Ginny Gall (26 page)

He shivered. He was cold though it was a warm June night. A desolate feeling came over him and he thought he couldn’t bear what it meant to be a human being on the earth. This feeling welled up and slowly ebbed as he walked on thinking of it.

Back in the van, lying on the floor on his cotton pallet in front of the door, he could still feel a little of this impression or inclination, and he carried with him for days the recall of a faint sadness. It became something he didn’t completely forget. He returned to study and wonder about it, the singular occasion of reprimand and the grief it uncovered and the moment of silence it revealed and how this silence or space with nothing in it seemed so important.

Nothing where everything is
, he would think and draw tiny circles in his notebook and make dots.

The professor, who dressed generally in the same clothes every day (so he didn’t get distracted, he said, by sartorial concerns), continued to instruct him by way of books and disquisitions on the meaning of existence, and Delvin found this education to be interesting and informative, but he preferred other written words, stories he found mainly in books in the small libraries he encountered. These libraries were mostly in churches. Many of the town libraries were not open to colored, and not many people in the quarter had books, but some churches had collected a few and he read many with inspirational themes. These, together with the books from the professor, formed the basis of his education at this time.

He thought of Celia daily and told her of his reading in the letters he wrote, listing the books he read and telling her his hopes for exotic travel. He sent her his itinerary as he learned it as well as his address in Chattanooga; he would occasionally receive a note from her. She was in her third year at college and found it more difficult than the first two. She was studying literature, but found herself pulled more strongly by her science studies. She was lonely often, but she met regularly with a circle of young women to talk politics and literature and social life (
Quite often we get bogged down in the last
), but still,
afterwards, she said, on the walk home through the campus or after she was supposed to be asleep, she would feel a loneliness.
Maybe it’s only something trying to tug me into another kind of life
, she wrote, but she didn’t know what it was.
I sense the world standing ready for me like a big feast, but I feel scared and unsure of where I want to start. I’d like to find some work that is so demanding that I won’t think of anything else. Isn’t that crazy?

I wish you would write some about us, you and me, he thought, and added this to the bottom of the letter he was writing.
I think of all sorts of things we could do together.
He told her about the little zoo they visited down in Treesburg, Louisiana, that had several goats and snakes and raccoons and a panther with the mange and a skinny bear that slept all the time. In Suberville he had climbed an abandoned fire tower and looked out at the country that seemed hapless and dull in its monotony.
I want to see the world
, he wrote,
but only the parts that are surprising.
In a note he read on the worn stone steps of the post office in Mooksville, she said she was the same.

It was in Mooksville that he got in a fight with a couple of white boys. Negro on the run, he should have known better. The boys had mocked him on the street for receiving a letter. The letter was written on green stationary and smelled of Celia’s cunning perfume. He had it spread out on one hand as he stood under a big live oak tree.

“Look at that nigra acting like he’s getting mail,” one of them said. “Hey so and so [some derogatory racial term and why repeat it], who you think’d be writing a dumb whatchamacallit like you etcetera etcetera. Who you know anyway who can write?”

“And what you doing pretending to read?” the other, a towheaded skinny boy with a slight limp, chimed in.

“You hang around I’ll teach you to read
and
write,” Delvin said. He didn’t want to be bothered by these silly boys. Celia was speaking in dark blue ink about a jar of pickled peaches her roommate received from her family. She was also describing her Freud studies, which she found gloomy and a kind of outrageous European voodoo.
It’s a lot of wishful thinking
, she said.
But really smart. Even if there is a lot more mystery in the world than this man has any idea of
.
White people always like to put their thumb on everything, Delvin thought. They were scared not to.

The boys were like yellow flies stuttering about. He shooed them with the letter. The nearest, a stout boy about his age with coal-black straight hair cut short and a lopsided evil smile, came up close and slapped him in the face.

Delvin was so startled he lost his footing and fell, or half fell, onto his side. He pushed up, jumped to his feet, and backhanded the boy across the forehead, hurting his hand slightly.

