Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

When the trap in his cell door opens and his two pails are handed out to the guard and in a minute the door opens again and in are shoved two fresh buckets, one an empty slop pail and the other his week’s worth of what the underground population calls cinder soup, with a chunk of cornbread so hard it has sunk to the bottom without soaking any juice in, he is barely interrupted, even in his thoughts, or especially in his thoughts.

He continues his story. In it he lists the different local bugs and green fruits he ate as a child, including red and black ants, doodlebugs, bees, dirt dobbers, beetles of various kinds, four types of grasshoppers, worms, all raw; among the fruits he ate: green plums, blackberries and raspberries, cherries, apples, grapes, quinces and figs. He lies quietly on his wood bunk trying to think of others. He sees his name written high on the wall of his bedroom where he climbed up a stepladder to scrawl it, using one of Mr. O’s mascara pens from the preparation room down in the basement.

The story goes uninterruptedly on.

He begins to say parts of it over to himself until they fill his memory.

The first line of the book is I waked to the sight of a woman wildly dancing . He says this sentence over to himself, and all the sentences that follow, until they are carved into his brain sentence after sentence and he has memorized a first chapter. The work is both exhilarating and tedious, and there begin to be times when what he says outloud is not strictly true. He didn’t really chase Jack Elbert down the alley and leg-swipe him so he fell into the barrel of an old washing machine and broke his left ankle. It didn’t happen like that. Nor did old Mr. Anse Carter say he, Delvin, was bound for the hangman’s noose. He said the Ghost was.

He goes over these parts of the story and corrects them and then changes them again, just slightly. He can’t stay away from the little changes that seem to brighten things.

He grows confused and loses his place.

He stops telling the book for a day and lies on his back, sleeping and thinking and listening to the scurrying of the rats, and realizes finally that something is breaking apart inside him. He begins to weep. For a week he cries, waking each day in the slush of himself and turning on his side and weeping, letting the tears run down his face and drop onto the packed dirt.

He thinks, well, I can maybe get to the other side of this bawling, but then his thoughts cut back to his mother and his phantom father and Mr. O and the professor in his truck and Celia — and Celia — everything becomes elaborated and tricked out with grief.

When the tears finally stop he is not redeemed or relieved or free in any way he can figure, he is only exhausted.

Above his head the heavy wooden floorboards of the kitchen creak as the cooks walk back and forth. “Yall need to go off and take lessons ,” he cries. A muffled curse comes back. A guard he doesn’t know unlocks the door, steps in and punches him in the face. “You think that hurt?” Delvin says and licks the blood off his lips. The guard has already stepped back out into the corridor.

Sometimes in his dreams he smells horses. Sometimes in his dreams his mother squats alone beside a small night fire in woods so vast all the sound is lost in them. He wakes crying.

Noises are coming out of his mouth. The noises are unfamiliar and have a grouchy, splintery quality that scares him. It is as if some old man with bad intentions is speaking from his head. He turns on his side and tries to remember the time Mr. Oliver took him fishing. They both slipped on a blue clay bank and fell into the little pond out on Hazel Burch’s farm and scared the ducks, and a big drake came after them and scared them both. The noises are wheezing and snorting now, and he thinks, well I am a madman. He loses track after that of how things are with him, but one day the door opens wide and two men drag him out and he is carried to the infirmary and flung down onto a bed.

This is his first bout with malaria; the red dog nearly kills him.

He shakes and rattles all the way down to his most minor bones and hallucinates that he is boarding a big silver airplane bound for the rice paddies of China and he shouts out against this because he knows this is a white man’s trick to sell him back into slavery. Celia speaks from out of a pink silk scarf wrapped like a burnoose around her face and says he will never get to the woods. He cries in his bed and it takes another ten days to come back to himself and when he does he is chastened and meek and unpitied by anyone.

When he is returned to his rack on Block 5 he finds his notebooks have been confiscated.

He is put on kitchen duty washing pots, and though the hot sink is extra hot in the heat of summer he is glad to be able to feel this double accumulation and begins to get well in spirit. He has never minded washing things. In sinks or creeks or road ditches or big-bellied washing machines that danced around the floor, him gripping the handle of the mangle, wringing water out of some blue shirt or pair of stempipe trousers, he has never minded the work of getting what was dirty clean. From time to time he stomps on the floor to let whoever is down below know that he is not alone. “We done cotched ye,” he says out loud, his voice taking on the phraseology of a blackness he never practiced back at the Home.

It is thirteen months before he escapes again, and this time he unscrews the chain traces off his mule and gallops him across a mile of cotton fields and down into Regret Swamp where, exhausted and oddly fretful, he is taken in by a couple of poachers who after he falls asleep in a foul-smelling birchwood bed turn him in for the standard reward of twenty dollars a head for escaped prisoners.

He is on his way back to the underground bin at the same time his lawyers, Gammon and his crew, get him another trial, and he is transferred to the capital, where his trial takes place starting on May 2, 1937. The lies are flaking from the stories, but there are many stories and they have been told by every white person connected with the accusations and so take some time to shuck off.

This particular go-round the slight woman Hazel Fran, grown more slight since 1931, is unsure if she was actually raped and is now unable to identify the attackers except for Delvin and Carl Crawford who she still thinks might have assaulted her, I’m not absolutely sure, Judge, Your Honor, but I think they were there at the time. The other woman, Lucille Blaine, whom everyone in the courtroom — including such juried-up Kluxers as Clifford Bumper, Carlton Fuchs, Brother Wren and two others who have participated in lynchings plural and attended half a dozen more, all of which they considered justified, necessary, even righteous — know to be a liar, sticks to her story. She is an indissoluble lump of solid rage, in person.

The doctor, Mills, has a shamed look on his face as he once again sets out the medical proof of male violation.

Gammon presents a witness who says he had sex with Miss Blaine the morning before she was supposedly raped in the afternoon.

Miss Blaine sits at the prosecution table, heavy and menacing, her tongue stuck half out of her mouth. She flings curses at the defense witnesses. The judge, a middle-sized man with a homely, unoffending face, has to admonish her. She accuses the judge of being a nigger lover and has to be escorted briefly from the courtroom and taken to a windowless waiting room where a woman bailiff smirkingly tells her she doesn’t want to go to jail herself for something it’s only a nigra’s doing, honey.

Everybody senses the sadness and despair fuming around her like a cloud of bottleflies as she passes by but nobody calls it that.

Every human being, so the story goes, has to find something to believe in, to base his ridiculous hopes on, and she has found this.