South of Haunted Dreams (24 page)

This is the land that made me. Its history and its heritage are mine. Its various cultures live within me. Each achievement is mine. I own every dream. Each fulfillment belongs to me. And I am responsible for every promise that has not been kept.

We all bear that responsibility. None of us is blameless. None of us.

The trouble is, too many of us attempt to exclude instead of include. We narrow the definition of what it means to be American, or what it takes to be black, and we want to leave out the rest, especially those who are different from us, whose thinking, whose experience varies from our own. We limit our families carefully.

All men are not created equal.

“Goddamn it! I was born in this country! My children were born in this country! What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?”

—Joseph Kennedy.

All men are not created equal, not even rich powerful ones. Joseph Kennedy had turned his family into a political and financial dynasty. It was not enough. Even Joseph Kennedy felt the sting of discrimination. He was a Catholic.

“As a nation we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it: All men are created equal except Negroes. Soon it will read: All men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.”

—Abraham Lincoln.

If Thomas Jefferson or Robert E. Lee, Babe Ruth or Wilbur Wright had as their excuse that they were victims of the times in which they lived, what excuse for racism do we have in our more enlightened age?

It's simple: we have no excuse. We ought to know better.

I spent the night on the beach near Kitty Hawk. I woke up stiff. The early morning air was chilling, so I tossed on the Confederate soldier's cap I had bought at Gettysburg and walked across the highway to a small restaurant for breakfast. I had taken my cap off when I went in, but now I put it back on. I sat at a table next to a burly fellow wearing a baseball cap. The emblem sewn onto the crown of his cap was a rebel flag.

I clenched my fists and shoved them into my pockets. I resisted my impulse to smack him or tell him off. It was enough that I made him uncomfortable.

He sneered at me. I sneered back. He looked away and every time his eyes sneaked back around for a glance at me, I was still there, staring at him. I hoped he would get up and say something to me. I was trying to provoke him into provoking me. But all he did was stare.

He didn't like that I sat near him. He didn't like that I was there at all. But what he hated more than anything else was that I was wearing a symbol of the old Confederacy on my head. After all, Benvisti had said,
“Symbols are indivisible. If it's mine, it can't be yours.”

I was co-opting this man's symbol and corrupting it, defiling it.

He stared at me as if to let me know I didn't belong. I stared at him to let him know I did. I sat back and relaxed. I stuck my long legs out. And then I smirked at him. He seethed.

My breakfast that morning, country ham and two eggs on toast, tasted especially fine. I wondered how his food tasted.

*   *   *

In a little while the sun came up. The morning mist and fog drifted out to sea and hung in a thick indecisive line until quite suddenly it vanished. One minute it was there, the next minute, after I had given full attention to the road, the fog was gone. I was riding south toward Hatteras on Highway 12. The wind was gusting and sand had blown across the road. I was picking my way carefully.

The islands are very narrow. The ocean is almost always in view. And there is no protection from the wind. When it blows, you feel it. The bike leans into the wind to compensate. But still every now and again the bike slides sideways. When you hit a patch of sand, the bike skids and for a second or two you lose control.

But the sun is full on your face and warm. The wind is alive and cooling. The day is streaked with color.

At Cape Hatteras the road bends sharply to the west. In a few minutes the road abruptly ends. There is no more island.

A ferry takes you to the next one, Ocracoke, a short ride in a small boat.

At the far end of Ocracoke there is a little village where the next ferry waits. On the edge of the village there is an inn owned by Jacob, a young man who rode the ferry with me, and his younger brother, Peter. Jacob had been admiring my bike, and as we talked and I told him where I was going, he offered me a room for the night.

“The house is completely booked up,” he told me. “But you can be our guest.” He was telling me I wouldn't have to pay.

“You may have to pitch your tent in the yard,” he said, “but we'll find a place for you. In the attic or in the yard, but somewhere. If anybody cancels, we'll give you the nicest room.”

