Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Delvin does not account particularly well for himself. Already bearer of an extended sentence (escape fiend), he has lapses during which he forgets the order of things and thinks this is the second trial and then for a sec thinks he is sitting in the cab of the van, debating with the professor the true facts of the slave revolt in Haiti, and then suddenly he is snatched up by a rage that according to the Capital City Observer seems to fill him like a gust of hot wind fills a sail and he lets loose with a gusher of vituperation aimed at the state judicial system and the state itself (“impoverished, derelict agency of numbskullery and perversion”), including every soul in said state, though those accusing him of these crimes, so the paper points out, are all natives of other states, including not only the accused’s home state of Tennessee but such northern states as Ohio and New York. Gammon has allowed him to be put up for cross-examination and he does no better, really, at the hands of the state prosecutor. He does get across to the jury that he believes himself to be falsely accused, but that is pretty much the limit of it.

By this time the state is becoming embarrassed by the whole confabulation. The first two trials were hot topics in the national media. The state, which already considers itself put upon and misused as all get-out, is now presented in an even more unfavorable light. The nativeborn, who think of themselves — white folk, that is — as among the most accommodating and generous human beings on earth, are scalded by the adverse publicity. Dolts, bigots, murderers, incesters, juicers, addled row runners, slew-footed cretins and nutcases, nightcrawlers, dusters, general miscreants and shovel-faced fools, showoffs, clods, shitheads — utter assholes — are some of the terms used against them.

But if they have never grown used to such, they are prepared. Ever since things first began to go badly with the cheap labor business, the locals learned to fling back what was flung at them. They are beginning in this instance to grow tired of the acidic innuendoes and outright slanders. This crazy nigra and all those other crazy nigras have caused them more trouble really than they are worth, or than standing them straight up by way of a profound lesson in how to behave is. Men lying in their beds under window fans sucking in the scents of yellow jasmine, fertilizer, spun cotton and Bull Durham tobacco smoke feel in their deepest recesses the faint but insistent pressure of a misused people rising. The powers of custom and church-sponsored reason are all that hold back a tide of despair that otherwise would swamp these men and drive them to wild futile acts. But they — like everybody — have to find a way to go on without befouling themselves, or at least without making it look as if they did.

Out beyond the tiny zone of actuality, the meaty core of fact from which they receive their instructions to do what is necessary to stay alive on earth (no matter what), pressed and marbled with the sweet fat of love for those children whose lives are being cut down at the root by falseness, beyond this supersaturated mix of divisible realities, they experience, as always, the need to hold to a position that is imperishable. Only such a position will allow them to take a break and start to get some fun out of life. That’s what, goddammit, this routine with these grassy coons is about, they say.

“Everybody down here thinks he is right,” Gammon says, pulling on his cigar. “He is too scared not to think it.

“Movement, that is the sine qua non of this universe,” Gammon says. “Keep it moving.” He has developed motes in his right eye and though the doctor assures him they are harmless, they scare him. “What is wrong with this malefactorous boys of Klaudio, this KO Boys thing, is it has stopped moving. Everything living that can still twitch is bailing out of that ratless grounded ship.” He has haplessly married a game-legged woman from the capital whose family owns a string of peanut mills in four states and who wants him to give up the law and go traveling with her. “The prosecutors want to live happily. The juries, the judges, the defense lawyers, the uncoddled and spiritually mutilated accused — they want to live happily. Even the white boys who got their asses kicked. Even the two violated women. Or even one of them.” He has promised his wife he will retire from the law in the spring. “There is still a woman,” he says, “this adiposal Cypriot from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and points north and south, who holds to her story that Delvin Walker and Carl Crawford and Little Buster Wayfield, among others, committed the crime of rape on her body and must be punished for it.”

He looks heavily at his listeners, a couple of beat reporters plus loafers and afternoon drinkers and ex-preachers — the common habitues of the Constitution Bar on State street. He wishes he was singing Schubert lieder in a choir. He signals the barkeep for another.

“The exasperated gents sitting at their restaurant tables ordering without menu or leaning back in Adirondack chairs under the scuppernong arbor drowsy with the heavy wine of ripe grapes and the soothing hum of honeybees, or jumping from a third-story window to escape the Meredith Hotel fire on Custom street, or sitting on a doughnut cushion to ease their hemorrhoids at the Melody mule and horse auction in Loris, or watching their young daughters dive from the ten-foot board into the clear green waters of Aucilla Springs, or walking or fighting or sleeping or arguing with an associate or straining on the crapper or praying or whining or crying out to God or cursing the day they were born — these men, who by circumstance or personal effort have become embroiled in this calamity, cannot quite get this dear woman, lying snoring on her back, I expect, as we speak, through the balmy hours of a late spring Saturday morning, say — have not been able to prevail, or suggest with enough persuasiveness, or lean against with appropriate gesturing, or outwait or outwit, to retrieve from her a recantation that would set them free.

“This is a true story,” he says, sipping assertively from his iced whiskey. “Of course it is human nature to buy into positions that claim the means to solve problems of assault against the well-being of the one buying. So there are those deeply disposed to carry the hurt forth and onward.”

His listeners have mostly turned away.

Gammon knows that later in the afternoon about dusk, even drunk, he will begin to wish he was dead. It is something he has almost grown used to.

These are some of the factors Delvin struggles against at this time.

The latest trial, its facts rubbed, squeezed and twisted to produce enough juice to quench the mortal thirst of its participants, lurches wheezing to its end. Coover Broadfoot’s sentence is reduced to three more years, to be served in the restful conditions of Burning Mountain prison. Bony, who has shanked his cellmate, and Delvin Walker, the chosen, will go on as if these extra trials haven’t happened. Delvin is not however returned to Uniball, where he would be thrust back into his punishment conditions, but sent onward like a dupe in a prank to the next skookum house on the list of houses for Uniball troublemakers, down on the Salt Plateau in the middle of the state.

After a few years in the soppy heat — after another trial in which the by-now-wobbling parties, as the day fades to sunset, fight like weary and desperate, numbed and baffled dogs — he is shunted on to Acheron, a raw spot in the woods in the southern regions.

From there he has just now escaped.

He sits hunched against his knees, looking out at the slowly flopping meager surf. The inshore water is the color of weak coffee and the combs of the surf too are stained a faded brown. Down the beach the blackened stumps of stubbed-off trees protrude from the gray sand. Through a thin rain he can see woody islands out in the bay. He looks up at the tops of the tall pines stirring faintly in breeze. The rain falls softly. It is mild, soothing; weather without malice. A freeboard rain. He has come a long way and he has a long way to go. But for this moment there is nothing but easily drawn breaths. He wishes Mr. Oliver was here and the Ghost and Polly and Elmer the assistant and Mrs. Parker and everybody from those days. Wherever they are, pressed down by life or sweating over some difficult task or running for their lives in a dream, let them step aside for a time and come sit on this sandy beach and rest.