Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

In the car, sitting across from Delvin, a big negro man in overalls with a red-and-white-check lining was grinning like he had found true happiness. A sharp red line ran along the part in a man’s hair. A man tried to reach way down his back and another man, trembling as he did so, scratched the place for him. Another kept stretching out his arm and pulling it back. His crew was mostly smiling and talking fast. They had won. A man called Butter gripped himself in both arms as he leaned against the back, honey-colored wall. Beside him a small boy pronounced the name Bonette over and over, or maybe he was saying bone it, holding up a thumb that had blood — maybe not his — on it. Another man kept shooting out his fist, punching air. Others held their heads and smiled out the open door at the world that had noticed none of this. They had beat the white boys at their own game. They had been quicker and stronger and they had more heart. They hadn’t backed down. It felt good to be who they were.

We feel like we could run up a mountain and dance on the top , Delvin thought. He pulled out his notebook and wrote: One man keeps shaking his hands and jumping up and down on his toes like a boxer , but his fingers were aching too much for him to continue.

All of a sudden he wanted to cry. He wasn’t the only one. Carl Crawford, Rollie Gregory — they looked like they wanted to cry too. Not for happiness. Some hard grief pressing down. He climbed up on top of the boxcar.

The train rolled along through grain fields, then woods, then clearings, then, out of nowhere — he’d seen this no place before — they passed the old country zoo outside Kollersburg. Under skimpy oak cages on stilts, chickenwire enclosures, sheds with open, wired-over doors. Animals, creatures from the woods, raccoons, porcupines, held prisoner inside. “Look a’yonder,” somebody said. Strange but familiar sharp-eyed creatures drawn up close so you could get a good look at them. Detainees, the unredeemable. Sun caught in the fur of a mangy bobcat, what fur there was, bristling the hairs, a peacock screamed and screamed again in the late daylight as if he didn’t care about anything but screaming, a bear — that must of been a bear — lay curled up like a dog, a camel bleated; and then they were gone.

The train rounded a long curve past a field of seeding sorghum. The dark gold knobby tops shook and gave in a nicking breeze. The train began to slow down. What’s that coming? Delvin thought. Not just the curve. Off across the grain field he could see the wind shake the tops of some beech trees, flicking the leaves over on their white sides, flicking them back. He wanted to leap up and jump off the train. Something said to, but he couldn’t make himself do it.

They were approaching the junction at Kollersburg. The train slowed. He got to his feet, danced a slow little step to get the feeling back in his legs. He climbed down through the trap into the car. The women were shouting again. Crows squawking. You get scared to the point you can’t turn it off. At the edge of their group a large man with blood crusted on his knuckles. He had a dazed look. Delvin thought he would like to speak to this man, but the train was coming to a stop. He heard angry voices above the clattering and squealing of metal. Shouts. Men were running. The sound of horses. The train creaking to a stop.

He saw four white men race past the door, men carrying shotguns, one in a bow tie and a brown vest — like a lawyer, he thought, or a doctor — but he was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. And then the runners saw the men on the train and stopped and wheeled in a fury of shouts and spit popping from their lips and cried for you niggers (they shrieked the word) to come down out of there, trotting beside the open door, not waiting for the train to fully stop before they were giving orders.

“You get down or by God and Jesus we will shoot you where you stand.”

He knew what was happening, he saw it, but something off to the side, a lingering presence, said this is not so. Above the men’s heads a lone blue jay sailed along, dipping and rising. What was the matter with that bird?

“Oh, don’t let them kill me,” the skinny, wrenched girl yelled from back in the boxcar gloom.

Both doors filled with guns, leveled on them, on the boys, men, of color. You had a front gun row, a second, third and gallery of guns, safeties off. The ones who had participated in lynchings knew what to do, but the ones who had never seen a mob before also, instinctively, knew as well. It was as if they had been here many times. As if this furious clumping together, this scarifying, claiming vengeance or redemption, was as natural as sunlight.

Wading through the mob came the sheriff and his deputies, men in khaki carrying shotguns all of the same make and model, Colt Busters, 12 gauge pump-action, loaded with double-aught buckshot. They walked without looking to the side or with any waywardness, as if they were marching to their destinies and they understood and welcomed it.

A sharp, dingy despair cut across Delvin’s mind. He knew as if it was tattooed on the palm of his hand what was coming. But he couldn’t believe it. From among the ruck of eight africano boys left in the car — one of them barely thirteen — he gaped at the irreversible future taking shape under a richly blue September sky. The afternoon heat was like hot syrup stuffing every crevice, heat so strong it was nauseating.

“Come on out of there, boys,” the sheriff said in his heavy, florid voice, Sheriff Benny Capers, born in 1880 in the Capers Park community over near Marksonville. As that Babylonian king called to Daniel in the lions’ den, the sheriff called to them. What you doing sitting back there in the filth and the murk, Mr. Daniel?

“Wonder Where Is Old Daniel” was sometimes sung at funerals. Where was old Mr. Oliver? Where was Celia? Where was his mother?

Delvin’s body had become almost too heavy to move, but he wasn’t quite in his body, even as he experienced it doddering toward the door. How natural it was to do what he was told! How far there was to go! He was heavy but he floated. A line of tiny red ants flowed steadily along the joining of the wall to the floor. Where you going, ants? Where you come from?

The posse had dogs out there too, so he saw as he reached the door, already shuffling like a man in irons — dogs: curs and shaggy varmint-catchers and mongrel farm dogs had joined the party, yapping and snarling. Somebody close by had already shit his pants.

They made them jump. Stepped back so the boys jumped onto the hard yellow clay. Delvin banged his right knee but he wouldn’t feel it for hours. Not until the culprits, the lazy fools and black hooligans, had exited and been grabbed and rope-tied and hooded with flour sacks did they call for the women to come out. One by one the defiled were lifted carefully, almost delicately, down, the men trying their best not to injure these destroyed ladies any further. The big one still shouting.

The africano boys — some stoical, some dumbly distant, some crying under the hoods that smelled of biscuits, one yelling It’s them white boys and pointing blindly and catching a blow, one shaking like he’d break — are slapped and prodded and loaded into the back of Mr. Sandal Morgan’s slat-sided cattle truck and at the head of a convoy of trucks and cars hauled to the castle-like granite county jail in Klaudio.

Deputies, unable to conceal their disgust, march the boys through the jail and up the stone stairs to a windowless blind aerie at the top, unlock it with a flat brass key, and hustle them in to a complete blackness. Black on black, one says. They don’t bother to take the ropes off and they leave the negroes looped together by another knot-tied rope in the hot dark. A few of the men, blind and re-destined, are scared to untie the rope, but Delvin finds himself speaking up to say they will be better off without any ropes at all, mentioning this almost as an aside, the misery that has come on him during the roundup unabated, stinking and stuck against his brain, a fresh damp gray endlessness stretching in all directions, his voice inside it hollow, creaking, faltering as if the old familiar language is no longer his, never had been. Hoods still on, in the dark, nobody can see anything. Delvin carefully pulls a little slack and works his hood off; it is still too black to see. Two of the boys cry steadily. Two others start yelling when Delvin comes down the line unlooping the rope. They don’t want to be cut loose. Somebody elbows Delvin in the side, another jerks up a fist that catches him in the right temple, a lucky blow that knocks him silly on his feet. For a moment he is dancing among leaves in the street outside the funeral home. Celia twirls in a yellow dress under the big sweet gum trees. Two seconds later he is back in the cell. A monstrous, unavoidable despair reaches through time and blackness and finds him. He smells a stink he can’t entirely place — pork grease, shit, sweat, and something else, reptilian and indelible.