COLLECTIONS OF THE DAMNED: The Historical Records of Dead Men Are Never Worth More Than the Lives of Those Yet to Come

"Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

- Cassius, from Julius Caesar (I.ii.140–142)

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHSIDE VIRGINIA (ZP) -- He almost wept as he showed me the largest piece from his personal collection, a lithograph print of the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest, ringed in tiny black-and-white photographs.

My knees buckled for a moment, as if his shame suddenly became mine as the artifact changed hands for the first time since the 1970s. That weight pulled me down onto his couch as the strong desire to vomit almost overtook me.

If I hadn't been sitting on that couch, the amount of smug, smiling hate in those mugshots would've eaten me alive.

Even years later, I can still feel that old widower's couch devouring me in its plushness, comforting my body so my senses could absorb it all.

* * * *

Some of the most prominent citizens from my own corner of Virginia stared up from behind the glass, their younger 1950s selves captured forever in white robes, my memories of them as simply nice old men shattered like a ceramic Jesus in hell.

One of the men used to cut my hair - I have many fond memories of my time in his barber's chair. Another face, that of a prominent retailer, a friend to not only my family but of many, glowed with his beautiful, Tobacco Country smile - a shopkeeper by day, and a Grand Dragon by night.

The most exclusive of fraternities, one of White Protestant Male paranoia, from the end of the Second World War through the end of Vietnam, residents of counties with such regal, Old World names: Prince Edward, Charlotte, Lunenburg, Cumberland. They hailed from towns like Farmville and Keysville and Burkeville, from Victoria and Kenbridge and Darlington Heights.

I knew all but four of them, at some point in my life, personally. The four I didn't know had all died before I was even born. But the record of their time in the Ku Klux Klan had been trapped in that old man's closet, in that frame.

Up until that point, several years ago, they had all been men I respected. The grandparents of classmates and friends, men who'd mentored my mother through her years as a business owner in the area, men who gave me candy and free bottles of soda in their shops, told wonderful stories and who entertained me before I could even walk.

And for all of the anxiety and terrifying expectation...

I wasn't even shocked.

* * * *

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

- James Baldwin

The elderly man finally broke down as we went through this one box, one full of photographs and, of all things, a ledger.

This one branch of Virginia's Klan, during the 1950s and 1960s, operated like other popular fraternal organizations, like the Kiwanis or the Moose or the Shriners. Members paid dues, paid for their robes and hoods. They even contributed money for timber and fuel oil to hold their rituals.

And someone, probably the local chapter's Klabee, kept very detailed records.

More than 50 pages of writing in that one ledger, filled with addresses and old switchboard phone extensions - and, of course, names.

Names.

How many of these men knew that almost a half-century later, society would change so drastically? Did they know how wrong they were? Did they realize, like my old collector, that society would not remember them for working to save the South but as an instrument of terror, a symbol of intolerance and fear?

* * * *

It was the snapshots in that box, however, that offered real insight into the true dynamic that drove racism and prejudice in the South.

The origins of segregation and slavery lie not in the color of skin but in the gluttonous insanity of unchecked capitalism, a pursuit of wealth and power devoid of compassion, reason, and responsibility. The quest for money, guns, and land gave rise to the social construct of race in the New World, just as surely as the monarchist traditions of Europe gave rise to Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism in the Old.

It was easy for slave owners to justify oppression as just another cost of doing business, for example. And after slavery, it was equally easy for white landowners to justify the system of sharecropping - a system propped up by Jim Crow policies designed to keep not only former slaves unable to escape agrarian servitude, but the descendants of the white non-landowning classes as well.

While the ledger detailed the business transactions of an organization, the basic bookkeeping that goes into any exchange of capital for privilege and property, the black-and-white images testified to the corrupting nature of the quest for profit.

One series of prints, banded together with an event program and several anti-integration pamphlets, spoke volumes about the true greedy, childish face of institutionalized racism:

The event, sponsored by a supposedly less-offensive white citizen's group dedicated to what in Virginia was known as the Massive Resistance Movement , touted the evening's keynote speech, about the dangers of integration to certain businesses and communities.

