Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“It was just so clear to me that we done nothing. And before I could say a word the bottom fell out.”

“Nothing you could do really.”

“I might as well have just got up and danced and capered.”

He wanted the boy to shut up, stop talking so much.

“The truth,” he said, “no matter what they do with it, is now in the court record. That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah. For the historians.”

The boy was smart and he knew the story but he hadn’t been able to tell it. Like all of them he didn’t believe what was happening to him. Three hundred years of teaching, and they still didn’t get it.

“We’ll do all right.”

“Yes, a foolish person,” Delvin said, smiling a plain, uninflected smile. In his mind he said Let them be brought before me: I will deny every one. He didn’t know what this meant or where the words came from. Back in his cell later he whispered the words again: I will deny every one of them.

Billy Gammon returned to his three-dollar-a-night hotel room and lay on his bed. He had spoken to Miss Ellen Bayride from Birmingham that night and she had looked at him as if he had got some black on him. That was what happened to lawyers who put up a rigorous defense for negro men. Such negro men as this. Well, that part of it was all right. But he was sorry she felt that way, disappointed, and dismal. He pictured her walking to her house where she stayed with her aunt, Mrs. Walter Shrove, after sending her story by wire to the paper in the capital. She would sit in the kitchen eating supper and talking about the WCU with her aunt. Her aunt was a big wheel in the WCU, the Baptist women were the ones, so they claimed, who really ran the state. This was probably true, he thought. They are the ones who want most to keep the colored folks from getting ahead. Ahead they turn around and start rustling the women. Would they think that was bad or secretly good? Jesus, he thought, sat up and poured himself a drink. He wished he was a man of heroic character. He was not, he knew that. If you put your heart into it you are going to get a chance to see what you are really made of. So said his uncle Henry who had contributed to his raising, overcontributed. He had stood outside the telegraph office looking at her through the dusty picture window as she sent her story off to the capital. In the dust with his finger he wrote I am what you don’t think I am and she had turned around and seen the words — written backwards in the white dust — and acted as if she didn’t see them and went back to speaking to the clerk and after a while he had walked away.

Slippery, bendable stuff, that’s me, he thought, and plumped his pillow and lay looking up at the ceiling.

Delvin sat all night on the floor of the holding cell pressing his back against the tin-sheathed wall, falling asleep and waking in a start, coming out of sleep like coming out of a fit, only quieter. He imagined he could press right through the metal and timber and brick and bust out into the night. Everything’s already moved off and left me , he thought. And he thought I got one dip and that’s it, and a heavy pain entered his body and he lay on his side thinking where are they? — who are they and where are they? — remembering the time in Jackson, Mississippi, when he rode in a cab for the only time in his life, hurrying to the hospital where the professor had gone when he thought he was having a heart attack. He wasn’t but they had him in bed in the colored ward and he was sitting up looking out the window. Just now, he said, I saw a man try to hand a sandwich to a squirrel. He was smiling and the smile was held close to himself, a personal smile he had for his own private joys. I got to get me one of those smiles , Delvin had thought. He told the professor about riding in the cab that smelled of hair preparation and the window handle didn’t work but was choice anyway, but the professor wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t get my story across to him then either. The professor had a better one. But he knew he had stories inside him that were like silver fish swimming in fresh cool water. I got to keep em alive, he thought. Don’t let time to come chisel down and take em. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could do that, maybe not. Bonette and Little Buster Wayfield whimpered in their bunks. That was all right. Carl slept soundly, emitting little puffy snores that sounded like rain falling softly on the plank floor. These boys he didn’t even know really. Chattanooga boys he would probably never even have talked to, n’ar would they have talked to him. He leaned his head back and pictured riding on a train to Celia’s house. His mother was there waiting for him too. And maybe his father who he couldn’t picture from life but looked, so his mother had told him once, like a photograph of John Wilkes Booth, except he was colored. He had been embarrassed to tell anybody that his father looked like President Lincoln’s assassin. But he would write it down in his book. The night lay its hand on him like an ordination, he didn’t know for what salvation, and pressed him down into sleep. In a dream he saw his father, and his father was bending down to look at his face in the smooth surface of a stream, only there was no reflection. He tried to get out of the dream and thought he woke but he didn’t, not yet, but he didn’t remember what came after except it was too dark.

As he settled onto the board seat in the enclosed back of the state truck carrying them to Burning Mountain penitentiary, Delvin tried to picture what he was missing out on that day but he got only as far as rice pudding and the copy of Joe Bakerfield’s Boston speeches that he’d left in the professor’s truck.

I’m just a sweetback, he told himself, which was what they called those just sampling the hobo life, passing by on the cob.

His first escape attempt would not be his last; he had promised himself that.

Beside him Bony wept steadily, like a tiny seep. He had cried all night in his sleep and he was crying when he woke up. He leaned against Delvin and from time to time Delvin put his hand on his shoulder. Bony had pissed his pants when the pharmacy clerk jury foreman Bivins, with the warrant held up in both bony hands, had read the verdict in his cramped and wheezy voice.

All you bastards, you menless men, you hopeless negroes, are sentenced to forced familiarity and slave labor and a stab in the eye. You are all condemned to hell.

So this is where you keep it, Delvin thought when he heard the man read the sentence. He hadn’t expected anything different but still he was shocked. You think somebody’s going to wake up, some bit of religion or hope or human reason or kindness is going to kick in, but then it doesn’t and you stop thinking that. His knees had wobbled. He’d thought he was going to vomit and he swallowed back down a mouthful of bitter juice. Rollie had cried out and behind them in the balcony reserved for colored a few women had shouted out — not his mother — and a few had called for Jesus or Mary or Elijah. The judge told them to shut up. He had no kindness in him, this judge. “We will appeal,” Billy Gammon had whispered to him. “Don’t worry.”

But then the road of your life forked and you were being dragged down the dark one. For the rest of my life I’m going to be trying to get out of something. Everybody had lied. The white boys, the women, the doctors, even two of the boys in his gang. It wasn’t a gang, but two of them, Bony and Little Buster, had begun to believe they had assaulted the women. On the stand, squirming in the big brown chair, they had said they might have broke in — Little Buster said it and Bony confirmed — on those two women.

Suddenly the whirlwind dips down, picks you up and throws you against the rocks. No wonder all those women cry out in church. Where do you turn then?