South of Haunted Dreams (33 page)

“What's your problem?” I said.

“You're my fucking problem,” he screamed. “Now get out of my way.”

“No,” I said gently. “What's your real problem?”

“You want me to say it,” the man said to me. “All right, then, I'll say it. I don't like niggers.”

“Simple as that, is it?” I stayed cool and calm.

“Simple as that. You're a nigger, and I don't like you.”

I waited for him to get out of his car.

He was about my size, a little heavier maybe, stockier and surely stronger. I couldn't tell if he was older or younger. But he drove an old car that had a few dents in the door and was beginning to rust around the edges; soon it would need a new muffler. The door creaked when it was opened and closed.

I thought of all the ways in my life I had deflected racist attacks—subtle and unconscious racism, or overt racism of the most dangerous kind—and how I had protected myself sometimes with laughter, sometimes with kindness, once with a gun. But this time I wasn't sure I wanted to deflect it. I had been through too much to try to avoid it—too many miles, too many emotions, remembrances, and discoveries. His pride was on the line, and now so was my own.

“You don't even know me, mister … mister … What's your name?”

He stood up taller.

“Davis,” he said, as if he were proud of it, as if I should know who he was. “Greg Davis.”

Funny what people will tell you, even information that can be used against them. No wonder common crooks so often get caught.

“Well, Greg Davis, you don't even know me,” I said. “You don't know anything about me. How can you not like me?”

“I know enough about you,” he said. “I know all I need to know. You're a nigger and that's enough for me.”

If he had said this to me two weeks ago I would have popped him in the mouth, six weeks ago I would have broken his arm, four months ago and I would be telling this story to my death-row prison mates. Today all I could do was laugh at him.

All of a crazy sudden, my fear and loathing and most of my rage escaped from me, and the only response I had for Greg Davis was laughter.

The South is a little child wanting approval, a scared and confused little orphan hiding its self-doubt behind a wall of bluster and self-righteousness.

But then the South has always been very righteous about its wrongness.

In Greenwood, Mississippi, Martha Gabler had told me about her mother whose church refused to be integrated. Someone asked the old woman what Jesus would have done in a similar situation. “Wouldn't Jesus let those black people into his church?” she was asked. She thought for a good while.

“Of course he would,” she said. Then she thought a little more.

“But Jesus would have been wrong,” she said.

That was the old old South, Martha told me. She wanted me to know things were changing.

This same Martha Gabler who had been raised by a woman who could not see the rightness of acting as Jesus would have done, the living God she prayed to; this same Martha Gabler who was rich and white, the same as her mother; this same Martha Gabler whose household like her mother's was tended to by an old black woman who washed the clothes, made the beds, scrubbed the floors, and minded the children—this same Martha Gabler invited me to stay in her home, sleep in her guest bedroom, and make myself totally and remarkably at home.

The next day she organized a luncheon for me to meet her friends and to discuss, I suppose, changes they had all seen in the South over the years. But some things never change. I asked them to notice that the waiters and waitresses in this restaurant, as in many many others, were white. The kitchen help was black.

“Why?” I asked.

One lady offered the country's poor economy as an answer.

“Whites have been forced out of the good jobs,” she said. “They've had to take jobs black people would normally do. Blacks get forced down even lower.”

But Martha—dear Martha—was truly astounded.

“I never honestly paid attention before. To tell you the truth,” she said, “I never even thought about who was a waiter and who always worked in the kitchen. I will from now on.”

And that was enough for me.

We spent more than two hours at lunch. We talked about many things, important things, I'm sure. But what I remember most was her promise to watch the world a little more carefully.

“If we are ever really going to change,” she said, “if things are ever going to get better, we need to look at a lot of things more carefully.”

Martha Gabler is the South to me. She represents the glorious generosity that all people are capable of.

Greg Davis is just a throwback to the past, clinging to it the way an old dog clings to life even as it goes into the woods to find a quiet private place to die.

I looked at Greg Davis with pity. He made a fist. I just laughed at him some more. He looked absurd.

He watched me quizzically, as if I was crazy. He took half a step back. I thought he was going to get into his car and drive away. I didn't want that. I had been through too much to let him off that easily.

I had swung south and now was making my way up through Louisiana, winding my way through Cajun country, listening to a language I could not make heads or tails of. I had crossed the great river at Baton Rouge, headed for Natchitoches. I had heard there was a statue called the Good Negro in the town square, hat in hand, head bowed. I wanted to see the shameful thing. Touch the past.

That Sunday morning I passed along Jackson Street in Alexandria, passed Emmanuel Baptist Church. All the churchgoers on their way to the service were white. Every single one. Two blocks down the street, the same street, the same side of the road, Good Hope Baptist Church was receiving its black congregation. Nothing, it seemed, had changed in a hundred years.

I went to a Catholic mass on the other side of the Cape River. As usual I was not paying attention. My mind wandered during readings.
What were these people thinking of me, the only black face in their church this morning?
But something suddenly caught my ear. I knew, of course, I could not have heard what I thought I had heard.

“… you must lay aside your former way of life and the old South…”

I knew he could not have, but I would have sworn he had said “old South.” I picked up my missal and found the chapter in Ephesians the lector had been reading from. It said “old self,” but that was close enough.

When I left mass that morning, twenty, thirty people greeted me in the friendliest fashion and shook my hand hello.

Some things do change.

Some things never do.

Bernie Moreland stopped me outside a convenience store where I was drinking juice and eating a doughnut.

“Man, it sure is good to see you,” he said.

I thought he had mistaken me for somebody else.

“It's good to see a black man standing tall and proud,” he said. “These black people in the South are all hangdog tired. I have just got to get out of here.”

