South of Haunted Dreams (3 page)

Some other time, of course, will be soon enough.

The motorcycle revs to its highest-pitched whine and continues on, following the road over these rolling hills and around every bend, leading me on. I have no idea where the road will go.

II

I … turning about in my saddle took a farewell look in the direction from which we came, conscious of having reached the dividing line.

—William Johnston

I too turned around in my saddle and long I looked in the direction from which I had come, not knowing then that my backward glance, like William Johnston's so long before me, also would be a farewell one.

The road behind bent in the distance and disappeared in the trees; ahead it ran straight like a time-line into the haze of future. It ran to the horizon and got lost in the glare, shrank near the faraway limits of my sight and was gone. I faced forward on the machine, toward tomorrow, toward the unknown. I put the bike in gear. Spurning the fear and apprehension that vibrated through me, I rode on, into the labyrinth of time, the ultimate purpose of my mission and its final significance as hidden from me as the future, as unknown to me then as William Johnston's was to him.

William Johnston was an overlander with the Lewis and Clark expedition who in 1804 left St. Louis to explore the upper reaches of the Missouri River and the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. Their mission was to learn about the land, to make peace with the native tribes they encountered, and to add still one more jigsaw section that would help make this puzzle one indivisible nation from sea to shining sea.

Perhaps William Johnston and the others saw their lives as insignificant compared to the task before them. Perhaps they surrendered their fates to Providence, the same as I surrendered mine, to chance, to Providence, to the wind.

They went west; I left my home in St. Louis and headed south.

For William Johnston and for the other explorers with him the dividing line was a range of mountains that split the nation and the continent east and west. On one side of the great divide the rivers all flow into the Pacific Ocean; on the other side they run ultimately down to the Gulf of Mexico, out to the Atlantic.

But there are other partitions, not all of them physical, other continental divides, and one of them, just an imaginary line—as imaginary and arbitrary as all man-made boundaries are—has divided the land as no physical barrier could ever have done.

Originally it was no more than the southern border of Pennsylvania, a line named for the two surveyors who had laid it out, Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason, a mere marking on a map, a red line on some engineer's drawing. But not for long. The line began to grow and soon it stretched across the eastern half of the nation, which at that time was nearly the entire nation, and as the line grew it gained in significance both actual and symbolic. It extended west following the very real line of the Ohio River and itself became as real as a river, as plain and obvious as any rail fence of the day, separating neighbor from neighbor along a thousand-mile frontier reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, as formidable in many ways and as insurmountable as any mountain range. Mason and Dixon's line separated the slave states to the south from the free states to the north. And that has made all the difference.

To the north of this not-so-imaginary line and to the south of it men and women speak the same language. They share a common history, and for the most part they claim the same heroes, ancestors, lands of origin. But the perception, upon crossing the Mason-Dixon, is of entering another country, a land whose customs, whose pace, whose traditions make it altogether different from the land next-door. And the one tradition that sets the South cleanly apart has always been, and remains to this day, slavery and its lingering legacy. Its shadow still hangs over the South, hangs still over us all. And we are all complicit.

The southern climate is temperate, mild winters, searing summers, the heat lending itself to laze, to slow movement and long naps in the afternoon, to sipping iced tea in the shade, to long visits and great hospitality, to the romantic images of the South that naturally spring to mind. Lives of leisure and of indolence.

But still the work had to be done, fields had to be plowed, cows milked, crops harvested. And the work was done by hand.

Bent backs, straining sinew, sweat and song.

The Industrial Revolution came late to the South. There were no factories, no mills. The economy was all in the soil. Cheap labor was a necessity. A way of life hinged on it.

The South did not invent slavery. But as with God, had slavery not existed, the South would have had to create it. The South needed it. The South worshipped it. The South insisted on it. Without it there would have been no union—nor disunion—no thirteen original states, no Manifest Destiny, no Civil War. It was acceptance of slavery that kept the country whole. Yet it was slavery, its absence on one side of the line, its existence on the other, that divided this nation into North and South, slavery that turned the one country into two.

When the war forced slavery's end, the South clung to its racist ways, its separateness. The Civil War in spirit went on. The ways of the South continued to divide.

Among Blackamericans who have not forgotten old times in the land of cotton, crossing into the South revisits upon them the shadows of a culture that regarded their forebears as second-class citizens at best, certainly as inferior, often as less than human.

When I left my home, when I loaded my motorcycle and hit the road that wet August morning, I had no desire, no intention whatsoever, to travel the Deep South.

It was ten o'clock on a cloudy Tuesday morning. The air was electric with rumbled threats of thunder and rain and with the unspoken promise of excitement. The smell of moisture crowded the air. It was one of those heavily humid summer days when the moisture hangs like haze in the air, denser than fog but not quite a drizzle. Already the day was hot and steamy, the sky overcast, and the sun less than a hint in the tops of the trees. Rain was on the way. A light wind gathered. Fallen leaves drifted in the yard, paper danced in the street, but little else was moved by the wind. Overhead, a jet plane glided across the sky. Far behind, the plane's rumble got lost in the clouds and was swallowed up by the thunderstorm stirring in the southwest, growling like a grizzly bear and lumbering toward me. Soft rain like tears began to fall.

I had in mind to spend some time on the road, aiming perhaps for Alaska—the long way round, of course: via New England and the Canadian maritime provinces. Winter would catch up with me somewhere along the way and force me toward the southwest, toward California. Then the following spring I would go up the coast and on to the frozen north. If it took me a year, what did it matter? I just wanted to hit the road and go.

In Africa, where I spent nearly a year traversing that continent, I promised myself I would do just that: come home, hit the road, and go.

