South of Haunted Dreams
A Memoir
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For black Americans from the north, a crossing into the South has always been a meaningful transition, a journey weighted with the burdens of history and oppression. Writing with real emotion and a twist of irony, Eddy L. Harris combines the lively detail of travel writing with a brilliant exploration of race in America in South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir.
PUBLISHERS 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.
