South of Haunted Dreams (28 page)

“Why not?” he said. “People always sound surprised that a black man either stays in the South or leaves and comes back. This is home, man. It's not a bad place to be, better than some.”

But home was under siege.

“You know,” he said, “General Sherman gave this land to black people after the Civil War. He took it from the former slave owners and gave it to the former slaves. It took them almost a hundred fifty years, but now they're winning it back. Buying out the ones who'll sell, taking it from the ones who won't.”

“Taking it? They can't just take your land.”

“They have their ways,” he said. “They would prefer you to sell it but they ain't going to try and make you. All they have to do is find a couple people whose kids don't want to stay here and have no reason to hang on to the property. You get a few people to sell, start developing the land around, and pretty soon property values are up. The tax assessor man says the land around is worth more too so you have to pay more in taxes than you can afford. It's not long before you either sell out or the state comes to take your land for the back taxes you owe. The developer gets it on the auction block and probably at a cheaper price than he offered you in the first place. Land that has been in your family for a hundred years gets turned into private estates and golf courses that they'll shoot you for trying to cross. And maybe when all is said and done, you've got a pocketful of money, but that's not going to last you long. And you can't buy anything like you just lost. It wouldn't be that much money. So you go from owning your own home and your own land to being poor and begging. It just ain't fair.”

“And you can't see it coming, can you?” I said.

He looked up and gave me a wry smile.

“Oh, we saw it coming,” he said. “We always knew the white man would get us sooner or later. If he wants you, one way or another he'll get you. But we hold out as long as we can. That's why I'm here. Trying to hold out.”

He squinted up into the sun and took a deep breath to fill his head with the smell of the marsh. He seemed a little sadder now.

“The difference between poor black people and poor white people,” he said, “is that poor white people think that because they're white they have an advantage over us. And sometimes they do, but mostly they don't. The game is all about rich against poor. They can't see it because the color game blinds them. They ought to be on our side but they think the rule of law is in their favor, and that's a false hope, believe me.”

“… wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes.”

—Learned Hand.

I looked carefully at Gopher, at his sun-darkened young face and at his strong gnarly hands. He looked poor. He wasn't.

*   *   *

As I rode south along the coast, through Savannah and deeper into Georgia, I tried to remember why I had come to the South in the first place, what I had expected to find. White people shooting at me. Black people bitching and moaning. A reason to hate this place. Or was I looking for a reason to love this place? I didn't really know anymore. But the South was surprising me. The South was a contradiction, always had been.

Many if not most of the country's greatest forefathers were slave-holding southerners preaching liberty and the rights of man. James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia, was vehemently against slavery.

A southern state—Virginia—elected the first black governor in the U.S. More blacks were hired on to state payrolls during the reign of George Wallace—“Segregation now, segregation forever”—than ever before. And while Mississippi is synonymous with racial hatred, there are more elected black officials in Mississippi than in any other state.

I no longer knew what to make of anything.

I walked the dark streets of Savannah and breathed in the night air. A street called Bull cuts through the center of town. Quiet neighborhoods extend on either side of it. The houses are old, some are large, most are lovely. Every few blocks there is a little square. A little to the east, the pavement is chipped and the yards are weeds if anything green, but mostly dirt. The houses are not in good shape. You can always tell when you reach the poor black neighborhood. But there is a street sign that read
E. HARRIS
, and that made me smile.

I rode on like some lonesome cowboy looking for a place to call home. But the dusty roads keep calling him, something keeps beckoning him. One more place to see, one more stranger to talk to. He rides restlessly from town to town, has a look around, then rides on again.

Somewhere near Valdosta, Georgia, I stopped for gas. Then I pulled my bike over to the edge of the parking lot and lay in the grass. Three men approached me. They were dressed alike, all three, in blue jeans and light blue shirts and bright orange safety vests. They had been working on the road. A bus was waiting for them, and beside the bus a man stood holding a shotgun. This was part of a prison chain gang.

They had come over to talk about the bike. They looked it over and praised it, and then I said, “So how are the white folks treating you all down here?”

Right away two of them left, as if it was some trap and there might be trouble. But the third stayed and talked until he got the signal from the guard that it was time to move on.

The light in his eyes flashed. He was like a little boy about to say something naughty and delighting in it. He laughed boisterously.

“About like white folks treat niggers anyplace else,” he said. “You know how they are.”

The light in his eyes dimmed while he thought. His broad smile of crooked teeth relaxed and reformed itself, tensing again in a pursing of his lips. First his eyes narrowed into a frown of thoughtfulness, then into one of anger. The light that had been a twinkle in his eyes now became like fire.

“It's a good thing I'm in jail,” he said. “If I had stayed in Detroit, where I'm from, I think I'd be dead by now, killed either by some junkie or killed by the police. If I had stayed in Detroit I'd have been stealing and robbing and killing folks just to get by.”

“What have you been doing down here?”

“Stealing and robbing just to get by,” he said. “But not killing, anyway.” He laughed.

He had come south to be with his family.

“There ain't nothing left in Detroit. There ain't nothing nowhere else in this country either for black people. No jobs. No way to get no money. Nothing in the cities but dope killers and angry white people who don't want you around nohow. They got the whole loaf and they got the nerve to hate you 'cause you're asking for a few crumbs. At least here I got me some family.”

“Is it different? The South, I mean.”

