Ginny Gall (19 page)

So his real travels began. He rode the trains that passed through dinky towns and entered big cities through the back doors and he rested on the top of boxcars smelling of rotted grain and rode the gunnels when he had to and swung onto the metal porches of gondolas and spoke with men who had wandered so far that they had almost outdistanced their own bodies and become ghosts, and he learned to dodge the bulls and the rough riders, and he picked up what he could working here and there, baling hay and hoeing bush beans and winding tobacco leaves onto sticks, and everywhere he went the stories collected and the unpainted domiciles of black citizens stood before him like memories of olden times and he entered new worlds life by life and gathered there his tares and offered what he could and the days passed clanking or whispering along the chain of his life. At night sometimes a loneliness like a lost letter found him in his bed in a cottonhouse or on a forest floor or inside the patternless wooden walls of a boxcar and it tried to explain to him that he would never find a home but he refused to listen and turned his back and gazed out at the moonlight standing in wet grass like an angelina too shy to come inside. Time sang its cracked songs in rail yards and along the edges of the fields and passed on, leaving half memories
and slights and a false heartiness and belly laughs and cold suppers on somebody’s sagging back steps: the poor-mouthings of a crass deceiver he took little count of and rarely worried about.

The dots of blackness on each calendar date, marking another day when the police did not come pulling at him, rousting him from a hobo jungle or barn or back steps, added time, freedom from what he knew was awaiting him. He carried this knowledge of the pursuit like a stranger, dark man, darker than he was, accompanying him into whatever town he passed through, whatever road he walked along, slipping with him at night into open fields or woods or along leafy riverbanks. It was in this flight, in these days, that he touched his mother again. Beside a stream in Louisiana choked with rusty foam he found himself dreaming of her so profoundly that he thought he lay with his head in her lap listening to her sing “Old Johnny Jones,” one of the songs she had sung to him under the little peach tree in their backyard in Chattanooga. He too was a runner, he had wanted to say, he too knew pursuit, but she faded before he could get the words out. In dawns of swirling fog he called silently to her, but she never answered. The days came up, wintry or steaming with heat, and in them he felt the press of the law. But always he felt the reassurance of his mother, escapee and wanderer, out ahead of him somewhere on the roads or crossing a river on a hand-pulled ferry, sitting by a campfire or dancing on a stage before admiring crowds, and gradually in these dreams, these fantasies or reveries or boy’s make-believe, she bent toward success, toward kindness and elaboration, rosy with life, resting as a free woman in a happiness that was the happiness of dreams, and in these dreams he too was free.

He was walking one fall day along an unpaved side street in the dark quarter in Yellow Cross, Mississippi, when he passed a black-painted truck the size and shape of a small moving van. The truck was parked in front of an African Holiness church. On the side in dusty gold letters were the words
Negro Museum of the Americas.
In back was a door and a fold-down set of steps. A slim middle-aged africano man in a long tan canvas duster shiny at the elbows and a soft black felt hat sat on the step eating cantaloupe chunks out of a white bowl. Delvin asked him what this was, this museum. The man cocked his head, continued chewing until he could swallow good and then turned and squinted up at the high back of the vehicle.

“You mean this here?” he said, smiling, showing flat white teeth. “This is the only traveling museum of the american negro in existence.”

Delvin felt a jolt of pleasure. “A real museum,” he said.

“Exactly right. Photos mostly, but in fact a record of the negro’s trials and sufferings and joys on this side of the Atlantic ocean.”

“Could I take a look?”

“Why certainly. Only cost you a nickel.”

Delvin allowed as he had an extra nickel at that time and would be pleased to spend it on such an operation.

The man put the bowl down on the steps, took out a large yellow handkerchief and with gestures ceremonial wiped his mouth and hands.

“You produce the cash and I’ll open her up for you.”

The man had an accent like a northern white man, and his facial features—narrow nose, thin lips, soft green eyes—were those of a white man, but he was as black nearly as he was—sealblack, they called it.

The man—Professor Carmel, he called himself—produced a flat brass key, opened the back door and ushered Delvin into the van, stepping ahead of him to raise the canvas shades on one side. Along the back and other side walls were photographs, hundreds of them. On a table running down the long closed side were stacks of objects, jumbled together, among them skulls and batons and whisks and feathery headdresses and flutes and what looked like a gilded chamber pot. The photographs dominated the exhibit.

