South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir

by Eddy L. Harris

The author recounts his motorcycle journey through the South, discusses what it means to be Black, and describes his search for traces of his own great-great grandfather

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Memoir, Autobiography, Americana, History, Southern

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Eddy L. Harris is the author of six books, including Native Stranger (Vintage, 1992) and Still Life in Harlem (Holt, 1996), both selected as “Notable Books” of the year by the New York Times. He is the writer, producer, and subject of the new documentary film River to the Heart. Currently he is writing an accompanying book as well as an exploration of race in Eastern Europe. He lives in the village of Pranzac, France.
***************
Poussé par son père, il fait des études dans un collège blanc catholique, premier pas vers la Stanford University.
À 30 ans, il décide de descendre le Mississipi en canoë et fait du récit de cette expérience la matière de son premier livre, A Mississipi Solo (1988).
Native Stranger (1992) raconte le voyage d’un Blackamerican au coeur de l’Afrique. Southern Haunted Dream (1993) naît de sa traversée du Sud des Etats-Unis à moto, sur les traces de Amérique de l’esclavage et du racisme quotidien.
Still life in Harlem, qui paraît en 1996 (Harlem en traduction française, Liana Levi, 2000), mêle portraits et réflexions au cours des deux années qu’il a choisi de vivre au coeur de ce quartier new-yorkais symbole de
l’espérance noire, passée et présente.
Jupiter et moi (Liana Levi, 2005), est une évocation
de la figure paternelle.

Aujourd’hui, Eddy L. Harris a quitté Harlem et élu domicile en France (à Paris puis aujourd’hui en Poitou-Charentes), tout en voyageant régulièrement à travers les États-Unis.

Source : Entre2noirs

Reviews

[Clio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Study the history that destroys you.

I don't think I would have loved this book quite so much if less of my mindspace was made up of mythologies of All the King's Men. Jack Burden romanticized the study of history for me and caught me up in the idea that "the world is all of one piece." I think Eddy Harris and Robert Penn Warren have a lot of similar ideas about learning from history and the importance of connection.

I. When you use a philosophy of disconnection as a crutch, it becomes a mental block, and you become stuck in your ways, unable to move forward.

"You get so mired in a way of thinking that you lose all sight. The deeper you sink the darker it is, the easier on the eyes. The darkness becomes familiar, comfortable. It hides you, and you are safe. You can't see, but neither can you be seen. The darkness is your protector."
-South of Haunted Dreams

"He would sleep twelve hours, fourteen hours, fifteen hours, feeling himself, while asleep, plunge deeper and deeper into sleep like a diver groping downward into dark water feeling for something which may be there and which would glitter if there were any light in the depth, but there isn't any light."
-All the King's Men

II. The main question of confronting history that has become personal to you is whether to remember or forget.

"In order for you not to hate, you must be able to forget."
"But in order to know who I am, I must remember."
-South of Haunted Dreams

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him."
-All the King's Men

III. You leave your imprint on the world as the world leaves its imprint on you.

"We are formed by the world around us. It forms us, and we form it. We push the edges a little at a time. It is never fast enough for some, too fast for others, but in time we change and we grow, and the world changes with us."
-South of Haunted Dreams

"For when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass."
-All the King's Men

IV. In that vein,

"I believe we have two lives, the one we live for ourselves, and the one we live for others. And perhaps the measure of a man's worth is the smallness of the gap between the two."
-South of Haunted Dreams

"So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment."
-All the King's Men

The last two quotes from South of Haunted Dreams are about your relationship with the world as a whole, while the quotes from All the King's Men are about your relationship with one other person, but I think the same themes of interconnectedness and the freedom to be yourself in the relationship apply to both.

