South of Haunted Dreams (14 page)

If I had my choice I would see this world through the eyes of a stranger. A stranger's eyes are so much clearer.

If I had my choice I would pick my route solely by the scents on breezes and I would ride carefree along these old roads forever. It is freedom I seek. Plain, simple and glorious. Freedom
from,
certainly, from time and from place, but as well freedom
to,
freedom to go, to do, freedom to be.

But there is no such thing as real freedom, especially no freedom for a black man, chained as we are, in other people's eyes and in our own, to the past. In the blackness of my mind everything has significance. Every incident is viewed as if through a prism, the light refracted, the hidden meanings dissected. Every man's motive becomes suspect. Every word must be weighed. I must be forever on my guard.

Perhaps in the years since hope, nothing has really changed. Perhaps nothing ever will. Perhaps race will always determine the roads we travel.

I pretend I have strength, I pretend I have choice, but long ago the choices were made for me. The road has been decided. I am an addict and I cannot choose.

My bike feels heavy, sluggish and unresponsive. It fights my control, no longer reads my thoughts. I am no longer completely at ease. It is as if I carry an inexperienced passenger who does not lean when I lean, who is nervous and tries to guide the bike.

I wanted nothing more than to take to the road and see new places, to scratch this itch of mine and see what lies beyond the next bend. This was the old addiction, not so much to travel as simply to move, in the hope that in smelling its earth and breathing its air, tasting its flavor and meeting its people, I might find the soul of this land and touch it—never once imagining that I might find and touch my own black soul.

Instead I found myself at the mercy of a destiny I had not chosen.

I found myself in the clutches of a new addiction that I could not control. It was like heroin.

A cloud of euphoria surrounds you. You lie in quiet comfort. You lose the urge to breathe. You forget about thinking. You just want to feel the ball of warmth as it fills your center and begins to expand. It is so good and so soothing. There can be nothing better.

A bright light silently explodes inside your head. It softens into a glow, pink and golden. After a while it shrinks to a pinpoint of yellow with a red-hot center. Then all goes suddenly dark and finally you surrender to the familiar peace that conceals itself in the shadows. The darkness is safe, a haven. The darkness is your friend. The darkness is good.

Addiction is effortless and excellent—heroin is the best thing there is—as long as you don't try to fight it, to kick what has become habit. Once you have tasted the drug and slipped into its cocoon, everything becomes temptation. Everything reminds you.

Long I fought against the ease of addiction, fought against memory and against the will of the bike. I took the bike, or it took me, over the mountains and deeper into the South, back out again to places like Baltimore and Washington, thinking that if I removed myself from the source of racist thinking, I would escape the temptation and addiction of my own racist thinking.

But everywhere it was the same. I could not outrun the temptation. I ran smack into reminders at every turn. Everywhere was the past and painful memory, everywhere a reason for self-pity and self-loathing and anger, the bitter ease of being victim. This is the addiction.

Just east of the junction in London, Kentucky, on the right-hand side of the road, there was a restaurant attached to a small hotel. A charmless place made of brick and wood, it looked like it might collapse any minute. Nothing about it seemed inviting, nothing to recommend it apart from the fact that it was the only place around. I went in. I found myself listening to some inner voice that was guiding my every move. I thought it was the voice of addiction.

The walls were dark wood to suggest the interior of a log cabin. The place was dimly lit inside. I walked through the front door and stood before a glass display case crowded with candy bars and chewing gum, cheap cigars and a few souvenirs. Two ladies were yakking loudly. One stood behind the display case and leaned on the cash register. The other stood on my side of the display case and leaned on the counter, one hand resting on the glass, the other hand perched on her hip. She was almost blocking the doorway, with her back to me.

She was a hefty woman with the bad posture of one who works on her feet all day and never gets a moment's rest. She wore a dingy white uniform and her shoes were badly run-down. The right shoe was so twisted that the heel was gone. She shifted her weight constantly from one foot to the other, rolling her shoes onto their sides. A pencil was stuck in her beehive hairdo.