Delvin walked around the room that was as large nearly as the house he was born in, looking at the pictures. The man lit a kerosene lamp that made no impression on the daylight streaming under the rolled-up canvas shades and hung it from a brass hook in the ceiling. Delvin studied the photographs. Flat black-and-white representations, the stillness of each, the caughtness, gestures trapped, looks riveted to the paper, people turning and never getting there, the placements, the issuance of cries uncried, the smiles or grim looks, the sadness in a boy’s eyes, the girl looking at her mother who was fixing her hair with what looked like a gold bobbin—these only gradually touched him. Records of a moment pressed on either side by what came before and what was coming after. They all—all the africanos—knew what had been, had a pretty good idea of what was on its way. The proprietor, bent down under the table, fiddled with something, made a quick frantic motion and suddenly the scratchy voice of Bessie Smith flew up like a big yellow bird filling the van. Hurt and desolation, the crime of being black, the uselessness of fighting back, fear like a grime covering every surface, the tremors and quakes, a softness in the heart you couldn’t obliterate. He saw the hoes lifted in cotton fields like the specialized instrumentation of an anonymous and preposterous camarilla, men poised like dancers in barn rafters lifting long sticks upon which were strung the limp assegaial tobacco leaves, children standing waist deep in dew-drenched fields of cotton tobacco corn beans and peanuts bushy as gallberry shrub, or men posed in ditches over a dark infrangible corpus with pickaxes raised like the ceremonious antlery of some white man’s loony pestiferation. He had seen much on the roads, much that wasn’t found here, or
not on this day. Old men battered until their faces looked like a coal seam turned inside out. Boys used for the smoothness of their bodies. Women squatted by the tracks, heads and shoulders powdered in coal dust, waiting like mail sacks containing no good news for the next hard hook to snatch them up. Some of this was here. The music pressed him on, pressed the pictures as if they were leaves of a tree gathered again in reverse progeneration into the big armory of leafage.

He couldn’t take in half of these photos, not a tenth. Many were stuck like markers in big books. He liked the books themselves, the large folios, cloth and leather bound, stuffed with progeny. He ran his hands over their covers as the keeper showed them to him. The music scratched itself out. Suddenly he had to get away.

He rose up qualmous and shaking, abruptly overfretted in his mind. No not that exactly—scared he had for a second lost his sense of where he was, like the time he’d dreamed a moment longer than he needed to and almost pitched headfirst off the ladder of a Baton Rouge–bound freight car.

He set the book down (he had been by now sitting on the lowest of the van’s two back steps, out in the air) and staggered across the dust-charged street into a field grown up in plantains and pokeweed. He thrashed through these greeny drifts and pulled up in a little cleared space where somebody had once made a campfire. Some wanderer. “That is what I am,” Delvin said. Said and slumped to his knees and over, passed out, like somebody graved into by the heat.

He came to with the professor man dripping cold water in his face.

“Come on boy, you’re not all right but you will live.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Delvin said.

The man rocked back on his heels and laughed. He raised the white china bowl that now contained water. “Here.” He held the bowl to Delvin’s mouth and let him drink. The water tasted pleasantly of cantaloupe.

He told Professor Carmel that he had for many years worked—was raised actually—in a funeral home, and when the prof asked which
one and he told him he said with a broad smile that showed off his fine large teeth that he knew old Oliver well.

“A bit spendthrift with his emotions, but honorable and a fine consistency of service,” he said.

It made Delvin less lonely to hear this. He had been lonely for several days, maybe longer. Riding freights was generally a social activity of a kind, but due to a sweep by railroad detectives along the Southern line, he’d had to lay low in a canebrake by himself for three days before catching a local freight out of Metusa, a rattling train empty of cargo but for some loads of furniture and no other rail companions.

“You know something about the departed,” Prof Carmel said in a friendly way.

“I know something about how to prepare a body.”

“Fancy up the meat,” Carmel said.

“Most folks consider it showing respect for what’s coming. Don’t want to meet the Lord in your work clothes—”

“Worms and beetles are what’s coming,” the prof said.

Delvin believed pretty much the same thing, cosmologically speaking, but he didn’t generally like anybody else pressing on him in some righteous way that he had to believe this too. It didn’t matter what side of the theological fence people were on, they got hard-shelled about it quick enough. But the professor had given his correction or opinion in a genial way.

“Yall photograph up there?” he said.

“You mean the deceased? No, we don’t. Some do it by their own arrangements, but we don’t encourage it.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t discourage it either, but I think Mr. Oliver would rather people mourn by way of living memory. He’s not pushy about it though. He just doesn’t promote the service.”

“People are interesting no matter what shape they’re in, don’t you think?”

“Yes I do.”

“Look at these,” he said and pulled a long drawer out from a flat cabinet under the table.

Attached to big sheets of thick black paper were photographs of negro men hanging from the limbs of trees by their necks. Here we add to the number, he thought. Here we add to it. He wanted to turn away again. A nausea gripped him. Good lord, good lord. That boy out in the country, hanged and chopped and burned half away. It had been too much. It was still too much. This was too much.

