Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

I wish you would write some about us, you and me, he thought, and added this to the bottom of the letter he was writing. I think of all sorts of things we could do together. He told her about the little zoo they visited down in Treesburg, Louisiana, that had several goats and snakes and raccoons and a panther with the mange and a skinny bear that slept all the time. In Suberville he had climbed an abandoned fire tower and looked out at the country that seemed hapless and dull in its monotony. I want to see the world , he wrote, but only the parts that are surprising. In a note he read on the worn stone steps of the post office in Mooksville, she said she was the same.

It was in Mooksville that he got in a fight with a couple of white boys. Negro on the run, he should have known better. The boys had mocked him on the street for receiving a letter. The letter was written on green stationary and smelled of Celia’s cunning perfume. He had it spread out on one hand as he stood under a big live oak tree.

“Look at that nigra acting like he’s getting mail,” one of them said. “Hey so and so [some derogatory racial term and why repeat it], who you think’d be writing a dumb whatchamacallit like you etcetera etcetera. Who you know anyway who can write?”

“And what you doing pretending to read?” the other, a towheaded skinny boy with a slight limp, chimed in.

“You hang around I’ll teach you to read and write,” Delvin said. He didn’t want to be bothered by these silly boys. Celia was speaking in dark blue ink about a jar of pickled peaches her roommate received from her family. She was also describing her Freud studies, which she found gloomy and a kind of outrageous European voodoo. It’s a lot of wishful thinking , she said. But really smart. Even if there is a lot more mystery in the world than this man has any idea of . White people always like to put their thumb on everything, Delvin thought. They were scared not to.

The boys were like yellow flies stuttering about. He shooed them with the letter. The nearest, a stout boy about his age with coal-black straight hair cut short and a lopsided evil smile, came up close and slapped him in the face.

Delvin was so startled he lost his footing and fell, or half fell, onto his side. He pushed up, jumped to his feet, and backhanded the boy across the forehead, hurting his hand slightly.

The other, more slender, but with a strange, sterile look in his eye, hit him hard in the face. He again lost his sense of things. But didn’t go down. Then the other walloped him and he was instantly numb on the left side of his face and to his surprise revolving slowly, wondering where Celia had got to.

Right after this the police came by and he was thrown into the back of a Ford automobile, driven to the jail and locked up in it. The whole ride to the jail he shivered and wanted to cry out, sure this was his fallen day in which the clamps of white men’s justice would take hold in his life. The long rope that stretched from Chattanooga to this village in Alabama had tripped him. What was he thinking, to hit that boy?

But he was wrong about the ubiquity of the law. And it wasn’t the last time he hit a white boy.

The professor found him in the whitewashed brick jail the next day — after Delvin had been brought before the judge and given thirty days for fighting and assault. Justice was a quick and handy business for africano folks in that town. As Delvin stood before the judge, who wore not robes but a red-striped collarless shirt and black suspenders, he thought he could smell the citrus perfume on Celia’s letter and looked around wildly for her come to help him but she wasn’t there. The letter was gone and this hurt him in his heart. Just then the judge was speaking directly at him.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Delvin said, “I didn’t hear you.”

The judge added five days to his sentence for impertinence.

The prof wasn’t on the crime scene, but by nature of his relationship to Delvin he was implicated in the offense; the town took custody of the van (it wasn’t the first time the museum had been taken in) and planned to hold it until the authorities made sure the professor was not up to any illegal activity on his own.

In these situations usually the africano elders of the town would explain to the white fathers the value they placed on the museum, on enterprises of this sort, if not this particular enterprise, and hoped and pleaded, Your Honor, that you might let us enjoy this celebration of simple american negro life. The fathers, sometimes more jocosely than not, would liberate the van, not because they believed in the efficacy of nigra museums but generally because they didn’t want to get these black fools in a stir. But this time, in Haplessburg or Muttstown or whatever it was called, they were not so quick to see the good side of the museum’s existence.