A lot of what Harris discusses in South of Haunted Dreams is the freedom he desired to be seen just as a man, not as a black man with whatever expectations he believes that gives people about him. He says, "When I am alone, without other men's opinions of me, without their eyes attempting to define me, without the ways they treat me, their reactions to me, their fear and their loathing and their disgust, even their kindness, without other men I am simply me." He seeks the freedom to be seen as himself, and with that as his goal he travels across the south by motorcycle, expecting racism, seeing everything through a lens of racism, and talking to people about racism - both people who look like they will agree with him and people he expects to act quite differently. He has never been to the south before this and knows it only as the land of slavery and Jim Crow laws.

He starts his journey feeling deeply connected to the beauty of the land but apprehensive of connecting with the people, and the juxtaposition of his serenity derived from his appreciation of the land's beauty and his anger at only realizing recently what being a black man in the United States means (not just to him, but as a larger definition he has no control over) is jarring.

The main issue is not how people react to him, but how he expects them to. He starts to realize that his negative stereotypes of the south somewhat mirror the negative stereotypes he doesn't want others to feel towards him. He connects with many southerners, some he was expecting and some he wasn't. He learns from them. He listens to what white people say about how they think they can help reduce racism in the south and to what black people say about "how the white people are treating them." The answers varied, but it was pointed out that generational time is a great factor in reducing racism in white people in the south, because even if the older people still were a product of racist times, many of them expressed the desire to raise their children differently and to try to at least pay attention to what the problems were.

I think the main things that changed his opinion of the people of the south were his journey-within-a-journey to follow the path of his freed great-grandfather Joseph and think about what he may have encountered and his conversations with so many thoughtful southerners (though of course, not everyone was nice and thoughtful).

On this journey, he changed his own mind and began to love the south. He also had conversations with so many people and I'm sure he made them think. He definitely made me think.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

How do I type a sigh? If you I could figure that out, I would probably type two or three sentences worth. Since it looks like I'm the first person reviewing this book on Goodreads, I might as well tell you what it's about before I comment on it.

This is a work of creative non-fiction about a black man who grew up around whites in the North and decides to take a motorcycle trip to the South to find his roots and face the, what he initially believes, ongoing oppression of the black people by the white man. Even though he's never personally faced much racism, he feels the weight of a long oppressed people on his shoulders and is somehow compelled to go to the South and face it head on. The book is essentially a travelogue, with both a physical and mental journey going on, so we slowly see how his perceptions change as he comes to know what the South is actually like.

That doesn't sound so bad, right? Indeed the idea of the story isn't bad at all, and the writing is pretty good too – it's no Steinbeck mind you, but it's easy to read and flows well. The problem is that the narrator is just so dang angry for most of the book. Quite literally, the first 100 pages are an angry rant of all the horrible things that have happened in the (surprisingly recent) past. Yes, some horrible things have happened and, yes, horrible things continue to happen, but we get the idea that you're pissed from the first 5 pages of the book – another 95 pages doesn't drive the point home anymore than it already has. Even when that anger has mellowed out a bit, it still seems to pop back up over and over. An example of this is the narrator meets some white folk, a number of different times, who he expects to be mean and bigoted, but turn out to be super nice to him, and even though he's like "I've completely changed my mind about what the South is," he goes right back to where he was before at the beginning of the next chapter. It's not till the very end of the book that he really mellows out, and by that point you're just fed up with him.

Another issue that I had is that the story is far too focused on the narrator's opinion of things. We're supposed to be going on this journey with the guy, but he seems more interested in convincing us his own personal agenda than taking us along for a journey of self-discovery. In fact, the story seems to be more of a personal soapbox than, well, a story.

The thing that gets me, though, is that I really really wanted to like the book. The author actually came to our English class for a couple days and he seems like a really interesting person. He's not at all angry in real life (this book was written 20 years ago, so maybe he was angry back then) and it seems like he has all these great stories he could tell. Perhaps his more recent work is better – it's only published in France, in French, where he now lives – but I don't really have any interest after this book. Anyway, I got my book signed by him, which is neat, but I didn't really care for the book, which is too bad...

Overall, while this isn't anywhere near the worst book I've ever read, it's still not very good. Perhaps some people will enjoy it, but I sure didn't. Not recommended.

