Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“People are interesting no matter what shape they’re in, don’t you think?”

“Yes I do.”

“Look at these,” he said and pulled a long drawer out from a flat cabinet under the table.

Attached to big sheets of thick black paper were photographs of negro men hanging from the limbs of trees by their necks. Here we add to the number, he thought. Here we add to it. He wanted to turn away again. A nausea gripped him. Good lord, good lord. That boy out in the country, hanged and chopped and burned half away. It had been too much. It was still too much. This was too much.

As he bent to look at the bodies, some broken-necked, some burned so their arms were tapered stumps, some denatured, some with whip marks showing on their blood-greased naked backs, some gutted, one wearing high top shoes with the laces still tied in immaculate bows, another looking like the man who used to sell parched peanuts on the courthouse square — every one somebody, looking like somebody — he experienced a collapsing sensation as if he had soiled his pants, but he hadn’t. His private self shrank from the surface of his body, yielding inward like walls falling in on once safe rooms. He didn’t like it that Carmel had held these for last. Crippled, scarred, half-skinned, mutilated — still it was the faces that held him. Lonesome negro faces surrounded by the upturned faces of white men. No, not lonely, he had it wrong. He hadn’t been looking close enough; he had hardly been looking at all. But he saw it now: the faces of those no longer there. But not even that. No. He saw it: only the white men were there. All alone in the world they made. They were the ones who lived again in a universe made up of only their kind. Not again, but for once, finally. He shuddered. Many of the white faces were blank. No, not blank — he couldn’t get it right at first either—: addled, sated, entranced. But not that, no, not even that. They had the look of the rapturously crazed. Something tucked way down behind their souls had leapfrogged to the front. Yes. But not so quickly — and this is what he saw — that he couldn’t make out the shocked and hopeless expression still visible behind the stuporous glee. And this, the pictures whispered, to his face or behind his back as he turned away, is your fate. He shuddered as a chill flashed across his body and he staggered, catching himself against the table. He coughed into his fist.

“You see how human beings really are,” said the professor.

“White men,” Delvin said. He just said that. It was like saying “The devil.” No need to mention him.

The professor went to pull another sheet out, but Delvin stayed him with a touch of his hand on the tray. He turned back to the pictures on the walls. The van smelled of onions and sweat and of another, chemical, odor which the professor said was ferrous sulphate, from developing the photos. He stared again at the faces of the living. A little boy trailed a cotton sack behind him like a long fat grub. In his face a guilelessness, a comfortableness, you could call it a happiness. Shirtless, in overalls, and wearing a huge sombrero style hat, he looked back at Delvin with a gentleness that nearly brought tears to his eyes. Crying not for the dead — he’d learned this in the funeral business — but for the lifebound living. This wasn’t the only face that held him. There were others, skips and jumps of faces, expressions, dull and crisp and bloated or filled with a fierceness that stirred him and scared him and made him feel a churning in his guts and even deeper. An old woman with a wide fleshy gleaming face and flared nostrils looked out with an eagerness to please and so much. . it was sorrow. . that he laughed outloud, himself shocked. In many faces fright mingled with a desire to please. Others were as nearly blank as the faces of the lyncherous white men, though not so often erased. A man caught for murder (so a hand-lettered tag said) looked at him with cold eyes in a grimly smiling face; his lower lip looked as if it had been bitten in two and sewn roughly back together. Stunned faces, terrified faces, smashed and reconstituted faces, organized faces and the faces of the holy and the hustling, the light-complected face of a man in a high white collar and thin tie who looked as if nothing in the world could touch him. Faces that wanted to shame him and faces that made him want to slap them. A little girl with a high wide forehead and small intense eyes he wanted to kiss. Two old men sitting on the front steps of a grocery store laughing fit to bust.

And behind him the white faces of men looking up from the lynching field at the body of a black man or gazing at the camera as if they didn’t know what a camera was.

But then here were others, pinned to the opposite wall, spilling out of other big flat books, flows and gatherings — of silliness, of running and jumping, of yelling and delight. A woman laughed open-mouthed, a man beat time with sticks on a porch floor as two other men out in the dust before a spurt of campfire danced an ebullient jig. A congregation lustily sang. A man petted a horse’s face, the look in both of their eyes, horse and man, compelled and kindly. A boy called across a river to other boys rising like dolphins from the glassy water. Children rode a mule, old men played dominoes, gripping their laughter like it was a great fish they were landing by hand. A band marched, brass raised, down a sunny street. A little boy on a top step contemplated his stretched-out feet. An old woman whelmed with glee. A girl in a checkered headrag wiped sweat off her forehead, grinning over a big bowl of ice cream. A man in a dark suit bent over a tablet. Cascade of fellowship, of tickling or guffaws or brimmed-up festiveness. Children on top of a wagonload of cotton high as a house. Chuckling babies, women shouting in joy.

He turned away with tears in his eyes.

“Yessir,” Carmel said as he tapped the flats with the heel of his hand to straighten them, “you can see the true life of the race in these pictures.”

It took a minute for Delvin to draw himself together. A coolness came into his mind, and it was only then that he realized how tired he was.

The museum keeper had turned away, giving him time, rustling among his photos, gathering, careful to keep his fingers from the impacted centers of the paper.

“Ah, lord,” Delvin said.

“Yes, sholy. Like a mashed-up sweet potato.”

Delvin smiled. He indicated a photograph of men and women standing in front of a white-painted church with a half-finished steeple.

“That’s over in east Tennessee,” Carmel said. “That church has since been burned to the ground.”

It was the church where the funeral for the slain boy was held. “I’ve been there,” he said. “I was there.”

He told Carmel about the fire (set by unknown white men) and a little about his life as an undertaker’s assistant, parts of a past he rarely talked about for his aging but still lively fear of Chat-town police.

“That’s quite an education,” Carmel said. He looked at the boy who was disheveled and needed a haircut, but who had the gleam of intelligence in his fine brown eyes. “You just touring around the country?”

“You might say that.”

“They kick you out of the funeral business?”

“No, ’twern’t that.”

“You don’t have to go into it. We all from time to time stick our foot into the dung heap.”

“I’m looking to further my education,” Delvin said. Said it and meant it — had said it before — even though he was tired out by all the instruction he’d received in the van. But he liked the smell of the place, liked the old man puttering about.

“Racewise you got a full education gathered right here in one location, my boy.”

Delvin on the spot decided to postpone his rod-riding travels. He spent the night in a hobo camp outside town and returned the next day and the next. On the third the professor invited him to hang around and gave him little chores to do. On the fifth day he proposed that Delvin join him on the road.