South of Haunted Dreams (29 page)

“And you think it'll be better down here?”

“One thing's for damned sure,” he said. “It won't be any worse. And that's good enough for me.”

The four piled into the cars and drove away. I waved them out of sight.

As I watched them disappear, I wondered if they had any idea what lay ahead, if they had any notion of the history of the South, what the South had been and what it had meant, what it still means. They were so young. I wondered if they had given any thought to it at all.

Perhaps they didn't need to. Perhaps the South for these young ones would be different from what it had been for those older. I could hope anyway.

I needed a new visor for my helmet. Mine was old and scuffed up, and I could no longer see very clearly out of it. Rocks kicked up by passing trucks, bits of gravel and ten thousand insects had slammed into the visor and scarred it. The bug juice had dried so hard that I had to scrape it off. The paper towels and coarse cloths I used had scratched the visor further. Now the glaring sun made it nearly impossible to see.

On the way out of Atlanta there was a cycle shop, far on the southern outskirts of town. I stopped there.

It was a cluttered space. The air smelled of grease. The concrete floor was coated with a layer of something slippery.

The man who owned the place took his time about coming to wait on me. He was as friendly as could be with another man. At me he barely glanced. Without a word, without a nod or a smile, with nothing so much as, “I'll be with you in a second,” he just ignored me until the other man left.

When my turn came he was still gruff. He never smiled, was never pleasant, never called me sir, but he thanked me, even gave me directions out of town. And there was something about him, his grease-stained shirt, his overhanging belly, his big hammy hands—something about him that told where I was, that told where we had been together, this man and I.

How can you know where you need to get
to
unless you know what you need to get away
from?

That evening when I stopped for the night at the Colonial Motel in North Thomaston, the innkeeper was a man from India or Pakistan. I thought nothing of it at first but there was something so incongruous about his being in that dark, lonely town that when I checked in, I had to ask.

“What in the world are you doing here, in the middle of racist redneck Georgia, of all places?” I asked. If I were Asian or African or anything else, this would not be my first choice of places to live.

He frowned at me. “There is an opportunity here,” he said warily. “I and my family have taken it. We will try to make a good living.”

Then I explained.

“The racist South has not only directed its venom against blacks,” I said. “From time to time Jews and Catholics and foreigners of all kinds have been targets of southern hatred.”

“It is the same in many places,” he said. “People hate people, people kill people. One place is very often as bad as another.” Then he added, “Or as good.”

This last made me stop and think.

“But why here?” I asked.

“Hope,” he said. “What else is there?”

What indeed!

I drove south full of hope that next morning. I wanted very much for the innkeeper and for Jim and Mike and their girlfriends to find happiness and peace here. I hoped, as I rode in the cool air toward Americus, for them.

I passed the factory that makes mobile homes, passed the mobile home at the side of the road, clutter in the yard, the big picture of Elvis Presley in the window, the rebel flag hanging.

At the next junction I turned off the main road and headed toward Andersonville and Camp Sumter, largest of the Confederacy's military prisons. Once more to touch the past.

There is a cemetery near the prison. The headstones are white and arranged neatly in rows like soldiers on parade. You walk between the rows and an old sad song plays in your head. Maybe the song is “Dixie,” the song of the South, played as lament on guitar, not as a march, not as celebration. And it makes you want to cry—for what has been, but mostly for what could have been. The beauty of the landscape, the green and well-manicured slopes of softly rolling hills, the trees and the cool forgiving shade these trees bring to a hot afternoon, do not help you to forget that 13,000 men died here in about a year's time, mostly from disease and malnutrition, exposure to the heat and cold and poor sanitation. It doesn't even try to make you forget. If anything it reminds us what we are capable of, that we fought and why we fought, and what we have done to one another.

The new South and the old South are never very far removed. The South is rooted in the past, and that may not be a bad thing, to be reminded of what we once were, what we are and what we are not, what we are trying to get away from, what we are trying to get to.

It was here in Andersonville that Willie Ann Towns told me she likes to eat dirt.

I had cruised slowly through the old part of the town, parked, and went inside the old general store, went inside the old railroad station now turned into a museum. When I finished looking around at things of interest to someone else, I crossed the tracks and entered a residential neighborhood where all the houses were small and made of brick and looked exactly alike. Willie Ann Towns was sitting on the front steps of her house.

I stopped, pretending I was lost, and asked for directions.

“How y'all doing?” I asked.

Slowly Willie Ann got up and came down to the curb.

“That's a pretty bike,” she said. “Where you going on it?”

“Just going,” I said. “Do you live here?”

She nodded. She said it was a housing project.

There weren't very many houses, six or seven in a row leading down a short street. You don't expect to see housing projects out in the middle of nowhere. You think of housing projects and welfare as products of the city. But the countryside has its poor as well.

“What's it like inside?” I wanted to know. I wanted to know everything about being poor and black in a little backwater place like Andersonville.

Willie Ann told me about the smallness of the little two-room houses that looked a bit like slave quarters on some plantation. The only difference was the bricks, the indoor plumbing and heat.

We talked for a good long time about nothing to do when suddenly she told me that she likes to eat dirt.

I hardly heard her, but asked her why.

“It tastes good,” she said. “Dirt and chalk too. But you have to be careful about the chalk.”

I was too tunnel-visioned to hear. I wanted her to tell me about the South, about how it was living here, and I missed what she was telling me, that it's the same as it's always been, that some people still eat dirt.

And then at a café in Americus where I stopped to get a hot dog and a bowl of chili, the South fooled me again.

It was a bright, very clean little place in a row of shops facing the square. I sat at the lunch counter. A black man was sitting next to me. Two white men were sitting in the far corner. They were leaning against the wall and reading the news. They looked like they owned the place.

I asked the man next to me, “What's with those two white guys in the corner?”

