South of Haunted Dreams (21 page)

“And why?” another lady adds.

There is the murmur of general agreement.

A big yellow ribbon and an American flag hang from the center beams that support the ceiling. Thank God it isn't a rebel flag.

There is only one waitress and she comes to me. She is very skinny, has no hips at all, her blue jeans just barely hanging on to her waist. She forces herself to smile at me, but she sounds almost rude. She doesn't seem to want me here.

But then again, she doesn't seem to want anybody here. She doesn't want to be here herself.

“What's it going to be?”

I can't tell how old she is, forty-five or fifty. Her hair is black and she wears it cut very short like a young boy would. She has deep sacks under her eyes. Her sad face is bone thin and tired. I heard her say she's been working here for twelve years now, and I don't think she's the owner. I don't think she likes it here. But she looks like she has nowhere else to go.

I order pork chops and know right away the trouble I'm in.

She barks to the kitchen. “Hurry up and get some pork chops thawed out.”

When they come, the chops are tough as shoe leather. This is not the southern-style home cooking I came looking for.

An old man in green pants, a blue jacket, and a cap slowly shuffles by. He carries a white plastic pail. He had been in the parking lot when I pulled up. Now he has stopped whatever he was doing to come sit beside me and talk to me while I eat.

“Where's that state you're from? Is that Missouri?”

He had seen my license plate.

“I was in Missouri once,” he said. “In Mexico, Missouri. But that was back before you was born, way back in '43.”

His hair was white and he had no teeth. He came to tell me that and nothing more. It was an effort at being friendly. Then he struggled slowly to his feet and shuffled off with his bucket. I hacked into the pork chops and chewed slowly. They had the texture and taste of canvas.

When I had finished, for some idiot reason I ordered the apple cobbler. It was about as good as the pork.

The woman in the booth in front of me turned around to face me. She had just been served a cup of coffee but she had no sugar. She asked if she could borrow mine. She turned her back to me, took two sips of her coffee and then turned around again. In half a minute she had picked up her cup and saucer and slid out of her booth. She came and sat next to me.

I said hello.

“Hi! My name's Gwendoline,” she said. “What's yours?”

I told her.

“You're not from around here, are you?”

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “But my people come from around here.”

I was really stretching it.

“Who are your people?” she asked.

I told her that my last name is Harris.

“Oh, I know some Harrises. There's a lot of Harrises around here. Which ones do you belong to?”

“One Harris is about the same as another,” I said. “Somewhere down the line we're all related.”

“Somewhere down the line,” she agreed, “we are all of us related. It doesn't matter what our last name is.”

She sipped her coffee and looked out the window.

“Is that your bike?”

“It is,” I said.

“Those things scare me,” she said. “You don't ride it too fast, I hope.”

I grinned. “Not too fast,” I said.

“Where have you been? Where are you going?”

“Just all over,” I told her. “Just trying to find out how things are.”

She didn't respond to my gambit. She sat for a few silent seconds and looked dreamily out the window.

“So,” I said. “How are things?”

Very slowly she turned her face to me. We locked eyes, but she didn't speak. She was studying me.

I was waiting for a bombshell. The way she looked at me, I knew she had secrets to tell. I expected she would explode in a tirade of all the racial injustices she had ever experienced or heard about. I expected that in the next few minutes she would put a human face to all my earlier imaginings and fears. My hatred and dread would be renewed.

I was surprised to learn that what was uppermost in my mind was not what was most important to Gwendoline.

I was still in the throes of the addiction. Once you begin thinking in a certain way, the thinking becomes obsession. Everything explains itself in terms of race.

On one side of the racial fence, there is a racial justification for every negative thought or action, and all you end up seeing is a person's color.

On the other side of the racial fence, it's the same thing. Everything gets based on race. For every failure the excuse is founded on race. You get used to seeing yourself as a victim, you get comfortable with the role, you learn to see the world through the eyes of a victim. If it
can
happen, you tell yourself, it must
be
happening. All the time.

But Gwendoline said nothing about being black. She talked about her health, she talked about her weight, she told me she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, she told me her husband didn't make her happy. So she gained even more weight.

“I haven't always been this fat,” she said. “I used to be very pretty. My doctor says I'm gaining weight to keep my husband from wanting to sleep with me. Maybe he's right.”

She had been recently pregnant, she said, and had recently had an abortion—her second.

“I'll be damned if I'm going to have another child with that man,” she said. “Not until that man gets his act together. Not at this late date.”

She had a twenty-five-year-old daughter who was living in Washington, D.C. She told me I should look her up. She had two other children.

I couldn't tell how old she was, and would have guessed she was in her midfifties at least. She told me she was only forty-two.

“It's the weight,” she said. “The weight and all the worries and being unhappy. All that plays on your body just like it plays on your mind. It makes you look older. It makes you feel older.”

Gwendoline shifted her weight. She turned once more toward the window and looked out.

“But I'm going to get myself together,” she said. “Wait and see.”

“I believe you,” I said.

She looked up sharply.

“You do?” she said. “Do you really think I will?”

I nodded. She frowned. I don't think she believed me. I don't think she believed it herself. She bit her bottom lip and stared at me. I wanted to change the subject.

“How are the white folks treating you?” I asked her.

“The white folks?” she said. “Haven't you heard what I've been telling you? It's not all about white folks, and it's not all about race. I haven't got time to worry about what the white folks are doing or thinking or saying. This is my life. I've got to get on with it. White folks do not own my happiness and my sorrow. They are not going to make my life any better or any worse. All they can do, if they've got a mind to, is put up little barriers. It's like a game. And all I have to do is find some way around them. And we've been finding ways around them for two hundred years. There's always a way. Believe me, there is always a way.”

