Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

All around him was a world intricate and rich with smells and sounds that fascinated him. He loved the look and feel of the rusty dust kicked up out in the street whenever an automobile passed and he loved the smell of the mules parked with their wagons in front of Bynum’s and he loved to sit on the wooden bench out in the yard in front of the Azalea Bethany church on Slocum street to listen to hymns being sung and he loved the smell of baking in Miss Consolia Dikens’s outdoor oven that was big as a little cabin and stoked with wood from a pile that smelled of apples and he loved the swaying of the bulrush cane down in the gully and he loved the other kind of cane, sugar cane, that was stacked like broom handles in the big wooden barrel outside Heberson’s and liked to buy a stalk for a penny and strip the snakegreen hide off with his teeth and gnaw off a chunk and chew the sweet iron-tasting juice into his mouth. He loved the sound of the little girls’ voices as they passed on their way to school and even liked the way they mocked him as he sat in his tiny yellow rocking chair on the little front porch. Four years old and rocking up a storm and telling his little two-year-old neighbor about how French kings lived in the hills up the gully and kept great castles and palaces stocked with fresh fish and sweet potato pudding and big jars of strawberry soda.

“What’s the difference between a castle and a palace?” his older brother Whistler asked, laughing at him.

He was teaching himself to read from the funnypapers he got from stacks at the back of Heberson’s store, getting old J W first to read them to him then again while he moved his fingers through the words. After that he could read the panels himself.

“He’s got em learnt by heart,” J W said to Cappie, who was sitting beside Delvin on the plank back steps of the store eating canned oysters out of a little white china dish, giving every fourth one to Delvin who didn’t care for them and surreptitiously put each one in his pocket. She was fascinated by what her chappie could do, even if he was reciting. Reciting was even better than reading. Any fool could read — she could read and wasn’t a fool, but many others were — but how many got the natural head power to keep all those words in order inside his brain?

“He’s a wonderanemous child,” she said licking the small plump body of an oyster before forking it into her mouth.

Not that time, but three times later, reading the adventures of the Katzenjammer Kids, he told his mother what was true — that he really was reading. He went more slowly and his mother at first didn’t like it — she liked better the zippy way he had when he memorized the words — but he explained to her that now he could take a piece of paper with writing on it and didn’t have to have somebody read it to him first before he could tell her what was there. “It’s like I can tell the secrets now,” he told her. She lay in her bed late at night after she came in from the Emporium thinking about this. She had long believed that life was a secret thing, built on secrets, most of which she had no idea how to learn. That boy’s building him a key, she thought. He’s going to establish hisself.

Just beyond the crossing of Bynam and Adams streets was the oakwood bridge that led to the world of the white folks. Huge and ponderous, all powerful, it squatted over there.

“Like a big old hog,” Cappie told her children. “It’ll eat you up — unless you’re quick. And eat anything else it takes a mind to,” she said, her dark yellow eyes burning. “You got to be mindful every minute,” she told them. “You got to study their ways and not slip up. Or they’ll get you.”

But Delvin felt called to the territory on the other side of the gully bridge. He was sure he could make his way.

One day he sneaked out of the yard and crossed over — he could see the bridge from the house, and see the church steeples and the big square commercial buildings and the indecipherable flags on top of the Courtney Hotel — and made his way along Adams street past the Sinclair station and the printing plant and the big white stone post office that looked like a fortress and past the other buildings of stone and brick masonry with their big glass front windows behind which were potbellied washing machines and silver tubs and birchwood iceboxes with big silver handles and couches like the ones over at the Emporium except without the gold tassels and buckets and dynamic-looking water pumps and big glass-covered pictures of people riding horses.

What particularly drew him was a store he came on that had spangly colorful dresses in the front window, dresses that were buttoned onto dummy bodies with small painted white women’s heads on them. These dresses were yellow like sunshine and sky blue and honeydew green and had tiny colorful stones sewn into them. The stones were like the precious gems in the stories of kings, the booty and priceless possessions of kings and queens right here in this marvelous place just over the bridge that after all was like a bridge in the story of great King Charlemagne that he had to cross in the Alp mountains to get to the terrible vandals who were demeaning the empire, and here he was, nearly five years old and feeling fine, looking right at such preciousness.

Though he could hear his mother’s voice saying no, he could not keep himself from climbing the two white marble steps and ducking into the store.

He headed straight for the dresses and knew no better than to scramble up the little wooden step into the window. He began to run his fingers over the jewels. One of them, a green shiny wonder he hadn’t even noticed from outside, the size of his thumbnail, came off in his hand. He slipped it into his pocket. There were so many who could mind? He ran his hands over the soft fabric. It made a faint hissing sound under his fingers. He would like to take this dress home to his mama. Maybe there was some way. But then there were jewels on this other cascade of smooth green cloth, jewels of dark yellow like his mother’s eyes, red jewels and a few that were clear — diamonds he knew they were called, the most precious of all, though not the prettiest. He began to pick the stones like berries and put them in his pockets.

He thought his heart might give out. It was hard to draw breath. His body tingled. But he was a brave boy and would not falter. He believed he had strength in him.

He slid to his left, eyes on the glitter of the brightest of the yellow stones, a stone that caught light of different colors in its depths. He rustled through dresses that very well could be the dresses of magnificent royalty, the shimmery fabric hissing and whispering as he brushed by until he was able to reach his small hand out and nearly. .

At that moment he felt a sharp pain in his back. At the same time he heard a voice shout out, a white voice.

“You damn little dickens!”

He was snatched up into the air by his shirt, hauled out of the window and flung down onto the carpeted floor of the shop. He was dazed and couldn’t place himself. Loud white voices filled the air. Through a haze he saw contorted white faces glaring down at him. Ugly faces, sickly red and furrowed, with misshapen noses and tiny nostrils clotted with snot. Demons. He shrunk from them, or would have if he’d been allowed to, but he was held down by a foot on his chest.

“You quit squirming, you pickaninny booger.”

He was hit again, this time with the flat of a broom. His mother had once hit him with a broom. He began to cry, he couldn’t help it. He was jerked to his feet, but he didn’t have the strength to hold himself up. He fell to the floor.

“Look at that,” a voice cried, “look what that little sneak’s got in his hand.”

“Oh, don’t touch it!”