Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“It is our greatness,” Carmel said, stretching his short legs out in front of him. He sat on the van’s back step; Delvin sat on the tufty grass in front of him. The summer-dry leaves of a sycamore above their heads creaked in a faint breeze.

“And though we are become a wandering people,” Carmel said, “we nevertheless come from somewhere.”

“Yeah — Africa.”

The professor held up his hand. The butterscotch palm was crossed by a wild hatch of lines.

“Wait. I know a couple of those books say we arrived here in big ships swung down from the heavens — from outer space somewhere parked on the backside of Jupiter — but truth is we come from the great empires of Africa.”

“I just said—”

“Wait. We are the descendants of mighty rulers.” He went on to explain how the stepped-on negro folk of the US of A were the natural children of great chiefs who had ruled vast African empires. “Just imagine how much fortitude and imagination it took to rule a continent as fierce and wild as Africa. That’s not one of those puny so-called civilized countries of Europe. No sir.”

He went on to explain how this fact was not so much the important consideration as the fact that Africa was the cradle of life, home of the original Garden of Eden and other great gardens and general stomping places, the most ancient of lands on the earth and thereby the place not only black people but all people must one day return to. “Except this time when the white people show up,” he said, “they will find the colored folks in charge. They will have to ask us about how the proceedings are supposed to go.”

“And what will we tell them?” Delvin said.

“Why, we will tell them to pick up a hoe and get to chopping that cotton.” He laughed. “Go forth,” he said, waving his hand, “that’s what we will tell them — and get yourselves a little first-class suffering.”

Delvin couldn’t help but laugh, it all sounded so comical. But he also couldn’t help being excited by what he heard and what he read in the slim floppy books. He’d agreed by then to come along more or less permanently with Carmel and work as his helper. After a week on the road he was driving the van and doing the cleaning work on the exhibits. The prof had not only photographs but a small collection of artifacts that included woven baskets, quilts, pipes, drums, fired bowls, woodcarvings, a few painted pictures (of well-dressed, healthy negro folk giving speeches, preaching or gathered together by a river talking among themselves), two Union army uniforms, a few bushee sticks for warding off evil at night and goofer bags and other conjur potions in little blue bottles and a collection of ty-ty seed and claystone necklaces.

“I intend to rustle up more of these curios,” he said, “when I get more room.”

“Are you looking for a home for all this?”

“I am and I am not,” the professor said. “I want to transfer this knowledge into as many minds as possible and in these dreary days it is best to bring the knowledge to the people instead of the other way around. But one day. . one day,” he said, smiling his wide, thin-lipped smile. He began to laugh as if everything he was saying and everything he was doing was a pleasant joke he was playing on the world.

They drove from town to town, parked in the africano sections and opened for business. A nickel per, able to accommodate ten people at a time, the money added up. They ate at colored restaurants or stood in line behind white restaurants at the window for colored folks or supped in people’s homes when invited (which happened not as often as the prof would have liked) and slept on the floor of the van or out beside it under a canvas awning. They were usually not bothered by the police and the local white population because the professor generally stopped off at the station first thing to offer a contribution to the police general welfare fund. He was well known and genially mocked in most towns and usually left alone. Since he stayed in the africano areas only he did not interfere with the dreams and illusions of white folks and trouble if it came was usually uncoordinated and of the variety that included fruit or hand-sized vegetables thrown at the big black van. Once a bucket of limewash was thrown from a passing vehicle, but the bucket missed and splashed across the front steps of the Pisgah AME church in New Constance, a town that over both east and west entrances had white-painted filigreed rose-climbing arches welcoming all good christian folk.

Delvin met stern-mouthed gents and audibly sighing women and little boys carrying big bandanas in their back pockets and fishermen who propped their cane poles on the side of the van and left their shoes outside and harmonica players and anonymous connivers and scoundrels and a tubercular essayist visiting from Boston, who mocked them both, and a retired sideshow Wildman of Borneo and various cute girls and several wanted men and loquacious clerks and bosomy, chuckling women; and he met some of his own kind — as he saw them — boomers and breezers of the great continental railroads, hoboes and angelinas like him (formerly) who flapped dust from their shirttails, laughing and telling stories about wild rides on the gunnels. He met buckheads and jeffs and caledonias pretending to be upright women and drunks and wine drinkers and some on dope ingested by way of syrups and elixirs, and he met bright-skinned dancing women and conjurers — all of whom, travelers and squinchers both, so the professor said, were on their way to Bee-luther-hatchee.

