Ginny Gall (45 page)

“You can’t make em do what they won’t,” he says glumly, clucking at the hammer-headed mule over the cotton plowline he uses for reins.

The sky is cloudy for the ten miles down and as they arrive in Salt Town it begins softly to rain. Delvin bids the man farewell and walks along the sandy main road out to the beach that is gray and littered with pine straw and forbidden to a person of color and stands under
the tall longleaf pines looking out at the chopped-up gray Gulf. The water seems to be moving steadily toward him and this bothers him and he retreats farther back among the trees. Three or four short roads run in from the main road to the water. A few white men are standing out in the low brown surf working a long net. He walks back closer to the waves, but not far, not even out from under the pines. He doesn’t like the shaky look of the water, doesn’t like how big and empty it is, and the white men spook him. Getting out into that world of salt and waves and white men pulling on nets like they think they are back on the shores of Galilee or someplace; it is too much for him. He’ll just stand a while under these whishing pine trees, he thinks, and enjoy being a free man.

Gammon entered the visiting room that was only a squared-off bit of an old holding cell that had bars over a single taped-over window with one little corner scraped away so if you put your eye to it you could see across the street the corner of the Miller Finery sign and the screen-door entrance to the Collins Bakery and a set of cement steps leading where you couldn’t tell, and told Delvin that he had found the woman he saw in the gallery and she said she was not his mother.

“Maybe she is lying to protect herself—and me.”

“Maybe that is true,” Gammon said, “but she says it isn’t—I asked that too—and says that she dudn’t want to come to the jail.”

“Maybe I will just have to go see her,” Delvin said and laughed a dry laugh. He could feel a mercilessness rising in his soul. Soul, he thought, I don’t know what that is.

Gammon looked at him with mixed compassion and and aggravation and said he didn’t think things were going very well.

“I thought it was your job to keep everything hopeful.”

“Yes, that is what I am supposed to do and I am sorry I have failed.”

“Don’t worry your head with it,” Delvin said. “I won’t be long for this place whatever you do.”

“I hope that dudn’t mean you are going to try to escape.”

“You are a foolish person,” Delvin said without heat. He felt things flattening out, sliding away. He knew his mother was gone, but just one little (maybe) glimpse and it was as if she was back. Something peeled off in his heart. He grimaced.

“It’s not cause of you,” Gammon said.

“What’s that?” Delvin said, startled.

“The trial.”

“I sho didn’t help the truth along though.”

“Truth’s a stone these folks don’t want to swallow.”

“It was just so clear to me that we done nothing. And before I could say a word the bottom fell out.”

“Nothing you could do really.”

“I might as well have just got up and danced and capered.”

He wanted the boy to shut up, stop talking so much.

“The truth,” he said, “no matter what they do with it, is now in the court record. That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah. For the historians.”

The boy was smart and he knew the story but he hadn’t been able to tell it. Like all of them he didn’t believe what was happening to him. Three hundred years of teaching, and they still didn’t get it.

“We’ll do all right.”

“Yes, a foolish person,” Delvin said, smiling a plain, uninflected smile. In his mind he said
Let them be brought before me: I will deny every one.
He didn’t know what this meant or where the words came from. Back in his cell later he whispered the words again:
I will deny every one of them.

Billy Gammon returned to his three-dollar-a-night hotel room and lay on his bed. He had spoken to Miss Ellen Bayride from Birmingham that night and she had looked at him as if he had got some black on him. That was what happened to lawyers who put up a rigorous defense for negro men. Such negro men as this. Well, that part of it was all right. But he was sorry she felt that way, disappointed, and dismal. He pictured her walking to her house where she stayed with her aunt, Mrs. Walter Shrove, after sending her story by wire to the paper in the capital. She would sit in the kitchen eating supper and talking about the WCU with her aunt. Her aunt was a big wheel in the WCU, the Baptist women were the ones, so they claimed, who really ran the state. This was probably true, he thought. They are the ones who want most to keep the colored folks from getting ahead. Ahead they turn around and start rustling the women. Would they think that was bad or secretly good? Jesus, he thought, sat up and
poured himself a drink. He wished he was a man of heroic character. He was not, he knew that. If you put your heart into it you are going to get a chance to see what you are really made of. So said his uncle Henry who had contributed to his raising, overcontributed. He had stood outside the telegraph office looking at her through the dusty picture window as she sent her story off to the capital. In the dust with his finger he wrote
I am what you don’t think I am
and she had turned around and seen the words—written backwards in the white dust—and acted as if she didn’t see them and went back to speaking to the clerk and after a while he had walked away.

Slippery, bendable stuff, that’s me, he thought, and plumped his pillow and lay looking up at the ceiling.

