South of Haunted Dreams (23 page)

“Racism exists,” she said. “It is not the worst thing there is. It can be overcome.”

I had wanted to ask what she thought was worse than racism, had wanted to ask how she thought it could be overcome. But I never did. I got on my bike and rode away, rode down a narrow lane until the road ran out. I rode down roads with numbers for names, rode down roads with no names at all. I rode until the heat of day stole my strength, rode until the cool evening air brought it back. I rode until the midnight light was the only light there was, and I was deeper and deeper into the South.

The South had always meant one hateful thing to me. I had never considered the possibility that it would mean anything else.

Suppose, I asked myself now, suppose that somewhere in the South someone is waiting to offer me a cool drink, to invite me home, to be my friend. Suppose someone is waiting to understand me a little. Suppose somewhere in the South the future is taking root, a flower among the weeds. Suppose somewhere someone is sorry.

I did not ask Gwendoline what is worse than racism. I did not ask her how it can be overcome. I think now I know. The answers are simple and intertwined. Worse than the racism itself is believing in racism and affirming it, losing yourself, letting racist ways and racist thinking define who you are and what you think and feel, until instead of acting, you can only react.

There is evil in the world—yes. But evil is not all there is. And yes! Evil can be overcome.

Great-Grandfather Joseph had seen evil, more in a single day probably than I will ever know in a lifetime, more than enough to last several generations. Yet when the time came, he did not let the evil block his way. He loaded his wagon with whatever possessions he owned and carried on down the road deeper into the South. He took his tools and his clothes. He took the name that would not have been his but for slavery and made the best of it, took the life that would not have been his but for slavery and made the best of it, took the circumstances that would not have been his but for slavery and overcame them. And all this without a mumbling word. He had a life to get on with. He had a star to aim for, a star to stand on, a destiny to follow, a fortune to find.

There were men waiting to call him nigger, men waiting to refuse him, men willing to hate him for the color of his skin. But he would not be denied.

There were men waiting to humiliate him, to threaten him for no reason, to lynch him for getting out of line. But they could not take his soul.

He was born here—in this South. He belonged here.

And he had become my hero.

I relaxed in the saddle now and rode on. My heart slowed. My breathing came easily. Stars appeared. The breeze picked up. It was going to be a beautiful night.

That next morning I headed back to Raleigh to find Andrew. There was plenty I wanted to tell him.

Thinking he would come to the train station as he usually did, I went there and waited for him. The afternoon train to Washington and New York came and went. Andrew never showed up.

It didn't matter. I don't know exactly what I would have said to him anyway, but something. I just wondered what had made him break his routine that day; something I had said the last time, perhaps. Or something he had said.

I imagined him sitting in another part of the city, perhaps on a bench near North Carolina State University. Doubtless he was watching the pretty young women sauntering to class, reminding him that there is still beauty in the world. But I preferred to think he had strolled over to the east side of the capitol, to the black side of town, to take in the beauty that was there.

I didn't wait for him. I got on the bike and rode out of town. There was someplace else I wanted to go. And this time, with Joseph's hand on my shoulder to guide me, his guardian eye protecting me, I knew where I was going.

After that, the rest was easy.

It is a three-hour ride from Raleigh to Wilmington on the Atlantic coast. It took me three days.

The wind had shifted. It blew a stiff and steady stream from west to east. I didn't want to head into it, didn't want to fight the wind all day, and I didn't want it hitting me from the side and shoving me back and forth across the road. I thought it would be nice to have the wind at my back for a change and so I made my way east along Highway 64.

Along the eastern shore of North Carolina there is a strip of land—several strips, really, a chain of sand islands called the Outer Banks where the wind blows meanly off the sea. There are few trees and only the bare shrubs to block the wind. The land is flat. Only the dunes that rise seem to offer any variety. The wind blows the sand and deposits it elsewhere. The dunes are forever shifting, but slowly. One hundred years from now a dune that looks as solid as the earth will have moved many feet. Another may have disappeared altogether.

I have walked to the edge of the sea. The wind blows. The sand stings my eyes. The ocean roars. It is the cold gray color of loneliness.

A liquid eeriness hangs in the mist and settles all around.

I walk along the line where the dry sand meets the wet. At the edge of the surf there are footprints, deep impressions in the sand. There is no one else around, but someone has been walking here, a lonely ghost, an unseen companion whose footsteps parallel my own.

The wind blows and a howling sound adds to the desolation. The islands seem almost haunted, barren and scary. A wet chill rips right through the skin and into the marrow of the bone. If this were a castle on the moors, it would be the scene of murderous encounters, a place where restless souls walk the night. Their wailing would awaken the winds. This isolation would be their hell. And these dunes … these dunes are the shoulders of giants upon which the next generation must stand.

I would guess that something momentous had happened here—if I didn't already know it.

Here on these dunes, some of which are quite high, a young man and his brother came to encounter destiny. They hauled a contraption up these sand hills again and again and again. And each time they would push the thing off the hill. These dunes and this wind were perfect.

Orville and Wilbur Wright set up shop here at Kitty Hawk. From 1900 to 1902 they built glider after glider and shoved each one off Kill Devil Hills until they had mastered the principles of controlled glider flight.

They were learning to fly.

They affixed a motor to their aeroplane and in mid-December 1903, the Wright brothers became the first to achieve and sustain powered flight.

It wasn't much of a flight. Only twelve seconds. But look where those twelve seconds have brought us.

So it is with a life well lived, all too brief in the grand scheme of things, all too imperfect, but full of consequence.

