Ginny Gall (3 page)

“You better run, you little africanis!”

He didn’t quit running until he was on the Red Row side of the bridge. Dodging behind a big loquat bush, he stopped, bent over and began to draw back his breath. Those blaring, crumpled, pink-and-red-mottled faces. He’d seen angry colored faces among them too.

Cappie found him that afternoon sitting in his little yellow rocking chair with tears streaming down his face, still wearing the green cotton shirt. His sister had pinned the halves of the shirt together because he would not take it off. Coolmist told Cappie what had happened. She had heard it from Miss Maylene Watts, who was employed by the Minor family over on Covington street. Miss Maylene had been accompanying Mrs. Watts downtown to carry packages for her when she saw the boy tossed into the street. Mr. Jimmy Coolidge, who janitored for the Atwell Appliance store across the street from the Miss and Mrs. Style Shop, had filled her in on the details. According to the story Delvin had been thrashed in the street by Mr. Billy Hammock, the assistant manager of Cooper Drugs on Main street.

A hot gushing rage filled Cappie’s body, almost blinding her. She couldn’t hear what her daughter was saying. A stiff, bony purpose rose in her. She rushed out of the house and down Adams street. At the intersection she stepped on the meaty half of an apple lying in the dirt, slipped and fell to her knees. She pushed herself up and as she did so she saw the white underflesh of her knee and inside it a crescent-shaped slice of blood. A nausea filled her but she made herself start out again, limping onto the bridge.

Mr. Dominion Baskrell, a one-eyed negro barber just passing by, stopped her by grabbing her arm.

“Where you going now?” he said. “Git down. You aint goin to rile the white folks.”

“Get off me,” she cried, pulling her arm. Her voice that she thought should be loud was only a whisper. She felt a feathery faintness. Blood ran down her shin, a thin stream. “I got to go,” she said and started on, but before she got all the way across the bridge a
suffocating tiredness came over her. Poor child. My poor child. She began to weep. The tears felt like cold water. Why aren’t they hot? she wondered.

Just beyond the bridge she stopped in a field where a market was held every Saturday. Some white boys were throwing a ragged ball around. A couple of them stopped to look at her. Shame crawled her. She was wearing her work clothes, a shiny, ruffled purple dress cut halfway up her thigh, and she carried her black patent leather pocketbook. The buildings of the city, up a slight incline from where she stood, seemed the ramparts of a fortress reared up before her. The heaviness in her body weighed her down. She couldn’t go forward. She began to walk, angling off to the other side of the street where a solitary house stood. She couldn’t tell quite where she was. She seemed to be sliding backwards down a slope. She bent and picked a purple thistle flower.

She still had this twirl of silky filament in her hand when she reached the bar at the Emporium.

Later that evening she appeared at the back door of Mr. Louis Miller’s clothing shop on Ducat street. She slipped inside the little boxlike back entry and yelled up the stairs for him to come down. She visited him on Wednesday nights after his store closed. He was an old flat-faced white man who had lived forty years in the town. Miller poked his head out of his door. He saw a drunken familiar woman with her hair all spriggy and spiraled around her head. He had always liked the darkest women; black as Africa, he thought of them as, but Cappie was blacker than that. She shouted that he had broke her child.

He tried to calm her and was able to for a while. He was frightened and wondered if she had a knife on her. But he was a kind man and was saddened by the trouble she described. That little boy—like many very young colored children—was a pretty little thing. Miller had brought her in behind the closed back door, but he didn’t take her upstairs. As she came close to him he smelled the rich rank odor
that he associated with the jungles of Africa, a smell of the untamed and unknowable world that both taunted and fascinated him, the smell that was her mix of pomade and junk perfume and bad food and fear sweat blended with the whole combination of dust and wash water and hog grease and happiness and terror and fealty and love juice and sooty lantern wicks and coal oil and hallelujahs and the sweet stink of old aunties bending down to kiss little boys on the mouth and the half worn away miseries in the heart of a woman with no stake but pride and humility in such a world as this. And in Cappie’s case too the ashy smell of lye soap and the sour tokay wine she used like a tonic. An assortment added to his own characteristic sour smells, smell of new clothes and worry and pickles and dryness of soul and lingering stinks of exclusion and distemper and forlornness and milk and stale bitter cheese. Both of them were attracted by the smell of the other.

