Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Pullen with an insubstantial flourish introduced him to the assembled and left him to himself. If Pullen didn’t ask questions or direct him, then the prosecution couldn’t either. He was alone with what he knew to be so.

He sat then in the trailing silence, waiting for some other voice besides his own to begin to speak. He needed to hear somebody else, some speaker he could respond to or hook up with in a call and shout. But there was no one. He leaned back in the chair. A half-scary man, they had taken the cuffs off but not the shackles. It was embarrassing to have to walk in front of people wearing that gear. His escape attempt had made it harder on the others. The guards jostled and poked them, drew their armatures tighter. His fellow transgressors cursed him. He coughed, and a slipperiness went down his throat. He lifted his face and felt on his skin the burning of a blow, some hit from long ago, still afire.

He said, I never did a thing but what any man wouldn’t do.

He told of sitting on the steel crossbar under the hopper and reaching to steady himself when a man, a white boy, stepped on his hand. He had barked at him, barked, he said— “ so quick I didn’t even know it was me — or him.” The white boy had cursed him for a nigger. One thing led to another and after a while in the empty boxcar that smelled of rotten peaches there had been a fight the colored boys clearly won. Yes, and on from there to his riding on top of a blue boxcar after the fight, sitting with a couple of boys as the train passed a little farm zoo under some big trees. The zoo had an old ratty camel in it and the camel had two humps and one of the humps was folded over and he had wondered if this was because it needed water to pump it back up. The zoo had donkeys and a bear, maybe it was a bear, and several raccoons and a fox or two panting in their cages under the big droopy trees, but then the train went on around this long bend headed toward Haverhill and he sat there wondering about the camel. About what life was for such a beast in a country with no sand dunes and all that. It wasn’t till the train stopped in Kollersburg and the deputies called them down and rounded everybody up that he realized anything was wrong. He had never seen those two white women before he saw them at the jail. He started to say he felt sorry for them, but at that moment it was an actual lie because right then he hated those women though he also pitied them and wondered what made them the way they were, and then he caught himself again for a liar because he knew very well what made them like that because it was the same thing that made anybody mean, just too many whippings, he had seen it with dogs and bindlestiffs and even children, and sure there were those with a natural brokenness inside them too and they were the ones who at seven years old set fire to the school and all, but what it was most of the time was from the meanness they’d suffered, which there was a sufficiency of in the world, and he had sat in his borrowed courtroom chair over there looking those women in the face and seen the print of the striking hand on their faces and recognized it and wanted to stand up then and say, I know about all this, it’s all right, but he didn’t, as he didn’t now, said no word at all about those women or what he knew, he simply stopped talking and let the communal breathing and a rustly little humid breeze fill up the silence, thinking where was I and what was I saying, oh Lord.

“Those sheriffs must have mistaken me for another person,” he said. “I promised myself to somebody else — a long time ago I did that.”

He scanned the balcony, but whoever might have been Celia was not there. A white boy with bronze ringlets leaned on the balcony rail picking his nose. A white woman in a smart red dress adjusted a yellow cloth flower on her shoulder. A white man in overalls fanned himself with a crushed straw hat. Jakes and Blarneys and cordial bug shifters. Too much going on to keep track of it all. Anything he might say was nothing to what he knew. The lawyers had told him to hang his story on a string of time. One occurrence after another until he was taken away by the sheriffs. They — the sheriffs at the train station — had sweated through their shirts, Delvin remembered. The stocks of their shotguns were slick with sweat. A colored boy in a bright red shirt sat on a wagon seat in front of a store. It was a hardware store and had a box of bright copper piping on the front porch; the boy had ducked down and hid behind the wagon seat. The high sheriff wore a black broadcloth suit and carried a scuffed derby in his hand. His knuckles too were scuffed. In the window of a white house across the dirt street a small white cake rested. I would like a piece of that cake, he had thought.

He wanted to tell them how scared he was, how scared he had been all along. We all been scared. We been scared to death over here for the last three hundred years. All day every day. Like when somebody you didn’t see jumps out a door at you.

He said, “I can’t tell you I have done wrong when I haven’t, not the wrong you all are accusing me of.”

His voice soft and plain, hardly a negro’s voice at all. Billy Gammon thought he sounded like a white man. And Pullen wondered for a furious second if the boy was mocking them. I’ll kill him myself, he thought.

“If I had violated either of those white women,” Delvin said, “I would have jumped off that train long before it got to Kollersburg. Any of us would. We were born knowing what the penalty for business such as that is. But we didn’t jump off. We didn’t run. Anybody who saw us when the train pulled into that town would know we didn’t suspect a thing. We were not guilty men. Not a one of us—”

He would have gone on, but he saw how they were looking at him. For a moment everything lost its name. He noticed a couple of yellowed leaves lying on the wooden floor between the judge’s bench and the defendants’ tables. The wind must have blown them in through the tall open windows. As he stared at the leaves — they were tulip poplar, black-speckled yellow — he realized he had forgotten the names of his fellow prisoners, and forgotten the names of the lawyers and the judge, of the women, and of everyone he knew or had known. That morning the light in the courtroom had been suffused with green, as if the sunlight coming through the windows had soaked up green from the trees and deposited it here, but now, in the late afternoon, the light in the courtroom was red, as if a storm was descending in the west and the sun had picked this up too and spread it around the room. He did not know who he was or what was happening here — everyone, everything, was strange — he only knew, and it was all he knew, where each of them was going, but this did not frighten him; it seemed only as it should be. A sweetness, a radiancy, filled him, and his weariness slipped away. I am. ., he thought and then he couldn’t think, and it didn’t matter. Their eyes had glazed over. Or else they were looking at him like they were about to jump up and slap him. He wanted suddenly to reach out and pinch their noses. Chuck them under the chin, thump them on the chest. Come on, we just joking here, aint we? He felt a chill so strong the thin coiled hairs on his arms stood up. He saw himself loitering on the edge of a hobo creek tossing crabapples into the water. He looked up from the witness chair and saw for the first time a woman with deep black skin and a sharp pretty face. For a second like an eternity he knew this woman for his mama, come to fetch him out of this. But no, not his mama. That was just a dream.

They sling a chain through the gyves and drag him naked across the yard and throw him into the former root cellar beside the warden’s house. A plank door set in the ground over eight wooden steps leading down to a square dirt room. A little light comes through the joining of the planks but not much. As he is dragged past the warden’s house he sees through the kitchen window the warden’s wife, a fat woman who wears a gray shapeless housedress around the clock, set a pan of cornbread to cool on the windowsill. “Wait,” he cries, “I think that white woman wants to give us some of that crackling bread.” Why would she be baking at night? The guard closest to him, Flimsy Plutter, jaundiced and twitchy, swats him across the face with the grommet-speckled work glove he carries for just such occasions. A fingertip cuts Delvin under the eye, making him yelp with pain. The woman looks out the window with no expression in her wide freckled face. On the radio in her kitchen Ethel Merman sings “You’re the Top.” On the little porch in back a calendar with a picture of the snow-covered Rockies is tacked to a post. I could be cartwheeling down that icy mountain, he thinks.