Ginny Gall (25 page)

The next day they were on the road, headed for Cary. Then on to Dumont and then to Cromville. They drove past the long finger lake, Rommy Run. Inland gulls, white and gray, their sickle wings catching the late afternoon light, wheeled over the dark green waters of a little cove. They made it to Depburg by dark.

From time to time, but regularly, after the museum closed, after he wrote his letter to Celia and posted it, he studied the photographs. Looking at them—for signs, clues, entryways into mysteries, facts, solutions—he wondered if his own face were not a collection of hidden messages, like one of the notes posted on signboards at crossroads stores and post offices, readable by all, telling stories, revealing secrets, offering humorous bits or pitiful revelations; in the triangular piece of mirror they hung on the back door each morning for washing he began to study his face to discover what was there, what hidden messages or revelations were posted for the searchers of the world and the passersby . . . and not just the traditional indicators such as a weak chin (his was short but square) or ferrety eyes (his were large and hazel), but others, the special sign in the slightly curled and hard-edged upper lip that he was a man who dreamed of silver flying fishes and an empty caleche on a tropic shore . . . and a crease at the corner of his mouth that revealed the love of a duplicitous but comely woman who would leave him for a mule trader, say, who was losing his business to the tractor companies . . . or a level gouge above his short chin that revealed his susceptibility to the taste of quince and vinegar pie . . . a tiny curving indentation, a hook, at the edge of his left eyebrow that foretold hard days in the cotton and sweet pepper fields above the Acheron river (unknown to him as yet), as well as the throbbing soreness in his chest on evenings smelling of rust and sour pecans . . . and the tiny indentation below his left nostril, put there by a wasp sting when he was three months old (he’d been told by Coolmist), that signified the suffering of humankind . . .

The future, like a purple martin swooping in the last light of day,
was almost near enough, clear enough, to see, to fix . . . but then it was gone.

His face collapsed back into a pudding of dark lumpy skin. It had no character, he thought.

He went back to studying the faces of the mostly anonymous photographed negroes. These faces were fascinating to him. He had asked the prof why they didn’t take more pictures themselves, and the professor had said creation was not his line and besides he was baffled by some of the complex workings of that craft. Delvin himself was not particularly interested in taking pictures but it bothered him that they didn’t add more of their own manufacture to the lot. But they didn’t have money for a new camera and the one they had was busted when the professor threw it at a rabid coon.

Despite all this Delvin had begun to study the faces of those who came to view the exhibits.

He began to jot down descriptions of the clientele. He looked for signifying features, marks, signs. In this one he saw by the slant of a nose the confusion and the name-calling that was coming. In another down-shaded mouth he thought he perceived the impotent attempts to shift blame. In a drooping earlobe he saw bitterness against children. He liked the bumpy spots in faces. The knots and swellings. He himself had two small knots on his forehead and another just back of his chin on the left side. What they were caused by he didn’t know, but they worried him; he hoped they weren’t infant goiters. The hen’s egg on the forehead of a workman in Bayless fascinated him. He described it as a hen’s egg, duck’s egg, eagle’s egg, as a marble under the skin or a lump of custard. He wanted to run it between his fingers; squeeze the juice out of it, he wrote. The left half of one woman’s lip was swollen and droopy. She wanted to hide it with her hand (he wrote), but she’d decided not to. Bravely, she entered the museum with her head high. It was only as she re-entered the brilliant waxy sunlight that she ever so slightly flinched. He wanted to kiss her lip and tell her not to be ashamed and thought of Celia whose lips looked carved, long lips with the narrowest ridges running along their edge and tiny lines stroked vertically into them—lips
he wanted more than anything to kiss. He described her face before he forgot. He kept the written-down description of Celia’s face and returned to it in the night, adding a little, taking a little away, raising her cheekbones slightly, tapering her eyebrows and plucking them. She was fading. Without the description he couldn’t picture her.

He turned to describing what was around him. The truck was once black:
but now it’s gray
, he wrote.