The speaker that night back in the 1950s was not George Wallace, or Gov. Byrd, or some other blowhard Southern Segregationist politician - the keynote was delivered, instead, by a prominent Negro leader speaking, supposedly, on behalf of concerned colored business owners.

And in the photographs, I beheld an interesting rider upon a very different pale horse - a black community leader and racial separatist, preaching to a Caucasian choir, with the Confederate colors flying above him. In some of the prints, he posed with old Daughters of the Confederacy ladies and with local football heroes from the all-white public high school.

And he posed with some of those same Klansmen, too, shook their hands and smiled beneath the ol' Stars and Bars. Sure, the Klan hadn't shown up in robes and hoods. There wasn't a flaming cross anywhere to be found. After all, who would want to offend a business partner?

And, I remember the old man explaining, many white folks had no problem with a Negro leader who blamed the social disturbances and protests of the era on what they saw as the real threat to America - the Northern pinkos and godless Muslims, the flashy Hollywood communists, and, of course, the Jews.

And again, nothing shocking. Does anyone really think there were no black men who supported, who prospered under the laws of the Old South? And that those same men never did business with white supremacists?

Makes perfect sense, actually, in a time when the whole of society was based on a flawed separate-but-equal system, including the economics. The elimination of segregated facilities and services signaled the death-knell for race-based businesses, both black and white.

Who, at the dawn of the dreaded Big Box Stores, would want to keep paying for the right to shop free of other races, for a Whites Only section, would continue to pay extra for it, as competition grew? And did anyone think that black folk really wanted to pay more for a dozen oranges at the Colored grocery than at one of those new-fangled, integrated supermarkets?

* * * *

It took five years' worth of correspondence to get the old man to even discuss the his activities, much less admit that he'd been a member of an organization that once corrupted the minds of many decent folks, a blasted society that fed on its members' fear of change as much as it fed upon the fear of the outside world.

At one point, it was an obsession - to expose something called the truth, the righteous concept of social justice driven by a personal need, a self-righteousness more akin to that of a lynch mob than to anything else. I'd planned a book, done the library research, studied my prey like a scholarly assassin.

I needed dirt to throw upon the graves of my enemies, the ghosts of the Old South. I didn't, at the time, care who I hurt. Hurt was, at the time, just what I intended to cause, through my quest to expose the truth. I'd made the mistake of so many, those who mistake arrogance for social justice - I'd passed sentence well before I'd judged the crime.

Though the mid-20th century Ku Klux Klan in Southside Virginia was abhorrent, it never was the violent terror that plagued the American Deep South. Sure, there were cross-burnings, and hateful speeches, and even acts of intimidation. But for the most part, history seems to record that its leaders failed to convince the majority of white folks in the area that their black neighbors were somehow deserving of violence. It wasn't the dreaded midnight monster of the 1800s or early 1900s. And, by most accounts, it was nowhere near as insane as the current White Pride movements.

Even a clergyman, a leader at a historically black church and veteran of the Civil Rights Movement I'd interviewed early on in my pursuit of truth, back when I was still in high school, wondered why a white boy would want to dig up such skeletons.

It took me watching an old man cry over his sins, the sins that terrified him as he prepared to meet his Creator, to understand that my quest to expose the truth looked a whole hell of a lot like the sort of insanity groups like the Klan generate.

What right does anyone have to sacrifice the future in order to preserve the past?

* * * *

Come to hate hypocrisy and the evil thought; for it is the thought that gives birth to hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is far from truth.

- Christ, according to The Apocryphon of James
[Jung Codex, Nag Hammadi Library]

I asked the curator of the Collection of the Damned why he'd left the Klan, why his incarnation had disappeared into barely an urban legend, a silenced joke without a punchline.

It was, strangely enough, Martin Luther King, Jr. Not the man, or the minister, or even the activist.

Dr. King's corpse changed him, changed his view of the Nig'ra people, saved him from becoming just another hateful man damned to a cultural hell of stagnation and bitterness.

