Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Sweating, Delvin asked the fat woman if his mother had left anything there.

“I don’t know about that,” the woman said. She was primping a curly bronze wig on a stand as she talked. “You don’t have to be worried about that gentleman,” she said indicating Williams. “He’s all show like a green fly.”

“Would somebody else know about Mama’s things?”

“You don’t have to be afraid to look at him neither,” the fat woman said and laughed.

Delvin could feel his face burning. The woman patted his arm.

“Go ask Miss Ellereen,” she said. “She’ll know.”

Miss Ellereen, the proprietress, gave him an ivory letter opener with a broken tip that, so she said, had belonged to his mother. Chinese characters were stamped on the yellowed blade and the handle was shaded in swirls and stripes and looked as if it had once been painted gold; it was a faded blood color. Miss Ellereen said his mother was light on her feet in a way men noticed. “She had a bounce to her,” she said. “A quick mouth too.”

“You think she’s still alive?”

The woman cocked her head to the side and stared at him. A smell of anise and soapy sweat gusted from her. She wore an oversized man’s green silk robe.

“I expect she’s off in some other swell town, carrying on like she knows how to do.”

“She said my daddy’s from out west.”

“Yes, child, they all are, all them daddies.”

His love-pimping for Mr. Oliver had led to his being banished to the yard where he lived for a week in a tent made from an old quilt strung between two trees, and he wondered if word of the humiliation had gotten this far over into Red Row. The thought made him sweat some more. He said something about this and Miss Ellereen laughed outloud.

“You too nervous to know what to talk about, aint you?”

“I know , I’m just too nervous to say it.”

“Well sometimes that’s a good thing.”

She waved her fan in a way that made him know his time was up.

He found himself back at the sporting house two days later sitting on the back porch writing in his notebook as Kattie, one of the cook’s helpers, peeled baked sweet potatoes and mashed them in a pot for a soufflé. The Emporium was a world of smells. Compounded and contentious loamy perfumes hung in the air like remnants of a gas attack mixed with the rooty odors of female sweat and excretion and drippage and exfoliations and discharge — the blood and the brew, as Portia, a lanky pale-skinned woman from Florida called it — added to the multiple odors from the kitchen of pork-flavored vegetables and chops and hams and frying bacon as well as beef roasts and skillet-fried catfish from the depths of the Tennessee river and the sugary smells of yams and cakes and the sharp odor of turnips and mustard greens and rutabagas and the earthy aroma of grits and hominy and the stinks of lye and the perfumy savors of soaps to drown the lye out.

None of these stinks and perfumes completely masked the early morning stench of sour and near to rot sexualization, the grease and juice of high-velocity cell work, sexwork. The odor trailed behind the women like a beaten puppy as they came down the unpainted back stairs into the kitchen and rear parlor where on two cotton-batting-extruding couches pulled from the main parlor they threw themselves down in various stages of exhaustion or satiety for a last break or breakfast before going off to bed. These were the smells that were the most exotic to Delvin. Each woman had a slightly different odor. Each was in its own way interesting. Loquaty, orangey, musty, green grape sour, smell of rotten tomatoes and smells of the backhouse and the sour smells of loneliness and shame, bitter, sugary, burnt, plummy, cidery smells of pulverized bone and of blood mixed with mucosal parts, sweetly piercing, crossmixed with house perfumes and the faint scents of mold, crapulous, orotund, sleek, conjur smells of van-van and angel’s turnip, smells of screech liquor — he aimed his nose at them, face uplifted, sniffing like a hunter as the women passed. Some smells even of the grave, hints, brief passing traces familiar in the funeral home.

Sitting against the porch post with his stretched-out feet as close to Kattie’s hip as he thought he could get away with — thrillingly close as she sat on the top step — he jotted this material into his folding notebook. The rich musty smell of the sweet potatoes excited him. Kattie offered him a piece and he pulled it in two and offered half back to her.

“I don’t care to eat what I’m cooking,” she said.

The red skins lay clumped at her feet. He picked one up, flopped it over his fingers and back and licked it. “I could eat these things all day,” he said.

“You’d bloat up like a pig.”

“A happy one though.”

He always felt as if he didn’t get quite enough of whatever it was he wanted. He mentioned this to Kattie. “Why you reckon that is?”

“For you? I couldn’t say.”

“But I mean don’t a lot of people think that? For instance, yall had a duck supper the other night. You saved me out a leg that was very tasty. I wanted some more, but there wadn’t any. And then several of the ladies”—he always called them ladies—“said they wished they could have more too.”

“Maybe that was just a problem of the number against the duck.”

“But look at this whole place. All these gentlemen keep coming back.”

“That’s just appetite; they get filled up every time.”

“I don’t know. There are a lot of instances of what I’m talking about. I for one never get enough summer. Or enough of gardenias or lilacs or pe-ony flowers. I like the smell of horses so much sometimes I wish I lived in the stable.”

“Sometimes you smell like you do.”

“Ah.” He shifted his approach. “And Othello .”

“What’s that?”

“That’s a play. Mr. William Shakespeare wrote it.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“He’s the best of them all.”

“Them all who?”

“Playwriters.”

“Sometimes we put on skits right here.”

“I know. I watched that one about the Queen of Sheba night before last.”

“Was that you hiding behind the curtain?”

“Somebody close to it.”

“Was that like Mr. Shakebutt?”

He barked a quick laugh and she blushed, ashamed that she would say such a thing but delighted too.

“No. His plays are put on on big stages. In New York and Chicago, New Orleans. Paris even.”

“He’s from France?”

“No. He’s a Englishman. Was.”

“Then how do they understand him in Paris?”

“I expect they have to listen pretty hard.”

“Well, what about O-thella?”

“I wish there was more of it.”

“Does it quit before the end?”

“No, it gets there just right.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about this colored general.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“There was back then.”

“When?”

“I don’t know — centuries ago. Five hundred years maybe.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Sure is. Back in Venice.”

“Where’s that?”

“Over in Italy I think.”

“Does O-thella speak italian?”

“No. He speaks english.”

“How about the other people?”

“In the play? They speak english too.”

She lay a skin flat in her palm, scraped with her fingernail the stringy remnant of orange meat and licked it off her fingertip. Her palms were the faintest brown, hardly any color at all.

She said, “Sounds like a lot of folks who don’t understand a word of what each other’s saying. I’m familiar with that problem.”

Orange flesh between her teeth made her white teeth even prettier. He was about to tell how the Venice big shots mocked Othello and Iago hated him because he was a negro (but more important than that because he was powerful and Iago had nothing but the black emptiness of the powerless to stare into, and that terrified and ruined your mind, he would think) and Desdemona’s father and relatives and Iago’s friends and the riffraff and common white trash of Venice all hated him too. About how they tricked him into thinking his wife was running around with another man and how this — along with all the other badmouthing — drove Othello so crazy that he wound up strangling Desdemona with his own bare hands. It was pitiful.