Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He spent the morning sleeping in a back bedroom at Mrs. Cutler’s house and then in the afternoon up the gully in a little pinestraw nest he fashioned under some rhododendron bushes, sleeping some more and writing in his notebook. Mostly notes. Fragments of nothing much, signs painted on the sides of barns saying HERE IT IS in some form or other, extra tall men craning to see over a board fence, a woman washing her hair in a tub out behind a poultry yard. A big dark hemlock by a stream had jolted him. He wanted to jolt people. Touch them in a secret place. That was all right. He’d seen army men in full packs marching down a dusty road that went nowhere. “What you think of that?” he’d asked the man standing beside him in the boxcar door. “A clown parade,” the man had said and spit out the door. “I got the cure for loneliness!” shouted a man peering from a lit window in Jacksonville, but he’d ducked back in before Delvin could ask what it was. Standing under a church window in Monroeville he listened to a choir director correct the same bright-eyed girl six times before she burst into tears. Six, ten, twenty-seven times — whatever it takes, they’ll get you. A man stood so long on a trestle bridge showing off a string of croakers with the train coming he’d had to jump for it into the river. He’d come up without his pole or his fish. Once the professor’d laughed so hard he cut a fart that busted the seat out of his britches. “Could have been worse,” he said and they both laughed until their bellies hurt. “I got it,” a man in faded longhandles rose in an empty fertilizer car to say, “but I don’t know where I put it.” A big woman who said she was from Alaska had slung her wispy girlfriend so far through the boxcar door she landed in a field of golden wheat. And jumped up yelling. “I got to go,” he would say, and he would go, make his break for freedom, no matter how foolishly. That was me , he wrote, the one missing at the head count . His mama had to flee because she killed a man after white folks beat her five-year-old boy for stealing a fake jewel attached to a dress in the window of a shop in Chattanooga. The jewel was yellow like a cat’s eye and he had to have it. That was me , he wrote. And the old, ever-denied guilt licked about his heart. From his leafy hideout he looked back down the long slope to a field grown up in Joe Pye weed. The flimsy tops of the weeds, strangled by fall, nodded and gave in a breeze that didn’t reach up to where he was. “I am that boy,” he said.

After a while he walked back to the house to check on Mr. Oliver but he was sleeping. He used a brush he’d found in the bathroom to brush off his clothes. He sat out on the porch a while and then he started to the Emporium. A couple of old men he thought he recognized sat on the short green bench in front of the overly clean white-man’s store that had replaced Heberson’s. He and the Ghost had stolen whips of licorice from the old store; the candy’d turned their palms brown. “Now I’m full colored,” the Ghost had said, and Delvin had asked him if he was sure that’s what he wanted to be. Looked like now he’d found another satisfaction. From behind the building came the sound of somebody chopping wood. That man there putting a crate of cabbages in a car trunk — we buried his wife out of the funeral home twenty years ago. She was a tiny scaredy woman killed when a bakery wagon knocked her down and backed over her. He remembered Culver joking that they ought to cut a casket down for her and save Mr. — what was his name? — some money but nobody had laughed. The old man — Hunt, that was his name — looked up from his conversation and stared at Delvin. I guess he recognizes me. A chain had started to form. From moving identityless through the world — some essential signifier rubbed so thin that not only was he walking through a foreign land but he was walking through it nameless — he had begun his return to substance, to palpable life in the minds of his former townspeople. Judgments might be made, conclusions drawn, plans of action or gossip take shape. It was scary, yet he wanted to experience this, have it once more: somebody in the so-called free world thinking of him. Minnie May was thinking of him — maybe she was — but that was in Atlanta and he’d left her behind; he wanted more, or wanted it here, in the town he was born in, right now.

He didn’t make a fool of himself as he walked under the big rustling trees, didn’t when the half dozen young men pulled up in their green Olds convertible to the front door of the Hopalong Fancy Room and as they jumped out gave him a quick and not-so-quick lookover, one or two trying to place him in the sultry early fall twilight on Red Row — didn’t exchange witticisms or offer challenges or dares or start in on the dozens, he merely walked calmly on. One boy, who had a piece of yellow satin ribbon tied around his waist, nodded at him, a squarish man with a face black and polished as a shoeshine.

Hell, I’m like one of these Sunday showoffs, these fancy boys strutting. But he wasn’t really showing off. He was joining again. He didn’t want to wait until he got up north and found a place in some town not so fearful of africano folk, some mixed neighborhood in Ypsilanti or Pontiac or Toronto where he would settle in and accept a stipend from the Brotherhood of Africa Aid Society to write his autobiography; he wanted in on things now.

The wanting had come on him like an attack of some kind. Or an understanding that appears from nowhere and catches you eating a muffin or sitting on the toilet or shouting out a piece of homemade verse in a hobo camp. This was after all his hometown. On that corner there, Ellenton and Bunker Hill, he had paid a dime for a big sack of scuppernong grapes, bought from Shorty Youngblood, whose sister was said to be the prettiest girl on Red Row. He had hoped buying the grapes would ingratiate him with her but it didn’t. His footprints were all over that corner. He had skipped, run, walked, danced across it, stopped at a shout, laughed, railed against foolishness, his own included, passed by as if he was on his way to glory, or shame, halted in his tracks to tell Mosley Wilkins that he, Delvin, would one day marry Miss Estelle Franks, convey to Arthur Turnbill that it was not possible, as it was claimed in the story about Fleet Willie Barnes, to run a hundred miles nonstop. Over there, in the right now of time, Mrs. Arthur Coventry, standing in her yard futilely raging, just like she used to, swung her cane at a big mullein plant. She called him by name—“You, Delvin Walker!”—asking what sorriness he was up to now. To her, prison or no, he was still just an impertinent boy. She shook the cane at him. A few strands of green matter clung to the tip. He could smell cornbread baking and maybe gingerbread. At Sammy Wolper’s down the street they baked bread every day in a big pig-iron oven, still did apparently, maybe they would forever.

But mostly the street was empty of people he knew. The big round-fendered cars were shiny from the rain earlier in the day. He had lain on the narrow floral-smelling bed in Mrs. Cutler’s house listening to the light, hesitant rain peck at the tin roof, half counting the drops, half coming to know each one, half marking where each hit, which pile of dobber dust, which leaf or cheek, which shingle or board laid aside and forgotten. Forgotten! That was the conjur. That was the evil word. In each place, each comfy corner, each sideboard with its special teapot or trencher, its little carved doodad brought back from campground, he was forgotten; every porch had grown used to his absence, each room and kettle and heart. He had passed, still living, into the realm of ghosts. It was enough to take the heart out of a man. But oddly — and this was odd to him — he felt not an emptiness but a gathering, a sweetness and an openness that he had not expected. He wanted to run forth like a child, singing some snappy song.