You see, sometime after King's assassination, while the evening newscasters rattled off tributes and the newspapers ran stories of mourning and the demands for justice, the old man realized something that probably changed a lot of men like him.

King was a Baptist like the curator, a Southerner like the curator. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, had preached nonviolence and tolerance, and had died at the hands of a coward. A coward who, well, held the same views the curator held, who'd sought to silence agitators and protect the Old South - who'd taken fear to the point of murder.

And while those Klan meetings often began with prayers to God for guidance, nobody ever brought up that hating thy neighbor was, indeed, a sin, that murder was a sin.

The old man told me that it took days for him to remember what that sort of propaganda reminded him of. It kicked like a mule when he finally figured out the connection between his fraternity and the murder of a Nobel Prize winner and fellow Southern Baptist.

Europe.

He'd heard it in Europe, seen it as he'd marched across a continent towards the stronghold of a madman from Austria, witnessed what hate and murder really cost a man, a nation, a continent.

Adolf Hitler's not remembered for preserving Europe's traditions, either.

* * * *

I asked him what he intended to do with them after he'd confessed his sins, had asked for absolution in the form of the kind of anonymity that only a young man can grant a man close to death.

He didn't know.

But he did know that he didn't want his descendants to ever know and figured that the rest of his former knights probably wouldn't want their descendants to suffer for their sins, either. And that Negro leader? What price would his family pay?

Men, armed with such records, could blackmail, could drive others to murder others as James Earl Ray did, could seek not reconciliation but lustful, bloody revenge in the name of social justice. People are fallible, will punish whole generations for the sins of their ancestors, will reign destruction upon the brows of the countless innocent.

Let's be realistic here: People kill to acquire such records. And people will murder their own kin to bury it.

He offered me the records. I declined. I have no right to such power. And I had no right to risk the safety of my own Virginia kinfolk, either.

Information is, indeed, the most brutal form of power - and power can corrupt even a young man's promises to the old, corrupt his honor for things like money or some sense of self-importance.

I offered him a solution, however - a way to be free.

* * * *

I spent $40,000 on graduate school, learned the proper ways to select and preserve historical records, to digitize them and make them available for future generations.

Sometimes, one just has to accept that teaching a man how to un-preserve the past means more to the future than any amount of academic argument.

On my last trip back to Virginia, prior to my most recent journey, I learned that that old man has moved on, has been called back to His Father, Who Art in Heaven.

I have no clue what happened to those records, but I have a good idea.

But I'm sure, wherever he is, that he got a chance to meet that fellow Baptist Southerner, to be free at last, free at last...

And my notes have conveniently disappeared, and that book will never be published. Names? Well, my memory isn't what it used to be...

* * * *

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

- Nelson Mandela

It's the last week of September. I'm staring up at the new town hall in Farmville, the county seat of my home, built atop the ruins of a former strip mall that'd burned at the turn of the century.

I'm sipping on a cup of Joe from one of several coffee shops that now dot Downtown. When I was in high school, there was nothing remotely resembling a coffee shop in downtown Farmville. And now, on this trip back, in 2007, there are independents and national chains to choose from - I even found a shop that serves the best fairly-traded, organic Ethiopian blend.

It's a Wednesday, midmorning, and Main Street's a happening place. For more than 20 years, for most of my childhood, it'd been the home to not progress but the economic abandonment that plagues many small Southern communities.

But now, today, a group of international undergrads from the local college, speaking what sounds like Mandarin, pass behind me, bags full of touristy items clamoring as loud as their conversation. A black police officer, up the street, pulls over a pick-up full of white teenagers for violating the town's new noise ordinance, for playing G-Unit tunes too loud in a business district. An artsy-looking woman, plain and strangely beautiful, snaps photographs in front of the county courthouse.

Art. It's everywhere in town these days. There's even a museum where an abandoned department store used to be, on the corner of Third and Main. Plasma screen TVs fill its plate-glass storefront, a multimedia exhibit that wouldn't have been possible in 1996, much less 1956.