When the ferry landed, I followed Jacob to the house that sits across the road from the general store. Clapboard, white, built from the timbers of a wrecked sailing ship, the old two-story house sits deep in the yard. The driveway is unpaved and covered with big rocks. I left my bike close to the road and walked. Jacob got out of his car, Peter came from the house. They both received me as warmly as if they knew me. Peter went to fetch cool drinks. Jacob gave me a tour of the place, upstairs and down, and out back to the garage that was big enough to be a barn. Then we sat in the rocking chairs in the shade of the front porch and lingered a long time there, sipping iced tea, munching on snacks and talking.

But in the end I didn't stay the night. I don't know why. It wasn't at all like me to decline a kindness or refuse hospitality. But something seemed to beckon. It might have been the way the late afternoon sun caught the tips of waves in the sound and streaked them silver, sparkling on the water. The sea breeze smelled of exotic worlds, foreign ports. It carried aloft excitement and the promise of something new, some magic on the other side of the horizon. I wanted to travel on. I had the urge to ride in the cool of the evening and deep into the night.

I caught the last ferry to Cedar Island and rode until darkness slipped around me. Then night fell with the suddenness of fatigue. In Morehead City I quit for the evening and carried on the next morning.

I will never know what I missed by not staying the night with Jacob and Peter. But I know that the slightest wind can blow a ship drastically off course. The history of the world has been formed by the seemingly insignificant decisions as well by the important ones. The future is decided by every little thing we do. Everything that happens, each moment well spent, each wasted minute, every smile or hello, becomes a paving stone on the path. Change one thing and you change the shape of tomorrow.

I chose to ride on that night. And that would make all the difference.

In the morning I got on the road early. I was in a tremendous hurry—I realize it now—but told myself I merely wanted to beat the heat. I wanted to ride as long as possible in the continuation of yesterday, but the cool that lingered since evening was warming rapidly. The sun had come up quickly. The blue had been scorched from the sky. The soft morning mist thickened into haze. It was going to be a hot day.

My haste, however, had nothing to do with heat.

Looking back now I see that not only was I eager to reach Charleston, my next significant destination, but I was impatient to reach my rendezvous with the evil in the haze. The evil spirit of the South. It was out there—somewhere—dressed in white, streaked with red, covered with blood, waiting for me. And I wanted to find it. I wanted to see it for myself, wanted to feel it. I did not know if my sword would fall from my hand and I might turn coward. Or I might turn violent. Though it might easily kill me, I doubted I could kill it. But I had to find the evil, confront it and spit in its eye. If ever I was going to put it fully behind me, I had to touch it, admit it was there, and move past it.

It was a Saturday morning. I was headed toward Wrightsville Beach, a place that people from Raleigh and Greensboro and Fayetteville flock to on warm weekends. Traffic was heavy. To escape it, I drove like a maniac from Morehead City to Jacksonville. From there I slowed down and took my time.

It was a nice morning to be out riding on a bike. I was not the only one who thought so. I passed several bikers coming from the opposite direction. Each one in turn threw up his hand to wave.

There is a special camaraderie among motorcyclists. You are part of a family. You will be waved at each time you pass. You will be talked to about your bike. You will be offered help when you need it. The kinship crosses the barriers we normally erect. You are a motorcyclist whether man or woman, black or white or brown, local or foreign. You pass a cyclist and he will wave. You stop nearby and he will have a chat.

I never gave a second thought to the motorcyclists who waved; only to the ones who didn't.

Then I noticed that more than motorcyclists were waving at me. Drivers in oncoming lanes were throwing up their hands to me, often when I was not expecting it. I would see the hand fly up and think the driver was scratching his nose. When I realized it was a wave, it was too late to wave back. We had already passed.

Not everybody waved, of course, but enough to make me wonder if it was some kind of signal. Was there a cop ahead? Were they telling me to slow down?

I slowed. And it gave me more time to react to the waving. And it was infectious. I started waving first.

