Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He saw that Delvin carried a little blue notebook and a couple of cedarwood pencil nubs and told him to take notes if he wanted to.

“In fact,” he said, “I recommend it.”

He spoke to him of the great power and destiny of the African peoples. The Wandering Negro, he called them.

“That’s us,” he said. “We are loose in the world, free to wander the earth poking our noses into whatever interests us. Many will complain and grieve about our plight, and it’s true it looks, especially in certain areas, as if the white man has the upper hand, yes. But this is only appearances. In the kingdom of the spirit, we are so far ahead of these lily-livered folk that it is really our job to take care of them . Look at us. Stolen from our homes and sold into slavery, mistreated, raped and lynched, and still we find a way to love the work of the Lord, if you want to call it that, or the natural creations of the universe if you don’t. That church you are familiar with. It’s not just a house of worship — rebuilt, by the way — it’s a depot, a trolley stop, a way station and refreshment stand for those traveling this world of pain and struggle. In religion after religion you find at the heart of God a mystery. That same mystery is in everything, every rose — it’s in every dog or pig, every human being. In that mystery is the power of life. Not only the existence of life, but the purpose as well. The mystery is at the heart of life itself. A perplexity, a boggler. Everywhere you turn you find it. Who are we? Who is that lovely young woman over there? What did you mean by saying that? Who are you? A life of questions. Well, we don’t need so many questions really. Our job, son, through living, through love, through helping one another along in this wilderness, is to snug up with it. Simply that.”

He stared at Delvin with an expectant expression in his cool green eyes as if he had just explained everything.

Delvin looked him straight back. “With the mystery ?” he said.

“Damn, you’re right,” Carmel cried, chuckling. “That must be what I mean.” He laughed, a croaky, slappy laugh. “Yes, son, with the mystery. We are the ones supposed to get up close and hug it till it squeaks.”

“You mean, colored folk?”

“I do indeed. We are the only ones got the heart for the job.”

He went on to explain that this wandering life — plus, he said, the willingness to bear burdens without complaint — was—“were,” he said — exactly the recipe for getting down to the heart of said mystery.

This last was spoken at a dinner they ate at Fanny’s Hot Shop over on Washington street in the quarter. Carmel informed Delvin that he was on the run from forces that were dedicated to the elimination of the negro race in general and him in particular.

“The materials I carry in my little traveling museum are a threat to the well-being of certain elements that will not be deterred until they have put out of existence the truths these materials contain. And I have to admit, it is true that in some quarters what I carry has the eliminatary aspects of a bomb. Built to blow the foolish, sanctimonious notions of these folks right out of the water. In a generous, in a kindly, way,” he added, his eyes twinkling.

As it turned out, Carmel had received this caravan of truths from a white man, his former employer, Dr. Haskell Sullivan, the famous ethnologist from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sullivan, with whom Professor Carmel had worked for many years as driver and helper of all kinds, and finally as partner, “ in the ethnological enterprise you see before you” (they were back with the van, parked now in a field next to a little brushy river), had passed the outfit on to Carmel when he was taken with spasms and became too ill to continue.

“What kind of spasms?” Delvin asked.

“Hard to say. Gut mainly. He’d also lost a bit in the head department. I had to put him in a home over in Jackson. I left him on the front steps of the Berrins Home for the Aged with a note pinned to his coat.”

This was six days into their association. Delvin sat in sweet-smelling roadside grass on a rice mat provided by Carmel. By then Carmel had told him to call him Professor. They were drinking sugar cane juice from white china mugs.

“It was five years ago this September,” the professor said, “that I said goodbye to that fine white man on the steps of the charity home. When I am in the area I stop by and check on him. He is still alive, but only in body. His mind has become part of the great mystery.”

This mystery the professor spoke of hung like a misty picture in Delvin’s mind. His life was filled with mystery. Everywhere he looked he was baffled and diverted.

In days to come the professor gave Delvin books to read: novels, poetry, polemics, race stories, histories, uplift books and books designed to probe the ways of men on the earth. Many of these books were written by black authors, and not just the big-timers like Du Bois and Washington and Sojourner Truth. There were slim softbacks printed on flimsy paper written by men sweating away, so Carmel said, in Manhattan and Brooklyn tenements, and books written by africano men living over in Europe, and men in Chicago, and even Memphis. Why, in Memphis, he said, there was a small publishing house that specialized in literature written by negro men — and women — for the negro race only. He owned some of these books. They tended to be long arguments concerning the superiority of the negro race, most of them, as well as a few that counseled brotherhood and love. In one Carmel showed him, the author Seneca Wilson — a nom de plume, Carmel said — wrote of the vacancy in white men’s faces and the “digested fullness” in black faces (“This goes right along with what I’ve pointed out to you in the photographs,” Carmel said, smiling). The faces were empty, Wilson said, because white people, by way of their long defense of their “rightness,” their right to consider themselves the top dogs in life, had lost touch with faithfulness. This showed in the wrenched-up greed in their faces (“When the disease of corruption has reached the bone, there’s nothing left but greed and self-importance,” he said), whereas the negro man, who lived in a disheveled and turmoil-filled state, one he was constantly having to call for help with and constantly getting knocked around by, had thereby come on a much deeper understanding of the great mysteries of being. As you could plainly see in the face of every negro person you met.

It wore Delvin out to read all this.

Other books proclaimed the day when the negro man would rise up and by force of simple righteousness take his rightful place at the head of the table. It scared Delvin to read these and gave him a guilty thrill. He had not thought particularly of these matters. The world belonged to the white man. Delvin and his kind were merely scumbling through it. They were stranded in a country whose language was not theirs and whose customs were foreign to them. They did their best under these circumstances. Nothing he knew of had corrupted the spirit of negro folk, not in any significant way. Even the lynchings. Sojourner Truth said it was most important to show love and concern for those around us, colored or white. This was the only way to show our love of God, she said. Love meant freedom from oppression. Somehow it soothed him to read this. But many of the negro writers appeared to be girding up for a fight.

He spoke of this to Carmel who listened with his small cropped head down. They were parked behind the Bethlehem Baptist church in the african quarter in New Hope, Mississippi.

“If it’s their country, then where is our country?” Carmel asked.

“I thought you saw our greatness as being people not tied to any place.”