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another travel book by Harris, a black author, this time about a motorcycle trip through the U.S. South. I thought it was almost as good as Native Stranger. It was told with the same poetic description, the same raw honesty. He shows great skill as a writer by arranging his experiences and thoughts in such a way as to form a novel-like construction, with buildup, climax and denouement, even though it is (for the most part, certainly) non-fiction. The pure honesty of Harris' presentation & the depth of his thought made this book no disappointment.

[Julie H. Ernstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I literally just finished South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride through Slavery's Old Back Yard and have not afforded myself much time to process it yet. That said, this review is subject to change over the next few days.

The book gives an account of a black man's 1990s-era motorcycle trip through the South where he wrestles with racism, his own demons, and comes to some sort of resolution. He starts out tremendously angry--not surprising at all--and follows a rapid roller coaster of emotions. Each time he finds some measure of peace or resolution it is then upended just a few pages (or even paragraphs) later. This must have been tremendously exhausting for him as he experienced each day's relative ups and downs.

I will say that having read Tony Horowitz's Spying on the South and seen other authors deftly introduce hypocrisy, tough topics, within the confines of a slightly more systematic approach to their travelogue, I am keen to hear from the writer in coming days to learn his thoughts on more recent events and see when and why he decided to leave the U.S. One can only wonder if he were to publish an anniversary edition, what new preface he might write. Here's hoping he shares that info with the members of the Joy Trip Reading Project, for which this is our third read.

[Jason Soroski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful, poignant, and startlingly relevant

I have been a longtime fan of Harris and this book merely cements what I knew before: his unique and wonderful perspective is both intensely personal while being effortlessly universal. Reading his experiences, his family heritage becomes mine, becomes ours. He presents the South with all its flaws and charms. Highly recommend this book!

[Ellice · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted this book to be much better than it actually was.  The premise was interesting--a modern African American, descended from slaves, takes a motorcycle road trip through the South where his forbears were enslaved. But he spends far more time discussing what he expects to happen and making sweeping generalities about the sense of dread the South evokes in him than he does actually talking about the people he meets and the places he visits.  He gins up a sense that important things will happen on this trip that isn't really supported by the things that do happen (at least the ones he shares). There's also a sense of melodrama and repetition in his writing that I found distracting and even annoying--when talking about events that are so full of import themselves, there's no need to drum up additional drama. It felt like filler for a book that perhaps couldn't otherwise have justified an entire book-length narrative, given the trip he actually had (as opposed to the one he anticipated). I would not recommend it.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this would be a travel book, but it is more a meditation on racism and its impact on the author, his family and society sparked by the his travels through the South, especially places connected to his family. In some sense, as an African American, he considers the South is his homeland - and in fact he grew up around St. Louis. It is something of an internal reckoning, very well written.

[wildct2003 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got better as it went along.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent analysis of his experience with race issues in the deep south.

[Joy Weese Moll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eddy Harris, an African-American who grew up near where I live in the St. Louis region, takes a journey by motorcycle through the Deep South of the United States, encountering personal and societal demons about race.

More thoughts on my blog, including how it fit with our book club: South of Haunted Dreams

[David Ward · Rating 2 out of 5]

South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir by Eddy L. Harris (Holt Paperbacks 1993)(Biography). A Northern-raised Black guy comes South. His preconceptions and prejudices almost cost him any pleasure in the trip, but he finally came around some. My rating: 5/10, finished 2006.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful book about a man who confronts his fear/anger about the country's racist past by planning a motorcycle trip through the South. The lessons he learns are inspiring for sure.

[Florence Buchholz · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I thought, "this guy is so angry", then I began to like him and take his journey to heart.

[Avary Doubleday · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Native Stranger rides a motorcycle through the South -- expecting the worst. He is surprised with what he finds. Another honest look.

[Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another winner from Eddy L. Harris. Beautiful writing. A introspective journey through the US South, confronting prejudice, his own and others.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is immensely enjoyable and ultimately revealing about race, the South and America. For anyone even remotely interested in those topics, this is without doubt a must read.