South of Haunted Dreams (32 page)

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

By the time I found the men waiting to call me nigger, I had been to this Civil Rights Memorial and sat in the cool shade. The late afternoon sun could not reach the place where I sat, where I meditated. I cooled my bottom on the pavement and rested. The tall shadow of people I had never met fell over me. I felt a deep sense of peace.

The Civil Rights Memorial fronts a modern office building that houses the Southern Poverty Law Center. The man who started the center, Morris Dees, is a lawyer who made a fortune publishing a cookbook. For some godly reason he turned his back on the security of business. He got involved instead in the right fight and on the right side. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to ask him why. Morris Dees is a white man.

When the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Dees was a part-time minister at a white church. From the pulpit he asked members of his parish to donate money to help rebuild the church. He asked them to pray for the families of the four little girls who were killed. His congregation of Christians walked out on him.

Five years later Dees was devoted full-time to civil rights law.

Lawyers from Washington had come to the South to put into motion the legal workings of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When those structures were set up, the northern lawyers went home. Dees got involved with the lawsuits that would make the real gains possible. He made a lot of enemies. Ku Klux Klan graffiti were painted on his office walls. His office was flooded. The hate mail started.

In the 1980s Dees took on the Klan itself when Klansmen lynched a nineteen-year-old black kid named Michael Donald. Dees and the Law Center sued in civil court on behalf of Donald's mother and won a seven-million-dollar judgment against the United Klans of America. This particular branch of the Klan was essentially put out of business, bankrupt.

Dees became something of a marked man. Hate mail increased, death threats were not uncommon. No wonder then that I could not get into his office. I had to have an appointment and no amount of persuasion could gain me access. They didn't know me and they were not going to let me in.

I left Montgomery and came back, I made connections with politicians in Mississippi and tried to get to Dees through them, I called the Law Center and said I wanted to interview Mr. Dees for a book I was writing, but nothing I tried got me past the voice on the intercom system or past the women who juggled me from one to another on the telephone.

I only wanted to ask one question. I simply wanted to know why he did what he did. I wanted to hear it from Dees, but I already knew what he would say.

As I sat on the steps at the memorial I ran scenario after scenario in my head. I imagined Dees' soft drawl, his paunch, and the tired sadness beneath his eyes. I imagined the fire within them. He didn't look like a lawyer. He certainly didn't look like a cookbook salesman. He just looked like a southern white man.

Why I do what I do? I imagined him saying. Because I love your people and I love my people. Well, they are the same people. I do what I do because I love my country. And this is what my country stands for. It stands for justice. I do what I do because I love the South and I do not want to see the South ruined again, and the only way to avoid such destruction is to redeem the past. This is the only way I know how. I do what I do because no one else would do it. I do what I do because of a debt I owe to those who will come after. I do what I do because it's right and it's good and it needs doing. I do what I do because I have no choice.

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash; your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”

—William Faulkner.

Suddenly, mysteriously, miraculously, I found myself loving the South. Fear and loathing vanished. My eyes opened all at once and I saw the South for what it truly is, in all of its contradiction and confusion, a swirl of strangeness and strain.

The South is a wounded old dog.

How it longs for its glory days when it was the most savage beast on the block, how it longs for its youth. How it growls and snarls, ferociously barking its bravado while craving a gentle word, a little understanding, the kind touch of a friendly hand. The South is old and tired.

The South is as afraid of me as I had been of it.

I pulled into the gravel parking lot of a roadside café near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A hot day, the sun beat down brightly. I was in my leather jacket and sweltering. I peeled it off, then took off the helmet. I was frowning from the heat, from the effort. My hair was matted, my beard overgrown and wild. I must have looked mean, angry, and dangerous.

A man was watching me from the window. He stared hard and I stared hard back. I frowned even more. We locked eyes and I would not back down, would not give an inch. Unmoving, unflinching, I glowered fiercely at him. He looked away.

On the side of the building there was a window where you could get cold drinks and ice cream. That's all I wanted, a cold drink. I didn't want to go inside. I only wanted a moment to stretch my legs. I had been on the bike a long time that day, doing more miles in a few hours than Great-Grandfather Joseph, on foot or in a wagon, could have done in weeks. Perhaps that is why, at the end of his journey, knowing firsthand the slow difficulty of each long day's journey toward frontier and future, he sank his bucket where he was and dug his well, and started a stagecoach line.

In those days, Mississippi was the far West, new country, the distant frontier and the end of the line. As a nation we have always looked west to find the future, west to the setting sun, west to paradise, to unspoiled and uncrowded lands, wide open spaces, freedom. Joseph would have been no different from any other American in his expectations, desires, and concerns. Only in one concern was his outlook different: He went west to escape, went west until the great river blocked his way.

There he settled, in Tennessee, and there he established his line.

Others would come behind him, others would cross the river and push on farther west. From somewhere to the river they would need transportation. Joseph, with one eye surely on the past and the other eye squarely on the future, supplied travelers with speedier transport and so found his own future.

I wonder what they called Joseph.
Mister? Sir? Uncle Joe?
I wonder if they knew he was black. I wonder if it would have mattered. Instead of riding a creaky old wagon over a rutted road, they could ride a stagecoach and drastically shorten their travel time. Efficiency, that's all that mattered. Time saved was money earned. They were in a hurry. Even then Americans were always in a hurry.

Despite the speed of stagecoach and railroad, however, they could not do in a month what I on the bike could do in a day. I was in a hurry too, putting miles between me and the past, in a hurry to taste as much of the South as I could, flying with not much rhyme or reason, other than to ride on. On and on. This day, I had ridden forever.

Now with a cold soda I washed the heat and dust from my mouth. I strolled to stretch my legs. I crunched ice as I walked. I went back to the bike and suited up.

