Ginny Gall (40 page)

He had stood up and started to walk out of the courtroom. A shout arose and some guard, some man he didn’t even know, had clubbed him in the ear. He still had a little cauliflowering from the blow. With the blow (it had been as if) his mind had been knocked out of his body into the street two floors down. He couldn’t believe it—that was putting it mildly.

All these years later he has come to believe it. His mind has filtered on through that.

This man, Preacher Ansley, who himself stuck a knife in the gizzard of some man he thought cheated him, wants him to believe in some alien god. Well, he will get to that when he has finished with this other project, thanks.

He watches the preacher as he walks, swinging lightly a spring of sorrel grass against his leg, and enters the shade of the barracks. Each barracks has two lanterns. There is no real protection against night life. Men lie awake in the dark listening to the mosquitoes whine and the little house lizards chirp. His own steps are lighter now, but not from happiness. Or not only from that. He has told the doc he is better. The doc has made it clear that he isn’t cured but he’s accepted his claim to feeling well enough to get out. Delvin wants to be free of this extra imprisonment. At least he can escape from the infirmary. His clothes smell of sulfur and citronella. He stood in the shade on the
eastern side of the infirmary shaking the outdoor smell into his shirt. But he can still smell the pesthouse on his body.

His step is trivial and untrustworthy, the step of a sick man. He wants to lie down in the dust. He stops walking and Milo offers another drink from the tin cup he carries, an act of love since he too thinks the malaria is contagious. The blood sluices in Delvin’s veins; he can feel it washing back and forth, a heatedness picking up speed. The top of his back feels as if a hot board is pressing against it. He staggers; it takes both of them to catch him up. Steadies, he pauses and takes the cup. The sip of water brings with it a yearning for mountain air, for water that tastes of granite, of iron. Often these delicacies of his past revisited. At first he thought they might be helpful in sustaining his drive to escape but they aren’t. He tries to avoid them, but sometimes, as now, they come unbidden.

Up ahead, on the wooden bench encircling the big water oak, Bulky Dunning sits weaving a length of grass rope. Bulky never weaves lengths longer than two or three feet. Any longer and the guards will confiscate it. Some of these lengths he is able to secrete in various cubbyholes around the prison. He plans to go over the wire using one of the joined-together ropes. Delvin knows all about this. Bulky offered to take him with him and Delvin is glad to see that during his period of incapacitation he hasn’t run off. They met at Delvin’s second day at Uniball, when Bulky asked if he was familiar with the negro writer Zora Hurston. No, he said, he wasn’t. “How do you spell that,” he asked. Bulky carefully spelled the name. “Never met anybody named Zora,” Delvin said. “Oh,” Bulky, a bright-eyed little man with a thin mustache, said, “I know several. Down in Florida where I come from they’re all over.” The remark made Delvin laugh. Bulky went on to describe her work, light-footed stories that caught the flavor of negritude without its being stained with white folks’ life. “Some kind of dream?” Delvin had asked. “Better,” Bulky had answered. “‘I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal.’ That’s her.” Delvin had let out a
low whistle. “Well, no wonder I never heard of that woman.” “Yeah,” Bulky said. “Spoken by somebody who’s found a way out of the general disrespectfulness.” Delvin laughed again. The words had pricked him; he experienced a sulky, sullen shame that evaporated as quickly as it came. “I want to read one of her books.” But Bulky didn’t have one and he couldn’t remember any of the titles.

He looks up now from plaiting his eternal rope. He stretches the rope through his fingers and flicks the tail of it, smiling calmly at Delvin he gets up and enters the barracks. He wanted that first day, or the day after, to slide into Delvin’s bed, but Delvin shooed him out. “I’m spoke for,” he whispered, which was what he said from the beginning though it hadn’t always worked; he hadn’t always wanted it to; Sandy Suber up at Uniball he loved like he’d never loved a man before, but Sandy died of diphtheria, moaning and blind and crying for his sister. Crouching beside his bed in the dark, Bulky said he didn’t really mind and appeared not to. They talked occasionally when their paths crossed out in the fields and sometimes after supper Bulky would sit with Delvin on the steps behind the kitchen and talk about his boyhood in Florida. He had swum in the Gulf of Mexico, the first colored person Delvin had met who’d done that, and he’d raked oysters and fished for speckled trout with his uncle who owned a boat. These stories charged Delvin up. He wanted to dive into that big blue water even though he hardly knew how to swim. Delvin knows where Bulky keeps his rope. It is coiled in a little rack under the floor of one of the old deserted barracks where it juts over a latrine. The fit is tight and smelly. The officers never poke up there and the prisoners they send feeling around come back saying there wont nothing but black widow spiders. Bulky won’t speak about what is or isn’t under the floor.

