybe he ran a ferryboat between the islands.

And each time the wind shifted, he carried on, down through Georgia and into Florida, across Alabama and Mississippi, and on until the great river blocked his path, and then north but not too far north, to Tennessee, where the rich soil was deep enough for a wandering man to plant his roots. There Joseph Harris found his home.

He took the money he had saved, applied his skills as a horseman, and started a stagecoach line. He bought land. He prospered. And in the same way that my father is happiest when his kids are home and around him, Joseph surrounded himself with his children and was happy.

Much of this is conjecture, of course, but by the time Joseph died in 1875, he had indeed started and operated a stagecoach line in western Tennessee. He had amassed a sizable wealth and 317 acres of land.

The land is still there. They call it Harris Hill. When Joseph died it was divided among his children according to terms set forth in a will of such sophistication that I wonder at it now, sounding like every white man who has ever asked me how it is that a black man travels the world and has as his hobbies skiing and scuba diving and fly fishing:

How in the world did a black man, a former slave, acquire wealth enough to leave behind at the time of his death five pages of final will and testament and 317 acres of land: 50 acres each to his daughter Martha and son Cornelius, 50 acres each to his daughters Mary and Lettie, 30 acres to his wife, Milly. The remaining 87 acres to be sold at public out-cry for one-third cash, the balance due in one and two years with interest and approved security. Where did a black man, former slave, gain such financial shrewdness?

Joseph ordered that the cash be doled out in equal shares among his children—except to his son James, to whom he willed ten dollars and nothing more.

Perhaps James was a bit of a goof-off. Perhaps he was a man, not unlike his father, with wanderlust in his soul. His father wanted James to settle down, be a farmer or a businessman, be respectable. James had different ideas. They fought.

Certain that James would only squander his share and amount to little, Joseph left him little.

James was the man who fathered Samuel, the man who fathered Melvin, the man who fathered another Samuel—my father. His blood is in my veins, and perhaps I am like him.

(My father also worried about me and my place in the world. For a long time he expected little from me, a writer, a dreamer, the one with different ideas. And we too have argued. But that is another story.)

James's brother Peter must have danced with uncommon visions as well. He left the hill and set off to find his own way in the world. Along the way he settled in the area known as the Delta in western Mississippi. He was a founding father of an all-black town called Mound Bayou.

It was a long way from the Harris plantation in Virginia to Harris Hill in Tennessee, and beyond; a long way from being a slave to being a landowner to founding a town. A long way to now. But here I stand, many generations and many fortunes hence. The torch has been passed. I carry Joseph's flame.

The mist recedes further from the mirror. The darkness brightens. I can see a bit clearer.

In all the kingdoms of the biological world, the instinct to survive surpasses every other. There is in mankind an intense instinct to survive. Joseph with his head bowed and his back bent was surviving. My father, when it was his turn, his eyes averted and his voice trembling, he was surviving. At the same time, it was more than survival of self. It had to be.

When Joseph stepped a free man out of the Goochland County Courthouse that September afternoon the day was very warm. It was a partly overcast sky, the clouds billowing up from dark bottoms to threaten rain. But the tops of the clouds boiled into the heavens and the sun struck them there and they gleamed almost golden. The light that late afternoon had such an amber quality that Joseph's skin darkened and seemed almost tan.

John went home without him. Joseph wanted to be alone. It was one of those moments best savored in quiet solitude.

Joseph did not shout his joy. He took his pleasure quietly, almost portentously, as he looked backward and forward at the same time. He stood on the hill of the courthouse and remembered. And then he looked forward and thought about his children and his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, the same as he had thought about them every day of his captive life. He had been thinking about me.

I was the reason Joseph endured, the reason he could not stand up and say, “No, I refuse, I will do your bidding no more and you will just have to kill me.” He would have died, and the future would have died with him.

“The struggle of today is not altogether for today,”
as Abraham Lincoln said in 1862.
“It is for a vast future also.”

