South of Haunted Dreams (8 page)

He looked askance at me.

“Right?”

I took a deep breath.

“I'll tell you another thing,” he said quickly. “They ain't never going to let you forget you're black, that's for sure too. White people, black people too. They're going to force you to be black and to think black and to act black. And those kids would do better the sooner they realized it. One of these days they'll split up and go their separate ways. The white boys will forget they ever had friends who were black, the black boys will live like they don't know anybody white. That's one thing that ain't changed.”

I saw then that he was much older than he first appeared. I had guessed him to be forty-five or fifty. He had a youthfulness about him. But in the way he now squinted, the sudden melancholy, the deep furrows when he wrinkled his brow, and the harshness of his memory, I put him now at about sixty. He had seen and been through plenty.

His voice was suddenly very heavy. He stared out straight ahead, gazed far past the scene playing out in front of us, and he talked cheerlessly as if to himself.

“They have no idea,” he said. “No idea what we went through to get here, no idea just how far they've got to go. They think everything's cozy. They think all they have to be is good as the next man, as smart, or as rich. They don't know it yet but they'll find out that that black kid over there could be the most likable kid in class—hell, in all of Bowling Green—everything a mother could want in a husband for her daughter, but if her daughter happens to be white, even if they've been friends forever, the minute they want to go to bed together or have children together or get married together, ain't nothing else going to matter but the color of his skin. And it'll make him think there's something wrong with being black. He'll forget just how good it is to be black, and it'll make him crazy. But that's just the way the world is, sorry to say.”

The joy had been sucked out of the air. He tried to get it back by slapping me on the knee. Now when he spoke, he looked at me from time to time, but his smile was still weak.

“Take, for example, you,” he said. “Now, let's just say you're an artist and you painted a picture. If you're a black artist, that's what they're going to call you. A black artist. And they'll expect certain things from you and they'll limit you, try to make you fit in. And white people won't collect you or they won't take you serious. Not just a painter or a politician, but a black this or a black that. And the same goes for women. That's so you'll always know this ain't where you're supposed to be. Just like white basketball players. They say, ‘Aw, he's pretty good for a white ballplayer.' And they'll compare you to other black artists and try to make you feel you're not really good enough to be compared to the main bunch of artists, or ballplayers, or whatever the thing is. Of course you and I know they're just scared. Ain't that what it is? As soon as they let black people in fair and square, black people just seem to take over. A lot of times it seems like black people are just better at a whole lot of things. Like baseball and basketball and a whole lot of other things. Smarter too. Because black people see the world different. Maybe that's why black people don't get a fair shake. And maybe that's why America's in decline. Things have changed, all right, but I don't think things have changed enough.”

Franklyn kept talking. I heard his voice but my own thoughts carried me a little farther on. I was thinking of black writers and black literature, and what makes them black. Is it only the color of the writer's skin, or is it his state of mind, what a writer brings to his work, his subject, his outlook? A black writer's point of view can be very different, but it doesn't have to be. And if it isn't, is it still black literature?

The reader too brings with him certain expectations.

What makes the characters in a novel white or black? If the author doesn't tell me, do I automatically imagine that they're white—characters in a novel, voices on the radio? Is this what the dominant culture has done? And if the author is black, do I assume his characters are also black? What has the culture done to my expectations and to my assumptions?

Think back to the people I saw up around the Coon Hunters' Club, the children who ran down to the road, the old man who waved, the women in gingham, the fat-bellied men in torn undershirts. Were they black or were they white? If I don't describe them in terms of color, what color does the imagination supply? The color of the reader, or the color of the culture? Close your eyes. This man I'm talking to now, Franklyn, is he black or is he white? Can you tell from his being, what's important to him and the way he talks, or do you have to look to know? Or does it not matter?

Of course it matters. He's black and how he sees the world is different precisely because he
is
black.

The waitress was white. The men on the ladder, they were white too. The cop in Hartford of course was white. And every one of those country folk lining my route to Bowling Green was white. And it matters. In some way it matters a lot.

Then Franklyn stopped my reflections and shocked me.

“Maybe it doesn't matter at all,” he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. “Maybe it's like Jesus. We all know Jesus was a Jew, going to the temple, singing in the choir maybe, with a rich and soft tenor voice. What do you call those Jewish men who sing in the Sunday choir?”

“Cantors, I think,” I said. “And you mean Saturday. The Jewish sabbath runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.”

“Whatever,” he said. He looked at me with impatience. “Anyway, we all know Jesus looked more like that terrorist fellow—what's his name? That man in the PLO.”

“Yasser Arafat.”

“Right. Well, Jesus probably looked more like him than like the handsome wavy-haired blond with blue eyes that we always see in pictures and statues. But in some black churches, Jesus looks like an African. And in South America I bet Jesus looks like an Inca Indian.”

I scooted to the edge of the bench and turned to look at him full-face. He was smiling, happy that he had got my attention, that he was the genius.

“Maybe a character in a book doesn't have to be one thing or another. Maybe he can be everything depending on who's doing the reading. Just like Jesus. And it doesn't even have to make sense. Maybe that's why I stopped going to the movies. They steal away your imagination. And they cost too much.”

My frown melted into a broad grin to mimic Franklyn's. He was looking straight ahead, but he felt my smile and he beamed and he looked at me.

“What's the matter?” he said. “You can't imagine that deep thoughts would pass through this old head of mine? What else you think a man does when he sits all day on a park bench?”

We made together at that moment a joyful sound, our laughter running together and ringing out across the park in melodious harmony, his the bass, mine the baritone. The kids across the way turned to look at us. It was impossible to tell if they were laughing with us or at us or not paying us any attention at all, but anyway they were laughing.

