Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Both ducked to the side, the boy thrashing through the berry bushes flailing his arms, swimming through greenery. He was not trying to call attention, he was trying to get away; Delvin saw this. He had ducked too, and as he saw the boy swinging his arms he began to run.

Some other boy, a boy with narrow muscular shoulders and a crusted star-shaped cut on his cheekbone, a boy done with fighting but afraid to say so, saw Delvin as he raised up and started to run.

He cried out. “Yonder’s a black ’un spying!”

Others too had had enough. They too were ready to retire.

“Get him!” they cried.

The boys were quick in this way, instantly and solidly opposed to an africano person watching them in their secret white boys’ Sunday afternoon battle that they’d come up with to break loose from the boredom and dreariness of their lives. But this here was better.

Whooping, cawing like crows, they took after Delvin.

Delvin was fast, and he remembered the way he’d come. It was easy to run among the trees. He sprinted up the track, cut between two big chestnut trees that said shoo shoo in low windy voices as he passed, dashed straight up the hill and cut over to where he’d left Onely. The white boys came on behind him running, not in a bunch but spread out through the woods. Virgin forest, Onely had said this was. Delvin was wearing sneakers so old the white canvas had turned green. He could feel the rocks and the hard ground through the gutta percha soles.

He reached the spot where they’d napped, but Onely wasn’t there. Maybe he’d mistook the place, but no, he recognized the tulip poplar, a black streak on it about head high.

“Onely,” he called in a low voice, “Whoo, Onely.”

“Keep on coming this way,” said Onely’s voice from on up the track. He stuck his head around a large oak. “Come on,” he said.

Delvin ran toward him. Behind him he could hear the boys coming. As he passed him he saw from the corner of his eye Onely get to his feet. He had the.410 up and pointed. Delvin ran on by him. Then a shot. The gun going off with a loud crumping sound that seemed to slam against the trees.

A cry came from the chasing boys.

“He hit him!” somebody yelled.

Delvin had continued on up the track thinking Onely would follow. Now he did, sprinting right past Delvin. Delvin heard what had happened — heard the shot and the cry — but he didn’t want to know it.

He ran as hard as he could and they continued running up the ridge and along it through the long grass and a stand of yellow birch trees and down into a mixed wood of maples and poplars that made a sound as if it was raining in the leaves (it wasn’t) and on through a canebrake in a hollow where they hid for a minute but couldn’t stay because the fright was on them in a punishing way. They crashed through the limber cane shoots and ran past a huge cherry tree and ran on without fatigue across the shoulder of the ridge and down and across another sun-splashed swale where blackberries were making among their own white flowers. Two young africano girls were picking the ripe berries and dropping them into buckets.

Onely yelled at the girls to run away but they stood looking at them. Delvin grabbed one girl’s wrist and began to pull her along. He stopped when the other didn’t come and said to them both that crazy white boys were coming and they had to run. The other came along slowly, swinging her bucket. When Delvin started to run again they ran too. He was thinking wildly, coming up closer in his mind to jumping off into some hideout or cave he couldn’t find and he wanted to start shrieking and yelling (all the while mutttering “damn damn damn”) and then in the next moment saw ahead of him the cuts and swerves he would be racing along in just a second and he couldn’t get it straight exactly what was happening or even who it was happening to, saw the jostle in a chokecherry branch and the sideslip of some tiny creature exiting the premises, and didn’t know anything, he thought, but just run and run.

Onely had disappeared up ahead but Delvin ran with the girls. One of them was crying but the other ran with a solemn face, not saying a word. They made it to the top of the ridge and when Delvin started down toward the north the solemn girl whose wrist he still held tugged him the opposite way.

“We got to. .,” he said, but he didn’t know what, and when the girl pulled him again hard, in her face still wordless a look of severe intelligence and knowing, he went with her.

He couldn’t tell where Onely was. With the girls, the one whose hand he was still holding now leading — twelve-year-old girls, thirteen maybe — he crossed the long bottom where jack-in-the-pulpits bloomed in mucky soil and climbed through a complex understory of rhododendron bushes and laurel beneath tall loblolly pines to a ridge covered in holly bushes that the girl knew a path through and down into a gully that they followed, jumping from rock to rock, until they were suddenly back in Red Row at the head of Jersey street.

He stopped, winded, run through with an exhilaration that made him want to run some more, keep on running, maybe cross out of the mountains to the flatlands that spilled toward the Mississippi river and then rose again to the Texas plains where maybe his mother was if she wasn’t all the way to California and Hollywood or some other flimsy place — stopped and bent over his knees and drew in big breaths that he suddenly wanted the girls to see, notice the heroic boy who’d just outwitted the white people once again, a fine fellow. But when he raised up he was dizzy, and swayed, almost fell. The girls, particularly the one solemn-faced pretty girl, didn’t even seem to be ruffled. Even as he was telling them not to say anything about what had happened, the one he was still holding (for dear life) broke free and together the girls ran away from him down the street, their bare feet kicking up puffs of dust as they ran.

At the corner the girl he’d run with stopped and looked back at him. Her face was solemn yet. For a moment she studied him before wheeling about and disappearing beyond the porch of a man’s house whose wife had been buried the week before, he remembered, by accommodation of the Constitution Funeral Home.

Then the truth of what kind of trouble he was in poked its snout up like a ground rat.

He wouldn’t be safe anywhere and he knew it. If that white boy was killed — even if he wasn’t — they wouldn’t stop looking until they found him. He would have to head right back into the woods. He felt sick to his stomach. Just like his mother he was going to have run off into the mountains.

But before he did that he wanted to go home. He loped across the Row, running like a boy who had somewhere to get to but didn’t want anybody to know it.

Many people saw him that evening, a well-formed boy with a bush of thick hair cut in a high part and the handsome face of a blackness that even africano people remarked on, a good boy, they said, son of a murderer who had escaped retribution, a lucky boy despite that, who, so they figured, would some day come into one of the three or four largest fortunes in the quarter — former dewbaby, as they called him, black as grandmama’s skillet and kindly.

He was sure they would be looking for him at home so he ducked around behind the big yellow frame AME church on Jefferson where under a pollarded magnolia three little girls were playing fly the hoop. One of them skipped and fell in the dust. She looked up at him as if he was the cause. In the office he found Miss Marvie Appleton who let him use the phone to call the house.

Miss Parker said no one had been around looking for him. He asked her to put Willie Burt on and after a few minutes his raspy voice said he too hadn’t seen anybody looking. But then maybe, Delvin thought, it was too early. Had Willie seen the Ghost? Sho, he was out in the shed eating apples he stole from Mr. Oliver’s supply. Well, would Willie tell Winston to come meet him over behind Miss Louise Marchant’s house where he was working on something for her?