“You are already stirring up trouble with that vexacious tribunery,” they said. “If we release it, you might cause even more trouble.”

“We receive so little in the way of education about our people. .,” the professor began, but one of the fathers, a usually genial druggist named Mames, stared at the pencil he was holding as if it might be a magic wand of some kind and said, “What you talking about — your people? You aint got no people . You’re a nigra — am I right?”

“Yessir, I am.”

“The nigras are not a people. They are just — what’s the word I’m looking for, Monk? Not a herd—”

“A flock?” Monk Wilkes, the florid owner of the hardware store, said.

“No, damn it!”

“That’s a quarter for swearing in the meeting,” the mayor, a disputacious little lawyer and landlord, said.

“Not a flock,” Mames said, “no, they’re just — well, there is no name for what you are. You’re just an ordinary part of the life of folks in this area, like junebugs or dirt daubers or possums. Wait — okay: Folks is what you are, just folks. The Israelites, they are a people. The Chinese are a people. Americans are a people. You are folks .”

He smiled complacently at the professor who stood before him in what he called his presentation clothes, a pair of faded but very clean black broadcloth pants with a yellow shirt and cream-colored canvas jacket, waiting patiently for a chance to speak. When it came, he said calmly that he believed the exhibit helped colored folks — folks, he said — to appreciate how good their lives were down here in the rural south. Let them know how rich and pleasant it is. (Truth was he believed that, despite all this nonsensical fuss, it was a good life — a good life being possible under almost any conditions. This was one of his major philosophical points.)

The mayor screwed up his little empty blue eyes and said, “We will take this matter under advisement and let you know.”

The professor attempted to plead further that the museum was his life’s work and only means of earning a living and so forth, but these pleadings did not sway the fathers. They waved him out with the disinterested courtesy of retired mule skinners seeing an oldtime customer onto a bus, and the chief of police ushered him from the room.

From the moment he was in the hands of the police Delvin experienced tides of nausea that rolled in carrying his expectation of discovery of his Tennessee crime and rolled out with any sort of courage he might have. He stayed by himself as best he could and thought distractedly of escape. He watched the fields of corn that stretched away from the central compound. He walked the fence line and gazed at the play of fat cumulus drifting across the blue sky. Trapped, he thought, I’m trapped. Each day, when any of the officers spoke to him or came near him or appeared around the deckle-braid corner of the barracks or hollered for the prisoners to truck it up and climb into the rickety dust-splattered bus that carried them out to work in the vegetable fields, a tension gripped him by the shoulders, stiffened his face and bent him down and robbed him of readiness to confront what he was sure was coming. The other prisoners noticed his state of mind. A couple tried to calm him, pointing out that his sentence was short and the work at the farm was not any harder than it would be on the outside. “You gets three squares and clean bedding every two weeks,” Sully John Baker, a short gray-headed man, told him. Delvin thanked him for the info and continued his distracted wandering around the compound. It would have been easy enough to escape (in the cornfields they were often out of sight of the guards), but he didn’t want to take the chance. And he didn’t want to get the professor into any further trouble. After a week he began to calm down. He began to believe that if they were going to discover him they would have done it by now. He relaxed enough to be able to sit in the little shed they used as a dining hall and eat a healthy portion of his cornbread and stew beans. It was at this point that twin brothers from the west side of the county, also in for fighting, decided to test Delvin along these lines. Delvin pointed out that he was not a fighter at all but simply a man who had been assaulted by white men (they were in the colored section of the county farm). The brothers did not consider this a sufficient disincentive and waylaid Delvin at the outdoor washing area and knocked him down. He slid half under the sidewalk-like boards before the washstands, cutting and twisting his ankle. This laid him up for five days in the farm hospital where he spent his time reading religious tracts. He considered himself lucky not to have had to suffer more of this material. The Bible had been always too bloodthirsty for his taste, a mix of self-glorification and sideshow magic that led only to feeling bad about yourself.