As he bent to look at the bodies, some broken-necked, some burned so their arms were tapered stumps, some denatured, some with whip marks showing on their blood-greased naked backs, some gutted, one wearing high top shoes with the laces still tied in immaculate bows, another looking like the man who used to sell parched peanuts on the courthouse square—every one somebody, looking like somebody—he experienced a collapsing sensation as if he had soiled his pants, but he hadn’t. His private self shrank from the surface of his body, yielding inward like walls falling in on once safe rooms. He didn’t like it that Carmel had held these for last. Crippled, scarred, half-skinned, mutilated—still it was the faces that held him. Lonesome negro faces surrounded by the upturned faces of white men. No, not lonely, he had it wrong. He hadn’t been looking close enough; he had hardly been looking at all. But he saw it now: the faces of those no longer there. But not even that. No. He saw it: only the white men were there. All alone in the world they made. They were the ones who lived again in a universe made up of only their kind. Not again, but for once, finally. He shuddered. Many of the white faces were blank. No, not blank—he couldn’t get it right at first either—: addled, sated, entranced. But not that, no, not even that. They had the look of the rapturously crazed. Something tucked way down behind their souls had leapfrogged to the front. Yes. But not so quickly—and this is what he saw—that he couldn’t make out the shocked and hopeless expression still visible behind the stuporous glee. And this, the pictures whispered, to his face or behind his back as he turned away, is your fate. He shuddered as a chill flashed
across his body and he staggered, catching himself against the table. He coughed into his fist.

“You see how human beings really are,” said the professor.

“White men,” Delvin said. He just said that. It was like saying “The devil.” No need to mention him.

The professor went to pull another sheet out, but Delvin stayed him with a touch of his hand on the tray. He turned back to the pictures on the walls. The van smelled of onions and sweat and of another, chemical, odor which the professor said was ferrous sulphate, from developing the photos. He stared again at the faces of the living. A little boy trailed a cotton sack behind him like a long fat grub. In his face a guilelessness, a comfortableness, you could call it a happiness. Shirtless, in overalls, and wearing a huge sombrero style hat, he looked back at Delvin with a gentleness that nearly brought tears to his eyes. Crying not for the dead—he’d learned this in the funeral business—but for the lifebound living. This wasn’t the only face that held him. There were others, skips and jumps of faces, expressions, dull and crisp and bloated or filled with a fierceness that stirred him and scared him and made him feel a churning in his guts and even deeper. An old woman with a wide fleshy gleaming face and flared nostrils looked out with an eagerness to please and so much . . . it was sorrow . . . that he laughed outloud, himself shocked. In many faces fright mingled with a desire to please. Others were as nearly blank as the faces of the lyncherous white men, though not so often erased. A man caught for murder (so a hand-lettered tag said) looked at him with cold eyes in a grimly smiling face; his lower lip looked as if it had been bitten in two and sewn roughly back together. Stunned faces, terrified faces, smashed and reconstituted faces, organized faces and the faces of the holy and the hustling, the light-complected face of a man in a high white collar and thin tie who looked as if nothing in the world could touch him. Faces that wanted to shame him and faces that made him want to slap them. A little girl with a high wide forehead and small intense eyes he wanted to kiss. Two old men sitting on the front steps of a grocery store laughing fit to bust.

And behind him the white faces of men looking up from the
lynching field at the body of a black man or gazing at the camera as if they didn’t know what a camera was.

But then here were others, pinned to the opposite wall, spilling out of other big flat books, flows and gatherings—of silliness, of running and jumping, of yelling and delight. A woman laughed open-mouthed, a man beat time with sticks on a porch floor as two other men out in the dust before a spurt of campfire danced an ebullient jig. A congregation lustily sang. A man petted a horse’s face, the look in both of their eyes, horse and man, compelled and kindly. A boy called across a river to other boys rising like dolphins from the glassy water. Children rode a mule, old men played dominoes, gripping their laughter like it was a great fish they were landing by hand. A band marched, brass raised, down a sunny street. A little boy on a top step contemplated his stretched-out feet. An old woman whelmed with glee. A girl in a checkered headrag wiped sweat off her forehead, grinning over a big bowl of ice cream. A man in a dark suit bent over a tablet. Cascade of fellowship, of tickling or guffaws or brimmed-up festiveness. Children on top of a wagonload of cotton high as a house. Chuckling babies, women shouting in joy.

He turned away with tears in his eyes.

“Yessir,” Carmel said as he tapped the flats with the heel of his hand to straighten them, “you can see the true life of the race in these pictures.”

It took a minute for Delvin to draw himself together. A coolness came into his mind, and it was only then that he realized how tired he was.

The museum keeper had turned away, giving him time, rustling among his photos, gathering, careful to keep his fingers from the impacted centers of the paper.

“Ah, lord,” Delvin said.

“Yes, sholy. Like a mashed-up sweet potato.”

Delvin smiled. He indicated a photograph of men and women standing in front of a white-painted church with a half-finished steeple.

“That’s over in east Tennessee,” Carmel said. “That church has since been burned to the ground.”

It was the church where the funeral for the slain boy was held. “I’ve been there,” he said. “I
was
there.”