Charlie Smith: Ginny Gall

Delvin waked to his mother kissing his face. She smelled of wine and of the jailhouse, a familiar combo; not one he liked. But he really liked the kiss. He was almost gone to five years old now and still he believed his mother was a woman who would belong to him for the rest of his life. It amazed him that a woman so big and filled with rich smells and talk could belong to someone like him. It gave him a sense of the possibilities in the world and a belief in his own strength and in the power of desire. The kissing was fine. A rough happiness roared in his body. He trembled and his hands shook as she snatched him up and squeezed him against her. The husked raw ache began to melt away against her lean hard maternal creatureliness. She set him on his feet and looked him in the face.

“Don’t worry about none of that,” she said, her voice hoarse and creaky but filled with an insistence he couldn’t turn away from. Her eyes seemed black as pitch. “None of that meanness,” she said, “has a thing to do with you, boy. Not one speck of it. You know what I am talking about?”

He only half did, and it was that half that brought tears to his eyes.

“Weep you should, little child,” she said, running her hand harshly and lovingly over his springy hair. She felt bound by chains to this earth. Chains running back into the white world and down into pits and wells she was terrified of being pulled into. Yet in her life was much happiness. She was not ashamed of how she lived. Her children fascinated her. The two men she helped along — Mr. Miller and old Heberson — were dear to her, in a way. She was scared of them and she appreciated the gifts they gave her. She wondered about Mr. Miller and hoped he was all right. Maybe she ought to go see about him, but she wanted to tend to her child first.

She walked him across the yard to the little open shed where the washing took place and cleaned him up, recleaned him. Delvin stood in the washtub as she bathed his body, which she at first warmed by the fire in the open kitchen. Coolmist had already built a fire of fat lighter and alder sticks. A mockingbird darted in and out of the angle of brush fence separating their yard from the alley and the cottage next door. Across the way a woman called “Cora. . Cora, I can’t find the mat. .” in an expressionless voice. The mockingbird flicked up into the slim maple tree and began to set out a little song like a peddler rolling out a sleeve of silver watches. Delvin, who had not complained and had hardly spoken since he came home, began to shiver. The water was warm but he couldn’t stop. He trembled and shook, teeth chattering. He cringed from a dream of mule snot and hard paving stones and yellow leaves of a beech tree like tiny grabbing hands reaching out for him. The hands of those white people like claws grabbing him. Cappie remembered times she’d lain in bed shaking from the disharmonies of life. The boy, sturdy, sleek, his perfect little black seal body, skin as smooth as polished wood, made her heart break. He jerked like a man with the quakes, tears streaming down his face. As the quavering gradually trailed away he shut his eyes and leaned back in her arms. A trance, she thought. Alarmed, she wondered if he might never come free of it. But he was in a heavenly state. She was about to shake him back into the world when she realized he was asleep. Just a little boy, tired out. She wrapped him in the big square of soft toweling Mr. Miller had given her for Christmas, carried him into the house and set him down on her bed.

Delvin didn’t wake when in the blank foreshadow of morning the police came in three cars to get his mother. Before the white men even got in the house Cappie had slipped out the back. She ran up the alley, crossed Tremaine, zipped around the corner onto Van Buren, leapt a collapsing syringa hedge, skinnied down into the gully and was on her way into the mountains. She was barefoot and wore an old flower print blue dress she liked to sleep in out on the rocking chair on the back porch in the afternoon sunlight. She ran leaping from rock to rock up the valley until she was far enough ahead of the police to cut into the woods. She had been partially raised in the woods, in her auntie’s cabin back in a hollow across the mountain, and she knew how to go on through the laurel scrub and sourberry thickets. No police could keep up.

Back at the house they rounded the children up and took them to the juvenile center over on Wilson street where they were kept in the africano section and looked after by Miss Pearl Foster who was subscribed a pittance by the city to mind destitute, deserted and wayward negro children. It wasn’t until the next day when Curtis Wunkle, an eleven-year-old wandering boy notorious for stealing shiny objects of little value, showed up that Delvin and his three siblings were told of his mother’s predicament.

“She’s wanted for a killing,” Curtis said, smirking at the thought. He knew what their mother was known for over at the Emporium. And now she had come home with blood staining the hem of her purple satin party dress. It was Curtis’s auntie Belle Campion who, herself fresh from the jail, had informed the child of the Cappie Florence plight (Florence wasn’t even her real name, they said). “She done coldbraced that old jewman up Ducat street,” he said to the fourteen other child habitués of the city establishment.

“You mean murdered?” Winston Morgred said. He was a small albino child of six whose parents had been killed in the Homefield warehouse fire. Winston (called the Ghost) had skin that was a pasty white and his hair was orange. (“Like a negative of a africur,” the owner of the office supply store where his mother had swept up, said.)

“Murdered?” Curtis laughed. “I mean murdered. Left that old man lying in a pool of his own blood in the back of his own store. Knocked him down with a car jack the size of a locust log — that’s what my auntie said.”

“None of that’s true,” the twins cried, but they were shouted down by the excited children.

Delvin slid around to the side of the testimony crowd, slipped through, and before anybody could stop him caught Curtis with a punch in the mouth. The surprised boy fell back squealing. A fight broke out. All the boys including Delvin socked and swatted at each other like something out of the funnypapers, the sadpapers. Miss Pearl rushed from her office where she had been working out the youngsters’ documents, poor things, and swinging a big torn felt hat beat the hooligans into submission. It was time for supper.

The children were marched into a small room lit by kerosene lamps. A long table wrapped in tin sheeting with squared-away corners. The regulars, the long-termers, led the way to a back window of the same kitchen that served the white children in the larger, electrically lit hall on the other side. Into a tin bowl was scooped grits, stew beans with gravy and a chunk of cornbread hard as a schoolbook.

Back at the table they ate with spoons attached by thin lengths of chain to an iron firedog screwed into the tabletop. It was the oldest child’s job to sort out the chains and pass the spoons to the children. They were supposed to sit quietly, but this quiet was almost impossible to maintain.

During the week Miss Pearl read to them at meals from the Bible. This was Delvin’s first experience with the famous old legends and tales. As time passed he found himself enthralled with the stories, especially the ones concerning wars and killing. The story of Joshua, who stopped the sun and knocked down the walls of Jericho with a bugle shout, was his favorite. He daydreamed of great victories won by obscure means such as horns and freakish powers. He was impressed with the Lord. The French lords were familiar to him from his home study. The lord the old Israelites called upon seemed mighty capable though he liked mostly to hang back in the shadows. This appealed to Delvin, who liked to lay low himself.