Neither woman greeted me. Neither noticed me standing there, unless they were making a point of ignoring me.

They were engrossed in conversation about a woman they knew who lived, they said, at the beck and call of a miserable, conceited bastard named Cliff.

“He's such a pretty boy,” the one with the tired feet said. “He really thinks he's God's gift.”

“Well, he is single. He's young. He's not bad to look at. And after all he is a man.”

“Yeah,” the one said. She shifted her weight to the left foot. “But if he called me late in the night do you think I'd get up, get dressed, and run over to his house the way Alice does?”

They both paused for a moment. Suddenly they burst into laughter.

“In half a heartbeat,” the one behind the counter told her.

Their gossip had about it an air of harmlessness, but its edges were sharp and malicious. They didn't like the woman who ran after Cliff. They disliked her for chasing him, they disliked her more for catching him. They were jealous.

“The way she comes in here acting like she's all happy and everything, like she's got something the rest of us ain't got. It makes me sick. And him that she's got, he ain't so much. He makes me sick too.”

It was casual gossip, not much different than gossip generally is among intimates.

“I've seen you sometimes flirting with him mighty hard,” the one was saying to the other.

“Well, like you said, he is a man. And if Alice can latch on to him, I'm sure enough good as her, and maybe he's looking for a little variety. She makes me sick too, the way she thinks she's so smart all the time.”

Their tongues were barbed and sharp. They spoke candidly to each other, as if I couldn't hear what they were saying. As if they didn't care if I could hear. They spoke as if I were an invisible man, or not there at all.

In days of slavery, so I've read and so I've been told, white men and women very often would speak frankly and openly in front of blacks, servants and slaves. The whites would reveal intimacies that would kill them of shame if anyone white ever heard these things said in confidence. But they were so unconcerned about a black man's eyes and ears and a black man's opinion, it was as if blacks in the same room did not exist, were not there, or could not communicate secrets. It was as if they were family pets, incapable of understanding.

The waitress pulled the pencil from her hair and scratched her scalp with it. Finally now she looked over in my direction. Before she said another word to her friend, she pointed with her chin the way into the dining room.

“Find yourself a seat,” she said. “Somebody will be right with you.”

She did not call me “sir.”

And nobody came to see about me. The two women went on talking about Cliff and about men in general. I was completely ignored.

I sat in a booth near a window. It seemed the only well-lit place in the room. Behind me was a shelf of old books leaning against one another, stacked in disarray, most of them covered with dust. While I waited for any attention at all, I pulled down one of the books and leafed through it. It was a history book, the
American Heritage History of the Law in America,
and from page 72 this notice leaped up and stung my eyes:

CAUTION
!!

COLORED PEOPLE OF BOSTON, ONE AND ALL

YOU ARE HEREBY RESPECTFULLY CAUTIONED AND ADVISED,

TO AVOID CONVERSING WITH THE WATCHMEN AND POLICE OFFICERS

OF BOSTON

FOR SINCE THE RECENT ORDER

OF THE MAYOR AND ALDERMEN, THEY

ARE EMPOWERED TO ACT AS

KIDNAPPERS AND

SLAVE CATCHERS

AND
they have already been actually employed in
KIDNAPPING AND KEEPING SLAVES.
Therefore, if you value your
LIBERTY
, and the
WELFARE
of the fugitives among you,
SHUN
them in every possible manner, as so many
HOUNDS
on the track of the most unfortunate of your race.
KEEP A SHARP LOOK OUT FOR KIDNAPPERS
and have
TOP EYE
open.

April 24, 1854

It wasn't much of a reminder, but there it was. I could not outrun nor blot out the memory of how it used to be. I was in the South, all right, the South full of reminders, the South which is a symbol of how it used to be,
why
it used to be, and why it still is today.

I did not stay to have breakfast.

The South.