It
’
s becoming ghostly. We
’
re the ghosts of present, past and future, slipping through the towns. In the morning sometimes when there
’
s fog the truck disappears and no one can find it. It
’
s as if all this huge collection of photographs, of pictured history, was erased, as if it never existed at all. Something makes me want to cry. Not just for my own troubles, which are pointed and rolling right on, but for everybody
’
s. Each photographed face is something true about the world. The happy ones, the sad ones, the lost ones, the found, each one telling its story. The truck hauling this great assembly through the towns. The people, the dazed and the suffering
. . .

and then he quit the writing. It was becoming too grandeed. He had a tendency in this direction that he recognized.
Everybody got to do something,
the professor said. He got the canvas bucket and hauled water from a well in the front yard of a slanted negro cabin and washed the truck. It didn’t come back to shiny black; it still was gray.

They were in Cullen, then Astor, then Cumming, then the old coal town of Radsburg. How did they, two negroes in a shabby van filled with photographs, escape destruction by the white race? In each town the strict divide between the races was carefully and forcefully maintained.
Place
was most important.
Remember your place
,
boy
, the instructions lettered invisibly but legibly on every sign and attitude and takeout window and coldwater shanty said.

The professor said, “When your own unholiness gets you burned down, shot, cannonaded, trampled, your close relatives killed, and
the victors dig up the dead and drunkenly dance with them by bonfirelight, which is just what happened to these white folks, what you want is a world or a section of the world where what was lost can be rebuilt, and, most important, none of those you wronged can make a move on you. You want a world that
stays still
. ‘We will live not in a spinning remnant,’ they say, ‘but in a world in which what stands for who we once were can be reconstructed and preserved without the shadow of death falling across it.’ But this is impossible to do. Life, snorting and fretting and sniffing around for something sweet, once loosed, can’t be fetched up. Even if it’s not loose, it will get loose. That’s the thing about life that makes it different from the stones: it moves around.”

But alien negroes driving a large truck—it was a kind of truck, built by the Ford Motor Company—bringing a celebration of things negroid, was pushing the limit. How did they get by without being lynched or at least beaten senseless, their van confiscated and their pictures burned with the yard trash?

The professor first thing when he arrived in whatever settled nervous burg they visited (they didn’t stop in every one) dropped by the police station and paid a bribe, made a donation, to the chief, yes, as said. And he made sure the chief and the city government understood that they—the alien purveyors—knew how stupid these dark folks were, showing each other photographs of their comic faces. They made it clear to the authorities that the exhibit was a folly, a cunning joke on the negro race, a lampoon and antic burlesque designed to humiliate and poke fun at every one of them. Make sure, Your Honor, these simple folk are in their place. What a hoot. He showed them examples of those feckless, half-wit darkies, granddaddy or some youngun napping in a porch swing or grinning big or a look on his face, as he stared off at the sun slipping down behind the pines, of foolish wonder. The police grinned and patted their bellies and laughed, mostly. Other times the professor cut it close, sometimes a little too close. But few wanted trouble, with negroes or any other group. (Times some defeated person, some sap that hatred
had knocked down so many times until he had to use a grudge to build himself back up, some fool who didn’t know better, some ex-tormented-child who wanted revenge, a self-despiser, would swing his feet back under him, rise up and knock the black man down. “But you always apologize,” the prof said, “and then you get back up.”

“I know about that,” Delvin said, remembering his scrape in the dress shop, and other venues.)

What up north they called the Depression circled like a flight of buzzards over every town. People still thought business would pull the country out even though business, since 1863, had not been able to pull the South out of anything and the new Depression was just a doubling up, locally.

“Yall just keep that race nonsense off among yourselves and don’t bother nobody,” the suzerains said to the professor, “we got real worries now.” Anyway, they had, since the war, quickly tied the black race back up in knots and they didn’t have to worry about them. Nor any fake professor and his truckload of comic photographs.

