Ginny Gall (27 page)

One of the prisoners had a mouth harp that he played the old songs on. Others mocked this music and called out for something more timely. But the player, a small man with close-set lively eyes, refused. So somebody took the harp away from him. Others rose up and tried to get the harp back from the robber, a short man with muscular forearms. He in his turn refused, so they beat him. In the struggle the harp was crushed on the concrete floor, smashed by the heel of a Georgia Logger boot. Now the owner of the instrument cried in his sleep. Delvin wasn’t the only one who heard him.

So life went; they had stew beans every night for supper and some kind of pig meat, usually sowbelly, and a corn dish, usually grits, and cornbread. These were among Delvin’s natural favorites. Nobody was sentenced here for more than a year, though some had their sentences lengthened for what the white men called misbehavior. Sentences of over a year went to state prison. This is a work farm, they said, not a prison. What did they know?

By time he got out there had been no word from Tennessee and he hadn’t heard from the professor for over two weeks. A man Josie got out with him and the two of them walked into town together on the dirt road that ran through the corn and tomato fields and the fields of sweet peppers. Delvin appreciated the company, but he wasn’t interested just then in any more lectures about philosophy or racial politics, which this man Josie was known for. Josie said he didn’t mind and then launched into a monologue about general restrictions placed on negroes and what this fact represented in the larger scheme of things. The negro’s hidden superior strength was what the gist seemed to Delvin.

On a little rise Josie stopped and told Delvin to turn around and look and he did and the two of them gazed back down the long slope at the farm, a shabby, roughhewn settlement among its vegetable fields.

“A place you could rub out with the bottom of your hand,” Josie said, “a ridiculous congregation of punishment for forgetful or over-energetic colored men, a crushed, upended heap lying like a dog exposing its spotted belly to the high-class sunshine pouring down upon it.”

On a wide leather band he was wearing one of the first wristwatches Delvin had ever seen and he had a faded straw panama set back on his head and he snorted through his gob of a nose and spit a white fleck that snagged on a pepper leaf. He stretched himself and worked his shoulders—throwing off the shame and degradation, he said. “I can feel it sliding back down this hill,” he said, smiling his snaggle-toothed smile.

Delvin had been returned a short gray pencil and his old blue flip-top notebook as well as a copy of the passing novel
Flight
by Walter White of Chicago and printed in that city by the Constant Press. As he read the book—as he did with every book—Delvin had turned back often to study the title and copyright pages, wondering about the world that had produced the volume. He was touched by the county’s willingness to return his property. He had thought the authorities would simply throw his belongings away, or at least complicate their retrieval, but it had them ready in a paper sack with his name scribbled in black ink on the side. They even gave him the sack.

He mentioned this to Josie, who began to make crowing noises, flapping his arms with his hands tucked under his armpits as he jumped around him.

“Well, all right,” Delvin said. Jim Crow—he got it. “Where you headed now?” he asked.

Josie paused mid-crow and shook his head. “I’ll just trot off in one direction or the other as the incitement takes me,” he said with a softened inflection.

Delvin thought about offering him a ride in the van but he wasn’t sure the professor had gotten the van back or what he might say about the non-owner offering a stranger a ride. He had been in the past a little testy about such behavior on Delvin’s part.

He poked around looking but the professor was nowhere to be found. He could hardly believe he had gone off and left him. With Josie he walked across town to the negro barbershop. He waked the single barber in his porcelain chair and asked him—fat, unshaven, with a merry manner—if he’d seen Professor Carmel, the spare-set gentleman in a long canvas coat and so forth.

The barber said he had indeed and that many like himself—meaning in the negro establishment—had been given a message to pass on to Delvin when he showed up.

“What message was that?”

“Let me see,” the barber, a Mr. Floris, said and rummaged in a small counter drawer among combs and hair nets and various pieces
of old dismantled hand clippers until he found what he was looking for, a folded piece of blue paper with Delvin’s name on the outside in the professor’s florid script.