“I'm a park bench philosopher,” Franklyn said, still laughing. “But to tell you the truth, I just thought all that stuff up.”

“But anyway, you might be right.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “And maybe people read other people like they read the characters in a book. Their history and your history will meet. And when they see you—you, I'm talking about now—maybe one man will see something completely different from what another man will see. The way you carry yourself. The way your eyes light up when you smile. The warmth in your hand. It's not easy to miss your intelligence. And something else too, but I don't know what it is. They won't see in you what they see in me, that's for sure. You're the new generation. You ain't never had to bow. Men can see that in your eyes.”

His eyes sparkled with a new idea. He raised his hand and pointed a finger—aha!—to the sky.

“Maybe you can be like Johnny Appleseed,” he said. “Maybe you can teach them.”

But I didn't know then what he was talking about and we fell silent.

“I sure do love that bike,” Franklyn was saying now. As he had invited me to sit, now subtly he was inviting me to leave, to get back on the road and on my way.

“I'd love to be off going everywhere,” he said. “But I surely do not envy you. I think you must be kind of nutty, riding around the South on that thing. People down here are still a little bit crazy. Everybody's got a gun. And you're more than a little bit exposed, you know. But I guess you know what you're doing.”

“Perhaps I don't,” I said. “But the Lord watches over fools and babies.”

“I sure hope so,” he said.

We shook hands once more and I got up to leave.

“I do wish you luck, brother,” he said. “And I wish you peace, with yourself and with other men. I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for. But damn! Couldn't you have looked for it in a pleasanter place?”

And I uttered these words for the first time, just to provoke: “Maybe the South isn't as bad as we think.”

“Oh, it is,” he said. “Maybe worse.”

“Well, look,” I said. “I met you, didn't I? And you're not so bad.”

“Yeah, I'm not so bad. When you look at it that way, maybe the South's not so bad either. It's as bad as
I
think, that's for sure. But maybe you'll find something different. Maybe it'll treat you different. Maybe it's all in how you've been used to seeing things. You're bringing with you a different history; maybe folks really will see it in your eyes.”

He frowned, squinting again and looking into my eyes as if to see what difference there might be.

He came with me as I suited up and climbed on the bike.

“You know,” he said, “in a more perfect world we would all be blind. Then a man's color wouldn't matter and there would be no assumptions to make.”

Then he realized. He shook his head.

“Naw,” he said. “We'd just find some other way to hate each other. To hate ourselves, too. That's all it really is anyhow.”

V

Pride of race will come to the Negro when a dark skin is no longer associated with poverty, misery, terror and insult.

—Carl Sandburg

What do people see when they see black?

Long before the road turned south, I was riding up the coast of Maine toward the Canadian border. Autumn hits the northeast early, and I wanted to get in a little fishing before cooler weather set in. I wanted to have a peaceful, perfect time watching the whales in Nova Scotia. I wanted to cruise along the sea and eat fresh lobsters. There is nothing sweeter-tasting or more tender than lobster pulled from the sea and plunged directly into a vat of boiling water. An ear of corn or two, maybe a salad and a beer, but nothing fancy to compete with the delicate flavor and texture of the lobster. Every time I passed a sign that said
FRESH LOBSTER
I wanted to stop.

I spent a night in Bath, Maine, at a little inn. A couple from California were the only other guests. They had retired and were traveling really for the first time in their lives. They had driven cross-country. They had laid a map on the coffee table and were plotting out their route, picking spots for trout fishing. I told them my favorite spots in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

“Do you fish for trout?”

“I don't go anywhere without my rod,” I said.

Then I told them some of the great places I had fished for rainbows and browns and brookies—Montana, Vermont, Scotland, South Africa. I suppose I was bragging a bit. The man was astounded. I showed him my fly rod, a very nice one—a very expensive one. He was more than a little bit jealous.

After breakfast the next morning, as we were saying our goodbyes, as the husband was packing the car in the driveway and I was loading the bike, he and his wife complimented me on my good fortune and on my deportment.

“It's too bad all black people can't be as articulate and nonthreatening as you,” he said. He meant it as praise. I was insulted.

“What makes you think they're not?”

“All we ever see on TV are radical blacks, criminals, and preachers. Maybe you ought to go into politics.”

And then the real insult.

“Tell me,” the man said. “How in the world does a black man come to take up such an elitist and expensive hobby as fly fishing for trout?”

“Fish are color-blind,” I said. “They can't tell.”

He didn't get it.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “You've been all around the world. You stay in the kinds of places that I've always wanted to stay in, you do the things I've been saving up for twenty years to do.”

As if his desires and mine should be so different, as if all black people are poor, on welfare and food stamps.

“I've had to wait all this time and I'm only just now able to do it. Are you rich?”

“No,” I said. “I just act like it.”

“Then what's the secret?”

“Attitude,” I said. “Attitude is everything. You never get to do anything if you work all the time. You get to do even less if you listen to what other people say you can and cannot do.”

What does this man see when he sees me? A glitch, something gone wrong, an aberration. An intelligent, nonthreatening black man that he wishes all black men could be. He just doesn't understand, does he?

Still I sometimes wish I could be what other people see as an ordinary black man, poor and blighted and easy to ignore, with the cares and concerns and interests of common black men. Then they would see nothing uncommon in the things I do, the places I've been. And oh how I wish that all black men could be as fortunate as I have been. For privilege is punishment. If all black men and women who wanted to do these same things were able and allowed to, then what I do and have grown used to would not seem so rare, would not be evidence of privilege, and I could be without the burdens of best behavior, duty and obligation. I could be left alone. I could rid myself of other people's expectations. There is advantage in privilege, certainly, disadvantage as well, punishment and responsibility. Always responsibility.