And then I wondered why they were waving back. Could they not see that I was black? With my arms covered by the sleeves of my jacket and my face partly hidden by the visor of my helmet, maybe they couldn't tell.

I leaned to the side to look at myself in the mirror. I thought maybe only my eyes and nose could be seen, but the mask is big enough that you can see almost the whole face. Nothing was hidden. They were waving at me anyway. And not only people on the road.

I passed through Hampstead. An elderly man with no shirt on was mowing his lawn. He walked deliberately, almost frailly. He pushed the mower carefully. When the car in front of me passed him, the old man stopped mowing. He took one hand off the mower handle and waved. When I got close enough, he did the same to me.

If he waved at everyone who passed, it would take him all day to cut his grass.

I wondered if this is what Great-Grandfather Joseph would have found.

When Virginia started enforcing laws requiring freed blacks to leave the state, Joseph almost certainly would have come into North Carolina. I don't know if he would have made his way along the coast, but having been a slave who had never seen the sea, it would have been on his mind. The whole wide world would have been on his mind. He would have wanted to explore it.

He was thirty-seven years old when he gained his freedom. There was so much that he had missed. So much that he would never get a chance to do. So many people he would never meet. So many places he would never see. Not knowing when he might die, he would have wanted to see and do it all. Even if it meant his sampling of the world would be brief and his exposure limited. A little of a lot would have suited him fine.

Perhaps his mission was like mine: to get out and about, see the lay of the land, meet some folks, and put the evil behind him.

The heat caught up with me in Wrightsville Beach and I pulled into the parking lot of a little strip mall to rest. I thought I might find a cold drink here. But it was too early. The shops were still closed. I got off the bike and found a narrow band of shade. I leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the pavement. No one else was around. No other cars were in the parking lot. The bike was alone, its blue skin gleaming in the bright sun. And I was all alone, sitting, pondering, wondering, dreaming. I took out my notebook and started to write but felt lazy. I took a little nap.

When I awoke, a teenaged boy was standing over me. The shops were open and he had just come out of the video store. He was leaning on his bicycle.

“Is that your motorcycle?” he said.

He was standing against the bright sky. I squinted up at him and couldn't make him out, but I could see that he pointed and I followed the line of his arm out to the parking lot where my bike sat. Another young man, older than this one, was walking around the bike and looking it over carefully.

“It's a beauty,” the kid said. He introduced himself and told me his name. Joseph.

The guy walking around my bike had my attention now. I shook Joseph's hand, but only halfheartedly.

“What are you doing?”

“I was taking a nap,” I said.

“No,” he said. “What are you doing here? You don't live around here, do you?”

“Just passing through.”

Joseph leaned his bicycle against the wall. He sat down beside me.

The guy inspecting my motorcycle came over now.

“That's a great-looking machine,” he said. “I never saw one like it before.”

Then he sat down on the curb near me.

“My name is Jack.”

We shook hands.

Jack was a young man about twenty-three years old. He was tall and strong-looking, blond and tan. He looked like a sailor, or at the very least a surfer. He worked at the end of the mall in a shop that sold small sailboats and beach gear.

We fell into a chat about riding around the country on a bike, and he told me he wished he could be doing the same thing. It seems every man I've met has at one time or another dreamed of it. “To be free as the wind,” he said.

We talked a little about the South. We did not talk about race. We talked about where I had been and where I was going. We did not talk about why.

“You must be very tired,” he said.

“And hot,” I added.

He nodded. “It's going to be a scorcher today,” he said. “It's not even ten o'clock yet.”

He had to work all day, he said, but if I wanted a place to nap for a few hours, or maybe a cold beer, he told me I could use his house. He gave me directions.

“It's on the peninsula,” he said. “Close to the beach, in fact almost right on it. And the front of the house faces the estuary. You can watch the boats going in and out of the harbor. When a cool breeze blows and when the sun goes down in the late afternoon there's no better spot than on our balcony.”