“Oh, it's different,” he said. “But it ain't better. White folks is white folks, that's all there is to it. But you know what I mean. My people went up north fifty, sixty years ago, and here I am coming back south to the same old shit they were trying to get away from. Not much has changed. When a white man looks at you, he still ain't really looking at you. He might be trying to be your friend, he might even be your friend, I mean really think he's your friend, but when he looks at you he's looking right past you at something else. He don't see you. He sees some make-believe image of you. He sees how you fit in with what he thinks black people are or how we ought to be. He's built up such a mind thing about black people that he thinks he knows all about you and your whole damned family before you say word one. And deep down inside, he hates you. He wants to know why you can't settle down and be a good little nigger and be happy with his leavings, the shit work he's going let you do, the little shack he's going let you live in. He'd be a damned sight happier if you just disappeared and quit wasting time and taking up space on HIS land, in HIS country that he stole fair and square. You ain't never going to mean nothing to him. You don't mean nothing to anybody white. And it don't matter if you're up north or down here somewhere. Our life is a war, man. You hear what I'm saying?”

He slapped me on the shoulder and went back to the bus. He was whistling as he walked, happy to have had an audience.

I thought back to Greg and Jack, how we had sat and talked on their verandah overlooking the sea, how they had opened their home to me, and invited me to stay as long as I liked. They are young, so young in fact that when Greg and I finally went to buy beer, he pulled out his driver's license to show he was over twenty-one.

I asked Greg why he had done it, pulled his ID before the salesgirl asked for it.

He said, “I didn't want to put her on the spot. I'm over twenty-one, but I look young. I didn't want her to feel embarrassed that she had asked me for the ID, and didn't want her wondering if she should have asked for it. Just a courtesy.”

I understood. And later that evening when we talked, I asked why that same courtesy wasn't applied with rebel flags. “If you know it might make somebody uncomfortable,” I said, “why not put it aside for the sake of someone else?”

We talked about affirmative action.

“It's not the best answer, maybe not even the right answer,” I said. “But if you know the playing field is not level, why not make the sacrifice for the good of the country? Otherwise these problems we have will never go away.”

We talked deep into the night, those youths and I; it was the same conversation I had had at the cocktail party in Connecticut, but with a difference.

“If a man as confident and capable as I think I am can be made to feel this way,” I said, “how do you think the less confident and able might be feeling?”

“I never thought about it that way,” they said.

Greg and Jack were young enough, their minds not yet made up, and they were willing to listen and to think.

And there was another difference.

I had calmed down. I was making peace.

I slept on their sofa, snored resoundingly. When I awoke, peace was all over me, in my beard and in my eyes, it covered the front of my shirt and bathed all of me.

XIV

The time has come for men to turn into gods or perish.

—Alan Harrington

I don't know when I started to like the South—and I mean really to like the place as opposed to simply not disliking it—but I did. Then I fell in love.

On one of my approaches to Atlanta I stopped for gas at one of those superstations that sell gasoline and groceries and auto parts; it even had a delicatessen inside. It's the kind of gas station where travelers in a hurry like to stop because they can fill up with gas, let the kids run around, stretch their legs, have lunch, buy snacks, even shower if they need to, and then be back on the road within minutes.

The building was modern, lots of windows, dozens of shoppers inside, and cars parked all around. In one of the cars, old and heavily loaded down with clothes and boxes and a few lamps, a young couple obviously on the move were rearranging their belongings. Another car, similarly loaded, was sitting beside a gasoline pump. The hose from the pump to the car's gas tank hung loosely, the nozzle was about to fall out. The young man filling his car was more interested in my bike than in paying attention to what he was doing. I filled my tank and rode over to the building to pay. The young man followed me.

“That's a real nice bike,” he said.

I smiled and went on inside.

When I came back out, the two old cars were sitting side by side, both of them next to the bike. The two young couples were leaning on the hood of one of the cars. They were studying a road map. I sat in the shade, drank the apple juice I had bought, and ate the potato chips.

When they had finished with the map, the two young men came over to admire the bike. They must have been older, but they didn't look more than nineteen or twenty. The two women with them looked even younger. But even at such a young age they had about them a haggard aspect, already worn down by life. They had been on the road many days and showed it. They looked tired. They looked poor. They might easily have been migrant farm workers, fruit and vegetable pickers. In an earlier time they might have been hippies.

They had come from Michigan, they said, and were on their way first to Atlanta, then to who knows where. One of them, Mike, said he had an uncle in Atlanta. They were all going to stay with the uncle until he got tired of them. By then they hoped to have found a different situation. They were looking for work, they wanted to find a new start, a new life.

“And if he gets tired of us or we can't find nothing to do,” Mike said, “we'll pack up the cars and move on again. Anyway, it's got to be better than Michigan. There's nothing left in Michigan. No jobs, no future. No life.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“You can say that again,” said the other. He took the cigarette from Mike and with it lit one of his own.

“Cities are falling apart,” he said. “And they're getting more and more dangerous all the time. There's nothing left up there. So when Mike says he's going to give it a try in Atlanta, I asked him if I could come along.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Jim here is going to keep on going to school at night. I'm a pretty fair mechanic. I think I can find a job.”

“And I'm going to work days,” Jim said. “I don't know what, but I'll find something.”

“What are they going to do?” I asked, looking at the two young women.

“School. Jobs. Same as us. We'll figure something out.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Jim turned to Mike and asked if he wanted anything from the store. He asked the two women, and they went in with him.

Mike was frowning when I looked back at him.

“To tell you the truth,” he said. “We didn't give this a whole lot of thought. I just knew I had to get out of there. It's bad and it's getting worse. Jobs and tension and general decay. It's just hopeless up there.”