He looked at me, looked at them, then bent back over his lunch and kept eating.

“How the hell should I know?” he said. “I don't even know what they're doing in here. They don't like to get too close to us nohow.”

“Sounds like nothing has changed in all these years,” I said.

He looked up and gave a twisted smile.

“Oh, some things change,” he said. “I remember when we couldn't sit at the lunch counter with them. Now we do. Now we own the place.”

The black woman behind the counter heard us. She was frantically busy, filling orders, answering the phone, quietly calling orders to someone in the kitchen, taking money and making change. But she stopped for a minute. I think she just wanted to smile at me. She was beautiful and when I paid my bill, I told her so.

“That's the owner,” the fellow beside me said. “We still got the white folks who like to sit in the corner away from us, but their money's good.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “And we'll take it,” he said, as if he owned the place himself.

In a way, I guess he did.

He walked away happy, and so did I.

How eagerly I had anticipated evil at every turn, expected it, longed for the horrors to visit me. I almost wanted it to happen, wanted to find nothing changed, wanted to hate the place. I was no better than the racist who on seeing me has his mind already made up. I wanted the South to prove the stereotypes carefully harbored in my mind.

How easy it is to insist that it is all about race, about black and white, about the past. Then you never have to think about the future.

I am glad for the man in the cycle shop, glad for the two white men sitting in the corner at the café in Americus, for they remind us of what we—I hope
we
—are trying to leave behind. At the same time they tell how far we are from where we are trying to go.

I began to look at the people who waved at me. I had been waving back all along, but as reflex. Now I looked each man in the face—only rarely would a woman wave—and I waved in return. There is nothing very grand about a wave. But it's those little things that can make all the difference in the world.

I made my way to Fort Walton Beach in the Florida panhandle. My bike needed a routine service and I called Forte Cycle Center for an appointment. They were booked solid. I explained that I was traveling through. They told me to come in and they would see what they could do.

“It might be a long wait,” the service manager said when I finally arrived. “But we'll get you in.”

I sat in the shade and read. Someone brought me a cold soda. An old man who used to ride motorcycles but could not any longer came to talk to me. We sat on the ground together. I had lunch at Mary's Kitchen up the road and the waitress called me sugar, brought me pie, made me feel at home.

When I finally went back to the shop, it was closed but they had stayed on to finish the bike for me. It was a family operation, everybody seemed to be there to see me off. They asked where I was headed. I said, “North, I think.” And they told me where to stay the night. They even called ahead for me and arranged for a cheaper rate than I would have gotten on my own. I don't know why they did this.

I spent the night in a hotel called Americano, in a town called Niceville.

The morning brought with it brightest sunshine and gladness. I was wickedly happy as I rode into the heat. I took off my jacket and wrapped a damp bandanna around my throat. I flew past every car on my side of the road, waved to every driver coming toward me. I was cool and cocky, a little too much at ease.

The knot in the bandanna came loose. The bandanna flew from my neck. I tried to grab it as it slipped off but was too slow. Immediately I looked for a place to turn around and pulled off on the left side of the road. The pavement there had ended. I was on gravel and dirt and going too fast. The bike skidded out from under me. At the last instant, I jumped. I fell.

The bike tottered and finally fell as well. The engine had not shut off and the rear wheel was spinning round and round. I walked over to it and switched off the motor. Then I sat on the ground and laughed.

The bike wasn't damaged. I walked back in the road and got my bandanna. Then I waited for someone to help me lift the bike.

It was a young kid from up the road in Florala, he said. He had seen the bike on its side when he passed and came back to see if I needed help.

“Florala,” I said. “That's in Alabama, right? How is it there?”

“Boring,” he said. “I hate it.”

“Do you have any black friends?”

“Yeah, a few,” he said. “And they hate it too.”

“And there's no tension?”

“Some,” he said. “There are people who don't like black people. Sure. But there are people who do. And mostly we get along fine. At least my friends and I do.”

I wondered if there was something going on that I didn't know anything about. I kept riding and I kept waving until I passed through a little town called Opp. I followed the road into town, made a right at the light, and drove through a residential neighborhood. A man about to get into a pickup truck waved. I waved and rode on.

But this final waving nagged at me and so I slowed the bike and turned around. I went around the block and found the man. He was writing something in a notebook, and when he heard me, he looked up and waved again.

I pulled in front of him and got off the bike. He got out of the truck.

“What's the matter?” he said. “Are you lost?”

“No, I'm not lost,” I said. “I'm just trying to figure out why everybody keeps waving at me.”

He laughed. “You're in South Alabama,” he said.

“That's what I mean,” I said. “This is Alabama.”

“Alabama is a very friendly place,” he said.

He offered me his hand, told me his name—James Anderman.

“Alabama scares the hell out of me,” I said. “It hasn't exactly been what you'd call a very friendly place to black people. In fact just the opposite.”

“Well, South Alabama has always been different,” he said. He got on his soapbox and started preaching to me.

“But Alabama in general has changed a lot, you know. The whole of the South has changed a lot. Haven't you seen it? You'll find this is the friendliest part of the country. And I know you're thinking about what goes on between blacks and whites down here, but I tell you it's not like that anymore. Not entirely. It's not entirely disappeared either, of course, but even when it was bad—well, I can't say it wasn't as bad as you probably heard, but still it was different. White people in the South have always been friendly toward black people, friendlier than in the North. The difference is that in the North white people claim they love black people but they don't know any. They can pass their whole lives without knowing any. It ain't that way down here. That could never happen without a whole lot of effort. So up north they want equality for black people as a race but not as individuals. Down here, even when things were bad and blacks were despised and thoroughly mistreated, and I admit it, you were severely mistreated, but we never disliked the black people we knew. We hated the race, you could say, but loved the people.”