South of Haunted Dreams

by Eddy L. Harris

  “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.

  One thing is certain. One way or another we pay for all we have and all we are.

  If I am well mannered, even-tempered, and good natured, it is to my detriment. Perhaps I am a coward after all, afraid to reveal the anger and the rage that boil within.

  Or have I, in some way, been a traitor all these years?

  I’m thinking of the grandfather in chapter one of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. As he lies dying he tells his son, “After I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction.”

  But does he mean a traitor to the white men he deceived, or traitor to his own people who followed his example and subjugated themselves, perhaps even bought into the lies of inferiority and promises of heaven, promises that their patience one day would be rewarded?

  And which have I been? Which of these lies did I sell my soul for: the biggest lie of all, perhaps, the one that claims that all men are created equal and that in this land of opportunity the cream rises and all who apply will be considered on their merits, on the content of their character and not on the color of their skin?

  (Somehow still I do believe it.)

  “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth,” the old grandfather says. “I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let them swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”

  But I feel sometimes that I was the one who did the swallowing, greedily, selfishly gobbling up the lies, at best clinging to hope, grasping at straws, and at worst doing whatever it takes to survive. Without the hope of tomorrow, there is no hope. And like the most desperate Jew in a Nazi death camp, I sold my soul perhaps for a chance at survival, for a chance at tomorrow, even to the point of being won over to the other side. I feel as if I have been colonized.

  The road turned south once and for all, though I didn’t realize it at the time, as I passed through the part of Connecticut that is ritzy suburb to metropolitan New York City. I stopped to visit my brother who lives there, in Stamford. He had been invited to a cocktail party the evening I arrived. He wanted to drag me along. I was grubby and very tired. I didn’t want to go.

  “Come on,” he said. “We won’t stay long, I promise. There should be lots to eat and drink.”

  I was very hungry.

  “You’ll like this,” he told me. “They’re your kind of people.” By which he meant refined and well mannered, the kind who hold their pinkies out when sipping tea or champagne. He was making fun of me. I was not in the mood for jokes.

  I had spent a year in Africa amid poverty and suffering. I had been casually insulted by a well-intentioned gentleman in Maine. I had been harassed and practically strip-searched by U.S. Customs on my return from Canada. A woman in Saratoga Springs wouldn’t even walk on the same sidewalk with me.

  “I don’t think I’m in the mood,” I said. “I think I’m tired of those kinds of people. I’ve had enough of polite society.” But Tommy didn’t believe me. So we went.

  There are two me’s—at least—and Tommy was right: one of me is very comfortable with refinement and with elegance. I have indeed been colonized.

  I have striven to be included in the culture that prevails, but have come to feel lately that I do not fit it. I wonder if I ever did fit.

  Instead I feel powerless and I feel useless. That is what it is to have been colonized: wanting in, but forever on the outside.

  The party was held in the home of Sam and Carla Mancini. My face and my brother’s were the only black faces there. But Sam and Carla probably see themselves as very liberal. They think they live in an integrated society. They think the whole country is an integrated society.

  I wondered how in the world I had learned comfort in the company of these others.

  The party was one of those dreadful affairs where you spend most of your time hovering over a table of hors d’oeuvre because there’s not much else to do. It was as boring as death. My life flashed in front of my eyes. Footprints in the sand, right to the edge of the shore. I could not see where I was headed, but I was reminded how I had come to be there. I had been on the road to that table all my life.

  Long ago when I was in seventh grade I found myself sitting in a classroom side by side with the crème de la crème, as they called themselves, of my hometown. I had taken the entrance examination for a private school founded in St. Louis by a group of stern British monks who had come from England at the request of wealthy St. Louisans wanting a Catholic school that was a cut above for their college-bound boys. Somehow I won a spot in their midst, learning French and Latin, studying Greek and calculus and Shakespeare.

  For some reason I never questioned if I belonged with them, these sons of doctors and industrialists and beer magnates.

  Their families were among the wealthiest and the oldest, the most influential in St. Louis, I suppose, the most respected and prestigious, certainly among the Catholics. There were other nonsectarian prep schools in the area, and private schools for boys and girls of other faiths, but I doubt any of them at that time carried the weight and snob value of the school for boys lorded over by the severe and aristocratically arrogant monks from North Yorkshire.

  The boys who attended were the brightest the area had to offer, groomed for this, most of them, their futures loosely outlined by the sometimes rigid, sometimes flexible and fragile boundaries of money, education, expectation, and exposure. Could any of them have imagined a future life as a long-distance truck driver or thirty years’ drudgery on an assembly line in some factory? Rather, the gods had reserved for those boys chairmanships of the board, prestigious positions as giants of architecture, high-powered attorneys, skilled surgeons, pillars of society. Like fathers, like sons. Positioned since before birth. They by prosperity, I by proximity.

  My first year with them I was one of only 5 blacks in that school of 214, one of only 2 in my class, but I was too busy to let the numbers worry me, working hard to keep up. And if I did sometimes feel different, the feelings were more about being poorer rather than about being blacker. No one called me nigger. I never once heard the
word even in anger, not when I fought Jim Niemann for a particular seat on the bus to school one morning, nor even when David Tucker hurled me to the gymnasium floor on a Saturday afternoon and sat on my chest until I cried uncle and surrendered only to get up and taunt him again and again—for what I cannot now remember. Each time I came at him he would throw me to the floor until finally I realized I would not win this battle. I burst into tears like some sissy, vaingloriously giving the fight one last attempt by swinging a folding chair in his direction. Then I quit, Tucker holding out his hand to shake mine.

  I was one of them, I guessed, learning their values, swimming daily in the foamy white surf of wealth, absorbing, learning new ways to balance with the old, until I remained who I was but no longer what I was, in a way half one thing and half another. And then the new ways consumed more than their rightful half, metastasizing within until only outwardly did I resemble the black shell that housed me.

