South of Haunted Dreams by Eddy L. Harris Page B

pensive. He slowed the car and looked at me.
    â€œWelcome 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.
    *   *   *
    The road south carried me through New York City to Coney Island, out into the harbor beneath Miss Liberty’s blind eye, out to Ellis Island.
    I hadn’t been to Coney Island in fifteen years. I had never been to Ellis Island.
    How different Coney Island seemed to me now. The gauzy curtain of time throws a soft haze over old memories, and everything is colored by newly darkened bifocals.
    I walked along the beach and remembered my first roller coaster, how I had adored it and how after each ride I had stood in the long line waiting for the thrill to repeat. But with each ride the thrill lessened, wide eyes narrowed, innocence receded as innocence does, like an aging man’s hairline. It was never the same.
    Nor was I, as I walked in the shadow of the Cyclone, the name for that old roller coaster, and could not conjure up that long-ago rush of excitement. Too many years had gone by, too many other emotions barred the way, too many ghosts had come between.
    The ghosts that haunt the cold stone halls of Ellis Island are not black ghosts. They whisper only part of the story. Photos on the walls, old tables and chairs left neatly in place, the past echoes quietly as if the fury of the world passed through these rooms and left nothing but serenity.
    Ellis Island is a national monument, but where is the black person’s Ellis Island, where the monument, however rusted over in the shame of chains and slavery, to immigrants from Africa? No reminders that blacks are, have been, and will always be part of the history.
    Perhaps because the reminders would be too filled with shame and pain. For all.
    And so, no reminders here in the North, the liberal and urban North, no reminders of the riots in 1864 New York or in 1917 Chicago in which blacks were picked out for slaughter, the thirty-nine dead blacks, the thousands left homeless after race riots that same year, 1917, in East St. Louis.
    Life in the South was a horror that many blacks fled, the flight from Egypt. But what of this place they fled to, this promised land? Better? Or did they find that the South truly begins at the Canadian border?
    When I am in church—on the road or in my hometown—why is my pew always the last to fill? I know how Catholics like to sit alone with their God, how they will always take an unoccupied pew. I prefer an unoccupied pew myself, and that’s usually where I find myself. Unless mass is absolutely packed, Christmas or Easter, or unless I’m in a black church, I am always the only one in my row, always the last one anybody wants to sit next to. I am forever sniffing my armpits in church to see what’s the matter.
    No wonder my hair is falling out.
    No matter what I do, good, bad, or indifferent, always it seems I am reminded just how black I am.
    No wonder that the links in this chain are wrapped tight around my neck and yanking me south.
    I do not believe in