South of Haunted Dreams Read Free

old South defined how blacks were to act. These guidelines of etiquette between the races were established during slavery days, but they were still the order of the day a hundred years after. Louisiana’s: “Free persons of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor pressure to conceive themselves equal to the white; but on the contrary they ought to yield to them in every occasion, and never speak or answer to them but with respect, under penalty of imprisonment according to the nature of the offense.” To act otherwise was to risk a lynching, have your home burned, your family driven out into the street. And no one, black or white, would lift a finger to help.
    Jesse Brooks was raised in the South, in Eads, Tennessee. He should have known better. But he had relatives in St. Louis, not quite the North and not quite the South either, and poor Jesse spent too much time there one summer. He learned from his young cousins that it was all right to fight the white boys from the next neighborhood over.
    On the corner of Ashland and Lambden was a vacant lot where the boys, black and white, played ball. When the games were over, the boys would fight—simple as that—and then go home. It was, in a way, friendly fighting, the kind of crazy thing young boys do, playing one minute, fighting the next, with some semblance of fairness, equality even. Poor Jesse. He went back to Eads, Tennessee, and thought he could expect blacks and whites to get along the way they did in St. Louis. He got too arrogant. He fought with the white boys in Tennessee, and they didn’t like it. He went too far when, like the other boys, he tried to buy candy on credit at the local grocer’s.
    â€œWhat makes you think you can buy candy on credit, boy? You sure you got your daddy’s permission?”
    â€œOf course I do,” he said. “He’s my daddy, ain’t he? I can buy what I want. Just like the other boys.”
    They didn’t like his attitude.
    â€œYou ain’t like the other boys,” he was told. They said he was a sassy little nigger and they chased him that day through the town.
    The black folks in Eads were afraid to help him. Every door he passed was suddenly shut to him. The black folks said, “God help you, son, but please don’t stop here.” They were that afraid.
    When the white folks caught up with Jesse they threw one end of a rope over the limb of an apple tree, the other end they tied around his neck. Maybe they just wanted to scare him. Maybe they wanted to warn him what happens to smart niggers. Maybe they hadn’t intended to and went a bit too far, but they lynched him just the same and left him hanging there. He was sixteen years old. He was my father’s cousin. And this was another story, not so funny, my father used to tell.
    No wonder my father drinks as much whiskey as he does.
    No wonder black men fear the South.
    I too am afraid, for I too carry the curse of dark skin, but my fear is different.
    Can you imagine how it is to waken every morning and know your father and relatives had to act the coward, had to act the “good Negro” instead of the “bad nigger,” had to adopt attitudes of subservience? When Blackamericans look at themselves and at their history, this in part is what we see: this violence, these constant reminders of being unwanted and unloved, of being treated as if we were less than human, these shadows of indignation, indignity and shame. Black men and women have had to bear them like crosses and there have been too few Simons (from Cyrene) to help with the load.
    Forgive me if I rant, but you cannot know how I have cried and despaired and nearly given myself over to the dark gods of bitterness and frustration. You cannot know, unless I now tell you, how the anger often wells up in me lately and I am driven to the edges of violence and hate and I want insanely to fight men bigger than myself and burn buildings