I turn on my heels, head south on Main. I walk past the site of the old State Theatre, remembering that my parents took me to see Fox and the Hound at a corner that now serves as an outdoor park and amphitheater. New brick high-rise apartments cast shadows down on the real estate beneath them - they're built atop property that once contained a decrepit shopping center, a liquor store, and a parking lot full of midnight drug dealers.

I stop in front of a Baptist church that now rests beneath the shadows cast by the high-rises, a church founded by former slaves, right after the U.S. Civil War.

A sign proudly proclaims that Martin Luther King once spoke there, proudly proclaims its place in history.

Without that visit by that martyred Baptist peacemaker, I wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have graduated from what became one of the most successfully integrated public school systems in North America. I couldn't proudly proclaim that I come from a community that spawned the most successful, peaceful student protest in U.S. history, a small town on the outskirts of change so monumental that some of its records are stored in places like the Library of Congress.

And King did more than simply visit, than simply speak and inspire during his lifetime. Even in death, he helped drive another nail in the coffin of one of the darkest times in Prince Edward's history.

He liberated a Klansman from his hate.

And he freed a bit of my soul, too, in the process.

The importance of burying the past, sometimes, paves the way for a greater future.

- # # # -

THE LUNENBURG COUNTY HOODOO HUNT OF '92: A Southern Tale of Witchcraft, Ghosts, and Other Human Terrors

"Pete" and I rode out into the dusk on our bicycles. It was the summer of 1992, along the Lunenburg/Prince Edward county line, a few miles east of the Green Bay, Virginia, post office.

We'd heard the stories for years, the tall tales of old white women, the legendary yarns of tobacco farmers and soybean sages. And we'd been warned by our elders, too, to never look for that old shack, because anyone who trespassed there would be doomed.

According to Pete's grandmother, the shack, whatever remained of it, was cursed - decent white folk, as she put it, never went a-looking for that nig'ra witch's place.

Despite the warnings, Pete and I had decided, in the midst of one of the hottest summers of our lives, to find out the truth. We sat out to locate the mythical witch's cabin, to investigate the rumors and legends for ourselves.

* * * *

Older people in that area knew the legend, but all of those who told it to me are now dead. I don't know if the story is still told in the 2000s, in this modern era, around campfires and at family cookouts. I suspect that those who are now the age I was in 1992 probably have never heard the tale.

This may well be the only written account of the legend of the Washerwoman Shack.

According to the versions I remember, the shack once belonged to a black laundress, a former slave. Her name has been lost to history, but she was said to have been a witch, a practitioner of the lost arcane art known throughout the South as Hoodoo. Rumor had it that her death was the result of arson, that several white teenagers had trapped her in her own home and then set the place ablaze - punishment for being an uppity nig'ra.

No historical record exists of the old midwife, or of the fire that supposedly killed her. That should shock no one reading this; the barbaric history of the Jim Crow South is full of convenient disappearances. Black people who were different from or educated beyond their white counterparts, especially in a region once known for its Klan-dominated government, tended to disappear, and people often left it at that.

To this day, in fact, there are still old white men alive throughout Dixie, family barbers and nice country doctors, kindly police officers and polite retired shopkeepers, who helped make people like the midwife disappear. And they will take their secrets to their graves as surely as they smile at church suppers and play poker down at the VFW, the face of one man or woman's unsung butcher simultaneously the face of someone's cherished grandfather or favorite teacher or beloved community leader.

With such hidden horrors of this mortal coil, throughout Virginia and the rest of the South, why would anyone be afraid of a dead woman's curse, a woman for whom there may be no record of her having ever lived in the first place?

* * * *

Pete and I didn't believe in witches, of course.

Sure, "Sara," Pete's neighbor, claimed to be a witch, a follower of something called Wicca. But she simply smoked a lot of pot, burned incense, and liked to dance around her mobile home naked, calling her acts sabbats. To us, witchcraft, at least the Caucasian version, was nothing more than a stoned redneck girl who collected dragon sculptures.

