DaytonDailyNews.com

I find traveling through tourist sites in the South as a black man can border on the surreal sometimes. Actually, it's that way most of the time.

Like last week, when my wife and I toured one of the preserved plantations near Charleston, S.C. We rode a tram past the plantation main house, through magnificent gardens and into forested swamplands where alligators basked in the sun watching diving birds fish.

All of it was breathtakingly beautiful and interesting and disturbing, and, as I said, surreal.

One moment we were marveling at an ancient live oak, and the next we rounded a corner to pass a row of slave cabins.

The one-story houses about the size of two-car garages each had two doors and were designed to bunk one family on each side. Or can you call it a family if the people living there were property with status only a little higher than the draft horses living in the barn?

"And we would be living here," is the thought that crossed my mind. No manor house with canopied beds and marble fireplaces for us; just a wood frame hut to crash in after a back-breaking day planting the rice that made our masters wealthy and respected.

Surreal.

The bus tour of Charleston's central historic areas was much the same. There are tours geared to Charleston's African-American history, but on the afternoon we got to the tourist depot, none of those tours were available.

The tour we took went through the narrow streets that inspired the Catfish Row setting of the opera "Porgy and Bess," and that was fascinating. Did you know "Porgy" was based on a real legless beggar from Charleston, and that the real guy was a total jerk?

The guide who told us stories behind "Porgy and Bess" was knowledgeable, but he seemed really, really proud that South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union at the start of the Civil War.

Should I have been insulted that this guy freely celebrated the valor and will of men who were basically fighting for the right to buy and sell other men who probably looked a lot like me?

Well, I'm not insulted; I'm just kind of amused at the tendency so many people have to glorify the events and supposed heroes of the past.

So what if our guide gets misty-eyed about the defense of Charleston harbor from Union ships? It's not much different than venerating the "Founding Fathers" who felt all men were created equal only as long as they were talking about free, white, male property owners.

Some of my friends take Southern history as much more of a personal affront than I do. Like the woman 20 years ago who acted like I'd made a pilgrimage to lay flowers on Hitler's grave when I told her I'd visited Stone Mountain in Georgia.

The carvings in the side of the mountain are magnificent even if they do depict heroes of the Confederacy.

Of course, riding the cable car up the side of that mountain getting a close look at Jefferson Davis on his snorting war horse can be for a black man, you know, kind of surreal.