I have always admired the Wright brothers, not quite as heroes but as men who were told it couldn't be done, as men who then did it. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to fly, to soar—not just in an airplane, but into the magical realm of the barely possible. I wanted to dream and then to turn the dreams into reality and then into myth. I wanted to touch the stars.

I wanted to discover cures to incurable diseases, to invent something, anything. I wanted to rob from the rich and give to the poor, perform miracles, save the world. I wanted to be president.

I, who couldn't then and cannot now turn on a good fastball, wanted to hit sixty homers in a season.

In the same classroom where I used to get myself in trouble sword fighting with pencils against Charles Reynolds, a small hand-painted sign was posted on the wall over the blackboard in the back of the room.
AIM FOR THE STARS
, it said. And I did.

If I failed the stars and reached the moon—well, better than missing the moon and hitting the dull ground.

When I was a kid, a bookwormish runt, an invalid first with casts and then heavy braces on my legs, I spent my early reading years surrounded by biographies of great men and women. I imagined myself to be Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, George Washington Carver and Thomas Alva Edison, Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Joaquin Murietta. I was Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright on alternate days, I was Marie Curie. I was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, I was Christopher Columbus. A time or two I was even Jesus.

It didn't occur to me to be a great black man, nor even a great American. I just wanted to be great.

I was young and stupid. I did not see limitations because of my race or my sex or my nationality. I didn't see limitations at all. Kids never do until they learn them.

But there are limitations to greatness—even to other people's greatness, tarnished now when seen through my prism of racial obsession, and I wondered if I ought to have any of these men and women as my heroes. I wondered if children ought to have heroes at all. The men and women we worship are as flawed as the men and women we don't.

Think of the indignities, the many nonheroic moments my hero Joseph endured just to survive; think how my father had to play the coward, hang his head and let himself be run out of town by men in sheets. Lives all too marred, yet full of merit.

When Wilbur Wright died of typhoid in 1912, his father honored him with a worshipful eulogy. He did not remember the little boy who played hooky from school, who swiped candy from the general store, who disobeyed and found trouble as easily as any man's son. He remembered Wilbur not entirely as Wilbur was, but with admiring eyes that did not question, that did not see the blemishes. It is the way heroes must always be seen.

The eulogy was this:

A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty. Seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.

It is the way every son dreams of one day being seen by his father. And I have often wished that my own father would finally come to understand and appreciate me with similar words of praise—the way I have finally come to understand and appreciate him.

Seeing the right clearly and pursuing it steadily.

But if Wilbur—or any other hero—had truly seen the right clearly, if he had spent as much time dreaming of justice as he spent dreaming of flight, if Babe Ruth had spent as much time championing Negro baseball as he spent being a champion baseball player, if Henry Ford had hired blacks as something other than janitors, if … if … if …

If our heroes had been truly heroic, had seen the right clearly and pursued it, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in. We could all be a lot farther along the road. If they had only had a little more vision.

I expect too much.

I want more from men than ought to be asked.

I should like my heroes flawless, brave and true and larger than life, and I wonder how a person could reasonably have as his hero someone who had moments of weakness. I wonder how a black man can have as his hero someone who had at his core a racist heart.

A hero is someone you want to emulate. A hero is someone who is heroic. And racism—my main concern for the moment, but not my only concern—is antiheroic.

So it seems we would need to strike from the list of our heroes all those who were imperfect. While we're at it, we might as well strike from the list anyone who doesn't think as we do, who doesn't have as his main concern those things which are most important to us, who doesn't think like us, look like us, or is not like us at all.

Because of the racist language he used, am I forbidden to admire Mark Twain? Because of how they thought and not for what they did, do I ignore Huey Long or George Wallace? Because he did not speak out, because he fought for the wrong side, because he did not do enough, because he did not see the right clearly enough nor pursue it steadily enough—must I refuse to admit and admire the greatness, the genius, the skill, the efforts of … of just about anyone you can think of?

Does it matter? Does racism, inadvertent or otherwise, negate everything else a person is or tries or achieves? And can there really be such a thing as inadvertent racism?

Does silent participation in an unjust system turn heroes into cowards instead?

Do time and circumstance and great achievements mitigate? Or should we hold our heroes accountable—or even more than accountable—for all that is and all that has been?

The nation—and the world—could have been a lot farther along if the ones we admire had had the necessary courage, if we all did. But we are, all of us, victims of the times we live in. And none of us is completely innocent. None of us.

Living as they did, when they did, and products of a racist society, isn't it probable the Wright brothers—and their heroic brethren—were racists? Does this spoil, limit, or diminish their achievements?

Even the most heroic among us cannot help but be influenced by the surrounding environment, by the culture that raised him, by the milieu in which he finds himself.

What, then, does this say about me?

Until I came south to awaken these feelings and thoughts of racism, I would have said I was different, that these things have not affected me. Now I see, in the way I think, that I have been as affected as anyone else. And if I had not come south, these feelings may have lain dormant forever.

Environment does influence us—even if we can't see the effect. It makes us who we are.

I am black. I can be nothing else. In this country I am forced—I know now—to see the world not through the eyes of a man or citizen or a human being but through the narrow-focused eyes of a black man. Every thought, every experience is focused through the funnel viewpoint of being black.

At the same time I am American. I can lay claim to no place else. There is no way out for me. I am caught.

But which am I more—black or American?

In 1915 Theodore Roosevelt wrote that there is no room in this country for “hyphenated Americanism.” Maybe he had a point. In or out, fish or fowl, be one thing or another, but get off that fence.

“There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country,”
he said.
“There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”