As Delvin counts it this is the night Bulky plans to make the slip; thus the occasion of his early release from the infirmary. Bulky isn’t afraid of the red dog, but he is worried about taking along a sick man. He visited Delvin in the infirmary and though no words were spoken on the subject, Delvin understood Bulky to be giving him the high sign on the decampment.

Delvin straightens up. He can bring himself to bear in whatever
way is needed—this is what he always tells himself even though it isn’t always true. But now the sweet lift of floating, of drifting through the hot afternoon, calls him. He nods at Bulky and with Milo supporting him makes his way along a path that curves around behind the barracks. Milo directs him into a wide turn toward the barracks door. The shade is no cooler than the sunlight and this pleases him. He squeezes Milo’s arm to make him stop. Over beyond the next barracks, in a chokecherry tree that still has a few black berries in it, before Delvin was hauled off to the pesthouse, a mockingbird took up early morning residence. Bird won’t be there now, but he wants to make sure. The tree is the tallest of three skinny chokecherries just beyond the barracks. The mockingbird lit each morning in the highest branches of the tallest tree, the one on the right. Mockingbirds always like to be as high as they can get. Early, just after the gray light was split open by the morning’s first coloring, the bird took up its trill and its rising and falling forays, imitations of robins and bobwhites and the old brown thrasher bird, cats and even the screek of squirrels. Each morning on the way to breakfast Delvin stopped to listen. The bird is gone now. Maybe Milo’d noticed him, but he doesn’t want to be told the bird no longer comes around. Looking, staring really—no sir.

“No, sir,” the boy says as if he heard, “I aint seen him.”

And they stand gazing like communicants at the empty trees.

After the fight, the ruinous fight, all those years ago now—twelve years by today’s count—he climbed up on top of the boxcar, a blue Tweetsy car, and sat on the catwalk looking at the country. He felt strong and alive, he felt like singing outloud. Off beyond the tailing run of a big grain field the train had passed a small zoo. The zoo had a camel and a bear and a stringy panther cat, some raccoons and possums. He had seen it before on this run. The camel had two humps, one of which flopped over like a half-empty sack. The bear looked dazed. As the train passed the bear rose up on its hind legs and holding to the cage wire gazed at the train. He looked like he knew all about the fight. Delvin felt sad for the bear locked up in a cage and he remembered how the sadness mingled with the satisfaction and easy fatigue from the fight. Then it seemed, just at that moment, as if something was about
to be explained, or fall into place, as if he and the bear and everything else living in the world suddenly knew about it and expected it and would be glad when it happened, but the moment slipped by like the zoo slipping by around the long bend and a salient of dark green pines.

“I missed that mockingbird,” Delvin says.

He feels all of a sudden cast down, burned through by the sun, broken up and scattered. Fool loneliness, that’s what it is, and what is he doing thinking about that?

In another minute they are in the barracks and Milo is trying to help him into bed.

“I don’t need none,” Delvin says. He wants to look strong.

He does a couple of jumps just to make Bulky, sitting on his rack three bunks away, think he is a springy character. Is Bulky paying attention? He can’t tell; maybe he is looking at him through his private mosquito net.

Delvin lets himself down again, leans back and after telling Milo to wake him in an hour goes to sleep.

Two hours later he wakes with Milo shaking him and telling him to come to supper. Bulky passes the bed as Delvin is getting up. He leans down without fully stopping, or only stopping for a second—Delvin drowsy still, hot and sweaty—and says “I’ll catch you on the right side,” and passes on smiling in that sideways way he has so he is actually smiling at something off to the other direction.

After supper and after a walk around the compound in the Sunday dusk that smells of green pecans, after a few short conversations with this or that wise or feckless one, he heads back to his bed. The sheet still smells faintly of his body. Milo squats next to him.

“We’ll wake you,” Delvin says.

The boy’s eyes shine. He lets his hand fall on the boy’s; the pull of his flesh that always smells faintly of wood smoke is strong; he grips the two middle fingers and lets go. He wants to grab the boy’s shirt collar and pull him down, smash his face right into his own. The boy’s fine soft lips are sweet. He wants everything in him, wants the weight of flesh on him, wants to feel his hands, the ingenious fingers, the energy that leaps into him from Milo’s touch. But he is too tired. He wants to
sleep and he wants to be alone even more than he wants the boy. He wants to escape into oblivion. His shoulders ache deep in the sockets.