I would have squatted naked in the rain in the public square waiting for you son but they threatened me with the whip and the pains of pitch fire if I did not get out of this town and put at least thirty-five miles between myself and it or that is between the museum and their ignorant dishonorable asses. So I have hightailed it. I am headed to Haverness and will wait if allowed for you there. Don’t fret or be low spirited any more than you have to. Obstacles are only a means for sharpening the wits. Glory to you, boy.

It was signed with the professor’s full name, Professor Clemens John Carmel MS, a name the first part of which Delvin had not heard the professor call himself before.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I need you to tell me how to get to Haverness.”

“Haverness,” the barber said. “I can not only tell you how to get there, but also where you might find yourself a ride with a gentleman going that way.”

He got a ride with Arthur Turnbill, who was hauling a load of sweetgrass hay to Mr. J. B. Suber, a white man up in Conniston county. Josie said he’d like to come along. In the truck Josie squirmed, fidgeted, popped his fingers on the gray metal dash and talked all the time until Mr. Turnbill asked him to take a little time off from it. He then commenced to humming. The humming was tuneless and this drove both Delvin and Mr. Turnbill crazy until Mr. Turnbull, a narrow-faced man with large fleshy lips, asked Josie to get in the back with the hay. Josie looked as if he’d been asked to swim with alligators.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just the naturally jumpy type. They say it was because my mother spilt hot grease on me when I was a baby, causing me not to trust in the given supports of this life, but I am working hard to get over—”

“Please,” Mr. Turnbull, himself a nervous man, said, jerking his head and his eyes to the left. He had pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the truck when he performed this pantomime. The sky was gradually filling in the southwest corner with bruised shadow-gray clouds like big balled fists. Delvin could smell the sweet dry scent of the hay. Off in the distance two red cows stood in the shade of a large oak tree. They didn’t appear to be concerned by any circumstance in the world of human beings. Delvin experienced a small quiet flood of happiness. What a thing it was to be alive. The sky was the glossy blue of turquoise jewelry. He started a popping little finger tune on the dash. Turnbill eyed him. “Yikes,” he softly said and apologized. “You want me to get in the back too?”

“I want both of you to be still before I put you out walking on the road.”

Except for a small burst of song from Josie they both remained silent unless spoken to—both still in the cab—for the rest of the way into Haverness.

In Haverness a row of houses on the highway opened into a district of shops and stores around a courthouse square that pushed up on the far side against a long cotton warehouse. They didn’t find the professor, but there was a note from him held by the minister of the Walls of Jericho Baptist church that said he was called away to attend the funeral of his cousin up in Rance City but would wait there for a week to see if they were following. They traveled by freight to RC, but there too they missed Professor Carmel. He left word with another minister, Caleb Jenkins of the local AME church, housed in a green-painted low wooden building behind the Rance City peanut mill. In the note, scrawled nearly illegibly on a scrap of greasy paper bag still smelling of fried chicken, he apologized but said against his will he was forced to leave RC due to complications with the local officials concerning a fracas over some allegedly pilfered property.

Delvin was ready to push on, but Josie was by this time exhausted.

“Our time on this earth is by its nature a trial to the endurance of human beings,” he said, “but I see no need to make things worse.”

He said he thought he might tarry a while in Rance City.

Delvin said he was sorry to see him leave the expedition, but he understood.

Josie then changed his mind half a dozen times before flopping down on the side of remaining in town.

“I can find work here,” he said, “maybe picking plums or some such thing.” It was long past plum season and the only plums Delvin had heard of in this part of the world anyway were of the sour yellow variety that flourished beside the roadways throughout. They were free for the picking, but few were known to want to pay money for any amount of them.

“I have notions to become a cook,” Josie said. “Cooks have time on their hands and are known for their eccentric and sometimes foolish-seeming ways. My off hours will give me time to work on my book.”

This book fascinated Delvin. Josie had twice shown it to him as they traveled, but though he (or his scrivener) had covered both sides of many pieces of scrap paper he carried wrapped in oilskin in his county-issued paper bag, Delvin had been unable to make any sense of it. This, Delvin figured, was the case with many a would-be writer. He himself might be among that unfortunate number. This thought dashed him slightly, but he remembered that he was still very young. This, so he figured, weighed in his favor; he had many years of energetic effort ahead of him, and even if his novice attempts made little sense and were hardly more than notes, quotations and lists of people and items he had encountered on his travels, he believed he would someday have the skill to shape these materials into a narrative stunning in its force and clarity, or at least readable.

