Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He hadn’t waited for Delvin to answer any of these questions.

“It must mean that the opposition I bring to the facts of life is necessary too. So it doesn’t matter what these dumb white boys have to say about me because I belong here just like they do. And my opposition to them is just as right as theirs is to me.”

Delvin said, “I don’t think their opposition is right.”

“That’s because you haven’t got the heart yet to look at the world as it is,” Jim said. “Maybe that day will come, maybe not. For many it never arrives. Most, really. They see only their side of the struggle.”

He blinked into the dimness and made a smacking sound with his full lips. “Well, I am getting tired,” he said, and with that he turned on his side and went to sleep.

This is a crazy man, Delvin thought as he sat in the shed, but he was excited by what he’d told him. He missed the professor. He missed riding along dirt roads in the van hauling photographs around the states. There was a foolish bit of activity. But he loved sitting out behind the van on summer twilights with citronella oil burning in the little china dish for the mosquitoes, letting the world row darkly along beside them. Time creaked by on those wandering days.

A few nights later Jim was caught trying to escape. They hauled him down off the wire fence, took him into the guard shed and beat him until he couldn’t stand and threw him into the box. He might not get out of this simple work farm alive. The farm grew corn and tomatoes and field greens and a little cotton for market and squash and butterbeans for the table. A small community of men working the sandy fields of west Dixie. Every one there except for three or four would go back to homes in the county. Some of the men were related. The white men knew the colored men and vice versa. Delvin was one of the few strangers. Everybody knew his place. Life here was unstirring. Fixed. Moldy, Delvin thought. The white folks hoped they would not have to make another big fight, but they were prepared if one came. Nobody gave up land and power without a fight. Well, what to do? The quiet in the evening here, he thought, is peaceful. It can’t help itself. Even in a war they can’t be firing the guns all the time. There has to be these quiet moments. In these moments I am refreshed. He had read these words somewhere. He remembered: Stanley Terrell, the negro philosopher from Harlem, a man known only by negro folks, who wrote that in the clamor and frenzy of the white-run life they were being hustled through, there were still times when we could take our rest, find peace and happiness. We do not even have to seek them out. There are already here, in moments by the well or behind the barn or walking back from the store carrying a ten-pound can of lard. In the city you can look up: above you is the endless wilderness of sky, a promised land and free to every man, a country unsullied and unclaimable, yours as well as any other’s. He had started looking at the sky more often, studying it, at least for a while. What was that old song Mrs. Parker sang in the kitchen? Yeah: “Before I’d Be A Slave,” also called, she said, “Oh Freedom.” Oh, freedom. Terrell said freedom was everywhere. In these songs, in the quiet of the day, in the sky when you stop at the washboard and feel the softness of a piece of cloth in your hands, in the eyes of your loved ones. But of course that didn’t stop the whip from coming down.

He didn’t feel too bad sitting in the shed stuffing flowers into the brown clay pots. He waked each day with a feeling of possibility, a sweet joyous feeling sometimes. The white guard was just outside the door beating a train rail with an iron bar. The prisoners slept side by side on their rough cots and had very little to their names in this place, like sailors out at sea, and in a way this suited Delvin. He had written the professor care of general delivery and got a single answer that he was working in the kitchen of the Gold Flower restaurant on Main street washing dishes and doing a little of the short work. They are still pondering , he said, whether or not to release the museum. Maybe watching to see if it will sprout arms and legs and jump on them. Nothing to do but sit and wait.

One of the prisoners had a mouth harp that he played the old songs on. Others mocked this music and called out for something more timely. But the player, a small man with close-set lively eyes, refused. So somebody took the harp away from him. Others rose up and tried to get the harp back from the robber, a short man with muscular forearms. He in his turn refused, so they beat him. In the struggle the harp was crushed on the concrete floor, smashed by the heel of a Georgia Logger boot. Now the owner of the instrument cried in his sleep. Delvin wasn’t the only one who heard him.

So life went; they had stew beans every night for supper and some kind of pig meat, usually sowbelly, and a corn dish, usually grits, and cornbread. These were among Delvin’s natural favorites. Nobody was sentenced here for more than a year, though some had their sentences lengthened for what the white men called misbehavior. Sentences of over a year went to state prison. This is a work farm, they said, not a prison. What did they know?

By time he got out there had been no word from Tennessee and he hadn’t heard from the professor for over two weeks. A man Josie got out with him and the two of them walked into town together on the dirt road that ran through the corn and tomato fields and the fields of sweet peppers. Delvin appreciated the company, but he wasn’t interested just then in any more lectures about philosophy or racial politics, which this man Josie was known for. Josie said he didn’t mind and then launched into a monologue about general restrictions placed on negroes and what this fact represented in the larger scheme of things. The negro’s hidden superior strength was what the gist seemed to Delvin.

On a little rise Josie stopped and told Delvin to turn around and look and he did and the two of them gazed back down the long slope at the farm, a shabby, roughhewn settlement among its vegetable fields.

“A place you could rub out with the bottom of your hand,” Josie said, “a ridiculous congregation of punishment for forgetful or over-energetic colored men, a crushed, upended heap lying like a dog exposing its spotted belly to the high-class sunshine pouring down upon it.”

On a wide leather band he was wearing one of the first wristwatches Delvin had ever seen and he had a faded straw panama set back on his head and he snorted through his gob of a nose and spit a white fleck that snagged on a pepper leaf. He stretched himself and worked his shoulders — throwing off the shame and degradation, he said. “I can feel it sliding back down this hill,” he said, smiling his snaggle-toothed smile.

Delvin had been returned a short gray pencil and his old blue flip-top notebook as well as a copy of the passing novel Flight by Walter White of Chicago and printed in that city by the Constant Press. As he read the book — as he did with every book — Delvin had turned back often to study the title and copyright pages, wondering about the world that had produced the volume. He was touched by the county’s willingness to return his property. He had thought the authorities would simply throw his belongings away, or at least complicate their retrieval, but it had them ready in a paper sack with his name scribbled in black ink on the side. They even gave him the sack.

He mentioned this to Josie, who began to make crowing noises, flapping his arms with his hands tucked under his armpits as he jumped around him.

“Well, all right,” Delvin said. Jim Crow — he got it. “Where you headed now?” he asked.