And curses? I believed in them, but, well, I'm part Cajun, with a great - grandmother who used to read my tea leaves on a regular basis. I still cross myself every time I pass a cemetery. Pete, however, did not. He was a Good Ol' Boy. He believed in the Holy Trinity of the Peckerwood - God, Guns, and the Rebel flag.

Pete and I had just celebrated our fourteenth birthdays. We were almost men at the dawn of the 21st century. We'd grown up with things like television, FM radio and VHS machines. We'd watched the Challenger explode a few years earlier, listened to Def Leppard and Winger and Warrant, and frequently shoplifted softcore porn from the local video store ...

* * * *

The Virginia dusk soaked us in sweat a few miles into our journey, so we stopped alongside Molasses Hill Road for a quick break. After carefully hiding our bikes in a patch of pokeberry, we did what many rural Southern teenagers do when there's a lack of adult supervision during the summer.

We had a pint of moonshine liberated from a local farmer's private stash. We had an ounce and a half of a certain illegal plant, rolled up in fresh cured tobacco leaves. And we had a backpack full of pimiento cheese sandwiches.

No great adventure, as a teenager, is ever devoid of a ceremonial meal. And witch hunting, in Southside Virgina, is hard work.

* * * *

We knew the legendary haunted ruins lay just off a timber road, somewhere along the county line. And by sundown, we'd found it.

The pine log structure was charred, held up only by the crumbling red clay that filled its joints. Inside, those same logs were found to be half-consumed by whatever fire had once raged through it. In what was left of the kitchen, a rusted iron kettle still hung in the back of a river stone fireplace - the walls around the hearth had collapsed long before we arrived. The remnants of two chairs and a table rested on the ground, partially buried in leaves. Firs and maples grew up from what had once been someone's well-worn dirt floor.

Pete and I decided to make camp for the night, right in the middle of our Virginia version of El Dorado, our great archaeological find in the Lunenburg wilderness. In the morning, we'd return home to tell of our expedition, to boast to friends on the phone, and to, well, begin planning new ways to use the site as a party spot for our forthcoming high school careers.

The way I remember it, I built the fire, using some of the chimney's collapsed stones to build a decent pit. We needed light to explore by, and, like the young juvenile delinquents we were, we'd forgotten to bring more than one flashlight. For some reason, the air inside seemed cold and damp despite the lack of a roof, as if the southern summer stopped at the walls.

Pete had brought his father's .45 and a box of shells; he spent most of the time killing off the blunt we'd started earlier and shooting at what had once been the outhouse a few yards past the "back door." I tossed him the old kettle at one point, figuring he could at least practice his aim on something smaller than an outdoor shitbox.

* * * *

Shadows cast by fires can play tricks on a person, especially at night. Moonshine, of course, doesn't help matters much.

Pete and I explored the ruins carefully. There were only three rooms to the place - a front room, the kitchen in the back, and what we guessed had at one time served as a bedroom. In every room, there were remnants of life buried in the leaves underfoot. Old tin cans, broken lanterns, and even what looked to the remains of a bed frame. Everything bore the signs of one hell of a house fire.

And then we found the door.

* * * *

There were no interior doors in the ruins. And the back door into the kitchen was long gone. The four windows, which probably hadn't held glass anyway, were nothing more than gaping holes into the darkness.

But ten feet away from the front room entrance, just past the charred remains of what had once been a porch, we found a z-frame door, propped against an old walnut tree. The hinges looked as if they'd been blown apart at the pin, as if the pin itself had exploded. The door looked as if it had been carefully placed there, like a tombstone in some old cemetery.

Pete, in his eagerness, wanted to drag the door inside, near the fire, so it could be inspected. He grabbed both sides and lifted the sucker while I held the flashlight. When he turned around, the backside was exposed for probably the first time since it had been placed...

I remember the chill that shot up my spine, the numbness of shock and childish fear that enveloped my body. There were bones on the back of the door. Not human bones but animal, firmly attached with wires, dangling in the light. There were whitetail antlers and groundhog skulls, petrified bird feet bound together. There were strings of bottle tops, too, interlaced into long bead ropes with animal teeth.

