Forty Years North of Dreamland

 

Gilbert Allen

Here, being visible is being white . . .

      —Wallace Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn”

 

Too far away, too late, I never saw

Dreamland. It rhymed with Margaret Mitchell’s wind,

now just as gone. The swimming lake’s swamp-forest,

the nine-hole golf course razed for home improvement—

Lowe’s, standing where Depression mill boys gathered

to carry woods and irons of the rich,

to make more money on good Saturdays

than any linthead father earned all week.

 

I live about a seven-minute drive

due north of where the kids from Monaghan,

Dunean, Poe, Brandon, Union Bleachery

walked every summer with their sweaty nickels

to cool off in the dream of T. F. Floyd.

His house survives, an upscale restaurant.

*

His house survives, an upscale restaurant

where some of those same children, now retired,

sit comfortably among us newcomers

and spend more on the Special of the Day

than three months’ rent on vanished birthplaces.

At dusk, we watch them looking through the glass

that lamplight turns half mirror—distant faces,

willows lost not just among the sight

of phantom water, but its sound, below—

 

until Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade

drifts from the ceiling’s speakers, followed by

the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra’s Green Eyes,

the sweetest song of 1941,

the one the lifeguard played, over and over.

*

The song the lifeguard played, over and over,

after his shift. He’d open Dreamland Lake

at 10 AM, clear snakes and snapping turtles

from the sand, watch new wives and new babies.

At lunch, the ones who knew Mama from church

would bring him half a sandwich, or a peach,

before they had to leave for home and husbands.

Before he had to chase the fifth-grade boys

from knotholes in the boards along the back side

of the changing rooms. Then all the girls

from Parker High would puddle at his feet,

begging him to trip the pavilion jukebox

for them that night—when they’d sneak back to dance,

after Dreamland had closed, officially.

*

Before Dreamland had closed, officially,

a preacher would drive down New Buncombe Road

most Sunday afternoons. He’d set up loudspeakers

in front of the pavilion or the clubhouse

and holler, “Don’t go down to that hell hole!”

 

Throughout the thirties, every year, big bands

headed to Atlanta, Asheville, Charlotte

would stop here at the foot of Paris Mountain

to play for thousands. But after the second war

the private swimming pools and television

accomplished what evangelism couldn’t.

One night, the empty old pavilion burned.

*

A couple of wars later, in the ruins,

a Vietnam vet builds a bamboo hut.

*

A Vietnam vet built a bamboo hut

somewhere down below the old golf course.

His name was Harold. He’d come out at night,

climb up the hill to Floyd’s converted house

to trade some junk—bent signs, illegible

with rust, abandoned putters, ancient Coke

and Pepsi bottles rescued from the mud—

for a few Miller Ponies at the bar.

I learn about him from the owner’s son,

who tried to shield him from the customers—

all white tonight, a mere coincidence,

for every color’s green is welcome here

and has been since the 1970s,

back when my wife and I first moved to Greenville.

*

Back when my wife and I first moved to Greenville,

nobody spoke of Dreamland. But we saw

an old gas station, same side of the road,

with broken pipes beside the service bays

still labeled WHITE and COLORED. At the college

where I’d soon teach, I joined the tennis club.

One evening, after a long match, I watched

the woman trusted with the restroom key

smile softly to a black kid on his bike.

“That door’s locked. Try the other one, in back.”

 

There was no other door—just screens of bushes

we’d use when the attendant wasn’t there.

She was a local, born and born again.

She might’ve gone to Dreamland as a girl.

*

She might’ve gone to Dreamland as a girl.

But by the start of FDR’s third term

she would’ve been too old to while away

her weekdays there. She might’ve worked downtown

in Penney’s, or in Eckerd’s Cut Rate Drugs.

She would’ve taken the Duke Power Trolley

to the last stop—North Franklin/Blue Ridge Drive—

right after work, and walked a country mile

before she changed into her bathing suit

or just slipped on her jitterbugging shoes.

