South of Haunted Dreams (10 page)

Outside on the back patio a young man was talking about the U.S. troop buildup in Saudi Arabia and the imminent war against Iraq. He was not part of the conversation inside, but I could hear him.

“I hope we do go to war,” he was saying. “I just want to see what happens.”

“You can't be serious.”

The group around this man was aghast. The genteel reaction was predictable. War is a terrible last resort, the failure of diplomacy, and let us pray for peace.

“Sure,” he said. “Let us all pray for peace and let us hope that utopia one day arrives and that the world will all make sense. Until it does, you should know that in the real world wars are not always fought for just causes against enemies you have a serious need to see destroyed. If they were, the United States and the Soviet Union would have started shooting long ago. War is about winning, so you pick your spots. It's about dominance; it's about flexing muscle. It's about making the country feel good when there's really nothing else to feel good about, something we can all rally around and support like good little citizens, something to make us forget for a while the rest of what's going on and what's going wrong. And sometimes, when you're a warrior tribe like we are, it's just wanting to know how strong your army is. That is what this war is all about. This one has nothing to do with our strategic interests or naked aggression or any other nonsense the president wants you to believe. Otherwise we could just send in a squadron of bombers and blow the hell out of Baghdad. This is a test; this is only a test. We haven't had a real war since Vietnam, and we lost that one. You can't count those big bully fights we keep picking against the likes of Grenada and Panama. This time it could be for real. The Iraqi army is battle-tested from eight long years of desert warfare against Iran. This is merely a test to see if the U.S. Army is any good. And I'm sorry for the lives that will get lost, but death is inevitable and just like those guys in the Pentagon, I'm dying to find out how good we are—if we are.”

I can only imagine how my face must have soured, how it must have silently roared. I bit my lip. My hand started to shake. I shoved the hand into my pocket. I tried to stop myself but couldn't.

Get hold of yourself,
I thought.
You've only had one glass of wine; you can't possibly be drunk.

I was prodded.

“Well?” someone said, I don't know who.

In almost slow-motion I looked around the room and took in the comfort of upper-middle-class living. It was, in a word, tasteful. Everything so tasteful and so neat. The paintings hung with care. The porcelain figurines and objets d'art decorating the shelves and tabletops. The furniture so carefully arranged. Even the colors had been chosen according to some scheme. Not a thing was out of place.

This is the life I had been prepared for, a life of ease and comfort, gentility and good taste.

But suddenly that decorous life no longer appealed to me. It seemed somehow so inadequate, as if something terribly important was missing. It did not reflect the world I had recently come to know. It lacked truth.

The house had all the worldly signs of refinement, all the comforts one could reasonably want. But it lacked realness and grit. It was sterile.

A house full of affluent, intelligent people and they didn't have a clue about the real world. It was like a cartoon, not real at all. The conversations were carried on in hushed murmurs, static noise.

And on the patio a man was advocating war for the sole purpose of testing an army. Killing people as if it were some sort of game.

No wonder the world is in the shape it's in.

My head was spinning. My vision blurred. I felt sick to my stomach. I tried to resist but found at last that I could not control myself. After Africa, who can? Suddenly I was back at the checkpoints with soldiers' rifles stuck in my ribs, with beggars and starving children swarming at my side, with illness and utter powerlessness at my throat.

In the course of a lifetime there are experiences so powerful that they become part of us. A place we've been, a thing we've seen, something heard or read or done. These events are more than mere memory. They shape us. They define us. They alter the way we think and feel, and the way we see the world. Ernest Hemingway said it of Paris, that if you have the good fortune of living there in your youth,
“then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it will always stay with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Africa had become my moveable feast.

Africa was with me still. The sufferings of other black men and women would remain with me always.

And then there was my childhood. I could not forget where I had been, how far I had come and the unfairness of fortune. The landscape of my memory was littered with friends who had not escaped. I could not forget them. All of a sudden I was bothered by what it means to be black in this country and to be a man and to be a black man.

I took a deep breath. I looked at my inquisitor, and he looked at me with a smirk that said he knew he had me: that America was paradise, and that I should appreciate living here.

“You just don't understand, do you?” I said. “You haven't got a clue.”

I can hardly describe what happened next. From my lips, through no control or desire of my own, all the anger of the ages funneled into me and then spewed out again. I lost half my mind. In the torrent of my venom I reminded him that I was black.

“What do you mean?” he said. “What has that got to do with anything?”

“It means that I understand everything about you,” I said. “I know where you're coming from and what you're thinking. I can get inside your head because in so many ways I am like you. I have your same twisted dreams and aspirations. I know what you want and I know what you feel because this culture has taught me to think like you. But you don't know a thing about me. You don't know who I am. You don't have an inkling what it feels like to be black. And what's more, you don't even try. You don't even care.”

He was stunned. He didn't know what to say. He stared for a second, then stammered, and then he was quiet.

“I care,” he said. “What makes you think I don't care?”

“Because if you and all the people who claimed to care really cared,” I said, “things wouldn't be as bad as they still are. Africa is not the only place with inhuman poverty and injustice.”

He wanted to talk to me about New York City.

“The greatest city in the world,” he called it. “It's got everything, rich and poor, black and white, side by side. People of all races live together and they get along fine. It's truly a melting pot.”