Pete dropped the door, its rotten timber splitting in half at the cross brace. We ran back into the house, swearing as we ran, huddled with our backs to the fire. Suddenly, the typical nighttime noise of the woods, the crickets and owls and whippoorwills, was amplified against the night.

As illogical, as irrational, as it sounds to write now, in the 21st century, I'm quite sure there was something out there watching us, something that we'd disturbed. And I remember feeling as if we were squatting in that something's ruined house.

* * * *

Pete and I sat in silence for almost four hours, afraid of the dark for the first time since we'd been little kids, terrified to make a sound without so much as a blanket to cover our faces.

And then, without warning, Pete reached into the backpack, withdrew his dad's pistol, and started firing wildly into the night. I tried to stop him, but the weed-induced paranoia had gotten the best of his fears. Ghosts, even if they do really exist, have never been known to be afraid of a gunshot.

Pete kept pulling the trigger until he'd emptied the clip. And I started to yell, to scream. I felt it in my throat, working its way up from my lungs. But my scream died somewhere between my teeth and my ribcage, died mute and still in captivity.

There was nothing but silence. Not a sound coming from the darkness.

Suddenly, from above us, from the back of the chimney, came a shrill scream like none I've ever heard. A large black bird, probably a buzzard, tore off into the night sky. I saw nothing but a looming silhouette against the light from the fire, felt nothing but the breeze of its wings.

At least, as an adult, I've convinced myself that it was simply a buzzard.

* * * *

The South is full of stories about black people who mysteriously disappeared, of old Hoodoo women who may or may not have met their ends at the hands of a lynch mob or group of white supremacists. While I'm convinced that whoever lived in that house probably practiced some sort of folk medicine, there will never be a way to prove or disprove the tall tales I'd heard.

Every once and a while, I'll have a nightmare about that ruined house, about that door. In the parts that I remember from those dreams, the door is almost always somehow alive, possessed by demons, the animal skulls and bird claws dancing with the strings of fangs and bottle caps.

And there's an old black woman there, too, my mind's interpretation of what she may have looked like, her white hair made of clouds and her body aflame, cursing those who killed her and crying out for justice.

And when I do dream those little dreams, I find myself hoping that I'm not cursed myself. I know, it's a silly thought. But one never knows what sinister powers exist in the World of the Supernatural.

A few days ago, I caught the smell of burnt pine drifting through my apartment windows here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, the same scent I smelled back in those Lunenburg ruins almost two decades ago. I flashed back to that night as I lay in bed. And I felt that strange chill upon me once more, that terrifying cold of the unknown.

I wonder now, as I did a few nights ago, what it would feel like to simply disappear, to become nothing more than a phantom in a tall tale?

I wonder what those surviving old white men dream about, the ones who will go to their graves knowing the true fate of African-Americans like that phantom hoodoo woman? What haunts them as they lay in bed? If there is indeed a Devil, the Judeo-Christian fallen angel of lore, I wonder what flesh-tearing things he has in store for them in his infernal pits of brimstone?

I wonder what terrifies those men? What torments those still alive who lynched innocent men across America, or burned them alive in their homes? Did their victims forgive from their disappearing graves? Or do the Undead rise like a mojo hand, returning to this world to serve as brown-skinned swords of a vengeful God?

Maybe, just maybe, that property really was cursed. And maybe we disturbed the restless spirit of a murdered black woman that night. And maybe, just maybe, Pete's gunshots were merely a reminder to her that the time had come for her to depart this world for a better, more Hoodoo-friendly afterlife.

Maybe we were spared that night because we were simply drunk, stoned children in search of adventure, not the old white men who once roamed Virginia nights in pointed white hoods?

The realm of the supernatural, if it does exist, is one a 13 year-old Virginia boy couldn't explain in 1992. And that kid, as a man, years removed, can't explain it, either.

Some of the things that haunt the sons and daughters of the American South, as real and as vivid as Emmett Till's bloated corpse, as haunting as Medgar Evers and the other ghosts of Mississippi, are much more terrifying than a simple ghost story could ever be.

- # # # -