I hate this place. How in the world could a black not hate it here, a feeling, thinking, remembering black man? After all that has been, it would take a miracle—evidence of absolute blindness or of greatest hope—not to surrender to bitterness and hate.

I hopped on the bike and rode like a demon, rode for hours and hours and hours, rode as if my life and my sanity depended on getting as far from where I was as fast as I could. I stopped for gas, got back on the bike, and rode some more. I talked to no one, except to thank the man for the gas. I knew there was no one I could trust, and no one who would trust me. In every smile I saw an evil motive, in every glance a leer. The South loved me no more than I loved it. I hated this place, all right, hated it for what it was doing to my mind. I was becoming paranoid and obsessed.

The South was winning.

No mere place could conjure up the images that are awakened here. No mere place stirs the emotions the way the South does. Just as that rebel flag is a symbol, the South too is a symbol. More than place, much more than physical boundary or political distinction, the South is a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a crucible of ill will.

It is not the soil of your native land that gives you strength, and it is not air that sustains you. It is not the trees that make you proud, nor the whispering wind that makes you afraid. It is the spirit of the land that defines your emotions. It is the people who live there who give a place its character, like-minded people sharing history, sharing ideas and tendencies, sharing narrow-mindednesses. The South is a state of mind.

In the winter of 1860–61, eleven states seceded from the Union. Texas was one of them; Kentucky was not. And yet Kentucky is the South to me. Texas feels something else entirely, Southwest perhaps, half-Mexican, almost another country, southern only in the sense that they grow cotton there, had an allegiance to the Confederacy, and that it has its share of racist rednecks—Texans, not southerners. Texas lacks, at least in my opinion, the feel of the Deep South. Across the rest of the South there is a common outlook.

The Confederate alliance arose from a perceived need for like-minded people to join together while separating from those damned Yankees—
those others
who shared neither ideology nor culture, but only so insignificant a thing as history. The South chose to ignore shared origins, shared blood and a shared past. The South chose to forge a new and separate tradition, which now holds me hostage and makes me hate this place. In all this time it seems nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed.

It had not been my intention to cover every square inch of every state, but merely to enter this state of mind. Now I had done it. And now I regretted it. I did not like this feeling of always being on my guard, always reading between the lines.

I longed to break free, longed simply to ride over the mountains of eastern Kentucky and get lost in the rising mist.

In the blindness of my newly discovered racialism I had lost sight of my original purposes, to head for the open road and just go, to find the perfect cheeseburger, the perfect milkshake, the perfect coconut cream pie.

I wished for an easier time of it, a simpler voyage, and could have found one if I had just turned west and headed for California.

I rode like an escaped prisoner. Just trying to get away. Yet, oddly, I continued to ride south, toward the prison, not from it, faster and faster until everything in my sight became a blur.

Suddenly somewhere there was a sign.

JESUS HABLA ESCUCHA Y CONTESTA EN ESPANOL

LLAME
754-2032

It flashed momentarily at the corner of my sight. It came into focus and was gone, passed before the words could register in my brain. But the sign snared my attention. I slowed and made a U-turn in the middle of traffic. I went back.

On the left-hand side of the road, what used to be a bank had been turned into a church. I pulled into the lot.

The drive-up window was still there where some teenaged teller used to sit all day. Now the window was covered over by a thick shade. I couldn't see inside.

The carport for the drive-up window was also still standing. I stopped beneath it and rested in the shade. A billboard told me I was in Corbin, Kentucky.

It could have been the main street of almost any small town in America. Fast-food joints lined the road. Car dealers crowded next to gas stations. These are the threads now that link all American regions and cities and small towns. Denver looks like Dallas looks like Detroit, Pittsfield looks like Springfield, Connersville looks like Fresno.

But I was in Corbin, Kentucky, in the South, and what struck me as strange was not the assurance that Jesus answers prayers. After all on the corner where stands the Daviess County Coon Hunters' Club, there was a similar promise, that God is the answer.