Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“I know about that,” Delvin said, remembering his scrape in the dress shop, and other venues.)

What up north they called the Depression circled like a flight of buzzards over every town. People still thought business would pull the country out even though business, since 1863, had not been able to pull the South out of anything and the new Depression was just a doubling up, locally.

“Yall just keep that race nonsense off among yourselves and don’t bother nobody,” the suzerains said to the professor, “we got real worries now.” Anyway, they had, since the war, quickly tied the black race back up in knots and they didn’t have to worry about them. Nor any fake professor and his truckload of comic photographs.

Into the negro half-towns and sham-cities Delvin began to go at night. He walked the streets of the Overtowns and Undertowns and the Congos and Mississippi and Louisiana quarters. The Lands of Darkness. Unpaved, they were often hardly streets at all. More like lanes in medieval towns of Europe or villages in Africa — streets filled with the smells of woodsmoke and spices and antique sensories made of bits of prehistoric matter and dried long-extinct flowers. On the creaky lopsided porches vague lights shone like bits of webbing or mist, casting huge shadows on the bare lopsided front walls of the little frame houses. Under the trees the tiny diastolic glimmers of lightning bugs ticked, becoming whiter the higher they rose. Up among the branches pinches and bits of gleaming too faint to cast shadows stayed on for hours. Up ahead, in the middle of the street, human shapes dipped and swooped in unhasty dances as the barely perceptible music of guitars and hand organs made their soundings in the deeps of night. Cries and hoots and whisperings. There seemed always to be a bit of fog at the end of the street. Cats moaned in their long nights of suffering. Dogs barked with a sound like consumptive muted coughing. As he walked the streets in the deepest parts of the night he could hear people talking in their beds. Old men confessed to their snoring wives the secret affairs of their youth. Old women spoke of masked riders galloping furiously down the roads on huge dark horses. Children spoke of boogeymen with hands growing out of their knees and bellies. In dreams girls whispered to kindly lovers. Boys answered questions with wit and intelligence.

Who dat dar? a woman’s voice called, but not to him. He carried in his heart the drubbed and muzzled love of a disallowing woman through the faintly whispering, crepitant streets. He believed this walking eased him and made him able to go about without so much fear he had to run away. He was scared all the time. What have I come to? he whispered in the dark caverns under oaks, and he was old enough — had been born old enough — to ask this question. He believed that whatever he was had to be played out in the world. He couldn’t hold off from it. What he was scared him. What he believed he was. Seventeen and strong, not very strong, but strong enough and able and filled with beef, with get-up-and-go, with pep, zip, vim — with lifting power , which the professor said was the greatest thing, lifting power — and he had an inexhaustible need to exercise himself on the earth.

In the shadows by a boarded-up livery stable, in a little town so small the africano section was only half of two streets next to the town dump, he waited as one would wait for a carriage called to take him to the far places of the world. The air smelled of pine smoke and rotten apples. Down the street a man in a long white nightshirt stepped out of his door and looked at the sky that was still dark. He waved at something in the sky and Delvin wondered who it was, or what, and thought he knew. What is coming? he wondered, but no one and nothing in the world could tell him. The man made a large sweeping gesture, turned back in and slammed the door behind him. The sound was like the last clap of a civilization closing up.

In Salisbury, Alabama, in the northwestern part of the state up near the Tennessee line, one clear night lit by stars, he walked by a church where choir practice was being held.

The choir was singing one of the old sorrow songs, a jubilee called “The Ship of Zion.” He stopped and stood under an open window to listen. Someone in the choir kept making a mistake, a woman. Each time, the director, a man, would stop the singing, crying out in a frustrated voice, “Halt!”

After a few busy-sounding and angry words from the director the choir would take up the song again. Again a mistake was made. With the same word—“Halt!”—the director would again stop the singing. This went on and on. A brief patch of silence, just a moment, followed each time at the quittance. In one of these empty moments, someone, a woman, maybe the erring singer, let loose a small, despairing cry. Her voice was like the voice of a child and maybe it was, but he didn’t think so and, studier of many faces, he thought hers was probably the face of some reedy girl, just in from the country probably, some plain-faced young person who just wanted to join a choir to praise the Lord and maybe meet people, maybe meet some boy who might like her, but who was finding out that she couldn’t really sing. Or maybe she just couldn’t please this stern master.

The choir started up again and once more the director stopped it with the same word; again Delvin heard the thin small wail.

The director spoke harshly again, this time ordering the woman out of the group. There was another silence and then came the sound, very quietly, of weeping. Gradually the weeping faded, as if the woman was leaving the room.

The choir started up again. This time the old jubilee went sweetly by without a hitch. But it seemed to Delvin there was a gap in the song, a little hole or gouged-out place where the young woman’s voice had been. He could hear this place. It was an emptiness like the silence inside the narrow circle of a well.

He shivered. He was cold though it was a warm June night. A desolate feeling came over him and he thought he couldn’t bear what it meant to be a human being on the earth. This feeling welled up and slowly ebbed as he walked on thinking of it.

Back in the van, lying on the floor on his cotton pallet in front of the door, he could still feel a little of this impression or inclination, and he carried with him for days the recall of a faint sadness. It became something he didn’t completely forget. He returned to study and wonder about it, the singular occasion of reprimand and the grief it uncovered and the moment of silence it revealed and how this silence or space with nothing in it seemed so important.

Nothing where everything is , he would think and draw tiny circles in his notebook and make dots.

The professor, who dressed generally in the same clothes every day (so he didn’t get distracted, he said, by sartorial concerns), continued to instruct him by way of books and disquisitions on the meaning of existence, and Delvin found this education to be interesting and informative, but he preferred other written words, stories he found mainly in books in the small libraries he encountered. These libraries were mostly in churches. Many of the town libraries were not open to colored, and not many people in the quarter had books, but some churches had collected a few and he read many with inspirational themes. These, together with the books from the professor, formed the basis of his education at this time.

He thought of Celia daily and told her of his reading in the letters he wrote, listing the books he read and telling her his hopes for exotic travel. He sent her his itinerary as he learned it as well as his address in Chattanooga; he would occasionally receive a note from her. She was in her third year at college and found it more difficult than the first two. She was studying literature, but found herself pulled more strongly by her science studies. She was lonely often, but she met regularly with a circle of young women to talk politics and literature and social life ( Quite often we get bogged down in the last ), but still, afterwards, she said, on the walk home through the campus or after she was supposed to be asleep, she would feel a loneliness. Maybe it’s only something trying to tug me into another kind of life , she wrote, but she didn’t know what it was. I sense the world standing ready for me like a big feast, but I feel scared and unsure of where I want to start. I’d like to find some work that is so demanding that I won’t think of anything else. Isn’t that crazy?