Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“I think she’s mad about being so plain — excuse me,” he said in deference to Delvin’s situation.

“I aint missed that part,” Delvin said. “She’s got other good qualities.”

“I know she do.”

“How you know?”

“I’ve knowed her all my life and she’s a big woman — you can’t miss em.”

“Hmm.”

Delvin didn’t think homeliness was what was bothering her — or not the only thing. “She just hadn’t fulfilled her purpose,” he said.

“Depends on what it is, I guess.”

“That’s right.”

When Feveril went in to pour himself another from from his kitchen jug, Delvin wandered out of his yard. On Lester street on his way to Minnie’s he heard the strains of a song he was familiar with, “Der Stürmische Morgen,” coming from the little one-man barbershop. He peeked in as he passed by and saw the barber, Mr. Eulis, sitting in his tipped-back porcelain chair listening to the Victrola with his eyes closed and moving one finger the way Mr. Oliver did when he played the same Schubert song on the wind-up machine in his bedroom. Down the street outside Leary’s grocery a tan dog stood on its hind legs trying to lick one of the hams Mr. Leary had hanging from the porch eave. A little boy dressed in white stumped slowly on crutches back and forth along the walk in front of a house on Bee way. A large man wearing pressed overalls without a shirt sat in a tree swing staring at the soft dust under his feet. Delvin wished the man would look up so he could hail him and smile. He’d started hanging a smile on his face since he left prison, making himself appear friendly. Wherever he got a chance and figured he could take a chance. Stella Burkle, a fine-looking woman but crazy, walked along on the other side of the street, swinging her big white patent leather pocketbook. If you spoke to her she would hit you with it.

Maybe a limp, he thought, maybe I ought to go back to that — throw the marshals off. But it was too late. People knew he had been sick, but that was all they’d heard of that might exclude him from military service. The penitentiary would keep you out. ’Cept they were probably putting prisoners now on work gangs for the good of the country. Well, the country needed cotton and the prisons he’d been in were good at producing that. The war was one more fright jabbing at men in prison. Negro men locked up in a lost corner of the white man’s world. What’s gon become of you? Who are you? Who you be? And here comes Mr. Billy Camp and his goat cart. The old man, walking beside his two-wheel cart pulled by two billies and accompanied by half a dozen outwalker goats, passed by going the other way. He gave Delvin a friendly wave with his leafy mulberry stick and Delvin waved back. Maybe he could join up with him, see the country at goat speed, pass as a friendly colored crazy man. Back at Minnie May’s white cottage home he sat on the back steps wearing a stained derby with a hole in the back the size of a peach, a hat he had picked out of the trash in Jacksonville. The warden at Burning Mountain had worn a derby with two scuffed marks on the front like the white eyes of a ghost. He had picked up his notebook on the way through the bedroom. The little slip of blue paper he put in it to mark his place was gone; Minnie May had looked through it. So now she knew he was an escapee — probably. But why had he left it for her to easily find? In the book he had taken note of the tin washtub hung on the shed wall, the beans coiled around their strings in the garden. A leaf on a spicebush that spun crazily in no wind he could feel, white as the wing of a cabbage butterfly. He’d studied the soft slim prints of Minnie May’s bare feet in the dust by the back steps, prints that reminded him of his mother’s. First thing his mama did when she came home was to take off her shoes. Walked around all day in her bare feet, leaving tracks he’d followed like a detective. He didn’t think about her as much as he used to. But still in dreams she came to him, laughing or crying, mute and determined, one time yelling at him with her thin arm raised like he was a dog she was bound to beat on.

Sitting now on the back steps, tracing with one finger his mother’s name, Cappie, looking at Minnie’s footprints that might have been his mama’s, he began to cry. He shaded his face and choked down the sounds, careful still of prison dangers. His body shook. It wasn’t all grief. Mingled with the pasty, durable, extenuated sadness was a happiness, a new one, a stretching out of himself, long-shanked and agile — he was, in this moment of American time, free, a misplaced man, overlooked, drifting on the breeze, a wanderer amid the garrison of interlockedness, sunk deep enough in negro life for a while not to be missed, uncounted by any census, omitted by the tax man, skipped by the army. Only the cross-Dixie skookum boys were looking for him.

He wiped his eyes.

If they were looking. Maybe they’d. . but he knew they hadn’t forgot. Couldn’t down here afford to neglect for too long any unaccounted-for colored man. Colored man — the rules he had to follow — was the linchpin of the whole business down here. Lynch pin.

In the garden he picked a tomato and ate it sitting on the ground next to a big pepper plant. The calendar said it was fall but it might as well be summer. The sky was speckled with tiny white clouds like little checkmarks. From another yard, not far off, came the thunk of an ax. “Rooster,” a woman’s voice called, “come here and help me mend that winder shade.” The smell of frying pork from far off, sweet smoke. He dried the tomato juice off his hands by rubbing them hard together, picked a pepper, shucked the flaky white seeds and ate that. Then he picked a few late runner beans, shelled them out into his palm and ate them. Then a small summer squash, the ring of yellow blossom a ruff around one end. I could eat myself around the world, garden to garden.

In the wash shed he cranked water into a tin basin and scrubbed his face and hands. In the piece of mirror propped on a piece of shelf he studied his face. There were deep lines running down his cheeks. He liked that; before prison he’d been a fat-faced boy, now he looked like a man who had seen trouble and lived through it. He patted his hair, mulling its length. Before he was arrested he wore his hair brushed out and squared off with a part razored on the left side, but afterwards, in the convict life, he had his hair cut short. Now, out in the world again, he’d let it grow some, and over here in Atlanta he’d gone to Mr. Eulis’s and while “Laudate Dominum” played on the Victrola had him chop a part into it. He’d tried a mustache, but it looked like a black caterpillar on his lip so he shaved it off. Minnie May had a razor right here in the house, left over from the last man who lived here, and he used that, glad to come that near to having his own. He took time lathering his face, leaned in close to the mirror, examining his creased cheek, the little dents up near his ears, the stubby chin. Sometimes he’d wash the lather off and start over just for the feel of it. Minnie May often heated water in a kettle and carried it out to him; he loved it when she did that.

He took his time shaving, no rush at the moment, pausing to study his face as it reappeared out of the lather.

“What’s going on in there?” he asked it. “You ever gon own up?” He touched the thin puffed scars on his left cheekbone. “I reckon not. No telling what you might have to own up to .” In case somebody was listening he laughed a little shushing laugh to cover his embarrassment at talking to himself.

He carefully washed his face and carefully patted it dry and stared at himself in the mirror. “We’ll keep you awhile longer,” he said. He washed the razor, dried it on the towel, folded it and put it in his pocket.