Dead-ends and no sidewalks

THERE ARE no sidewalks here. Of all the things that distinguish this place from home -- politics, customs, weather -- it’s the absence of sidewalks that disorients me most. I take sidewalks for granted: concrete slabs that limn every neighborhood, form corners, accommodate pedestrians. Even cracked and disfigured sidewalks order and democratize public space in a way I never thought about until I visited Fayetteville for the second time in as many years.

This is a sizable town, but I can’t figure how or where things go. Without the topographical discipline of sidewalks, streets and roads change names frequently, bend inexplicably, trail off into wide-open fields unexpectedly. Highways threaten to meet and then peel away from each other, lulled back into North Carolina’s infinite green like hyperbolas mapped on a graph. One thing’s for sure: It’s easier to stay put than to go places in Fayetteville.

My family is from New Orleans, and I was born and raised in L.A. So the South is both familiar and alien to me. The alienness starts with the physical. Where much of California is subdivided and looks ready-made, Fayetteville is a mere dent in a dominating landscape. Land is not just scenery but the heart and life and history of the South.

It also has enabled a brutal oppression, which I think about every time I see black people walking along the side of the highway -- or road, or street, or whatever it is -- without the benefit of pavement. I see far more blacks than whites on foot, walking in a slow, deliberate way that suggests to me that they’ve been walking this way a long time. It speaks to tradition and to a sense of home so acute that people hardly have to look up as they walk. It also speaks to defeat.

As it happens, the book I brought to read on the airplane and during stolen moments of this trip was David Blight’s “Race and Reunion.” It’s a devastating, detailed history of how America chose to remember the Civil War not as a war about the immorality of slavery or about black emancipation but as a kind of philosophical falling-out between two equally noble adversaries, both white, who had to endure a terrible fight before they could finally unify for the benefit of both. Blacks were not part of this pact but bit players who no longer had a role to play; they would have to find their own way in the “new” South and in a reconstituted America.

Certainly the ingrained American resistance to the cause of black freedom is not news to me. But Blight’s book gives my experience words, depth and reason. He writes that the “politics of memory” that formed in the decades after the Civil War are still in play today, and that the scuttling of black emancipation is a result of the greatest and most enduring political spin campaign this country has ever witnessed. I understand the appeal. How much more romantic it is for a Southerner to sigh over a Lost Cause than to serve the workaday cause of black freedom!

Blacks have had to struggle mightily with their own response to the romanticization of American history. Do they continue to claim their rightful place in it? Or give up on the conversion of the South -- and of America -- as a truly lost cause? Jostle for position on the increasingly treacherous path of national history or forge a friendlier path -- a sidewalk, if you will -- of their own?

These questions are as timeless as they are timely. And they remain nearly immune to easy or workable answers.

On my last morning in Fayetteville, I opened the local paper over coffee and read about something I never learned in school, the Wilmington race riots. Wilmington is a town up the river from Fayetteville; in 1898, its black government officials and citizenry were run out of town or killed by enraged white mobs. One hundred eight years after the fact, a state commission declared what happened in Wilmington to be the first and only coup d’etat in the history of the United States. It also decided that the descendants of the 60-odd blacks murdered are entitled to reparations.

This revelation is not on the front page; instead, it’s delivered in the local section by a black columnist. He is passionate and persuasive, but still the information feels segregated, ghettoized -- American history left, again, at the side of the road.