Or maybe she found work at Dreamland Lake—

at the concession stand, the dressing room.

She never would have chased Coloreds away.

They would’ve known, not bothered to have come.

*

They should’ve known, not bothered to have come.

But they were picking blackberries nearby

when Mr. T. F. Floyd saw them. They could

have been his grandchildren, but for the grace

of Jesus God. He’d built this very house

with old Black Remmy, after the Great War.

The two of them cleared stones from the golf course

and made a jigsaw puzzle fit to live in.

What did the world expect farm boys to do?

Walk all the way downtown, sneak into movies?

He whistled from his elevated porch,

told them to get their sorry backsides in

the water. Today was hot, goddammit! “Boys,

in this town, Hell stays in the cotton mills!”

*

In this town, Hell stayed inside cotton mills

where air conditioning was nothing but

a “feasibility initiative”

discussed by bureaucrats in Washington

determined to increase defense production.

They funded mobile X-ray clinics—TB

screening all along the Textile Crescent,

testing weavers during cigarette

and coffee breaks, to cull the cutting floor.

 

Three shifts, plenty of work for everyone.

The only time production ever stopped

was when some fool got caught between the rollers.

That, or the blackout drill in ’42,

when the whole city turned invisible.

*

When the whole city turned invisible,

the German subs off the Atlantic coast

were sinking silhouetted cargo ships

faster than America could build them.

New bicycles could only be obtained

“for wartime purposes.” The army raised

its volunteer enlistment age to fifty.

Belk-Simpson ran an illustrated ad—

It’s patriotic to be beautiful!

And from the month-old Greenville Army Air Base

Captain Hoffman’s B-24 bomber

flew all the way past Dreamland. The next day

he analyzed the blackout for the press.

“This one’s the most effective I have seen.”

*

This one’s the most effective I have seen—

period instruments and costuming,

mustached, brass-buttoned, polished volunteers

conducted by a musicologist.

The climate-controlled auditorium’s

packed for the Textile Heritage Band concert.

 

Their audience is equally authentic.

This afternoon, dark hair’s almost as rare

as dark faces. Only a few dyed women.

Every man is gray, or bald, or both.

 

The youngster on euphonium’s the star,

gets a belated, slow-mo standing O.

I wonder if the geriatrics here

worked at the mills, and walked to Dreamland Lake.

*

 

Work at the mill, and walk to Dreamland Lake—

where you could sit beneath the willow trees

and let the distant thunderstorm of looms

evaporate. Your ears clear once again,

you climb the high dive, try the Spinning Top,

take your turn at the outdoor bowling alley,

a few more turns around the roller rink.

Rub some Noxzema on your sunburned shoulders,

then hear the latest music from the jukebox.

 

You watch old men who hadn’t been your age

since the last century—now lawyers, doctors—

playing bad golf until the sun’s all gone.

 

A kid carries their bags to their new cars.

You’ll never be like them, you tell yourself.

*

You’d never be like them, you told yourself,

and yet you are. Like every one of them.

You’ve matched the doctors, lawyers, by degrees.

Your cars are new. You walk for exercise.

Each summer, you spend hours in the garden

with work that drove the farmers to the mills.

Your house, on the same side of Paris Mountain

as T. F. Floyd’s, now overlooks a park where kids

who don’t belong to country clubs can skateboard,

rollerblade, scream down the slides, soar on the

swing sets, sneak down by the creek under the

sweetgum trees. You see it from your elevated foyer,

hear it from your deck. You close your eyes. The

decades disappear.

*

You close your eyes, the decades disappear.

When I was seven, 1958,

I woke one summer morning to the news:

Our family would move to California!

 

We sold our home in Hempstead just before

my dad’s new job fell through. We had two weeks

to find a place we could afford, move in.

 

A little spec house near abandoned farms

long gone to scrub and weeds, miles farther east

out on Long Island. In a new suburb

destined to be white. But down the street

 

Deer Lake—a place to fish, and swim, and dream.

It closed after I went away to college.

Too far away, too late, I never saw.

*