Into the negro half-towns and sham-cities Delvin began to go at night. He walked the streets of the Overtowns and Undertowns and the Congos and Mississippi and Louisiana quarters. The Lands of Darkness. Unpaved, they were often hardly streets at all. More like lanes in medieval towns of Europe or villages in Africa—streets filled with the smells of woodsmoke and spices and antique sensories made of bits of prehistoric matter and dried long-extinct flowers. On the creaky lopsided porches vague lights shone like bits of webbing or mist, casting huge shadows on the bare lopsided front walls of the little frame houses. Under the trees the tiny diastolic glimmers of lightning bugs ticked, becoming whiter the higher they rose. Up among the branches pinches and bits of gleaming too faint to cast shadows stayed on for hours. Up ahead, in the middle of the street, human shapes dipped and swooped in unhasty dances as the barely perceptible music of guitars and hand organs made their soundings in the deeps of night. Cries and hoots and whisperings.
There seemed always to be a bit of fog at the end of the street. Cats moaned in their long nights of suffering. Dogs barked with a sound like consumptive muted coughing. As he walked the streets in the deepest parts of the night he could hear people talking in their beds. Old men confessed to their snoring wives the secret affairs of their youth. Old women spoke of masked riders galloping furiously down the roads on huge dark horses. Children spoke of boogeymen with hands growing out of their knees and bellies. In dreams girls whispered to kindly lovers. Boys answered questions with wit and intelligence.

Who dat dar?
a woman’s voice called, but not to him. He carried in his heart the drubbed and muzzled love of a disallowing woman through the faintly whispering, crepitant streets. He believed this walking eased him and made him able to go about without so much fear he had to run away. He was scared all the time.
What have I come to?
he whispered in the dark caverns under oaks, and he was old enough—had been born old enough—to ask this question. He believed that whatever he was had to be played out in the world. He couldn’t hold off from it. What he was scared him. What he believed he was. Seventeen and strong, not very strong, but strong enough and able and filled with beef, with get-up-and-go, with pep, zip, vim—with
lifting power
, which the professor said was the greatest thing, lifting power—and he had an inexhaustible need to exercise himself on the earth.

In the shadows by a boarded-up livery stable, in a little town so small the africano section was only half of two streets next to the town dump, he waited as one would wait for a carriage called to take him to the far places of the world. The air smelled of pine smoke and rotten apples. Down the street a man in a long white nightshirt stepped out of his door and looked at the sky that was still dark. He waved at something in the sky and Delvin wondered who it was, or what, and thought he knew. What is coming? he wondered, but no one and nothing in the world could tell him. The man made a large sweeping gesture, turned back in and slammed the door behind him. The sound was like the last clap of a civilization closing up.

In Salisbury, Alabama, in the northwestern part of the state up near the Tennessee line, one clear night lit by stars, he walked by a church where choir practice was being held.

The choir was singing one of the old sorrow songs, a jubilee called “The Ship of Zion.” He stopped and stood under an open window to listen. Someone in the choir kept making a mistake, a woman. Each time, the director, a man, would stop the singing, crying out in a frustrated voice, “Halt!”

After a few busy-sounding and angry words from the director the choir would take up the song again. Again a mistake was made. With the same word—“Halt!”—the director would again stop the singing. This went on and on. A brief patch of silence, just a moment, followed each time at the quittance. In one of these empty moments, someone, a woman, maybe the erring singer, let loose a small, despairing cry. Her voice was like the voice of a child and maybe it was, but he didn’t think so and, studier of many faces, he thought hers was probably the face of some reedy girl, just in from the country probably, some plain-faced young person who just wanted to join a choir to praise the Lord and maybe meet people, maybe meet some boy who might like her, but who was finding out that she couldn’t really sing. Or maybe she just couldn’t please this stern master.

The choir started up again and once more the director stopped it with the same word; again Delvin heard the thin small wail.

The director spoke harshly again, this time ordering the woman out of the group. There was another silence and then came the sound, very quietly, of weeping. Gradually the weeping faded, as if the woman was leaving the room.

The choir started up again. This time the old jubilee went sweetly by without a hitch. But it seemed to Delvin there was a gap in the song, a little hole or gouged-out place where the young woman’s voice had been. He could hear this place. It was an emptiness like the silence inside the narrow circle of a well.