Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He pushes up to his feet and takes a few small steps. He feels like a child, a lopsided novice, manhandled into the world. They said back in Chat-town that he was a zigzag baby. Zigzag by way of his irregular birth, by way of his wayward mother, needing all the luck he could get from the caul. They would say now that the zag had put him in prison and sent his life off into the briars. But here he is. For a moment he is here, free under these big pine trees. The wind soughs and shudders, a mild wind bringing with it hints and foretelling. He dances a few steps, swinging his shoulders, bending down, straightening his back as he moves. Under the hard hand a life moves. Somebody wrote those words and he read them. Words come all the way from some room in some city up north, some dreamer sitting alone at a table, who drew them off the reels of mystery and power in himself.

He scoops up a handful of beach sand, lets it pour through his fingers. The sand is soft, mixed in its coloring like something halfway between dirt and sand. With his gritty fingers he dabs his forehead. He knows he no longer looks as young as he is. He’s seen men in prison who look like Methuselah. A sadness, his own, the one he located early, pushes in among the hopefulness. A mournfulness — the miseries they call it in Chattanooga. Chat-town. Where people come and go. He wants to go back there, slip through like a will o’ the wisp, touch down here and there. Then he’ll see.

He lies back and listens to the surf lightly flop and sizzle, the brown Gulf water sliding up and sinking back again.

He walked east on the Old Spanish Trail, sinking to his ankles in the soft gray sand, and getting rides from africano folk passing in mule-pulled wagons. The road was paved in stretches now (and in those spots marked with small signs with the number 90 and the words DIXIE HIGHWAY stamped on them in black lettering), and among the wagons, flatbed trucks and a few autos made their way under mossy live oaks and through the pine barrens between the little board-and-brick towns. He stole a two-dollar bill out of a church basket in Chipley and was caught by the preacher’s nineteen-year-old son who was home from the war Delvin had barely known was going on, but the preacher took pity on him and let him keep the money and fed him at the kitchen table and gave him fresh clothes to replace the tatters he had been given by the Drovers off their own washline back on the banks of Aufuskie river and with the money and resurrected feelings a full belly gave him he bought fishline and hooks and a cane pole and fished his way across Florida in ditch creeks, branches and rivers, pulling in croakers and bream and roasting them on fires he built off the road among the circulating night creatures and bugs. Carrying the fishing pole fed him and made him inconspicuous, a colored man with a harmless purpose trudging the highway.

In August he was in Jacksonville, living with three other men in a dirt-floored cabin on the river where he idled on his plans and worked shifting sacks in a coffee warehouse and one early morning without discussing anything with himself or saying goodbye caught a freight headed to Atlanta. The passenger compartments were crowded, but the rods were emptier than he remembered except for the old men and the crazy boys running from imaginary pursuers and he pretended to be one of the lost and blubbering crazy ones, telling a story of wild men from the west riding huge machines that chased after him.

“Hell, boy,” an old cross-eyed white man who claimed to have once been manager of a streetcar company in Long Beach, California, said, “you just been seeing them tanks.”

He knew vaguely what a tank was but he knew little else about down-to-date life in the fall of 1943, but that didn’t matter because he was playing crazy. Around him in the car men talked of war and of mighty personages and of great battles fought with big guns and these matters got into his nap dream and tore loose big chunks of space from the sky and from cities that loomed like vast archipelagos over his tiny sleeping body and in his sleep he shuddered and whimpered and cried out and the men mocked him. In the Atlanta yards a white man wanted to fight him but he knocked him down with a single backhanded punch to the face and he felt a surge of killingness shoot up inside him and he could sense himself losing dominion and he staggered sideways and anybody who looked into his eyes would think he was looking into the eyes of a hellion. The experience frightened him. It was caused by the accumulation of poisons acquired in the penitentiary, he figured, but he was not sure how to make the poisons go away and he sat in the tall sooty grass thinking until he had to get up and go because another man, a stranger with marcelled hair, had come up to him and said he knew him. He ran away from this man as fast as he could.

Later he found himself in an area of the hilly city where those of his own kind lived in shanties beside dusty red clay streets and he met a woman there and lived with her for a couple of months. At night this woman washed vegetables and ran the pea sheller at the big farmers market out on Airline Road, and in the mornings she would slide into the big bed in her pleasant back bedroom and they would make love and she would talk a little about the night’s work before going to sleep. He would get up and sit on the back steps looking at the goldenrod flowering down by the back fence and at the big hooped-over tomato plants in the garden filled with ripe fruit and the corn stalks just streaking brown and watch the little red-throated hummingbirds buzz around the statice bushes and he would think he had come into a kind of heaven. The woman wanted him to marry her but he didn’t want to do that. It was no longer because of Celia, but he didn’t want to stay in Atlanta and he couldn’t bring himself to ask this woman, Minnie May Layfield by name, to come with him. He wanted to get out of the Southland entirely. That is, after he had visited Chattanooga one more time.

He told her a little about his life, eliminating the prison part, speaking of his time on the cotton plantation and his years on the rails before that and his travels with the professor and a little about his life in the funeral home in a small city he didn’t name. Minnie May loved him and didn’t mind his falsifying — she knew it for what it was — but she thought he was foolish not to marry her and told him so.

“We are supposed to enjoy the bounty that is offered us,” she said as they sat in the afternoon on the back steps sipping iced tea with a piece of lemon in it she had brought home from the market, his first lemon since he was a child. His teeth were loose in his head (like seeds in a gourd, he said) and his bones ached from the residual malaria but he was delighted to receive the bounty of these small touches, ice and citrus fruit, and he told her so.

“I mean some of the larger style bounties that have come your way.”

“I am also happy to have received the gift of your hospitality in much greater ways, I can promise you that,” he said, and rubbed along her strong smooth thigh. “I don’t mean just this either, though I do enjoy it.”

“Where in Ginny Gall’d you learn to talk like that?” Minnie said, looking off into the sweet gum that was beginning to soak up yellow.

He blushed in his deep black skin, and the blushing was new, or new again, and ran his knuckles lightly over her up-turned palm that was pink and hard as a workingman’s.

He found a woman’s body — this woman’s body — to be voluminous and swampy, massive, without end, a colossal force that threatened to sweep him away, that crammed against him, making him think of the Gulf that time off Sunny Point and of dreams and of the strange rolling affections that came on the darkest of prison nights. Touching her set off alarms that the touches themselves quieted.