Miller felt in his groin the customary stirring he thought of as soundness of spirit and life-giving and he was afraid he would wither and die without. But he was scared. He talked to her in a steady and precise way that only infuriated her further, choking her heart until in frustration and despair she struck him hard in the head with her stiff laminated purse—once and then more than once—and left him lying on the warped wooden floor of his back hall.

She was picked up for drunk later on the street outside the dress shop where Delvin had received his instruction.

In the jail she screamed and threatened, banging her hands on the doors until the jailer, a man because the woman who usually tended to the drunk or fighting negro women was home sick with influenza, until this man, Shorty Burke, a dreamer who in seven months would be stabbed in the neck and killed by a woman he’d been in love with since the second grade, threw buckets of cold pump water four times at Cappie until she stopped yelling and slunk off to a corner where she sat holding her wounded knee, crying, and fitfully sleeping, until the shift change at first light when through the high windows of the old stone cell the eastern light, in a trick of play that neither the architect or the builder or the police chief himself had considered, at this
time of year threw a single beam of radiant pale yellow light against the bars, making them shine like silver rods and crosses marking some heavenly spot on earth.

She was let out—she had the money to pay her fine—and was able to make her way home in the emollient, fribbly sunshine to see her child. He still sat in his little chair. He had slept in the chair but only after fatigue pulled him reluctantly down. Through the afternoon and evening, even as his sister fed him from a bowl of fried grits, forking the crisp bits of corn mash into his mouth with a stained fork as she liked to do, pretending that he was her baby, he hardly noticed anything. Through the meal and then through the lengthening twilight into evening with its hoots of men walking in the street and its soft calls of young women walking arm in arm wearing their loose shawls and then into the cries of pain and loss that marked the late hours, he stayed fixated, turning in his fingers the two small gems shaped like cat eyes, one clear as clear water and the other deep yellow, almost brown, that he had kept, and had polished that afternoon with the Astoria polish his mother used on her treasure of six silver spoons she kept in a wooden case that had once held a silver Colt pistol. These gems in the faint light from the kerosene lamp set on the floor beside him shone with an artificiality that drew him, a strangeness and allure that even as he stared at them he felt haunted by as if he was already stranded off in some country where the light of such delicate beauty never reached. They were part, he knew, of the stories his mother had told him and read to him of kings and treasures and palaces in far lands—lands that these jewels proved were so close, so nearby, that if he only thought hard enough he could somehow, without knowing any other key or possibility, get himself to.

Delvin waked to his mother kissing his face. She smelled of wine and of the jailhouse, a familiar combo; not one he liked. But he really liked the kiss. He was almost gone to five years old now and still he believed his mother was a woman who would belong to him for the rest of his life. It amazed him that a woman so big and filled with rich smells and talk could belong to someone like him. It gave him a
sense of the possibilities in the world and a belief in his own strength and in the power of desire. The kissing was fine. A rough happiness roared in his body. He trembled and his hands shook as she snatched him up and squeezed him against her. The husked raw ache began to melt away against her lean hard maternal creatureliness. She set him on his feet and looked him in the face.

“Don’t worry about none of that,” she said, her voice hoarse and creaky but filled with an insistence he couldn’t turn away from. Her eyes seemed black as pitch. “None of that meanness,” she said, “has a thing to do with you, boy. Not one speck of it. You know what I am talking about?”

He only half did, and it was that half that brought tears to his eyes.

“Weep you should, little child,” she said, running her hand harshly and lovingly over his springy hair. She felt bound by chains to this earth. Chains running back into the white world and down into pits and wells she was terrified of being pulled into. Yet in her life was much happiness. She was not ashamed of how she lived. Her children fascinated her. The two men she helped along—Mr. Miller and old Heberson—were dear to her, in a way. She was scared of them and she appreciated the gifts they gave her. She wondered about Mr. Miller and hoped he was all right. Maybe she ought to go see about him, but she wanted to tend to her child first.