  And I never questioned my belonging; they never let me. Almost as if by some design or conspiracy, they made me feel, parents and sons and the rest of their families, that I really was one of them.

  Every Friday after school, it now seems, I was invited to dinner in the Baldwins’ home. Each Friday I would be there hanging out with Tom, and each Friday at dinner time I was told to phone home and ask if I could stay for supper. We would sit sometimes in the kitchen to eat but most often in the dining room, cloth napkins in our laps, water goblets sparkling, silverware shining, and someone would serve me until I had taken my fill. Later someone would drive me home.

  In summer the afternoons were spent hitchhiking with John Niemann and swimming in Bill Sciortino’s pool. My weekend nights were spent playing poker, stretching the late nights into early morning in the homes of the Berglunds, the Hefferns, the Brinleys.

  The Niemanns never had a Christmas party that I wasn’t expected to attend, the Aviolis never failed to invite me to their New Year’s celebrations. The Barrys still consider me their seventh son.

  I cannot remember now why or what we talked about, but when our revolving poker game took us to the Tobias house, Sherwin senior would often invite me into his study and we would chat. Dr. Sciortino would often do the same. And Dr. Avioli seemed to have expectations as high for me as for his own children, his wife once saying to me: “We’re expecting great things from you one day.”

  (She never said what or why.)

  Once again, as in my childhood neighborhood—but different—being black hardly seemed to matter.

  My sensitivities were the same as everyone else’s around me, my desires, my aspirations, my outlook. My ambitions were the same as theirs and the life I thought would be mine was no different than the lives they dreamed of: doctor maybe, or corporate executive; a magnificent house in the suburbs, a passel of children, a happy family, comfort and the fast track to a million dollars. The well-worn American dream.

  Oh yes! As black as I am, I come to realize how white men have made me. As much as by any black man, I have been shaped by white men, and they continue to make me. Ought I now hate them for what they have done?

  Two winters ago one of them, Dr. Sciortino, died. I was more than saddened, so numbed that at the funeral I could hardly speak. I could not remember the name of Bill’s wife, forgot even that he was married. I was flooded instead with memories as alive and as warm as my tears that very cold morning.

  I spent the morning in a haze of memory. The gray-haired, bespectacled doctor was once again sitting in his big easy chair, smoking cigars that cost an ungodly sum and came wrapped not in plastic but in sealed metal tubes. I had never imagined there could be such a thing. His eyeglasses were dense and I never clearly saw his eyes, but I’ll never forget his smile and how he would sit in the dimly lit room surrounded in a fragrant cloud of smoke. His hands were strong with the skill and knowledge of his profession. When I injured myself one evening on the basketball court and we had gathered, as was our custom, in his kitchen to drink soda, Dr. Sciortino called me into his study and put his hands on my right thigh. He felt the warmth of my leg with his thumbs and pressed the sore spot where I had been kicked. He knew in an instant what had happened, what was wrong, and told me what I should do. I was profoundly impressed, as impressed as I had been the first time I walked through his pantry and found not a few six-packs of soda or even a case and a few cans of juice, but cases and cases of summertime refreshment stacked high as the ceiling, and not just one brand or two, but several. It was Aladdin’s treasure, pure enchantment for a kid limited at home to one glass of orange juice in the morning, and if we were lucky enough to have it, one soda in the afternoon. “It’s bad for your kidneys,” my father would tell us. “If you’re thirsty, drink water.”

  Not so with the Sciortinos, nor with the others who invited me into their homes to eat their food, swim in their pools, and be part of their lives. They shared with me their wealth, their ways, and their expectations.

  Somehow Dr. Sciortino’s death marked profoundly the end of one period in my life. And the start of another.

  It was then I went to Africa.

  There is another me waiting to be unraveled, another me I have only begun to discover. The other me was shaped in part by white men too, long before I was born, and is as black and as outraged as can be. The other me showed up at the Mancinis’ cocktail party in Connecticut.

  I was back from Africa, still thinking about the Invisible Man’s grandfather. And I started to think about my own grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-great-grandfather. If they could see me now, they who had been slaves, and sons of slaves, what would they think? Would they be proud or disheartened, marvel at how far I had come, or saddened because I had got no further? Would they see a spy in the enemy’s country? Or would they see a traitor who has done whatever he can to survive?

  I had tried but found I could no longer “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction.” They had swallowed me and now at the party in Connecticut, I was going to leave the revelers—a few of them, anyway—vomiting just a bit and busting wide open. I was heeding the grandfather’s other admonitions.

  I tried to avoid confrontation. I tried not to be conspicuous, to be in the room without being in the room. I tried to vanish into the woodwork, to blend in with the surroundings. I tried, as I always tried, to disappear without leaving, to keep my feelings to myself and my big mouth shut. But once it was discovered that I had been to Africa, that I had spent a year traveling there, I became the sudden center of attention. I was drawn in.

  “I bet you were glad to get home.”

  “I was,” I said.

  I was standing by the table of hors d’oeuvre. I had just shoved into my mouth a tortilla chip with crab dip on it and I was eying some sort of bean concoction. I wanted more to eat. I reached for a couple of little sandwiches.

  “I bet you saw some things in Africa that made you think, didn’t you, things that made you really appreciate what we’ve got here.”

  “No argument there,” I said.

  “And I bet you think this country is just about the best place on earth.”

  I poured myself another glass of wine. Before I took a sip, I finished chewing the piece of lemon chicken I had bitten into. I took a moment to think.

  The party was somber as a funeral. Laughter came in titters, disagreements in hushed tones. The loudest sound was the clinking of a fork on china.

  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.