South of Haunted Dreams (2 page)

As a young man during the Great Depression he hoboed around the country, as many did—no matter the color of skin. He hitchhiked. He hopped freight trains. He slept out in the rain. He tried to find a little work wherever he could, following the promise, even the rumor of a job. Eventually he found himself in the South.

“It wasn't too good for black folks up north,” he used to say. “But down south! Hell, no northern black man ever wanted to spend too much time in the South.”

But he went there anyway, tempting fate, testing his limits.

“It would have been about 1934 or '35,” he said, repeating a story he had told many times. He would take a deep breath each time and pucker his lips to help him remember. And each time he would wince. From somewhere within a tangle of wistful melancholy, pain and shame, the memory would awaken.

“I was just a boy,” he said. “Barely twenty years old. Brother…” (He often calls me brother.) “Brother, it's so long ago I can't even remember the name of that little town. But it was somewhere on the Ohio River, not too far from Louisville, Kentucky. And what I was doing there, I'm only guessing. Passing through, mostly.”

Passing through until he met a young woman who was lovely to look at, he said, and very nice to talk to. He decided to hang around awhile.

“Yeah, she was pretty,” he said. “She was very pretty.”

He might not remember the name of the town, might not really want to, but this woman he will never forget.

“Her hair was shiny black, soft and wavy,” he said. “Her skin was smooth and tight. She was black, but her complexion was light enough that she could have passed for white. They called them high yellow in those days. I don't know what they call them now.”

My father, very light-skinned himself, and this pretty young woman started keeping company. He said they made a handsome couple.

But then one day an old black man with a limp came to warn my father to stay away from her. The old man raised the stick he used for a cane and shook it, but he never said why, and my father just ignored him.

“I must have thought he was jealous or something,” said my father. “But man! That wasn't it at all.”

One night as my father was walking alone down a dark road near the river, a car pulled up. Four angry white men dressed in sheets jumped out, surrounded my father, trapped him. There was nowhere to run, no way to attempt to get away without giving them an excuse to shoot. Two of the men pulled out shotguns. One man had a pistol, another carried a big stick. All they needed was half an excuse.

“Boy, didn't you get word to stop fooling around up there on that hill?”

That's what they said to him. Then they grabbed him and started shoving him back and forth.

“Ain't you just been told to stop hanging around that girl Sally Ann?”

“But, mister, that girl's colored,” my father said.

“That don't mean she spends her time with nigger men. Don't you know whose colored girl that is? Don't you know who she belongs to?”

“No, sir, I sure don't.”

“Then, boy, you need to find out. And you're going to find out tonight.”

“Nigger, you think you could drink all the water in this here Ohio River? We're going to throw your coon ass off this damned bridge and find out.”

“Naw, let's don't kill him tonight. Let's have a little sport. Let's see how fast he can skedaddle.”

“Let's light a fire under his black ass and watch him squirm.”

“Okay, nigger, did you hear that? We ain't going to kill you tonight. We're going give you until noontime tomorrow to get the hell out of town. If we see you around here after that, we're going to hunt you down like a dog and then we're going to drown your black ass. You got that?”

“Yes, sir,” my father said. He must have said “yes, sir” ten hundred times that night.

“We're going to bind your ass with barbed wire and tie you to something that ain't going to float. Then we're going to dump you in the river. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tomorrow noon. Now you be gone.”

“Mister,” my father said, cowering. “Mister, I don't need that much time.”

The way he said it, imitating himself so many years after, was hilarious. His eyes crinkled with shameless fear, his bowed head cocked to one side, his voice humble, trembling.

He went to the station that very night and that arrogant young man, my father, suddenly a coward, was on the next bus to anywhere.

It used to be a story we laughed about. It isn't so funny anymore.

The Black Codes of the old South defined how blacks were to act. These guidelines of etiquette between the races were established during slavery days, but they were still the order of the day a hundred years after. Louisiana's:
“Free persons of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor pressure to conceive themselves equal to the white; but on the contrary they ought to yield to them in every occasion, and never speak or answer to them but with respect, under penalty of imprisonment according to the nature of the offense.”
To act otherwise was to risk a lynching, have your home burned, your family driven out into the street. And no one, black or white, would lift a finger to help.

