South of Haunted Dreams Read Free Page A

down, set fire to their homes, their happiness, their way of life. They and I alike pretend not to know whence comes this anger, for it seems in my case to be especially unfounded, to make little sense. I was not born into slavery or into abject circumstance. Luckily, for me and for those around me, the gods in whose laps we sit saw fit that I should not be so cursed, for then surely I would have been a murderer, indeed a butcher.
    Instead, I travel to the South to confront the source of my anger. I am half hoping to hurt someone. At the same time I am longing to find a new South, a new America, hoping with heart and soul that all is not hopelessness and despair. For if nothing has changed in these thirty years, then we as a people are living a great lie and are no different from other nations that now are crumbling in the crucible of disunity and ethnic discord. Then we are not a nation wholly joined by a common culture, but instead are separated by color and class and religion and judged by them and by them alone. How easy then it will be to surrender to the viler angels of my nature. How easy it will be to break the arm of anyone calling me “boy,” or the neck of someone who calls me “nigger.”
    Afraid? Yes. And my fear is indeed different from my father’s fear, different perhaps from the fears of other black men too, for I am afraid not only for the things that might happen to me as I wander south. I fear as well for the things I might do.
    I am not my father, not of my father’s generation. I was not tempered in the kiln of Jim Crow. I was instead forged in a new furnace, hammered out of a new tradition—wholly connected to the old, as all tradition must be, but so utterly different. I do not come to the South with hat in hand, head bowed, timid and humble. I stand tall and firmly planted. I am not small. I take up plenty of space. I am proud of who and what I am, as arrogant as my father ever was. And I burn with an anger that is rightfully his, but that is anger nonetheless. And I am afraid, am almost certain in fact, that before this trip ends someone will have died.
    Slowly I come to realize that I am not the man I once was, not the man who once believed he was who he was from the inside out, that the blackness of my skin is merely a physical attribute like being bearded or being tall.
    No. I am different now. I have awakened from my slumber.
    DAVIESS COUNTY COON HUNTERS’ CLUB. The sign helps to awaken me. The sign helps me remember. I am black, and being black matters.
    I turn the bike around and go back—slowly this time—back to the sign and to the arrow pointing down a narrow lane that disappears around a sharp bend.
    The sign is wooden, its painted letters fading in the hot sun, its post rusting. The arrow painted on it shows the way, and down this road I ride.
    The countryside smells faintly of tobacco, the scent borne on a gentle wind that riffles over the fields. Kentucky is tobacco country, just about the northernmost edge, but corn country too, and the fields are green with tall stalks. The corn tops are ripening. Their tassels once flowing gold have dried and turned to brown, dangling now, swaying in the delicate breeze that blows a hush across the valley and leads the eye from wave to wave of stalks bending. Deep into the distance the eye floats over an endless sea of meadows in bloom and corn fields that change color beneath sun and cloud-shadow from gold and green to amber and orange.
    The road winds through these fields on one side; trees, shrubs, and vines on the other. Beyond the trees a creek courses in the valley below. A dilapidated footbridge tries to cross the creek but has rotted with age and is ready to collapse halfway across. On the near edge of these trees there is a small white frame house for sale. Nearby, a shed with a corrugated metal roof waits to fall over. Next to the shed a small greenhouse decays. The roof has caved in, the windows are