Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

And, too, he was a man, wearing a suit snagged with a hook from a sidewalk wire outside a haberdasher’s on Orchard street, who wanted people to know who he was. And as the people he was hired to help wished they could do, he gathered influence like a golden grain.

The facts of the case, so these lawyers thought, were chits on a string, gaps here and there, adding up to not much. Delvin looked into their self-regarding, lurid faces, at the ructating misery that had not settled, sensing the complex lies they told themselves so they would not — so they thought — bring trouble down on their children, the way each was an official of this great empiric power they thought they were the checkers and refusers of, these freightless carriers and silly boys, these men with tickets, who would never suffer, or if they did, the suffering would be in passing, some condition or reversal that would consume a few days or years of their lives and then drop them and wander off in another direction. None of them lived in a state of fear or tyranny. He saw this, and as he saw he heard inside his head the voices saying that for these people Delvin and his compadres were only troublesome beasts caught momentarily in the chute. We are good-hearted and for fame and money we will get you cattle turned around the right way. Thank you, suh. But he was not cut off from his own heart by, or even from, his interceders, he was not yet disattached — that wasn’t the word — nor was he threaded through or aligned with them, none of that, he was only inseparable from the curiosity he felt looking at them, that was where the life was, his curiosity, and he knew this. What was it they were up to? Besides rattling along in their own peculiar version of a train ride?

It just wont right , was what they said in Red Row back in Chattanooga. That was closer to the truth of things than anything he could come up with.

Suddenly he was scared to death. His bowels loosened and he bent over, gripping himself.

“You all right, boy?” Pullen said.

“I got to go to the little house.”

“You can do that in a minute.”

“I mean right now. Suh.” But as he said the words his insides tightened up and he was all right.

Harris started to signal the guard but Delvin stopped him. “Thank you, suh, I guess I’m fine.”

“You trying to game us, boy?” Pullen said.

“No, suh. I felt a flash of sickness is all. I’m better now.”

“Well. That’s okay,” Harris said. “Now—”

“Yes suh,” Delvin said quickly, “I was in the fight, but I never saw either of those two women. Not til the end.”

“ None of you boys did,” said Pullen.

The stirring in Delvin’s bowels returned but he fought it down. He looked Pullen in the eyes. These white folks thought they had escaped the restrictions law and custom had placed on black skin. They were the new model human — an advance on the old dark model — built for politics and money. No stoop labor. Masterminds who were also generous, so they saw themselves. Why, if you keep to your place we will pat you on the head and give you a soup bone. And a kick to keep you honest. Well. Best to steer clear of crazy people like that. Just go widely around them in this alien land. But, once in a while, a misstep. Or a misstepped upon. And a door opened onto misery, anger, terror, watchfulness, confusion, ricky-tick submitting, echoes of overheard jokestering, wild wandering figments and destitutions of the spirit, thumps of excruciation and succorless moaning, strutting, argufying, testification, and power and regret and wondering and a rattling panic — all these in his eyes looking straight into lawyer Pullen’s.

In Pullen’s eyes under a moist filigree of power churned an unsorted mess of helpless degradation, hope, dishevelment, spite, useless muttering asides picked up from relatives and the stupidity of his kinfolk over in New Hall, endurance and pluck and delight in the quick free-heartedness of his children, boredom and a weasely shrewdness brimming — the combo — rocking in a sea of rage plastered over with a foolish smile quirky as a circus poster on the side of a burning barn.

The man despised him, Delvin could see this.

He stands on the low infirmary porch swaying faintly to a rhythm that has risen up from the earth and overtaken him. All these boys here with their necessary arrangements. Solomon over there working a yard broom, ready to run any errand. Little Croak, who wore a pink verbena blossom in his hair to please Winky Raffin. And Winky, who got down on his knees to please the LT, those stormy nights when Delvin watched him cross the yard in the rain to enter the LT’s pineboard shack. Carl Crawford, one of the boys from the train, stands waiting for him. He has a scrap of straw hat that he saved for when Delvin would come out of the infirmary and he gives it to him now.

“What’s next, Mr. Del?” he asks, a muscular boy, not a boy now after four trials and all these years in the white man’s penitentiaries. Even in the penitentiary the races are kept separate. A white man isn’t going to eat off a plate he sees a black man eat from. Nor put a black man’s spoon in his mouth, no matter how well washed it is. Lord, they wouldn’t breathe the same air as us if they didn’t have to. Off to the west is the river that runs along the edge of the swamp, but no one ever escaped that way. Patrols and outposts and towns in either direction, hamlets, solitary farmhouses — it would be like running a gantlet, each fouler armed and ready to shoot. That is the policy. Local folks might shoot escapees on sight and nobody would mind. One less mouth for the state to feed.