“What New York City are you talking about?” I shouted. “There's a hundred thousand homeless people living on the streets there. And blacks and whites and Koreans and Jews killing each other every day. Don't you read the papers? You can't be this naive.”

“I spend a lot of time in New York,” he said. “I never have a problem.”

“You think that because you can't see the problems the problems don't exist,” I said. “I don't know what part of New York you've been hanging around, but come with me tomorrow. I'll show you a New York you've never seen before. I'll show you places where you won't even want to get out of your car. Even in daytime. I'll show you places where the poverty and suffering will make you sick.”

He stammered, didn't know what to say.

“I'm almost thirty-five years old,” I said. “I have almost surpassed my life expectancy. According to the statistics, because I am black and because I am a man and because I live in a city, I've got a better chance of being dead or at best on drugs or in jail than I have of seeing my next birthday.”

Then the host joined in. He offered that things might not be as bad as they seemed. He said, “Certainly black people are a lot better off than they were in the past.” Bill Cosby, he pointed out, made forty million dollars last year.

I looked at him like he was crazy. Then I lost the other half of my mind.

“Because one black man made a lot of money,” I said, “you think things have gotten so much better? What's wrong with you people? Are you so blind that you can't see anything?” Now they were all listening to me.

Climb inside my head, I told them. Climb in and see what it's like to be black. See what it's like to always wonder if what happens to you is happening because of your color. See what it's like to constantly be under suspicion, to always be seen as criminal or deficient. Can you possibly know what that feels like? And if a man as fortunate as I can feel this way, can you imagine how the less fortunate must feel?

The system is stacked, I told them.

“I'll tell you one thing,” I said. “If I were poor and destitute I'd go where the money is, I'd stick up
your
neighborhood. I'd break into
your
house. But the way justice works in this country, it doesn't pay to break into your house. Listen, if a black man kills another black man, he gets a light sentence; if he kills a white man, he gets life in prison at least, the death penalty probably. The same is true for burglars. The system is stacked. If I were a criminal, I wouldn't steal from some miserable wretch as poor as I am; what am I going to get, a TV, a stereo? I'd steal from somebody who's got something I can really use. I'd steal from somebody who benefited most from the injustice. And you can bet we'd find a solution pretty quick if all the poor people stopped robbing and stealing from each other and started coming up here to your neighborhood. If they started marching into ritzy white neighborhoods and torching rich people's houses, you can bet that would shake up some things.”

It went on like this for forty minutes. And it got worse.

“The best thing we can do is to burn it all down and start all over,” I shouted. “Just line up all the people who aren't trying to make it better, line up all the people teaching hate, and shoot them. In fact, we ought to just line up everybody over the age of thirty and start shooting. Or over the age of twenty. Or even fifteen. Just line them up against the wall and get rid of them all.”

“What good would that do?”

“It would be a start. There wouldn't be any people left to teach their kids to hate. I would say kill everybody over the age of five, but somebody has to be around to raise the kids.”

“But you're over twenty,” he said. “You're over thirty.”

“Start with me,” I said. “I have gained from the way things are. I'm part of the problem. Shoot me first, set fire to my house. I'll make that sacrifice. What sacrifice will you make?”

The hostess was sobbing now.

“There's no point going on,” she said weakly, as much to herself as to her husband. “Can't you see you just can't get through to some people?”

A young woman had pulled my brother into the kitchen. I heard her say, “Why isn't your brother more like you?”

“More like me?” Tommy said. “I'm the hot-headed one. He's the one who's always so polite and quiet.”

“He's so hostile and malicious!”

“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why should I pity man more than he pities me?… Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.… If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.”

These words of Frankenstein's creation leapt burning to my ears.

“I guess he's just seen too much,” my brother was saying.

Once in the car my brother howled out in glee.

“Big Ed!” he shouted. He seemed happy. “Should I call you Mr. X, or will Malcolm be all right? You were a raving madman!”

He started to laugh.

“Did you see their faces?” he said. “They thought you had brought the revolution. They thought it was right outside their front door. They thought you were serious.”

“What makes you think I wasn't?”

“Right, Malcolm,” he said, and we laughed.

“You're just a sheep in wolf's clothing,” he said. “I know it and you know it too.” He laughed until he nearly convulsed.

“But they sure didn't know it,” he said. “Wait till I call your mother and father. Wait till I tell them how their baby boy was carrying on, shaking up the suburbs and scaring the white folks.”

He was genuinely thrilled. And then he got quiet and a little bit pensive. He slowed the car and looked at me.

“Welcome back,” he said.

We passed under a street lamp and the light caught dimly in his eyes. The laughter had gone. A wrinkle furrowed his brow. It lasted only a second, and then it was dark again.

*   *   *

I rode on quietly. The South was on my mind. The South was within me. And the prospect of going there left me brooding, for if things were as they were in the North, how bad then would they be in the South?

Africa had become a moveable feast for me because I had been there. The South was a moveable feast long before I even thought of going there—it had begun to affect everything I saw, every person I met, everything I thought and felt, long before I mounted the bike and headed out on the road.

It would not be an easy holiday tour, this much I knew—a journey not only across the South but back in time as well and into the future, and, most importantly, into the mind of a black man.

I wished the Mancinis and their guests could travel with me.

*   *   *