South of Haunted Dreams

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``How eagerly I had anticipated evil at every turn,'' writes Harris ( Native Stranger ) near the end of this impassioned account of his recent motorcycle tour of the South. The St. Louis, Mo., resident began his journey through the country of his slave forebears filled with rage at the treatment of his people, fearful for his safety and expecting indignities worse than those he was subjected to in the North. At Civil War sites and scenes of civil rights battles, he meditates on the history of slavery and bigotry, relating his family's and his own experiences. Of people he meets, he asks, ``How are the white folks treating you? Why do you stay?'' The answers astonish him. One black man insists that blacks in the North have run away from the ``real struggle'' while those in the South are winning the ``quiet fight for dignity . . . inch by inch.'' A white man maintains that life is less oppressed for black people in the South: ``We understand them better than they do up North, because we've been through the fire together down here.'' Claiming his heritage on this trip, with its moment at which ``suddenly, mysteriously, miraculously . . . fear and loathing vanished,'' Harris delivers travel literature of a rare sort: personal, and proof of the changing power of place. (May)

Library Journal

Like Mississippi Solo ( LJ 10/15/88) and Native Stranger ( LJ 2/1/92), this is the latest of Harris's highly personal travel books in which he seeks self-knowledge through his journey. In it, he examines his feelings about race and racism as he travels by motorcycle through the Deep South. He admits his rage--against slavery and slaves; against his great-great grandfather Joseph, a slave; against people who so obdurately strove to preserve segregation; against the South. Then he begins to talk to people, black and white, among them Andrew, who is watching the trains in Raleigh, and Gwendoline, who is having lunch in a cafe in Goochland, Virginia, and he changes his mind. He learns that black and white people have been living side by side in the South for hundreds of years and are trying to ``get on with it'' in a way unfamiliar to people in the North. This book is recommended for large travel and black studies collections.-- Mary Ann Parker, Dept. of Water Resources Law Lib., Sacramento, Cal.

Brad Hooper

Harris, a black man, author of two acclaimed travel books, "Mississippi Solo" (1989) and "Native Stranger" , is from St. Louis. Recently, with a bundle of a few belongings, he went off on a motorcycle tour of the South. He crossed the Mason-Dixon line into Kentucky, and crossed it with a chip on his shoulder. Though he told himself he was hoping to find that the New South was indeed that--that racism in a region where racism had been refined almost to a science had abated considerably--he was actually searching for evidence to the contrary. Initially, as Harris took his first steps further southward, he was convinced he was correct. "It's so tiring, the constant racism, the constant wondering and worrying, the constant vigilance. It steals your energy, clogs your pores, makes your hair fall out. It makes your food taste funny." Ironically, though, as he made his way through Virginia and the Carolinas and into the deepest regions of the Deep South, meeting more and more people and learning more and more from them, he underwent a sea change. That racism isn't gone but neither is it everywhere in every situation was a fact that kept manifesting itself. "I was making peace," he realized. "The South. It felt like home," he concluded. This journey into himself is told with an eloquence that never loses its euphony even in the heat of passion.

Kirkus Reviews

Harris's continuing search for his identity as a black American, previously documented in Mississippi Solo (1988) and Native Stranger (1992), now takes him on a compelling motorcycle journey through the American South. Setting out with little baggage and no fixed itinerary, Harris rides through the South with an inescapable awareness of the region's legacy of racism and oppression. On the very first page here, he passes a sign referring to a "Coon Hunters' Club," which instantly reminds him of the area's terrible history of lynching. At the same time, he acknowledges his "addiction" to the South, which he recognizes as his ancestral territory, paramount even to Africa. And so he looks for traces of his forebears, especially his great-grandfather, a slave in Virginia. He talks to ordinary people of all ages and races, met by chance on park benches and in roadside restaurants; visits Richmond, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Charleston, finding memories of the black struggle for freedom as well as Confederate monuments; hears a sermon in Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s old church; and finds his great-grandfather's manumission papers in a Virginia courthouse. The events of the journey set off riveting chains of association, meditations on being a descendent of slaves in a nation that proclaims itself free. Harris's ultimate journey is as much inward and emotional as geographical, and the reader will be as surprised as the author was to learn its true destination. Harris has an eye for detail that many novelists might envy, and a fine prose style—qualities that, combined with the powerful subject matter here, result in an energetic and emotionally satisfying work.