The other, more slender, but with a strange, sterile look in his eye, hit him hard in the face. He again lost his sense of things. But didn’t go down. Then the other walloped him and he was instantly numb on the left side of his face and to his surprise revolving slowly, wondering where Celia had got to.

Right after this the police came by and he was thrown into the back of a Ford automobile, driven to the jail and locked up in it. The whole ride to the jail he shivered and wanted to cry out, sure this was his fallen day in which the clamps of white men’s justice would take hold in his life. The long rope that stretched from Chattanooga to this village in Alabama had tripped him. What was he thinking, to hit that boy?

But he was wrong about the ubiquity of the law. And it wasn’t the last time he hit a white boy.

The professor found him in the whitewashed brick jail the next day—after Delvin had been brought before the judge and given thirty days for fighting and assault. Justice was a quick and handy business for africano folks in that town. As Delvin stood before the judge, who wore not robes but a red-striped collarless shirt and black suspenders, he thought he could smell the citrus perfume on Celia’s letter and looked around wildly for her come to help him but she wasn’t there. The letter was gone and this hurt him in his heart. Just then the judge was speaking directly at him.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Delvin said, “I didn’t hear you.”

The judge added five days to his sentence for impertinence.

The prof wasn’t on the crime scene, but by nature of his relationship to Delvin he was implicated in the offense; the town took custody of the van (it wasn’t the first time the museum had been taken in) and planned to hold it until the authorities made sure the professor was not up to any illegal activity on his own.

In these situations usually the africano elders of the town would explain to the white fathers the value they placed on the museum, on enterprises of this sort, if not this particular enterprise, and hoped and pleaded,
Your Honor, that you might let us enjoy this celebration of simple american negro life.
The fathers, sometimes more jocosely than not, would liberate the van, not because they believed in the efficacy of nigra museums but generally because they didn’t want to get these black fools in a stir. But this time, in Haplessburg or Muttstown or whatever it was called, they were not so quick to see the good side of the museum’s existence.

“You are already stirring up trouble with that vexacious tribunery,” they said. “If we release it, you might cause even more trouble.”

“We receive so little in the way of education about our people . . . ,” the professor began, but one of the fathers, a usually genial druggist named Mames, stared at the pencil he was holding as if it might be a magic wand of some kind and said, “What you talking about—your people? You aint got no
people
. You’re a nigra—am I right?”

“Yessir, I am.”

“The nigras are not a people. They are just—what’s the word I’m looking for, Monk? Not a herd—”

“A flock?” Monk Wilkes, the florid owner of the hardware store, said.

“No, damn it!”

“That’s a quarter for swearing in the meeting,” the mayor, a disputacious little lawyer and landlord, said.

“Not a flock,” Mames said, “no, they’re just—well, there is no name for what you are. You’re just an ordinary part of the life of folks in this area, like junebugs or dirt daubers or possums. Wait—okay:
Folks
is what you are, just folks. The Israelites,
they
are a people. The
Chinese
are a people.
Americans
are a people.
You
are
folks
.”

He smiled complacently at the professor who stood before him in what he called his presentation clothes, a pair of faded but very clean black broadcloth pants with a yellow shirt and cream-colored canvas jacket, waiting patiently for a chance to speak. When it came, he said calmly that he believed the exhibit helped colored folks—folks, he said—to appreciate how good their lives were down here in the rural south. Let them know how rich and pleasant it is. (Truth was he believed that, despite all this nonsensical fuss, it
was
a good life—a good life being possible under almost any conditions. This was one of his major philosophical points.)

The mayor screwed up his little empty blue eyes and said, “We will take this matter under advisement and let you know.”

The professor attempted to plead further that the museum was his life’s work and only means of earning a living and so forth, but these pleadings did not sway the fathers. They waved him out with the disinterested courtesy of retired mule skinners seeing an oldtime customer onto a bus, and the chief of police ushered him from the room.