Delvin sat all night on the floor of the holding cell pressing his back against the tin-sheathed wall, falling asleep and waking in a start, coming out of sleep like coming out of a fit, only quieter. He imagined he could press right through the metal and timber and brick and bust out into the night.
Everything’s already moved off and left me
, he thought. And he thought
I got one dip and that’s it,
and a heavy pain entered his body and he lay on his side thinking where are they?—who are they and where are they?—remembering the time in Jackson, Mississippi, when he rode in a cab for the only time in his life, hurrying to the hospital where the professor had gone when he thought he was having a heart attack. He wasn’t but they had him in bed in the colored ward and he was sitting up looking out the window. Just now, he said, I saw a man try to hand a sandwich to a squirrel. He was smiling and the smile was held close to himself, a personal smile he had for his own private joys.
I got to get me one of those smiles
, Delvin had thought. He told the professor about riding in the cab that smelled of hair preparation and the window handle didn’t work but was choice anyway, but the professor wasn’t paying attention.
I couldn’t get my story across to him then either.
The professor had a better one. But he knew he had stories inside him that were like silver fish swimming in fresh cool water. I
got to keep em alive, he thought. Don’t let time to come chisel down and take em. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could do that, maybe not. Bonette and Little Buster Wayfield whimpered in their bunks. That was all right. Carl slept soundly, emitting little puffy snores that sounded like rain falling softly on the plank floor. These boys he didn’t even know really. Chattanooga boys he would probably never even have talked to, n’ar would they have talked to him. He leaned his head back and pictured riding on a train to Celia’s house. His mother was there waiting for him too. And maybe his father who he couldn’t picture from life but looked, so his mother had told him once, like a photograph of John Wilkes Booth, except he was colored. He had been embarrassed to tell anybody that his father looked like President Lincoln’s assassin. But he would write it down in his book. The night lay its hand on him like an ordination, he didn’t know for what salvation, and pressed him down into sleep. In a dream he saw his father, and his father was bending down to look at his face in the smooth surface of a stream, only there was no reflection. He tried to get out of the dream and thought he woke but he didn’t, not yet, but he didn’t remember what came after except it was too dark.

As he settled onto the board seat in the enclosed back of the state truck carrying them to Burning Mountain penitentiary, Delvin tried to picture what he was missing out on that day but he got only as far as rice pudding and the copy of Joe Bakerfield’s Boston speeches that he’d left in the professor’s truck.

I’m just a sweetback, he told himself, which was what they called those just sampling the hobo life, passing by on the cob.

His first escape attempt would not be his last; he had promised himself that.

Beside him Bony wept steadily, like a tiny seep. He had cried all night in his sleep and he was crying when he woke up. He leaned against Delvin and from time to time Delvin put his hand on his shoulder. Bony had pissed his pants when the pharmacy clerk jury
foreman Bivins, with the warrant held up in both bony hands, had read the verdict in his cramped and wheezy voice.

All you bastards, you menless men, you hopeless negroes, are sentenced to forced familiarity and slave labor and a stab in the eye. You are all condemned to hell.

So this is where you keep it, Delvin thought when he heard the man read the sentence. He hadn’t expected anything different but still he was shocked. You think somebody’s going to wake up, some bit of religion or hope or human reason or kindness is going to kick in, but then it doesn’t and you stop thinking that. His knees had wobbled. He’d thought he was going to vomit and he swallowed back down a mouthful of bitter juice. Rollie had cried out and behind them in the balcony reserved for colored a few women had shouted out—not his mother—and a few had called for Jesus or Mary or Elijah. The judge told them to shut up. He had no kindness in him, this judge. “We will appeal,” Billy Gammon had whispered to him. “Don’t worry.”

But then the road of your life forked and you were being dragged down the dark one. For the rest of my life I’m going to be trying to get out of something. Everybody had lied. The white boys, the women, the doctors, even two of the boys in his gang. It wasn’t a gang, but two of them, Bony and Little Buster, had begun to believe they had assaulted the women. On the stand, squirming in the big brown chair, they had said they might have broke in—Little Buster said it and Bony confirmed—on those two women.

Suddenly the whirlwind dips down, picks you up and throws you against the rocks. No wonder all those women cry out in church. Where do you turn then?

Well, you sit down here and you start thinking how you are going to get loose.

