Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He was walking one fall day along an unpaved side street in the dark quarter in Yellow Cross, Mississippi, when he passed a black-painted truck the size and shape of a small moving van. The truck was parked in front of an African Holiness church. On the side in dusty gold letters were the words Negro Museum of the Americas. In back was a door and a fold-down set of steps. A slim middle-aged africano man in a long tan canvas duster shiny at the elbows and a soft black felt hat sat on the step eating cantaloupe chunks out of a white bowl. Delvin asked him what this was, this museum. The man cocked his head, continued chewing until he could swallow good and then turned and squinted up at the high back of the vehicle.

“You mean this here?” he said, smiling, showing flat white teeth. “This is the only traveling museum of the american negro in existence.”

Delvin felt a jolt of pleasure. “A real museum,” he said.

“Exactly right. Photos mostly, but in fact a record of the negro’s trials and sufferings and joys on this side of the Atlantic ocean.”

“Could I take a look?”

“Why certainly. Only cost you a nickel.”

Delvin allowed as he had an extra nickel at that time and would be pleased to spend it on such an operation.

The man put the bowl down on the steps, took out a large yellow handkerchief and with gestures ceremonial wiped his mouth and hands.

“You produce the cash and I’ll open her up for you.”

The man had an accent like a northern white man, and his facial features — narrow nose, thin lips, soft green eyes — were those of a white man, but he was as black nearly as he was — sealblack, they called it.

The man — Professor Carmel, he called himself — produced a flat brass key, opened the back door and ushered Delvin into the van, stepping ahead of him to raise the canvas shades on one side. Along the back and other side walls were photographs, hundreds of them. On a table running down the long closed side were stacks of objects, jumbled together, among them skulls and batons and whisks and feathery headdresses and flutes and what looked like a gilded chamber pot. The photographs dominated the exhibit.

Delvin walked around the room that was as large nearly as the house he was born in, looking at the pictures. The man lit a kerosene lamp that made no impression on the daylight streaming under the rolled-up canvas shades and hung it from a brass hook in the ceiling. Delvin studied the photographs. Flat black-and-white representations, the stillness of each, the caughtness, gestures trapped, looks riveted to the paper, people turning and never getting there, the placements, the issuance of cries uncried, the smiles or grim looks, the sadness in a boy’s eyes, the girl looking at her mother who was fixing her hair with what looked like a gold bobbin — these only gradually touched him. Records of a moment pressed on either side by what came before and what was coming after. They all — all the africanos — knew what had been, had a pretty good idea of what was on its way. The proprietor, bent down under the table, fiddled with something, made a quick frantic motion and suddenly the scratchy voice of Bessie Smith flew up like a big yellow bird filling the van. Hurt and desolation, the crime of being black, the uselessness of fighting back, fear like a grime covering every surface, the tremors and quakes, a softness in the heart you couldn’t obliterate. He saw the hoes lifted in cotton fields like the specialized instrumentation of an anonymous and preposterous camarilla, men poised like dancers in barn rafters lifting long sticks upon which were strung the limp assegaial tobacco leaves, children standing waist deep in dew-drenched fields of cotton tobacco corn beans and peanuts bushy as gallberry shrub, or men posed in ditches over a dark infrangible corpus with pickaxes raised like the ceremonious antlery of some white man’s loony pestiferation. He had seen much on the roads, much that wasn’t found here, or not on this day. Old men battered until their faces looked like a coal seam turned inside out. Boys used for the smoothness of their bodies. Women squatted by the tracks, heads and shoulders powdered in coal dust, waiting like mail sacks containing no good news for the next hard hook to snatch them up. Some of this was here. The music pressed him on, pressed the pictures as if they were leaves of a tree gathered again in reverse progeneration into the big armory of leafage.

He couldn’t take in half of these photos, not a tenth. Many were stuck like markers in big books. He liked the books themselves, the large folios, cloth and leather bound, stuffed with progeny. He ran his hands over their covers as the keeper showed them to him. The music scratched itself out. Suddenly he had to get away.

He rose up qualmous and shaking, abruptly overfretted in his mind. No not that exactly — scared he had for a second lost his sense of where he was, like the time he’d dreamed a moment longer than he needed to and almost pitched headfirst off the ladder of a Baton Rouge — bound freight car.

He set the book down (he had been by now sitting on the lowest of the van’s two back steps, out in the air) and staggered across the dust-charged street into a field grown up in plantains and pokeweed. He thrashed through these greeny drifts and pulled up in a little cleared space where somebody had once made a campfire. Some wanderer. “That is what I am,” Delvin said. Said and slumped to his knees and over, passed out, like somebody graved into by the heat.

He came to with the professor man dripping cold water in his face.

“Come on boy, you’re not all right but you will live.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Delvin said.

The man rocked back on his heels and laughed. He raised the white china bowl that now contained water. “Here.” He held the bowl to Delvin’s mouth and let him drink. The water tasted pleasantly of cantaloupe.

He told Professor Carmel that he had for many years worked — was raised actually — in a funeral home, and when the prof asked which one and he told him he said with a broad smile that showed off his fine large teeth that he knew old Oliver well.

“A bit spendthrift with his emotions, but honorable and a fine consistency of service,” he said.

It made Delvin less lonely to hear this. He had been lonely for several days, maybe longer. Riding freights was generally a social activity of a kind, but due to a sweep by railroad detectives along the Southern line, he’d had to lay low in a canebrake by himself for three days before catching a local freight out of Metusa, a rattling train empty of cargo but for some loads of furniture and no other rail companions.

“You know something about the departed,” Prof Carmel said in a friendly way.

“I know something about how to prepare a body.”

“Fancy up the meat,” Carmel said.

“Most folks consider it showing respect for what’s coming. Don’t want to meet the Lord in your work clothes—”

“Worms and beetles are what’s coming,” the prof said.

Delvin believed pretty much the same thing, cosmologically speaking, but he didn’t generally like anybody else pressing on him in some righteous way that he had to believe this too. It didn’t matter what side of the theological fence people were on, they got hard-shelled about it quick enough. But the professor had given his correction or opinion in a genial way.

“Yall photograph up there?” he said.

“You mean the deceased? No, we don’t. Some do it by their own arrangements, but we don’t encourage it.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t discourage it either, but I think Mr. Oliver would rather people mourn by way of living memory. He’s not pushy about it though. He just doesn’t promote the service.”