Jesse Brooks was raised in the South, in Eads, Tennessee. He should have known better. But he had relatives in St. Louis, not quite the North and not quite the South either, and poor Jesse spent too much time there one summer. He learned from his young cousins that it was all right to fight the white boys from the next neighborhood over.

On the corner of Ashland and Lambden was a vacant lot where the boys, black and white, played ball. When the games were over, the boys would fight—simple as that—and then go home. It was, in a way, friendly fighting, the kind of crazy thing young boys do, playing one minute, fighting the next, with some semblance of fairness, equality even. Poor Jesse. He went back to Eads, Tennessee, and thought he could expect blacks and whites to get along the way they did in St. Louis. He got too arrogant. He fought with the white boys in Tennessee, and they didn't like it. He went too far when, like the other boys, he tried to buy candy on credit at the local grocer's.

“What makes you think you can buy candy on credit, boy? You sure you got your daddy's permission?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “He's my daddy, ain't he? I can buy what I want. Just like the other boys.”

They didn't like his attitude.

“You ain't like the other boys,” he was told. They said he was a sassy little nigger and they chased him that day through the town.

The black folks in Eads were afraid to help him. Every door he passed was suddenly shut to him. The black folks said, “God help you, son, but please don't stop here.” They were that afraid.

When the white folks caught up with Jesse they threw one end of a rope over the limb of an apple tree, the other end they tied around his neck. Maybe they just wanted to scare him. Maybe they wanted to warn him what happens to smart niggers. Maybe they hadn't intended to and went a bit too far, but they lynched him just the same and left him hanging there. He was sixteen years old. He was my father's cousin. And this was another story, not so funny, my father used to tell.

No wonder my father drinks as much whiskey as he does.

No wonder black men fear the South.

I too am afraid, for I too carry the curse of dark skin, but my fear is different.

Can you imagine how it is to waken every morning and know your father and relatives had to act the coward, had to act the “good Negro” instead of the “bad nigger,” had to adopt attitudes of subservience? When Blackamericans look at themselves and at their history, this in part is what we see: this violence, these constant reminders of being unwanted and unloved, of being treated as if we were less than human, these shadows of indignation, indignity and shame. Black men and women have had to bear them like crosses and there have been too few Simons (from Cyrene) to help with the load.

Forgive me if I rant, but you cannot know how I have cried and despaired and nearly given myself over to the dark gods of bitterness and frustration. You cannot know, unless I now tell you, how the anger often wells up in me lately and I am driven to the edges of violence and hate and I want insanely to fight men bigger than myself and burn buildings down, set fire to their homes, their happiness, their way of life. They and I alike pretend not to know whence comes this anger, for it seems in my case to be especially unfounded, to make little sense. I was not born into slavery or into abject circumstance. Luckily, for me and for those around me, the gods in whose laps we sit saw fit that I should not be so cursed, for then surely I would have been a murderer, indeed a butcher.

Instead, I travel to the South to confront the source of my anger. I am half hoping to hurt someone. At the same time I am longing to find a new South, a new America, hoping with heart and soul that all is not hopelessness and despair. For if nothing has changed in these thirty years, then we as a people are living a great lie and are no different from other nations that now are crumbling in the crucible of disunity and ethnic discord. Then we are not a nation wholly joined by a common culture, but instead are separated by color and class and religion and judged by them and by them alone. How easy then it will be to surrender to the viler angels of my nature. How easy it will be to break the arm of anyone calling me “boy,” or the neck of someone who calls me “nigger.”

Afraid? Yes. And my fear is indeed different from my father's fear, different perhaps from the fears of other black men too, for I am afraid not only for the things that might happen to me as I wander south. I fear as well for the things I might do.