From the moment he was in the hands of the police Delvin experienced tides of nausea that rolled in carrying his expectation of discovery of his Tennessee crime and rolled out with any sort of courage he might have. He stayed by himself as best he could and thought distractedly of escape. He watched the fields of corn that stretched away from the central compound. He walked the fence line and gazed at the play of fat cumulus drifting across the blue sky. Trapped, he thought, I’m trapped. Each day, when any of the officers spoke to him or came near him or appeared around the deckle-braid corner of the barracks or hollered for the prisoners to truck it up and climb into the rickety dust-splattered bus that carried them out to work in the vegetable fields, a tension gripped him by the shoulders, stiffened his face and bent him down and robbed him of readiness to confront what he was sure was coming. The other prisoners noticed his state of mind. A couple tried to calm him, pointing out that his sentence was short and the work at the farm was not any harder than it would be on the outside. “You gets three squares and clean bedding every two weeks,” Sully John Baker, a short gray-headed man, told him. Delvin thanked him for the info and continued his distracted wandering around the compound. It would have been easy enough to escape (in the cornfields they were often out of sight of the guards), but he didn’t want to take the chance. And he didn’t want to get the professor into any further trouble. After a week he began to calm down. He began to believe that if they were going to discover him they would have done it by now. He relaxed enough to be able to sit in the little shed they used as a dining hall and eat a healthy portion of his cornbread and stew beans. It was at this point that twin brothers from the west side of the county, also in for fighting, decided to
test Delvin along these lines. Delvin pointed out that he was not a fighter at all but simply a man who had been assaulted by white men (they were in the colored section of the county farm). The brothers did not consider this a sufficient disincentive and waylaid Delvin at the outdoor washing area and knocked him down. He slid half under the sidewalk-like boards before the washstands, cutting and twisting his ankle. This laid him up for five days in the farm hospital where he spent his time reading religious tracts. He considered himself lucky not to have had to suffer more of this material. The Bible had been always too bloodthirsty for his taste, a mix of self-glorification and sideshow magic that led only to feeling bad about yourself.

When the cut on his ankle healed a little and the swelling from the sprain went down Delvin was given light duty checking equipment in the work shed. He checked and handed out hoes and mattocks and the cane poles used to knock pecans out of the farm trees as well as the canvas picking sacks for the apple orchard. The work was not onerous and he had ample time to jot descriptions and compose letters to Celia into his notebook that the professor had brought him. He posted his letters in the wooden box nailed to a post by the camp store. He was nervous about them going out stamped with the return address of the work farm, but he figured Celia would understand his situation, which he explained in his second letter;
I have nothing to be ashamed of
, he wrote. She said as much in her first letter.
It’s hard to live without getting stung by a bee once or twice in your life
, she answered. He read this sitting on the screened back porch of the potting shed where he was working, potting geraniums for the farm shop in Mooksville. His hands even after he washed them in the big galvanized sink still smelled of the sludgy potting soil that was made from mule manure and vegetable compost. He held her letter with the tips of his fingers. It smelled of her orangey perfume.

Segregation on the farm was strict. There was no mixing of the races, at work or at meals or in the barracks. The white folks, determined and nervous, felt better when it was like this. Delvin didn’t mind. He’d had only a slight and glancing contact with white people; he never missed them, busy as they were organizing themselves and
battering the world into shape. He was happy sitting on the bench among the spindly young geraniums. A slight breeze eased through the screen, cooling him. He wished he could swing the flimsy door open and walk out to meet Celia. He thought of the small indentation on the right side of her nose. He thought of this place often. He could remember it when he could not remember (without his crib sheet) the other parts of her. He wanted to sit in a cool place and talk with her about the books they were reading and about the tiny flat pressed-in place on her nose. He had proved slow in the fields, weak really, knocked back by the heavy sunshine, and fell behind early. It made sense to transfer him to the potting shed, and after he was wounded to check-out and -in duty. Much of his time was spent in the shed alone. Here he wrote his letters.

