South of Haunted Dreams (30 page)

“I hope you don't think that makes a bad situation better,” I said.

“Not better,” he said. “But different. The South is not a bad place. I just can't allow myself to believe that it is. That would make everybody who lives here bad. And me too. And I don't think I'm bad. We've done some bad things, that's true, but who hasn't? There's good people here too. I've got a lot of friends who are southerners who have done a lot of good things. I can't believe this is a bad place full of bad people. Don't you like it here? Be honest. Don't you like it just a little?”

I admitted that the South was growing on me. And I wished out loud that the past had not been so ugly, wished that my trip could have been all about food and fun, running from place to place on my bike and smelling the seasons change, talking to people about their lives, hearing their stories, listening to their laughter. Then I'm sure I would love the South. But the shadow covers me too.

“I think it
is
better down here,” he said. “And I mean better for black people. We know black people. We understand them better than they do up north, because we've been through the fire together down here. Right here in this very state we did some of the meanest things you can ever imagine. Horrible inhuman things. And I don't think anybody is proud of it. Oh, maybe a few crazy people, but I don't think anybody really wants to see those days again. They were too painful—for all of us—and too wrong. We've come a long way together. We've shared a great deal of suffering and shame and pain together. We have felt, and some of us—black and white—still feel passions of rage and hate. And this binds us. We think about this problem every day of our lives. Our memories won't let us forget. But if we're lucky and we raise our children right, then maybe their children's children will be different. If there's hope for this country, I think it's right here in the battlefield, right here in the South. We'll find a way because everywhere you look the memories stare us right in the face. What we have done and what we do affect how the rest of the country and the rest of the world sees us. On some deep level they even affect how we see ourselves. We have to find a way.”

He took a deep breath and was going to start again. He really wanted to convince or convert me. He wanted, I think, to convince himself. But I stopped him.

We talked on for a long time anyway, talked about his father and how his father had raised him to try and be fair. He told me about the part of town they called the nigger quarters and about the black men who lived there, black men his father considered friends.

“Did he ever invite them home for dinner?” I asked.

“Black people came to our house many times,” he said. “They were always around.”

“To sit down and have dinner?”

James looked away. His face was ashamed and sad.

“No,” he said. “And my father never went to their homes to eat either. But those were different days. And I know you think that's not a good excuse, but my father was a good man. A lot of white people never had dinner in our house either.”

“But those men weren't his friends, were they?” I said. “And the blacks were.”

“All I can say is they were different times,” he said. “And maybe he couldn't invite them home, I guess.”

James ran his fingers through his hair. He was visibly pained.

“Tell me this one thing,” he said. “You've been traveling all over on that thing. Has anybody mistreated you, been really malicious to you? I mean once you got to talking so he could know you weren't going to cause him any harm.”

I shook my head.

“You see,” he said. “It's an individual thing. Some people will treat you good, some bad, but most when they get to know you one on one will be kind to you. At least in the South we're not afraid to get to know black people.”

There was something in what he said.

I turned off the road I was on and headed up toward Tuskegee, where the famous institute is.

By tradition an all-black college. Started in 1881 when Lewis Adams, a former slave, and George Campbell, a former slave owner, persuaded the state of Alabama that a college for blacks would be a good thing. Tuskegee Institute illustrates the paradox of the South. A former slave working with a former slave owner. The state of Alabama giving $2,000 for teachers' salaries but nothing for land or buildings or equipment.

A falling-down church and an old wooden shack were the school until the treasurer of another black college, Hampton Institute in Virginia, made a personal loan of $200 to Tuskegee with which the school was able to buy a hundred acres of abandoned farm-land. There are 268 acres now and 161 buildings. From 30 students in the first class the school has grown into an academic community of 5,000—students, faculty, and staff. The campus is a national historic site administered by the U.S. National Park Service. It is a monument, a living museum.

For many of the old buildings on campus the bricks were made by students, and the buildings themselves were built by students. It was the philosophy of the school and its founder, Booker T. Washington, that young blacks receive a practical education as well as a theoretical and creative one. To Booker T., who had been born a slave and who had worked his way through college as a janitor, graduating with honors, education was a total experience, meant to take place in the classroom and the workshop, but also in the dormitories and the dining halls. He wanted Tuskegee to be what he called a civilizing agent.

So the school taught agriculture, and the students ate the produce from the school farm. Students made bricks and built buildings. And when they graduated, many students became educators, not only in the classroom. They went back, many of them, to the plantation areas to show people there how to put new energy and new ideas into farming and into life itself.

The buildings are old, some in need of repair; many wooden ones could use a coat of paint. And as I walked through the campus and into the buildings I felt nothing so much as the paradox of black/white life in America.

If not for donations from benefactors like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Tuskegee would not exist. If not for segregation and the two societies, Tuskegee would not need to exist. And who knows if the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and the Huntingtons were so generous only as a way to keep blacks in schools for blacks and away from schools for whites?

The whole thing was making me crazy, giving me a headache, making me want to examine everyone's motives, everything's reasons. I went a mile or so down the road to the center of town and sat in the very center of a noisy little restaurant just off the town's main square. The sign read:
PIERCE'S RESTAURANT. COUNTRY COOKING.

I talked to no one, just sat and watched the black people laughing and talking loud and loading down the country food. My spirits were lifted. I got an order of fried chicken, a side order of greens and one of black-eyed peas, some macaroni and cheese, and I ate until I couldn't eat any more.