I am not my father, not of my father's generation. I was not tempered in the kiln of Jim Crow. I was instead forged in a new furnace, hammered out of a new tradition—wholly connected to the old, as all tradition must be, but so utterly different. I do not come to the South with hat in hand, head bowed, timid and humble. I stand tall and firmly planted. I am not small. I take up plenty of space. I am proud of who and what I am, as arrogant as my father ever was. And I burn with an anger that is rightfully his, but that is anger nonetheless. And I am afraid, am almost certain in fact, that before this trip ends someone will have died.

Slowly I come to realize that I am not the man I once was, not the man who once believed he was who he was from the inside out, that the blackness of my skin is merely a physical attribute like being bearded or being tall.

No. I am different now. I have awakened from my slumber.

DAVIESS COUNTY COON HUNTERS' CLUB.
The sign helps to awaken me. The sign helps me remember. I am black, and being black matters.

I turn the bike around and go back—slowly this time—back to the sign and to the arrow pointing down a narrow lane that disappears around a sharp bend.

The sign is wooden, its painted letters fading in the hot sun, its post rusting. The arrow painted on it shows the way, and down this road I ride.

The countryside smells faintly of tobacco, the scent borne on a gentle wind that riffles over the fields. Kentucky is tobacco country, just about the northernmost edge, but corn country too, and the fields are green with tall stalks. The corn tops are ripening. Their tassels once flowing gold have dried and turned to brown, dangling now, swaying in the delicate breeze that blows a hush across the valley and leads the eye from wave to wave of stalks bending. Deep into the distance the eye floats over an endless sea of meadows in bloom and corn fields that change color beneath sun and cloud-shadow from gold and green to amber and orange.

The road winds through these fields on one side; trees, shrubs, and vines on the other. Beyond the trees a creek courses in the valley below. A dilapidated footbridge tries to cross the creek but has rotted with age and is ready to collapse halfway across. On the near edge of these trees there is a small white frame house for sale. Nearby, a shed with a corrugated metal roof waits to fall over. Next to the shed a small greenhouse decays. The roof has caved in, the windows are broken out, not yet boarded up. The house, now a shack, is overgrown with weeds and consumed by the undergrowth. Saplings and vines creep through the walls and climb through the gaps in the roof. Nature has staked its claim on all that once seemed it would last forever. But nothing is permanent. All eventually passes away.

When the road bends, the trees end. Cultivation runs on from there, the fields owning lines of sight from here to the horizon.

There ought to be a huge plantation house up on the hill, these fields of corn should be fields of cotton perhaps; old Negro laborers stooped over their hoes and baking in the hot sun should be happily singing their woes in these fields, for this is the South and that is the image, and down this road is the Coon Hunters' Club.

I expect that when I arrive there I will find a bunch of big-bellied rednecks sitting around an old wood-burning stove. They will be chewing tobacco and wearing caps advertising seed corn, tractors, and transmission companies. And they will be drinking beer, of course, telling stories and dreaming about the good old days, dreaming about lynching niggers.

Up on a hill a farmhouse does rise, but a modern one. Big metal silos glimmer in the sunlight. At the foot of the hill there is a sign for a school bus stop.

A car approaches and passes. The driver throws up a wave, does not stop, but goes on. From the yard surrounding a house on another hill, a child, awed, I suppose, by this big blue bike I ride, waves and runs down to the edge of the street. And I, not knowing how to take this waving, these friendly gestures, toss up my hand and continue on.

A couple of miles farther on, there is a right turn. One sign on the corner says
GOD IS THE ANSWER
, another sign promises
GOD ANSWERS PRAYER.
Just beyond the signs, the Coon Hunters' Club. Not much of a clubhouse, just a concrete box made of cinder blocks, a squat building only one story tall, four small windows on the front. But there is indeed a wood-burning stove inside, revealed by an exhaust pipe coming through a hole in the wall. An air-conditioner unit sticks out of the opposite wall and promises relief from the intense autumn heat. And perhaps there is beer inside to help with the same relief, but at this I can only guess, for the place is deserted. No one answers my knocking at the door. I will not this day get to see the inside of the Coon Hunters' Club, nor talk to any of the coon hunters. I will have to wait until some other time to be glared at, threatened, turned away, called names, and made afraid.