He puts the hat on and sticks his head out into the sunlight that hits him like fire flung from the roof. His body bends and his vision clouds and a dizziness spins up from the ground and envelops him; his insubstantial strength gurgles away and he sags. Though Carl tries with both arms to hold him, the two of them fall to their knees. Carl bounces up and begins to drag him to his feet.

“It’ll be all right, Mr. Del,” he says, ducking his head under Delvin’s arm.

They struggle up, and stand blank and unsure in the porch shade.

“They be watching us, Mr. Del,” Little Carl says. Carl is thick-bodied and strong as a bull and despite the battering he has taken still somewhat kindly. He nods toward the stilt tower cornered into the fence. Two guards equipped with pump-action scatter guns, 30.06 bolt-action Winchesters and a Thompson submachine gun gaze at them, not fondly. Delvin can see them talking, the words, he thinks, like doughy little thoughts with stones inside them. His mind drifts and he is again picturing Celia (or somebody he called Celia, some ragdoll fragment) floating through a field of march flowers. His knees are bloody. He raises his knees and does a little slow-motion dance stomp and almost tips over backwards. The two guards laugh. He waves, the wave an eloquent mix of woofing and bouncy-in-his-deuce-of-benders. It is one of the many hand gestures for dealing with white folks. Every hand carries danger. White folks prefer vocal salaams, bent backs. Any movement of the hand by a black man can become threatening. But the gestures of looniness, of imbecility, of fealty — are tolerated.

This is his fourth prison. He described (in earlier notebooks) the concrete floors at Burning Mountain, the red dirt floors at Uniball, the stone at Columbia, now the packed blue-clay floors at Acheron. Here when it rains, the floors became so slick you can hardly stand on them. In each prison he placed himself in this or that nook, in fields, under roof, walking across a dusty yard, standing under a graybeard tree looking out at rain pouring down in bright sunlight, squatting in a cotton field or tucked in his own deck address and darkest corner, and looked out at the world and wrote it down. They took the notebooks away, but he got more, bought more, that is, from whoever was selling them. He paid in whatever coin he could muster. Load-humping, errand work, decoying, the wealth accumulated at three cents a day from chopping cotton or picking vegetables, trade or capital turned over at the store. One of those, he would tell the clerk, one just like that one you’re scribbling into. The clerk each time had to be talked into it, sometimes paid extra or traded. But this was easy. No one can hold out against anything in prison, that is prison’s secret. No bit of information, no treasure secreted away, no practice, no escape plan or ruinous bit of felony behavior was secure. It is impossible to protect these safes and mental cashboxes. What held fast out in the world unraveled and fumed away in prison. Everybody walks around with fluxed, soggy insides. It’s okay. It is simply what you have to live with. No friend will protect you, no believer, no hard ass. They can’t even protect themselves. And it isn’t the various holes, pits, cabinets, closets, unheated tin sheds, Bake Houses and hotboxes the butchers stick reluctant or rowdy prisoners into. It isn’t beatings or starvation or forced labor in the killing sun. It is hopelessness. Delvin’s own sense of it, the crude stalled massing in his gut, comes back. This time not just in here. By now the disease has spread like a personal plague into all the corners of his mind. The world itself has in this way become infected. The long gray dirt road out there, slick as a gullet, running for miles through the sloppy, beat-down fields, the ragged (free) men they pass standing in ditches pushing gobs of clay into their mouths to quell hunger and for the minerals in it, the little boys shitting grease in the thin grass, the skinny, lacerated women not even turning to look at the truck passing. You see a griffe squinting into the sun and realize he isn’t seeing anything. One man has a goiter on his neck the size of a citron. He has to rip his shirts to be able to wear them. Country women humpbacked with rheumatism, children bowlegged with rickets and red-faced and slimy from pellagra, wasting from hookworm. Nobody has the money to fix anything that can make life endurable. Hammer toes and bunions and busted elbows and broken wrists and stomachaches that eventually turn out to be cancer except nobody learns that is the name for it because nobody calls the doctor and even if they did he would be the negro doctor just now dying himself of tuberculosis over in the little negro clinic in Sharpsburg; he’d be dead before they could piece together where it was you lived. In the whole prison no africano man who has ever lived on a street or a road that has a sign on it saying its name. Down these streets the drag-footed go.