But what could you do
, he wrote,
when you find people you cleave to who are up to things you don’t go for?

I guess you get used to what’s unnatural to you
, she wrote back,
if you can, or try to, but sometimes maybe you can’t and I guess that’s one of the places grief comes from.

He could tell she was edging away from him. He mentioned this in a letter, but in the return she didn’t address it.

Afternoons in the potting shed he looked out of the half-painted window, thinking of the people he knew, calling their names in a low voice. His mother was first, then his brothers and sister, then Mr. Oliver, then Polly, then the professor and Celia, and on down the line through the boys from the alley and the others he ran with in the woods and climbed with into wild cherry trees in June and the children from the homes and people he had met traveling on the trains and working in the museum, to finally the crew he had met at the farm. He had met a man named Jim here, a limping solitary prisoner, aloof and with eyes that carried an assurance that irritated the white guards and the white prisoners he encountered. Tuesday before, a guard had knocked him down, but he got right up and stood in front of the shabby overweight functionary who had only his outrage and the whole white nation to depend on, looking him straight in the eye.

“You don’t sass me, jig,” the guard said and hit him in the face
again. The lieutenant stopped him from beating Jim further, but he was sent forthwith to the box, a large freestanding tin-roofed closet behind the barracks they used for unreasonable prisoners. A small closed room with a slot in the door for food. Jim stayed there a week and was no different when he came out. He excited Delvin because he seemed able to survive with only—as he saw it—his determination for company. The older man, red-haired like some odd negroes, including the Ghost back home, was not interested in Delvin until he found out he could read and write. He asked Delvin to write a letter for him, which he did, a letter filled with pleading and sadness.

Dear Zee,
he dictated as they sat on Jim’s narrow cot,

I can not go on no longer in this foolish world without you, not a minute it’s likely sometimes, and the dust chokes me and the foul food and the whole wretched disorderly world of provocation and misery. There is no light, no place to rest in this world. I am alone with only the hope of your caress. Come to me. I am alive, trapped behind wire like an animal in a cage built on a sand hill.
The sun beats down on us with a force that makes me think the god who designed this world was a madman. I must find shade or some way to believe there will someday be shade. It is not through power or money or arms that this can be achieved. I am left only with love. What a meager portion that seems some days. But it is great and endless, I know it. The love I mean between a man and a woman and through them to the children. This is my only hope in this bitter world.

There was more and Delvin’s hand grew tired trying to keep up. Jim would stop, hold his face to the light, sniffing like a hunting dog on a scent, and wait impatiently for him to catch up. “Yes,” he said, “the word is
dereliction
, spell it as best you can. It means wreckage.” It was strange that he would know so many unusual words and not know how to write. Or read either. Jim said this was because he had been read to in his youth by an actor traveling the vaudeville circuit out west. This actor, a black man, a feeder in a crow act generally but a sometime comedian himself, had found him wandering on a street in Dallas and taken him in.

“I had something like that happen to me,” Delvin said.

“Not like this,” Jim said. The man had raised him and he had traveled with him as his factotum for several years. The man had held him in the thrall of an iniquitous sexual relationship it had taken years to extricate himself from. He had finally had to beat the man half to death and throw him down the stairs of a boarding house in Kansas City and leave him for dead to get free. “Free,” he said smiling sarcastically. “There is no damn freedom for the likes of me in this damn world.”

He believed everything in the world was corrupt and diseased.

“Except for family love,” Delvin said.

“Yeah, that,” Jim said smiling grimly. “There’s that, thank God; if you can get to it. This world,” he said, looking around as if it was sneaking up on him, “is crooked and defiled. Yet
still
, right down to the smallest speck and scurrying roach, it runs
just fine
. Which leads you to the conclusion that crooked and corrupt is how the world
likes
it.”

His glance then from his cot where he sat scrunched up against his knees was haggard and determined, winded.