In Africa I came face to face with the bitterest suffering. The hunger and starvation are relentless. The bribery, the corruption and suspicion so widespread they are a way of life. The simple act of getting from one place to another was so complicated with roadblock after roadblock and checkpoint after checkpoint that even a minor journey was an ordeal. Getting enough to eat was a miracle. I hungered for things easy and American, for cheeseburgers and fried chicken, for well-paved roads, for a comfortable bed. So much, in fact, that at the bottom of a letter to a friend I wrote that when I returned home I was going to head for the open road and ride as far as my imagination would take me.

I'm going to buy for myself a car, a convertible, of course, or a motorcycle, and head for the open road where I will eat greasy roadside food and think for some crazy reason that I'm in heaven. It will be impossible, I know, because nobody in this world makes a coconut cream pie like my mother's, meringue piled high and golden and slightly chewy, sweet and creamy and always more coconut than any recipe ever called for, but I'm going to search and search until I find the best coconut cream pie in the country, and with it, the best cheeseburger. And thick strawberry milkshakes to wash the taste of dust and loneliness from my mouth. I will celebrate the joys of freedom and plenty. With the wind in my face and bugs in my teeth I will fly down that open road going everywhere and nowhere in particular, with thoughts all my own and—wonder of wonders—no roadblocks, no checkpoints, no bribes to pay.

Why? Hell! Why not? Or better still: because I wanted to and because I could. No golden fleece, apart from the coconut pie, no grand yearnings except to travel freely and easily in this land where I was born, my real homeland, and to rediscover it, to take to the road for no real reason but to go.

It was wanderlust that took me to Africa.

I did not travel to Africa to find my roots. My roots are here. The thinnest tips that branch deep deep deep into the earth to suck sustenance from the soil might indeed extend all the way to Africa, but those are the roots of my blackness. They affect the color of my skin, the texture of my hair. But I am not African. The soil from which I draw my strength, my pride, and my happiness is American soil.

I cannot speak for those of French descent, or Irish or Lithuanian or Chinese—or even other blacks—but here is the land I love, the land I long for. Here is where I belong. Because here is where I am.

So much of a Blackamerican's Africanness was stolen away or lost that a new breed has been born, of African stock but not African, a new race almost, born out of warm love, roiling passions, and long suffering. Born out of the jungle rhythms of Africa but even more out of the pains of slavery and persecution, we are a people bred in fear and with freedom always out of reach, schooled in long-term denial and everlasting patience. A new race born of the blues, a hybrid strain, resilient, resistant, forgiving. And strong.

The sturdiest shafts of my roots are anchored solidly here in this land of my creation, this place whose history and various cultures are mine. And mine is its heritage. Its dreams and broken promises, its lies and its defeats. Each fulfillment is mine and every achievement. Every failing likewise belongs to me. And with each failure and broken promise I die a little.

Slowly the mist recedes from a steamed-up bathroom mirror. The mission becomes clearer.

I would travel this country for the first time in my life as a racist, with color and race always on my mind. Spoken or merely implied, my battle cry to every black person I meet would be: “How are the white folks treating you?”—because I have seen what the white folks, the Europeans, have done to Africa, to black folks like me. And I know what the white folks, the Americans, have felt about black folks here. I wanted to experience it myself, as a way of connection.

How could I not have been drawn to the South, magnetized as my bones were, the dreaded South? The South which defines us, the South which has done so much to make black people who they are, the South that has been the cause of so much suffering. The South that has been saturated in fear and in monumental hatefulness white toward black.

White people have never suffered the brunt of such hatred. They have never known it. Nor can they ever know it.

In 1959 a white man named John Howard Griffin tried to know it. He chemically treated his skin so it would darken enough to pass as the skin of a black man. He shaved his head. He traveled the South to taste the fear and the degradation for a time, and to know what it was to be black. He told about it in his book
Black Like Me.
But he could never really know it. He could never be black like me. His heart might have been heroic and in the right place, but always in the back of his mind was the safety net. He could always go home. He could be white once more—as if he weren't always white anyway, white in his thinking, white in his outlook, white in the range of his possibilities. When the chemicals and the sunlamp treatments wore off, there was a way out. He could awaken from the nightmare.

For black people there is no escape, no way out for me, I know that now and know it perhaps for the very first time in my life, no way to shun this blackness. Not by being ashamed of my race and color, not with skin bleaches and lighteners, not with hair straighteners and not with plastic surgery. Not by immersion in things white and European, nor by education, nor by pretending. Not even by wishing that when you see me you see first of all who I am, that you see above all a person and not a black person, for that wish too is denial.

When you look at me, you see before anything else the color of my skin. That, I have decided, is not a bad thing. It is how you react to the color that offends me. If what you see is someone—some-
thing
—strange and terrible, utterly different from yourself, something inferior, something criminal and evil, something to be avoided, then that is what pisses me off, what brings me to the point of rage and violence.

On the road from New England I stopped to spend the afternoon and maybe a few days in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was coming down the Hudson River valley from Canada, had ridden along the edge of Lake Champlain. I had been on the bike for too many hours without stopping and my legs were stiff. Before finding a place to have lunch, I took a stroll through town.

It was a chilly late summer afternoon. I wore a puffy red riding suit to cut the wind and keep me warm. When I got off the bike I did not remove the suit. If anything, I must have looked ridiculous, certainly not dangerous, certainly not like someone about to commit a crime, certainly not grabbing a purse and trying to run with it.

“Can you identify the man, lady?”

“Well, he was wearing a big red snowsuit, and he walked kind of stiff-legged like Frankenstein's monster.”

“Shouldn't be too hard to find.”

A man in a big red snowsuit, carrying a motorcycle helmet. In broad daylight. In plain view. Walking slow and stiff. I would have to have been an idiot to even think about snatching some lady's purse.