And he met the grief-stricken and the celebratory, the quilters and choristers. He met people at weddings and football games and pasture track meets and at barbecues under voluminous oaks by blackwater rivers where the smell of slow-roasting pork filled the woods with its sweetness. He met peddlers and dodgemen offering burial and life insurance for pennies a week and truck drivers and higglers; and he met preachers, jolly ones and severe ones and ones who told funny jokes at dinner and ones whose speech was so filled with extraordinary locutions that he wondered if it was a special language taught only to preachers and understood only by them; he met schoolteachers and doctors and barbers and lodgekeepers and tinners and ragpickers and butter and egg men and grifters and ex-bindlestiffs turned shouters, and a sightless wanderer who liked to fondle the porphyry necklaces. In Tarbitha, Alabama, he watched a silky-haired copperbright woman throw back a glass of red wine punch and thought his heart would stop. He met africano policemen wearing cracked Sam Browne belts and met house painters and a writer of tall tales that he said were better than the Uncle Remus stories that newspaperman Harris had stolen from the colored folks over there in Georgia. He met undertakers and talked shop with them and by way of the undertaker railroad you might call it sent messages to Oliver, telling him he was on a mighty adventure.

In the passing nights, the old days — of youth already encrusted with memory and the peculiar visitations of dream time — in these short summer nights and fall nights when the dust was lifted from the dry fields and sailed in clouds before the moon, turning the moon to rose — more secured now — again he brought back Oliver, Polly and the Ghost, and brought back the streets of the Row where he was a prince of boys, a wanderer among familiar byways, poking into the unusual facts and alliances of a neighborhood built on the lives of patrimonial and historical mimicries. He caught himself coughing quietly, from no disease other than the heart’s tendernesses, and pressed his hand on the floor of the van to steady himself as he shook with dream tears over the days gone from tarrying in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Parker about her adventures as a freight hauler’s wife in Florida, or the times, at the end of short winter days, when he sprawled in the voluminous armchair in Oliver’s bedroom reading of the high kings of Scotland and Venice. From a silence that seemed to flow endlessly both backward and forward he reached toward the shade that was his mother — shade of lingering breath. On cold days his own breath seemed at times to be hers too. The extensions of himself, the remainders, and especially the folded notes he sometimes handed to visitors asking them to pass the notes on if they were ever to come on an aubergine-faced, beautiful, springy-haired woman talking about the lives of kings — these scraps haunted him, their messages of hope and descriptions of some adventitious moment, of pulling on an oversized red sock or eating supper with gypsies or of waiting at a railroad crossing on a clay road in the late afternoon watching a breeze pick up and sort through its scatterings of yellow leaves. As far as the scribbled notes went, he had no idea if they found her, but he told himself — sometimes — that they did. This was his homemade religion, as the roads and the little towns smelling of wet ashes and pork grease, their painted arches welcoming everybody — so they said — and their overfed trees and storefronts where he and the professor caught themselves reflected with the same articulation and clarity as any other passersby, were his religion, and the cookfires they built and the august and pilfering nights and the collection itself, the big portmanteau they hauled around like medieval peddlers rolling their creaking schooners of trade goods, all these, and on some days not only these but everything he saw, touched, smelled and chanced on like motherless foundlings beside the road, were his religion. He tried to remember them all in the prayers of his noticing and his footsteps, especially his mother Cappie, offering a nodding and insufficient worship. Meanwhile in sleep he wrestled so mightily that the professor told him he would put him outside under the truck if he didn’t quiet down. It took a long time to ease up in the dreams. But the professor never did put him out. It was a secret ministration he thought and he thanked him for it. The old man’s clucky, crusty ways did not interfere with his kindness. Raised around childless grownups, Delvin was used to the standard selfishness of the lonely and habitbound. He had been studying people all his life so far. “Some kind of lookout,” the professor said when he told him. “You could say that,” Delvin said. Out the truck window the wind stroked channels and currents through a field of yellowing barley as they talked.