“What’s a man like me to do?” he asked. He looked around as if a crowd was waiting for his answer. He blew his breath out, not a sigh but so he could draw in a strong one behind it. “I conclude it is me who is out of step. I am a foolish man bound for ignominy. But I too it appears have a right to the tree of life. How do I know this?” He twirled his right hand as if he could spiral it through to the truth. “Because I am alive. If I wasn’t meant to be here I wouldn’t be able to suck breath, I’d be like a fish when you snatch it out of the water. Smothered by air. But I am not, am I? I draw breath and breathe and my heart beats and food sustains me, so I must belong here too. What do you reckon that means?”

He hadn’t waited for Delvin to answer any of these questions.

“It must mean that the opposition I bring to the facts of life is necessary too. So it doesn’t matter what these dumb white boys have to say about me because I belong here just like they do. And my opposition to them is just as right as theirs is to me.”

Delvin said, “I don’t think their opposition is right.”

“That’s because you haven’t got the heart yet to look at the world as it is,” Jim said. “Maybe that day will come, maybe not. For many it never arrives. Most, really. They see only their side of the struggle.”

He blinked into the dimness and made a smacking sound with his full lips. “Well, I am getting tired,” he said, and with that he turned on his side and went to sleep.

This is a crazy man, Delvin thought as he sat in the shed, but he was excited by what he’d told him. He missed the professor. He missed riding along dirt roads in the van hauling photographs around the states.
There
was a foolish bit of activity. But he loved sitting out behind the van on summer twilights with citronella oil burning in the little china dish for the mosquitoes, letting the world row darkly along beside them. Time creaked by on those wandering days.

A few nights later Jim was caught trying to escape. They hauled him down off the wire fence, took him into the guard shed and beat him until he couldn’t stand and threw him into the box. He might not get out of this simple work farm alive. The farm grew corn and tomatoes and field greens and a little cotton for market and squash and butterbeans for the table. A small community of men working the sandy fields of west Dixie. Every one there except for three or four would go back to homes in the county. Some of the men were related. The white men knew the colored men and vice versa. Delvin was one of the few strangers. Everybody knew his place. Life here was unstirring. Fixed. Moldy, Delvin thought. The white folks hoped they would not have to make another big fight, but they were prepared if one came. Nobody gave up land and power without a fight. Well, what to do? The quiet in the evening here, he thought, is peaceful. It can’t help itself. Even in a war they can’t be firing the guns
all
the time. There has to be these quiet moments.
In these moments I am refreshed.
He had read these words somewhere. He remembered: Stanley Terrell, the negro philosopher from Harlem, a man known only by negro folks, who wrote that in the clamor and frenzy of the white-run life they were being hustled through, there
were still times when we could take our rest, find peace and happiness.
We do not even have to seek them out. There are already here, in moments by the well or behind the barn or walking back from the store carrying a ten-pound can of lard. In the city you can look up: above you is the endless wilderness of sky, a promised land and free to every man, a country unsullied and unclaimable, yours as well as any other’s.
He had started looking at the sky more often, studying it, at least for a while. What was that old song Mrs. Parker sang in the kitchen? Yeah: “Before I’d Be A Slave,” also called, she said, “Oh Freedom.” Oh, freedom. Terrell said freedom was everywhere. In these songs, in the quiet of the day, in the sky when you stop at the washboard and feel the softness of a piece of cloth in your hands, in the eyes of your loved ones. But of course that didn’t stop the whip from coming down.

He didn’t feel too bad sitting in the shed stuffing flowers into the brown clay pots. He waked each day with a feeling of possibility, a sweet joyous feeling sometimes. The white guard was just outside the door beating a train rail with an iron bar. The prisoners slept side by side on their rough cots and had very little to their names in this place, like sailors out at sea, and in a way this suited Delvin. He had written the professor care of general delivery and got a single answer that he was working in the kitchen of the Gold Flower restaurant on Main street washing dishes and doing a little of the short work.
They are still pondering
, he said,
whether or not to release the museum. Maybe watching to see if it will sprout arms and legs and jump on them. Nothing to do but sit and wait.