Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

When the cut on his ankle healed a little and the swelling from the sprain went down Delvin was given light duty checking equipment in the work shed. He checked and handed out hoes and mattocks and the cane poles used to knock pecans out of the farm trees as well as the canvas picking sacks for the apple orchard. The work was not onerous and he had ample time to jot descriptions and compose letters to Celia into his notebook that the professor had brought him. He posted his letters in the wooden box nailed to a post by the camp store. He was nervous about them going out stamped with the return address of the work farm, but he figured Celia would understand his situation, which he explained in his second letter; I have nothing to be ashamed of , he wrote. She said as much in her first letter. It’s hard to live without getting stung by a bee once or twice in your life , she answered. He read this sitting on the screened back porch of the potting shed where he was working, potting geraniums for the farm shop in Mooksville. His hands even after he washed them in the big galvanized sink still smelled of the sludgy potting soil that was made from mule manure and vegetable compost. He held her letter with the tips of his fingers. It smelled of her orangey perfume.

Segregation on the farm was strict. There was no mixing of the races, at work or at meals or in the barracks. The white folks, determined and nervous, felt better when it was like this. Delvin didn’t mind. He’d had only a slight and glancing contact with white people; he never missed them, busy as they were organizing themselves and battering the world into shape. He was happy sitting on the bench among the spindly young geraniums. A slight breeze eased through the screen, cooling him. He wished he could swing the flimsy door open and walk out to meet Celia. He thought of the small indentation on the right side of her nose. He thought of this place often. He could remember it when he could not remember (without his crib sheet) the other parts of her. He wanted to sit in a cool place and talk with her about the books they were reading and about the tiny flat pressed-in place on her nose. He had proved slow in the fields, weak really, knocked back by the heavy sunshine, and fell behind early. It made sense to transfer him to the potting shed, and after he was wounded to check-out and — in duty. Much of his time was spent in the shed alone. Here he wrote his letters.

But what could you do , he wrote, when you find people you cleave to who are up to things you don’t go for?

I guess you get used to what’s unnatural to you , she wrote back, if you can, or try to, but sometimes maybe you can’t and I guess that’s one of the places grief comes from.

He could tell she was edging away from him. He mentioned this in a letter, but in the return she didn’t address it.

Afternoons in the potting shed he looked out of the half-painted window, thinking of the people he knew, calling their names in a low voice. His mother was first, then his brothers and sister, then Mr. Oliver, then Polly, then the professor and Celia, and on down the line through the boys from the alley and the others he ran with in the woods and climbed with into wild cherry trees in June and the children from the homes and people he had met traveling on the trains and working in the museum, to finally the crew he had met at the farm. He had met a man named Jim here, a limping solitary prisoner, aloof and with eyes that carried an assurance that irritated the white guards and the white prisoners he encountered. Tuesday before, a guard had knocked him down, but he got right up and stood in front of the shabby overweight functionary who had only his outrage and the whole white nation to depend on, looking him straight in the eye.

“You don’t sass me, jig,” the guard said and hit him in the face again. The lieutenant stopped him from beating Jim further, but he was sent forthwith to the box, a large freestanding tin-roofed closet behind the barracks they used for unreasonable prisoners. A small closed room with a slot in the door for food. Jim stayed there a week and was no different when he came out. He excited Delvin because he seemed able to survive with only — as he saw it — his determination for company. The older man, red-haired like some odd negroes, including the Ghost back home, was not interested in Delvin until he found out he could read and write. He asked Delvin to write a letter for him, which he did, a letter filled with pleading and sadness.

Dear Zee, he dictated as they sat on Jim’s narrow cot,

I can not go on no longer in this foolish world without you, not a minute it’s likely sometimes, and the dust chokes me and the foul food and the whole wretched disorderly world of provocation and misery. There is no light, no place to rest in this world. I am alone with only the hope of your caress. Come to me. I am alive, trapped behind wire like an animal in a cage built on a sand hill. The sun beats down on us with a force that makes me think the god who designed this world was a madman. I must find shade or some way to believe there will someday be shade. It is not through power or money or arms that this can be achieved. I am left only with love. What a meager portion that seems some days. But it is great and endless, I know it. The love I mean between a man and a woman and through them to the children. This is my only hope in this bitter world.

There was more and Delvin’s hand grew tired trying to keep up. Jim would stop, hold his face to the light, sniffing like a hunting dog on a scent, and wait impatiently for him to catch up. “Yes,” he said, “the word is dereliction , spell it as best you can. It means wreckage.” It was strange that he would know so many unusual words and not know how to write. Or read either. Jim said this was because he had been read to in his youth by an actor traveling the vaudeville circuit out west. This actor, a black man, a feeder in a crow act generally but a sometime comedian himself, had found him wandering on a street in Dallas and taken him in.

“I had something like that happen to me,” Delvin said.

“Not like this,” Jim said. The man had raised him and he had traveled with him as his factotum for several years. The man had held him in the thrall of an iniquitous sexual relationship it had taken years to extricate himself from. He had finally had to beat the man half to death and throw him down the stairs of a boarding house in Kansas City and leave him for dead to get free. “Free,” he said smiling sarcastically. “There is no damn freedom for the likes of me in this damn world.”

He believed everything in the world was corrupt and diseased.

“Except for family love,” Delvin said.

“Yeah, that,” Jim said smiling grimly. “There’s that, thank God; if you can get to it. This world,” he said, looking around as if it was sneaking up on him, “is crooked and defiled. Yet still , right down to the smallest speck and scurrying roach, it runs just fine . Which leads you to the conclusion that crooked and corrupt is how the world likes it.”

His glance then from his cot where he sat scrunched up against his knees was haggard and determined, winded.

“What’s a man like me to do?” he asked. He looked around as if a crowd was waiting for his answer. He blew his breath out, not a sigh but so he could draw in a strong one behind it. “I conclude it is me who is out of step. I am a foolish man bound for ignominy. But I too it appears have a right to the tree of life. How do I know this?” He twirled his right hand as if he could spiral it through to the truth. “Because I am alive. If I wasn’t meant to be here I wouldn’t be able to suck breath, I’d be like a fish when you snatch it out of the water. Smothered by air. But I am not, am I? I draw breath and breathe and my heart beats and food sustains me, so I must belong here too. What do you reckon that means?”