Milo runs his hand over Delvin’s knuckles.

“You feel like you coming back to life,” he says. “I like that.”

He grins. Around them others are getting ready for their night’s endeavors, alone or with a friend. The bell rings for lights out. Little Boy Dunlap blows out the lanterns. He makes a little funny squealing sound after he blows out the last one. Sam Brown, Little Boy’s protector, laughs as he always does. The prisoners can hear guards out in the yards talking. They will be walking around all night. They have a routine not difficult to keep track of. Delvin lies listening to the footfalls. He recognizes Blubber Watts’s heavy step. Blubber will beat you to death if you give him half a reason. Or no reason at all, Delvin thinks just before he vanishes into sleep.

There was plenty of room in the jail, but for safety’s sake they were kept now in two holding cells at the courthouse. Deputies, sweating in the heat, brought them up the back stairs to the third floor and through a side door into another holding cell, this a large room with benches around the walls and, screwed into blocks set into the walls, steel rings heavy chains ran through. The negroes—become the KO boys—were cuffed to these chains. Their legs were shackled. Nobody’d told Little Buster or Butter Beecham about working the cloth of their pants under the shackles, so they had sores now around their ankles. These sores that were beginning to ulcerate kept them awake at night. Delvin listened to them moaning and crying in the bunks across from him. He had gotten up to see to them but there was nothing he could do; he regretted forgetting to tell them about the tuck-in. He mentioned the problem to Billy Gammon and Gammon told the deputies, but the deputies didn’t care. His words bounced off their impervious eyeballs and lay withered and derelict on the floor. He thought maybe if I keep talking I’ll build a pile of words that’ll bury them, but he knew there weren’t enough words.

Gammon told the deputies that the doc said they’d have to delay the trial if the boys got sick or hurt and he’d heard the sheriff complaining already about how much the damn trial was costing the county; he tried that.

“You the ones costing the county,” Deputy Fred Wirkle said with a slapped-on smirk. “You ought to plead those jigs out and let us get on to frying em.”

Gammon gave a weak smile. “We were gon do that, but if we did these New York slickers would just start the appeals and then we would really be in a mess.”

“You the one’s a mess, Billy boy,” Deputy Bee Banks said.

He lived now in the hotel and liked being there in his little room that looked out on the alley. When it rained, water ran down the alley, carrying bits of grass and twigs and chunks of crumbling yellow dirt in a foamy stream that gurgled as it ran. It was as if he was living in a forest and not right in the middle of town. A maid came in every week to change the sheets and towels. He called his mother a couple times a week and they talked about how things were out on the farm. He had attended the state university and then the law school and she had made him promise to come back to Big Cumber county after that. He planned to leave as soon as the trial was over. Those two youngest boys didn’t understand yet that they were being
tried
. “But, mister,” fifteen-year-old Bony Bates said, “I aint done nothing. Tell em I aint done nothing.” The youngest, thirteen-year-old Little Buster Wayfield liked to play with a piece of string one of the deputies had given him. He made a cat’s cradle and swung a little acorn baby in it. He couldn’t concentrate enough to make out the charges. He smiled at whatever was said to him and reckoned, so he said, that the white mens were going to do what they needed to. Yes, Little Buster, they were. The boy didn’t seem to mind being in jail. He was a skinny child who had never gotten enough to eat and figured he was doing pretty well now. Most of the others couldn’t read or write. The one who understood best was the one who had started it all when he talked back to Carl Willis. Willis looked like a Sunday school boy. Walker was as black as Africa. Even among the colored folks he was considered low class. He had too much smartness in his eyes. But he was young too and Billy could see how scared he was. “How you going to get me free of this, Mr. Gammon?” he had asked. “What you going to do?”

It was obvious those girls were lying. One of them, the skinny one, looked like all she wanted to do was sneak off and forget the whole thing. Billy had talked to her about the Lord, His stand on deceit. She had gotten a sick look on her face when he told her that sending them to the electric chair on a lie was the same as murdering them. But she didn’t change her story. You got locked in, he knew
that. Fear—and pride, the old devil. Marcus Worley, the county attorney, had told him if he ever came near those girls again he would have him disbarred. People talked like that, but they all had to live with each other down here. After these boys—white and colored—were gone the rest of us would have to go on living together side by side. It wasn’t like up north where people didn’t live together like we do down here. When you’re close, you got to have an assigned sacrificial lamb. Local version. “Hell, I aint hardly
barred
as it is,” he’d told Marcus, and they’d both laughed.