The man in the window was still there, not moving, still staring. He raised his eyebrows. I smiled. And then, once broken, I couldn't help myself. I grinned. The tough guy laughed.

Quickly then he came running out.

“If you hadn't smiled,” he said, “I never would have come out.”

I wanted to tell him he was the one who had prompted my smile. I kept it to myself.

“But then you laughed,” he said. “Then I knew it was all right to come out and talk to you. I wanted to see your bike.”

Always the bike.

We talked. He invited me to his little farm. He had a room where I could take a nap, he said. I could spend some days there if I wanted to. I told him I was in a hurry, but I could use the nap, I said. I followed him home. His girlfriend made iced tea. I took a five-minute nap. That was enough. The rest of my time there I spent walking with him—his name was Bob—down by the river and making promises that I would return one day and that we'd go fishing together.

I don't even remember where Bob lives. I was just on the road somewhere and a stranger offered me a spot in his shade. How could I have refused?

“I found Christ when I was ten,” he said. “That has made all the difference. Now I'm color-blind.”

“I don't know if that's such a good thing,” I said. “It takes more than blindness. It takes awareness. We don't have to stop seeing our differences. We shouldn't have to stop being different, shouldn't even have to worry about it. We just have to stop making it a crime to be different.”

“I'm doing my best,” he said. “I'm trying to raise my kid right, anyway. It starts at home, the good and the bad, don't you think? Even so, you never know what's going to influence somebody.”

He told me the story of his young son in school.

“There is a new kid in class, a black kid,” he said. “All the kids in class have been calling him nigger. Every time they talked about him they called him nigger. My son had never heard that word before. He thought nigger was the boy's name. He went up to this new kid and introduced himself, just as the teacher was coming over to where they were. ‘Hello, Nigger,' my son said. The teacher heard him and he was in big trouble. Now he's confused. He's only six. He's in trouble at school for trying to be friendly to a black kid. I wonder what all this will do to him, now that he's eaten from the tree—if you know what I mean.”

He picked up a long branch and pretended to fish with it.

“What do I tell him?” he asked. “What do we do?”

I shrugged.

“Kids learn to be heartless and hateful at home,” he said.

“But then it quickly spreads,” I said. “A kid hears his father say something, the kid passes it to another kid, pretty soon all the kids have picked up some evil idea. It's like a disease. It's infectious.”

“Maybe the good can be too,” he said. “My father was prejudiced and I was raised to be prejudiced. But my father had a change of heart. He was in the hospital and all his best nurses were black. That opened his eyes. But even before that, he worked with black men and had black friends. It's funny. He was a racist but there were black men he trusted more than white ones.”

“Did the black men ever come to his house?”

“Yes,” he said. “He invited them home. But I'm sure around his white friends he said things and acted just like they did, just like he was supposed to do. But something good must have happened. It rubbed off on me, I think. Maybe it will rub off on somebody else. Maybe we can all have a change of heart.”

Maybe, I said. But with all this goodness rubbing off, why has it taken so long?

*   *   *

“Don't ask me,” George Brett told me. This was at a roadside hamburger bar in Demopolis, Alabama. It was raining. I had stopped to grab something to eat while I waited for the roads to dry. I sat at a splintery picnic table beneath the shelter and ate a greasy grilled chicken sandwich. There were other tables, plenty of places George could have chosen to sit. But he sat next to me.

He didn't sit beside me for any reason. He didn't start talking to me, didn't mention the bike, didn't even say hello. He nodded at me, but that was all. He wasn't sitting with me so much as he simply wasn't avoiding me. I was sitting near the walk-up window where he had placed his order and paid for it. Now that he had gotten his burger he sat beside me to eat it. I felt compelled to speak to him.

“I'm not a good one to ask,” he said. “We couldn't afford none of that being prejudiced stuff. My daddy was a school principal. It just never made any sense in my house.”

*   *   *

The South was trying hard, reaching out to me in such simple, subtle ways, offering me friendship's hand, showing me its prettiest face.

Its pretty faces are lovely to look at, sweet and inviting. But the South has an ugly face too. And its ugly face is the face of a nightmare.

Greg Davis was a nightmare. My path crossed his at a gasoline station in northeast Tennessee. I had filled my tank and absentmindedly took my time moving away from the pump. The car behind me started honking.

Way back near Sopchoppy, Florida, a car had started honking behind me. I had been taking my time that day too, driving at the speed limit for a change, not racing like a maniac. The car behind was trying to get around me. The driver was in an awful hurry. Oncoming traffic wouldn't let him pass. And I wouldn't let him get around me. I wouldn't speed up either. He started weaving in the lane to get my attention. He never stopped blowing his horn.

He got my attention all right. I slowed down even more. When he moved left in the lane, I moved left. When he moved to the right, so did I. I made him pay for his impatience.

About a mile down the road we approached the entrance to a hospital. I went past it. The frantic man behind me turned in. I felt miserable. Beside him in the car a woman seemed to be in agony. Maybe she had had a heart attack. Maybe she was having a baby. Who knows, but I swore I would try to see the other fellow's point of view and be more considerate.

But not today. Today in Tennessee I was up to my old tricks. This crazy man wanted me to move at his pace. I forced him to move at mine.

“Are you going to get that thing out of my way?” he shouted. “Or am I going to have to knock it over?”

“And me with it, I presume.”

“Get the hell out of the way.”

Slowly, very slowly I put on the jacket. Then the gloves. Even in this heat, I dug the gloves out of my gear and put them on. Then my sunglasses. Finally I grabbed the helmet and started to put it on, but first I had to wipe off the visor. The man behind me was burning with rage.