She smiled a tiny little bit. I started to speak, but she stopped me.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said. “All you people in the North think the same thing. Slavery and lynching and toilets for coloreds only.”

She saw in my eyes the recognition of her truth. She laughed.

“We've gotten past that now,” she said. “There ain't no going back. You maybe will get some flare-ups now and again, but that's just a desperate try by some people to hang on to what's not theirs anyway. There ain't no going back.”

“But are we moving forward?” I asked.

“Sugar,” she said, “anytime you're not going backwards, you're going forwards. Think about getting caught in a flash flood. All black folks have to do is keep on hanging on. We have to remember where we came from. Maybe we can touch on it from time to time, but that's enough. We got to quit dwelling on the poison of the past. We got to get on with it.”

She looked down and away, as if she was about to say something embarrassing or shameful.

“Slavery and lynching, that's what somebody else went through. Maybe they went through it so we could be here, but we can't do anything about what happened a long time ago. We're here now. There's more important things to worry about.”

Her sadness had left her. She was having a good time now.

“I'm in control of my own dignity,” she said. “No white man and nobody else can take it away from me unless I let him, like I let my husband. All somebody else can do to me is kill me or something like that, take my life, and right about now I'd say that's not a real big deal. Apart from that, nobody owns me. And nobody owes me nothing.”

I sat on the edge of my bench. I was waiting for more. But she was all played out.

“Excuse me if I went crazy,” she said. “But you know how it is. When you keep that stuff all bottled up inside you, soon as you get a little outlet, it all comes gushing out. I can't talk like that at home. My husband doesn't want to hear my ideas. He thinks I'm crazy.”

“You're not crazy,” I said. “You ought to tell more people what you think.”

“Nobody wants to listen to me,” she said quietly.

“You'd be surprised.”

She touched my cheek.

“You're sweet,” she said.

We sat quietly for a minute or two. Then she asked me if I had a place to sleep for the night.

“I'm just going to ride the countryside tonight,” I said. “I want to see what's lying around. And I want to be in Raleigh tomorrow morning. There's a guy I need to see.”

“Give a call if you change your mind,” she said. “You'll be welcomed.”

She wrote her name and her address on a paper napkin and slid it over to me.

“If I'm not there or if my husband answers,” she said, “tell him we talked. Tell him who you are. Tell him you're coming on over. He'll give you directions and we'll find room for you.”

The crabby waitress brought our bills written on little green pieces of lined paper. She set them down and walked away without a word or a second glance.

“Can I pay for your coffee?” I asked Gwendoline.

“No,” she said. “I was going to buy yours.”

“I didn't have coffee.”

“Then I'm going to pay for your pie or something.”

She grabbed for the check but I snatched it away.

“Let me get yours,” I said.

“Only if you promise to call me.”

I promised, but I knew I never would.

She walked me out to the bike and stood with me while I got ready to leave.

“It's a pretty motorcycle,” she said. “You ought to give it a name.”

I looked at her and smiled.

“Where are you going first?” she wanted to know.

I thought for a moment. I thought I had avoided the strong pull of sentimental curiosity, but its effect on me was stronger than ever.

“Over to the courthouse, I think. Something you said makes me want to find something.”

I didn't tell her what.

“Some family stuff,” I said.

“Do you want me to go with you? I know them over there.”

“I think this is something I want to do alone,” I said. “You understand, don't you?”

She put her arms around me and kissed my cheek.

“In case I don't see you again,” she said. “But anyway, you can write to me.”

“I will,” I said. But I knew I wouldn't. I knew I was a thief. Gwendoline probably knew it too.

I had entered her life. I had knocked on the door and she had invited me in. She had trusted me with her secrets and now I was walking off with them to sell them for profit. I felt like Jean Valjean with the bishop's candlesticks. Gwendoline probably knew she would never see or hear from me again.

I took her hand and squeezed it. When I hugged her, I kissed the soft spot where her neck joins her shoulder. Then I hurried. I got on the bike and rode away. I didn't have to look back to know she was there watching me disappear.

I didn't go far. The courthouse is practically right next door to the restaurant. I pulled into the lot and up the slight hill and I stopped.

It's hard to believe, but the courthouse is the same building Joseph Harris would have known. I stand on this hill and look at it, the same as Joseph might have stood here and looked at it. This same tree might have been here then, maybe even the bell that hangs out front. This is the meaning of history, that we are linked to the deep past in ways both vital and insignificant, often in ways we are not aware of and care nothing about.

This is the fourth (or fifth; they're not quite sure) courthouse building serving the county. But this is the first that has stood on this site. It was built in 1826 by Dabney Cosby, a brick mason who was trained by Thomas Jefferson and who had worked with Jefferson on some of the buildings at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

That the building was made of brick at all astounds me. Clapboard would have been more common. A wooden courthouse would have stood a greater risk of burning down. The records I have come to find might no longer exist.

But what really amazes me is the line that runs from me to Joseph to John Harris and through this courthouse to Dabney Cosby and to Thomas Jefferson. In how many ways are the lowest of the low linked, then, to those whose names we praise? In how many ways are we all linked to greatness, and linked to each other?

A simple low brick building. The columns give it stature. It looks a little like a humble classical Greek temple. It looks like a church without a steeple.

Around back, in an extension that certainly was not here a hundred fifty years ago, in a room whose rear wall is covered with shelf after shelf of old record books, I walked in and, with a little help from one of the women who worked there, I found the book and turned to the page that holds the original document. Joseph Harris's deed to freedom.