He’d grown tired of legal work, but it didn’t matter, still the years rolled on. His spirit had taken the shape of the suit the profession fit him for.

“Lord, don’t you let these crackers run me to the electric chair over some false testimony by women I don’t even know.” These words from Walker made sweat break out. The tone, the word
crackers
, made Billy want to slap the little seal’s face. Pullen had got to his feet and leaned over the table and said, “You better start practicing your manners if you want to come out of this alive, boy.” He was as bad as the prosecutors. Only Harris had been silent. Watching the exchange with a bemused expression on his hawkish face. He thought he was above all this. Thought he was smart enough to figure a way around a Dixie judge and jury. He’d find out on that one.

The trial jounced on like a runaway wagon. The big girl, Lucille Blaine, could talk all day. She sneered even at the prosecutor. She wore a dark blue crepe dress with white leather belt and white shoes and you could hear her stockings sizzle like searing meat as she walked from the rear of the courtroom. In the high-backed rail chair she had the confidence of the unreachable. Poking from her bland extruded face you could see the ridges of stony refusal, the uncomplicitous aggrievement and hatred. The world has come to this, Billy thought. It was decaying to stone before our eyes but we took no notice. He had no love for these black fellows but sometimes
he wanted to go into a small quiet room and weep there. Wrath, he thought, like the Bible turned inside out.

What had been done to this woman could not be undone and this scared him.

“I wouldn’t have no truck with a nigra,” she said. “Who would? They got diseases and, well, it would make me sick to my death.”

She showed her big shiny teeth to the jury and the jury shrunk back. She would eat the ones who disagreed. The courtroom smelled of gravy sandwiches and grease. “
This
one here, and those
other ones
,” she said, “came at me in that train car like I was a chicken they was trying to cut its head off with a ax. They was all laughing and they had a fire in their eyes. They pushed me down in this old messy straw. The straw dust got up my nose and made me sneeze. I couldn’t stop sneezing even when they threw my dress up over my head and went at me. I was crying and sneezing at the same time. And yelling to Jesus. That’s how I got the big bruise on my face. One of them—I think—and I think—and I think—” and Pullen stopped her because the judge wouldn’t and in his most affable manner asked the judge to explain to the young lady that she could only testify to what she had seen—not speculated. The judge smiled at the woman whom he would never have in his house, or even in his yard—or his street or his town that had a rose-twined arch under which travelers passed as they entered from the western environs—if he could help it, and reminded her of the rules. But when the traveler did it again, saying that she thought (
and thought and thought and thought
) it was—stopped by Pullen—the judge frowned at the lawyer and told him to quit harassing the witness. The traveler shed a smile like a bitter cry and plunged on, wielding her heavy knives and cannon and sorrow.

So she can’t let on, Billy thought—not anywhere on earth or in heaven—that she, a white woman, had let a black man have his way with her. (
Somebody
had—so the doctor said—but that somebody had probably paid and got his favor before she even left the rail yards up in Chattanooga. That was what she was doing on the train—working.) Even if the nigra paid, she had still let him. If she told the truth, the bottom might fall out of the bucket. Like everybody here,
he thought—each one of us fighting and dodging and swinging whatever weapon we can lift—she was trying to fend off the shame of it.

“I was scared they was gon kill me,” Lucille said, Miss Blaine. “The way they threw me around.”

A tittering at this due to Miss Blaine’s massivity. She glared at the assembled, swung a glare at the lawyers and the judge. “A man is strong,” she said. “Too strong. If any of you was a woman you’d know that.”

Her face was bright pink, and grainy like watermelon, and she was crying now, tiny round dark tears like birdshot rolling down her cheeks. Billy thinking this. For a moment he hated her. Even though he knew if what she was saying wasn’t true
now
, it was probably true
sometime,
somewhere
for her.

“They scratched me, and that one there”—she pointed at either Delvin Walker or Rollie Gregory, the largest and the oldest of the accused—“beat on me with his fist. Beat me like I was heaven’s gate locked against him.
Hell’s
gate.”

On she went, casting her net of hatred and fury. She swayed and lurched in her seat like a woman blown by storm—or like a woman, Pullen had said, dodging a whip. The white observers, leaning forward, their legs stiff, their hands working handkerchiefs, their faces rigid or slack-jawed with attention—that ripe individual over there sprawled in his chair like Caiphus or that old woman with her thin rouged lips lifted off her dog teeth or that young bailiff pressing with his fist a red mark into his forehead or the spiffy little judge with eyes squinched up into his bushy brows—all absorbing this, filling up with the befouled words, the words giving them something like life, but better.