“Fruit preserves,” Josie said when he asked about the interest in plums. “Fruit preserves are the secret passion of many a soul. Loved everywhere. You ever seen anybody turn down a helping of fruit preserves? Of course you haven’t. And what better way to start as a chef than with concoctions the main ingredient of which is free for the picking.”

Delvin pointed out that they had missed the plum season by two months at least.

“Gives me time to gather my materials and procure use of a kitchen,” Josie said with a ferocious and sly and somewhat doggish grin.

They were both dressed in faded overalls, Josie in a strap undershirt and carrying a greasy leather jacket and Delvin in a soft-collared red shirt that along with his underwear he washed every night and hung up to dry. His shoes were getting old and cracked but he hadn’t the money to replace them.

They walked around town looking in shop windows. Josie preferred the hardware stores where he could peruse cookware and other kitchen paraphernalia and Delvin enjoyed office supply stores. They both enjoyed the mule barn. In Rance City mules were sold out of a brick barn attached to a hardware and farm supply store. They worked their way over there past the sewing shop, the department store, the pharmacy with the spinning pinwheels in the window, the dime store (where they stopped off and walked the undulate wooden floors looking for pocket knives which they found and couldn’t afford but enjoyed studying through the glass case window), the men’s shop, dress shop, red brick hotel and restaurant, paint store, granite bank with recessed windows and big brass door, appliance store with the washing machines and new Frigidaires standing out on the sidewalk ready for purchase, a couple of insurance offices, two car dealerships (Ford and Packard), the movie theater showing a double bill of
Constant Motion
and
The Flamingo Kid Goes to Paris
, starring Manfred Boudin the Dancing Cowboy. He thought occasionally of the life of movie stars, tickled that at the moment he was thinking of Gloria Swanson or Ramón Navarro they were at that same moment, possibly, sitting down to supper in their dining nooks or washing their socks in the upstairs bathroom, maybe cutting pictures out of a magazine to paste into a scrapbook. Movie stars, soldiers, famous negro writers and artists excited him. He was prone, if not to hero worship, to affection for successful people. He felt some of this affection for Josie who seemed far ahead of him with his plans and accomplishments. In one part of himself he knew Josie was scatterbrained and bootless, but still he wanted to believe in his writing plans; he
was the first person he’d met who was writing a book, and Josie had encouraged him to begin one too. Plenty of room in that profession, he said.

They talked often of books and were in fact talking of the book
Smashed Idols
, written by the negro thinker Davis Stuckey, who lived, so the flyleaf said, on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, when they entered the Harding Hardware and Sale Barn on Stomont street across from the city waterworks. A boy Delvin’s age was leading three mules down the low wooden ramp from the barn into the street. He tied the mules to an iron post ring and went back inside. The smells of equine matters reminded Delvin of the stable shed back in Chattanooga. He wondered how the Ghost was doing. Probably by now riding the horses around town with a feather in his hat. And felt a shiver when he thought of what still lay in wait for him there, police lurking, his face most probably still on a wanted poster at the post office (though he’d never seen it out in the world), men growing old but still on standby, keeping an eye out for the cold-hearted shooter of white children, hands ready to reach out quick as a cat to catch that boy should he reappear in the oldtime streets. He shuddered. Nights he had lain awake thinking of the trouble to come. They entered the store and poked around for a while among the metal and leather and wood items. A white man looked hard at them and Delvin smiled a friendly smile. “Cooking equipment,” he said. “Over yonder,” the man said, indicating with his chin some low shelves. “Thank you, sir.” He had never cared much for these stores. In Harding’s the equipment, tools, the bulbous or spirally or contorted or bent metal and other work minutiae, baffled and oppressed him so that in a short time he began to sweat and feel as if he needed air.