She walked him across the yard to the little open shed where the washing took place and cleaned him up, recleaned him. Delvin stood in the washtub as she bathed his body, which she at first warmed by the fire in the open kitchen. Coolmist had already built a fire of fat lighter and alder sticks. A mockingbird darted in and out of the angle of brush fence separating their yard from the alley and the cottage next door. Across the way a woman called “Cora . . . Cora, I can’t find the mat . . .” in an expressionless voice. The mockingbird flicked up into the slim maple tree and began to set out a little song like a peddler rolling out a sleeve of silver watches. Delvin, who had not complained and had hardly spoken since he came home, began to shiver. The water was warm but he couldn’t stop. He trembled and
shook, teeth chattering. He cringed from a dream of mule snot and hard paving stones and yellow leaves of a beech tree like tiny grabbing hands reaching out for him. The hands of those white people like claws grabbing him. Cappie remembered times she’d lain in bed shaking from the disharmonies of life. The boy, sturdy, sleek, his perfect little black seal body, skin as smooth as polished wood, made her heart break. He jerked like a man with the quakes, tears streaming down his face. As the quavering gradually trailed away he shut his eyes and leaned back in her arms. A trance, she thought. Alarmed, she wondered if he might never come free of it. But he was in a heavenly state. She was about to shake him back into the world when she realized he was asleep. Just a little boy, tired out. She wrapped him in the big square of soft toweling Mr. Miller had given her for Christmas, carried him into the house and set him down on her bed.

Delvin didn’t wake when in the blank foreshadow of morning the police came in three cars to get his mother. Before the white men even got in the house Cappie had slipped out the back. She ran up the alley, crossed Tremaine, zipped around the corner onto Van Buren, leapt a collapsing syringa hedge, skinnied down into the gully and was on her way into the mountains. She was barefoot and wore an old flower print blue dress she liked to sleep in out on the rocking chair on the back porch in the afternoon sunlight. She ran leaping from rock to rock up the valley until she was far enough ahead of the police to cut into the woods. She had been partially raised in the woods, in her auntie’s cabin back in a hollow across the mountain, and she knew how to go on through the laurel scrub and sourberry thickets. No police could keep up.

Back at the house they rounded the children up and took them to the juvenile center over on Wilson street where they were kept in the africano section and looked after by Miss Pearl Foster who was subscribed a pittance by the city to mind destitute, deserted and wayward negro children. It wasn’t until the next day when Curtis Wunkle, an eleven-year-old wandering boy notorious for stealing
shiny objects of little value, showed up that Delvin and his three siblings were told of his mother’s predicament.

“She’s wanted for a killing,” Curtis said, smirking at the thought. He knew what their mother was known for over at the Emporium. And now she had come home with blood staining the hem of her purple satin party dress. It was Curtis’s auntie Belle Campion who, herself fresh from the jail, had informed the child of the Cappie Florence plight (Florence wasn’t even her real name, they said). “She done coldbraced that old jewman up Ducat street,” he said to the fourteen other child habitués of the city establishment.

“You mean murdered?” Winston Morgred said. He was a small albino child of six whose parents had been killed in the Homefield warehouse fire. Winston (called the Ghost) had skin that was a pasty white and his hair was orange. (“Like a negative of a africur,” the owner of the office supply store where his mother had swept up, said.)

“Murdered?” Curtis laughed. “I
mean
murdered. Left that old man lying in a pool of his own blood in the back of his own store. Knocked him down with a car jack the size of a locust log—that’s what my auntie said.”

“None of that’s true,” the twins cried, but they were shouted down by the excited children.

Delvin slid around to the side of the testimony crowd, slipped through, and before anybody could stop him caught Curtis with a punch in the mouth. The surprised boy fell back squealing. A fight broke out. All the boys including Delvin socked and swatted at each other like something out of the funnypapers, the sadpapers. Miss Pearl rushed from her office where she had been working out the youngsters’ documents, poor things, and swinging a big torn felt hat beat the hooligans into submission. It was time for supper.