And what was that? he thought. What was better than life? And what about the colored folk up in the balcony. They looked on with subreption and woe like a dullness and thinned-out hope in their faces.

But Billy didn’t have time to answer.

The big woman leaned back in her chair, settling her prayer-meeting dress around her. “I never stop feeling the hurt of it,” she said. Her cheeks glowed with suffering virtue.

She is trading her immortal soul, Billy thought, for a moment of irreproachable righteousness. It didn’t matter that she was lying. How could it? A moment like this was probably never coming again for a woman like this. It didn’t matter what the truth was. What mattered was filling head and heart with righteousness, for once finding something she could put her soul into. Like everybody, whether sorting through their own meagerness or fossicking their children’s lives for talents they didn’t have or stacking up cargo in the back room or abetting what they thought of as goodness—some something they could get behind with all they had. And the preacher, speaking from the rolled-down window of his Cadillac, saying, “Pass it on to the Lord, sinner.”

These thoughts zipped by and were gone.

Poor woman, he thought.

As they walked out last night from the hotel room they worked in now, Harris had said to him: “She’s going to have to stay mad all her life.” He was chuckling quietly as he said this, in wonder, a familiar wonder. Billy saw now what he meant. She was lying like a little boy saying it was trolls knocked him down and got his Sunday clothes dirty. Well, maybe it
was
trolls. And maybe this woman had been raped. Sure she had. She’d been raped and beaten and purely deceived, right from the set-out probably—this was what Harris had said as they sat out on the hotel’s second-floor porch, the old man smoking a cigarillo and drinking Spanish brandy from a tiny snifter—“misused and punished for things she didn’t do and lied to probably by every man she met. And now she has her chance to correct all that. These boys are the ones elected to pay the price for all those other boys who got away.”

“What can we do?” Billy had asked, as if he didn’t already know what the old man told him, or what was coming.

“Well, we will see,” Harris had said, tipping the snifter in his short pudgy fingers so the brandy almost but not quite spilled.

Now in the airy courtroom the old man from the
Daily Worker
’s legal auxiliary got to his feet. He began to ask the woman, Miss Blaine, questions about the details. What were the men wearing?
Did she notice anything special about any of them? If they had pulled her dress over her head, how could she identify who had done what? Why was it she had not gotten blood on her? Walker and the others were cut in the fight and they were wearing clothes splashed with blood. Why was it that none of the white boys had at first mentioned that a rape had occurred? What about her history? Did she not work regularly as a prostitute on the Richmond & Hattiesburg freight lines? Wasn’t prostitution her regular means of employment?

The judge stopped this line of questioning. “We are here,” he said tapping the bench top with his forefinger, “to find out what happened on the afternoon of September eight.”

“Why were you on that train?” Harris asked.

“I heard about jobs in Memphis.”

“What jobs were those, Miss Blaine?”

“Housework, cleaning.”

“Have you done much housework, Miss Blaine?”

“My share.”

“Could you tell us the names of some of your employers?”

Miss Blaine had forgotten their names.

Harris asked about the treatments for gonorrhea, in Chattanooga and Roanoke, Virginia.

The judge stopped him again.

Harris picked away at her story through the warm fall afternoon. The courtroom smelled of sweat and overly saturated perfume. Delvin could smell from somewhere nearby the slightly sour odor of cow manure somebody’d tracked in. It was all he could do not to leap from his chair to argue with the white woman. “Tell me one true thing about me—ME!” he wanted to shout. He knew she wouldn’t be able to say one thing. She was like a locustwood knot, nothing to her but sap and hardheadedness. Mr. Oliver used to call him hardheaded. Well he should come see hardheadedness now. He looked around the courtroom, but there was no Mr. Oliver. He had left after their meeting in the jail and Delvin had not heard from him since.
People had written him—Celia’s letters were the ones he cherished—and the Ghost had been in town for two weeks. Delvin had seen him standing outside the jail and waved to him. The Ghost acted like he didn’t know it was him waving. But the next day he showed up again, taking the same spot as the day before, next to the boiled peanuts stand. The steam from the boiler blew over Winston, alternately concealing and revealing him. He was as skinny as ever. Delvin had waved, but again the Ghost hadn’t acknowledged him. He was in the same spot most days of the two weeks and he never indicated that he had seen Delvin. He was in the courtroom too, on the second day, but Delvin had not seen him since.