He was a musician from Kansas City. His wife, who was from Alexandria, had dragged him here to live.

“Not even for love can I take much more of this,” he said.

“It's not changing?”

“Not fast enough for me,” he said. “Not fast enough, not far enough. You be careful on that bike. This is still the South, you know.”

As Greg Davis was at this moment making very clear.

But other places, other people were making other gestures, other signs that things were indeed very different.

The Good Negro had been removed from the square in Natchitoches. In the place where it used to stand, flowers now grow.

The South was growing on me, little by little, showing me the tiny ways it was trying to make peace. With the past, perhaps. Perhaps with me.

On my way out of Natchitoches I was flying along the narrow roads at my customary eighty-five, ninety miles an hour, up through the back country, heading toward Arkansas. Just before Winnfield and the left turn that would take me north, I saw a cop far in the distance ahead of me. I tried to slow down, but at that speed, with him coming toward me, there was no way. As soon as he got close, the red lights were on, the siren squealed for half a moment to get my attention. The police car skidded into a U-turn in the middle of the road. I slowed immediately and stopped.

The Louisiana trooper who pulled himself from the car was tall and thin. He walked slow. He took long careful strides. As he walked toward me, he started speaking. His drawl was as slow as his walk.

“How y'all doing today?” he said.

I just laughed. What else could I do? He had me red-handed.

“I don't know yet,” I said. “I'll tell you in a minute.”

But already he was talking. He even smiled. The cop in North Carolina who had given me the speeding ticket had not been pleasant. Why should this man be?

I took out my license and handed it to him. He went back to the car and talked into the radio a minute. Then he came back.

“That's a nice-looking bike,” he said. “But you ought to drive it a little slower.”

“You're right,” I said. I was perfectly willing to grovel my way out of a speeding ticket. I would have tried in North Carolina, but that cop wanted nothing friendly to pass between us.

“We got some nice scenery down here,” he said. “You ought to slow down and take a look at some of it. Stop and go fishing or something. You're too young to be in a hurry.”

He handed back the license.

“I'm not going to give you a ticket,” he said. “Just promise me you'll slow it up a little bit.”

“I promise,” I said. “That's it?”

“That's it,” he said.

I tried to read his name tag, Ponthiaux, I think, but he had turned already and was climbing back into his car. He made another U-turn and went on down the road.

I thought once more of the cop in North Carolina who had given me a ticket, the difference in their ways. I just shook my head. I put him out of my mind, far away. I wanted to remember Ponthiaux.

And I wanted to remember Doug Elms, a cop in Little Rock two days later. He came up to me as I was getting on my bike. He was on a bike of his own, had been riding as part of a funeral motorcade. He stopped me, we chatted, he asked if he could take my bike for a spin.

“You can ride mine,” he said.

I declined. He insisted. We traded bikes and I followed him.

“I wanted you to see the difference,” he said. “Your sweet machine and this old clunker.”

We rode out to a café. He bought me lunch. That evening he told me I could go with him when he was on patrol.

“Not on bikes, though,” he said. “In a police car.”

I was simply astounded.

I did not know what to make of any of this. Maybe some conspiracy was afoot to make me love the South and report back to the real world how everything was right and getting better.

But then there was Greg Davis. And there was Michael Grissom, a failed songwriter turned author in Nashville, Tennessee.

I had ridden up the Natchez Trace from Jackson, where I had met the governor of Mississippi.

Oh yes! I met Ray Mabus, governor of Mississippi. Martha Gabler somehow arranged it. And though I was not very excited about it I went, left Martha's house just after breakfast, and sped south to Jackson. I had to be there at 11:30. The governor, I was warned, was a busy man.

At faster-than-normal speeds it would have been more than a two-hour trip. I had less time than that. I drove like a maniac, thinking I could explain my speed by saying to any cop who stopped me, “I have a date with the governor. Radio ahead if you don't believe me.”

I didn't find out until later that the Mississippi State Patrol are not great supporters of the governor.

Luckily, I was not stopped.

The meeting lasted all of thirty seconds. It was a waste of time for me, nothing but a photo opportunity for Mabus.

Anne Sapp, the governor's director of policy management, tried to console me.

“What was that all about?” I asked. “I thought I was going to get an interview. Does he think I came all this way just to shake his hand and get my picture taken? Believe me, it's not that big a deal to say I was in the capitol with the governor of Mississippi.”

“Well,” she said. “There was a time when it would have been a very big deal indeed for a black person just to set foot inside this building. Let alone get photographed with the governor.”

We went to a black neighborhood, she and I, for a huge lunch of greens and ham and beans and corn bread and sweet potatoes. The place was packed. No wonder there were no cops on the highway to stop me. They were all in here. Black cops sitting with white cops.

“Not long ago,” Anne said, “there were no black state troopers. We're inching along in Mississippi. It's not a bad place.”

But I couldn't stay. I had made a date to meet Michael Grissom the next afternoon in Nashville. I rode through the night and all the next morning to find him. It started to rain. I stopped for a few hours. I continued on. I really wanted to meet him.

I knew him only as the author of a book that had grabbed my attention one day. The cover of the book is white, with blue letters, all bordered in red. In the center, the thing that caught my eye was the red-white-and-blue battle flag of the Confederacy. The man in whose shop I found the book was embarrassed even to carry the thing, he said. But it was selling like crazy, he admitted, and this too embarrassed him.

Southern by the Grace of God.
I didn't want to read it. But I wanted to talk to the man who wrote it.

I found Grissom through his publisher, phoned him, and made the date. I did not tell him I was black, and he was startled, frightened, in fact, when I crept up behind him and introduced myself. His face, gaunt and ghostly, fell. He had assumed I was a fan. Now he feared I had come to do him harm.