I like to think that if I had been a slave, if slavery had rested on my shoulders and the shoulders of others like me, then slavery would have ended early. There can be no slavery without the complicity of the slave. I would rather have died. But then, I am not very forward-looking. I cannot see much farther than next week. I cannot see six generations from now, as Joseph and the others could, do not seem to care about the future as much as Joseph and the others did, would not sacrifice even half as much.

I turn to face the whispering wind, turn to thank my great-grandfather for what he endured for my sake. I turn to ask his forgiveness for not knowing sooner. And for not holding the torch higher or carrying it farther, for not having more to show for the pains he endured for my sake.

I'm sorry, Joseph.

There is no sound in the trees, no noise in the air, but I feel his gentle caress upon my face.

Joseph. I call out and wonder if he can hear the love in my voice.

I climb on the bike and ride west out of Richmond. Joseph rides with me. Along Monument Avenue the statues of Lee and Stuart and Jefferson Davis do not seem so chilling as before, not so frightening in their symbolism, for now I have a symbol of my own. I have a champion.

XI

Do not wish to be anything but what you are—but be that perfectly.

—Francis de Sales

I settled into the saddle of my bike and rode, taking my time, going slowly for a change. I did not guide the bike. I did not know the way. Nor did I need to. I went where the wind blew me.

From Monument Avenue it is a left turn onto Glenside Drive, and then a right onto Patterson, which is Virginia Highway 6. This is the road that runs from Richmond to Goochland.

At the crest of a hill not very high I stopped the bike and got off. I wanted to lie for a moment in the grass. I wanted to feel its coolness against my back before the sun dried the earth and heated the air. I wanted to watch the cloud formations before the sun cleared them away.

It was going to be a hot day. I took off my jacket and strapped it to the back of the bike. Then I lay back and looked up. Something very magical and reassuring was suddenly in the air. I no longer felt alone.

Overhead the clouds struggled to conspire. A little more moisture in the air, a little less warmth, and they would have swelled together into large thunderheads. But the sun was too strong. The clouds surged upward instead of out, gathered the warm light into their white fleecy folds and then dissipated. Light now flooded the hills. The temperature rose.

In the sudden warmth a hatch of gnats and midges and small moths burst forth in great swarms. They hovered in ever moving clouds, frantic to fulfill their destiny, to survive this short while before death, to mate and lay eggs. For a year they had lain dormant waiting for this moment. Now it was upon them. The air was charged with new life.

Above, a sparrow fluttered by. In its beak it held dried grass and something that looked like a chewing gum wrapper. The sparrow darted into the trees. It had a nest to build.

In the distance, pine trees huddled against the now cloudless horizon. Houses dotted the hills, and kudzu covered the earth. The broad leafy plant filled the gullies along the side of the road. It clung to the bases of trees. It climbed telephone poles and stretched along the power lines that hung over the highway. It grew thick and lush and the air smelled of its growing.

It was like a dream, a very hot day, nothing but the flies moving, no sound but the chirping of distant birds.

From this hill, a hill that Great-Grandfather might have stopped to rest upon before heading to Richmond and then south toward his future—from this hill, all of a sudden the South didn't look so bad. I relaxed, crossed my legs at the ankle, folded my arms behind my head. I closed my eyes and drifted into a dreamlike state. I didn't want to sleep. I just wanted to dream. Serenity was overtaking me. I wanted to slide into it gradually, wanted to feel it fully.

Now the almost unthinkable, having taken shape once before in the clouds, was forming in my mind and reaching my lips.

What if I ended up liking this place?

There was magic in the air, all right. Suddenly I was at ease, more than comfortable. Even after all that has been—and how could this be possible?—I no longer hated the South. I no longer feared it.

But then, why should I?

There have been more fearsome times than these. Others faced them. Others survived them. Others with more reason than I will ever have to fear and to flee braved it out and stayed when the prudent course would seem to have been to turn away from the South and make a start somewhere else.