The place was owned by a black man. The ladies behind the counter were black. Most of the customers were black as well, but not all. There were many white people, farmers in overalls, laborers in blue jeans and dirty shirts, county bureaucrats in suits and ties. There were no private tables, you sat where you found a space. White people and black people sat shoulder to shoulder in this dusty southern town and ate greens and ham and sweet potatoes together. I don't know how close they sat—or even if they talked—once they left this two-room restaurant and the thousands of places like it in the South, but as James Anderman had said, in many ways blacks and whites are familiar with each other here. They may not be best friends, may not invite one another home for dinner, but they know each other. They are comfortable around each other in ways that they are not in the North. I cannot imagine a white lady sitting alone in a black restaurant in Cleveland or in St. Louis. That woman in Saratoga Springs couldn't even walk on the same street with me without panicking. And yet here in the racist South, a lone white woman sits and reads a book and eats her lunch.

Lunch hour for most was over. All the white people had left by the time she arrived. But she came in and sat and ate.

She was a nurse, dressed all in white. Her hair was so gray, even it was white. Her name—so the tag pinned to her dress said—was Grace Comer. I did not talk to her. I didn't need to. I just watched her and I think she must have felt me watching, for she looked up from her book and smiled at me.

James Anderman thinks that if there's hope for this country, it's right here, right here in the South. And I begin to wonder.

There is plenty to remind you that evil still lives in the world. And so we leap at the little flickers of hope, as if we were moths and the flickers bright flames. A smile, a wave, a moment's kindness. Enough flickers and there will be flame, and the flame will become blaze.

I was falling in love with this place. I took the hour's ride from Tuskegee to Montgomery without the dread and rage that perhaps rightly ought to have been within me. So much had happened in Montgomery, so much started here, that it is easy to think the entire struggle for human rights began here. Let's not forget Booker T. and George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth and Denmark Vesey and Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner and Ida Wells. These are the names we know. Let us not forget Rosa Parks, an ordinary woman, somebody's seamstress. She was simply tired one day—so the story goes—and refused to give up her seat to a white man. It was 1955. It wasn't that blacks had to sit at the back of the bus, as if there were a special section for them. It was simply that no black person was allowed to sit in front of a white person no matter where he sat. Rosa Parks was arrested for not surrendering her seat.

Some say she was just tired. Others claim the whole affair was planned. I am proud of her either way, proud of the blacks in Montgomery who refused to ride the buses as long as seating remained segregated. They made the necessary sacrifice. They walked to work and the buses ran empty for eleven months.

We like to think of them as ordinary people: Rosa and the black men and women who boycotted the buses; the college students in Greensboro and Nashville who sat at segregated lunch counters and endured the cursings and the beatings until the lunch counters were integrated; the men and women who marched peacefully for the right to vote; Elizabeth Eckford and eight black schoolmates who silently walked through a crowd of angry whites spitting at them, cursing them, hating them that first day blacks were allowed to go to Little Rock High School, and maybe every day afterwards.

They were not ordinary people but strong and brave, and we must never forget them and what they did for us.

Men like my father who hung his head in fear and shame to live and proudly tell the story. These are our heroes. Quiet heroes like Great-Grandfather Joseph and the many like him, men and women, whom we should remember if for no other reason than that they endured and that they survived and that they carried us one step farther, one step closer.

And while we are remembering, let us remember too the whites who believed in racial equality and were cursed and beaten, arrested and killed alongside the blacks.

Let us never forget.

And let us lift every voice in praise.

XV

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

—Winston Churchill

From the Ohio River south to the Gulf of Mexico. From the Atlantic to the Mississippi and a little beyond. More than half a million square miles—not counting Texas—and still only 14 percent of the country. Yet the South is the nation's linchpin, it seems. The South holds the key to our salvation. Always has, always will—until salvation comes.

Over the entire expanse at once, as if over all the earth, clouds of darkness have tangled together and threaten rain. The shadows cast are long and grotesque. They expand—the shadows on the earth, the clouds in the sky. They block the sun's rays, absorb them, and steal the light until all that remain are the shadows on the ground.

Our good fortunes and our joys, our triumphs may bring us relief and lightness, but only temporarily, it seems; it is our defeats, failure and sorrow that cast the shadows that darken our days as long as we live.

But through the gaps in the clouds a little light falls. And perhaps this is enough—a beginning. New shapes begin to form, and in these new shapes there is some peace, some tranquillity, some small reason to be calm.

I cannot help but wonder if Joseph passed this way, and wonder too what he might have felt in passing. There is no way to know, of course, no way but to imagine his route and what he might have gone through, how white he might have had to become in order to get by, only then to discover how black he truly was.

There was no way to know which route he might have taken, but I knew I was following in Joseph's footsteps. I knew now where I was going.

Before I arrived there, before it was all over, I would finally find the men who had been waiting to call me nigger, tempting me to violence. They were but two men out of the many hating me before they knew me. And they brought to mind all the pain of an old wound that has never healed. But by the time I found them, my rage had already been tempered.

My first night in Montgomery I slept the sleep of the drunk, a night of motion and crazy dreams. I woke up not knowing where I was.

I was at the Riverfront Inn, a very nice hotel on the corner of Coosa and Tallapoosa, the street names doubtless adding to my crazy dreams. I had checked in because I felt I had to. I checked in expecting—I don't know why—to be turned away, at the very least to be looked at askance and made to feel unwelcome. I wasn't. I sat in the hotel restaurant and ate a grilled steak for dinner. I made myself as conspicuous as possible. I moved to the hotel bar and stayed a couple of hours drinking alone. I waited for someone to suggest that I might not belong there. But no one ever did.