Running is all he thinks about. He thought about it on the truck ride carrying him fully sentenced into the heart—no, the liver, no, the excremental bowels—of Dixie, and he thinks about it as the gray-
suited guards walk them through the wire gantlet to the back of the Burning Mountain prison where there is a cleared space behind the big mess hall that stinks of stew beans and carbolic acid and march them up a flight of steel steps and in through a door above which is a sign that says W
ELCOME
T
O
Y
OUR
B
URNING
M
OUNTAIN
H
OME
and lock them inside where the concrete walls have sweated through and the place clangs and bellows with blows flung against metal and stone and they are welcomed by no one. And he thinks about it when they make them strip and place their hands against the wet stone wall and spread their legs and he feels the probe of a round-headed stick up his ass and then they make them shuffle into the dip pool where a mixture smelling of kerosene and sulfur and some other foul substance kills the lice and and all traces of civilized life so they come out burning with their new skin (that is still black) and are hustled to the showers where the water stings like acid—even then, among the piercing proofs of grief, he thinks of how to break free; and he thinks of jumping as he walks to the holding tank, where Butter gets in a fight with Rollie Gregory and almost chokes him to death; and later on that afternoon in his cell, which holds three men who are not happy to see him though they are curious and they touch and pat him and pump his muscles like stringy lions testing the new calf—they consider him a fool and causer of trouble for negroes in general because he raped those white women; and he thinks about it the first night as he crams the end of his wool blanket into his mouth to stifle his cries.

Every day in Burning Mountain prison he thinks of how to get out and joins a group that fashions shanks of sufficient quality and plans to perforate the guards—as Ricey Fleming put it—and flee from the cotton fields into Big Panther woods. He never has a shank in his hand but when the time comes he runs as hard as he can, a fleet boy with thin hard calves and narrow hips, and reaches the woods where he wanders around for four days before they find him hiding in an earth cave below a big chestnut tree blown down in a cyclone the year before. He is dirty and hungry and bitten by deerflies and after they keep him for a day and a half chained to an iron hoop
jammed into the red dirt in front of the metal shop he is thrown into and left lying on his belly in the Wire Room which is a cage out in the exercise yard open to weather and to the gaze and taunts of the inmates. He remains there for a month like a half-habitated carcass under fall storms and drying spells swirled about with the rich alluvial dust of the fields and environs, crouched for a time like a cat waiting to spring away, then sprawling, attempting to tell himself stories that he half makes up about traveling into a strange country by boxcar train.
The woods a distant slum of leaves
, he says,
untended quarter of loneliness and peril.
He dreams of banditries worked on his close person and aches in the dreams for the touch of a woman whom he never knows, never can even see—she isn’t Celia—but one who speaks in the hollow, coughing voices of animals penned up for life. On the afternoon they come to get him again he is standing like a soldier facing the wire, seeing if he can with his mind lift himself to the other side of the prison wall. “Thought I’d go get a Orange Crush,” he says when somebody asks him about it.

They put him with the death row prisoners and he doesn’t get off his cellblock again for two years, except for the afternoon escape trial conducted at the prison where ten years are added to his life sentence, until he goes before a judge—a new one—for a new (same old rape) trial in which the witnesses are a little more shaky this time and the prosecutors just a little more tired.

Like leaves falling from the tree of knowledge, the group, the old KO Boys, sheds members. The years knead them, cuff them, crease their backs, spit into the open pit of their skulls, and let them go. Bonette and Butter Beecham are released—called too incapacious to perform the acts they were accused of. They weep with their faces on the table. When Butter raises his head, Delvin sees a man blind with joy and relief, and he thinks he will be sick from despair. The letter he gets from Butter (penned by his aunt in florid, looping script) thanking him for his care of him during their time together is like a trick that nearly drives him to kill himself. Placer Wilkes gives him a little triangular piece of glass in the exercise yard to do it with. The shard is cloudy green like runoff water and brings back the
memory of Jim’s Gully in Chattanooga, the one separating the negro life of Red Row from the whites. The only private prisonwise place is his bed, and late in October he lies in the half light under the thin covers, drawing the glass across his throat. Humped under the blanket like a jackoff artist sunk in a dim wretchedness and ignorance, he feels like a fool. A shaky, choked, exasperated laugh catches in his mouth. He wants to explain himself. A fly has gotten in under the blanket with him. He can feel it crawling on his back. Explain?
It’s a burning palsy
, he says silently. He probes with the glass. Where does this instrument come from? From under the earth maybe, incised by an ocean turning and forgetting. He can smell the water in the stone walls. He can hear distant cries, men calling out under the weight of smothering dreams. He curls up tight and a little at a time lets himself go into tears, stopping and starting, catching himself each time just before falling over the brink. For a second he loses hold, grabs himself back, jabbing the point of the glass against his forehead. This scares him, but not badly, not enough to change how he thinks. There are tears on his face. He scrapes them off with the flat of the glass. Slowly he comes back around. The fly has crawled down to his waist and he tries to trap it there but it gets away.