Ginny Gall (47 page)

This is his first bout with malaria; the red dog nearly kills him.

He shakes and rattles all the way down to his most minor bones and hallucinates that he is boarding a big silver airplane bound for the rice paddies of China and he shouts out against this because he knows this is a white man’s trick to sell him back into slavery. Celia speaks from out of a pink silk scarf wrapped like a burnoose around her face and says he will never get to the woods. He cries in his bed and it takes another ten days to come back to himself and when he does he is chastened and meek and unpitied by anyone.

When he is returned to his rack on Block 5 he finds his notebooks have been confiscated.

He is put on kitchen duty washing pots, and though the hot sink
is extra hot in the heat of summer he is glad to be able to feel this double accumulation and begins to get well in spirit. He has never minded washing things. In sinks or creeks or road ditches or big-bellied washing machines that danced around the floor, him gripping the handle of the mangle, wringing water out of some blue shirt or pair of stempipe trousers, he has never minded the work of getting what was dirty clean. From time to time he stomps on the floor to let whoever is down below know that he is not alone. “We done cotched ye,” he says out loud, his voice taking on the phraseology of a blackness he never practiced back at the Home.

It is thirteen months before he escapes again, and this time he unscrews the chain traces off his mule and gallops him across a mile of cotton fields and down into Regret Swamp where, exhausted and oddly fretful, he is taken in by a couple of poachers who after he falls asleep in a foul-smelling birchwood bed turn him in for the standard reward of twenty dollars a head for escaped prisoners.

He is on his way back to the underground bin at the same time his lawyers, Gammon and his crew, get him another trial, and he is transferred to the capital, where his trial takes place starting on May 2, 1937. The lies are flaking from the stories, but there are many stories and they have been told by every white person connected with the accusations and so take some time to shuck off.

This particular go-round the slight woman Hazel Fran, grown more slight since 1931, is unsure if she was actually raped and is now unable to identify the attackers except for Delvin and Carl Crawford who she still thinks might have assaulted her,
I’m not absolutely sure, Judge, Your Honor, but I think they were there at the time.
The other woman, Lucille Blaine, whom everyone in the courtroom—including such juried-up Kluxers as Clifford Bumper, Carlton Fuchs, Brother Wren and two others who have participated in lynchings plural and attended half a dozen more, all of which they considered justified, necessary, even righteous—know
to be a liar, sticks to her story. She is an indissoluble lump of solid rage, in person.

The doctor, Mills, has a shamed look on his face as he once again sets out the medical proof of male violation.

Gammon presents a witness who says he had sex with Miss Blaine the morning before she was supposedly raped in the afternoon.

Miss Blaine sits at the prosecution table, heavy and menacing, her tongue stuck half out of her mouth. She flings curses at the defense witnesses. The judge, a middle-sized man with a homely, unoffending face, has to admonish her. She accuses the judge of being a nigger lover and has to be escorted briefly from the courtroom and taken to a windowless waiting room where a woman bailiff smirkingly tells her she doesn’t want to go to jail herself for something it’s only a nigra’s doing, honey.

Everybody senses the sadness and despair fuming around her like a cloud of bottleflies as she passes by but nobody calls it that.

Every human being, so the story goes, has to find something to believe in, to base his ridiculous hopes on, and she has found this.

Delvin does not account particularly well for himself. Already bearer of an extended sentence (escape fiend), he has lapses during which he forgets the order of things and thinks this is the second trial and then for a sec thinks he is sitting in the cab of the van, debating with the professor the true facts of the slave revolt in Haiti, and then suddenly he is snatched up by a rage that according to the
Capital City Observer
seems to fill him like a gust of hot wind fills a sail and he lets loose with a gusher of vituperation aimed at the state judicial system and the state itself (“impoverished, derelict agency of numbskullery and perversion”), including every soul in said state, though those accusing him of these crimes, so the paper points out, are all natives of other states, including not only the accused’s home state of Tennessee but such northern states as Ohio and New York. Gammon has allowed him to be put up for cross-examination and he does no better, really, at the hands of the state prosecutor. He does get across to the jury that he believes himself to be falsely accused, but that is pretty much the limit of it.

By this time the state is becoming embarrassed by the whole confabulation. The first two trials were hot topics in the national media. The state, which already considers itself put upon and misused as all get-out, is now presented in an even more unfavorable light. The nativeborn, who think of themselves—white folk, that is—as among the most accommodating and generous human beings on earth, are scalded by the adverse publicity. Dolts, bigots, murderers, incesters, juicers, addled row runners, slew-footed cretins and nutcases, nightcrawlers, dusters, general miscreants and shovel-faced fools, showoffs, clods, shitheads—utter assholes—are some of the terms used against them.

But if they have never grown used to such, they are prepared. Ever since things first began to go badly with the cheap labor business, the locals learned to fling back what was flung at them. They are beginning in this instance to grow tired of the acidic innuendoes and outright slanders. This crazy nigra and all those other crazy nigras have caused them more trouble really than they are worth, or than standing them straight up by way of a profound lesson in how to behave is. Men lying in their beds under window fans sucking in the scents of yellow jasmine, fertilizer, spun cotton and Bull Durham tobacco smoke feel in their deepest recesses the faint but insistent pressure of a misused people rising. The powers of custom and church-sponsored reason are all that hold back a tide of despair that otherwise would swamp these men and drive them to wild futile acts. But they—like everybody—have to find a way to go on without befouling themselves, or at least without making it look as if they did.

Out beyond the tiny zone of actuality, the meaty core of fact from which they receive their instructions to do what is necessary to stay alive on earth (no matter what), pressed and marbled with the sweet fat of love for those children whose lives are being cut down at the root by falseness, beyond this supersaturated mix of divisible realities, they experience, as always, the need to hold to a position that is imperishable. Only such a position will allow them to take a break
and start to get some fun out of life. That’s what, goddammit, this routine with these grassy coons is about, they say.

“Everybody down here thinks he is right,” Gammon says, pulling on his cigar. “He is too scared not to think it.

“Movement, that is the sine qua non of this universe,” Gammon says. “Keep it moving.” He has developed motes in his right eye and though the doctor assures him they are harmless, they scare him. “What is wrong with this malefactorous boys of Klaudio, this KO Boys thing, is it has stopped moving. Everything living that can still twitch is bailing out of that ratless grounded ship.” He has haplessly married a game-legged woman from the capital whose family owns a string of peanut mills in four states and who wants him to give up the law and go traveling with her. “The prosecutors want to live happily. The juries, the judges, the defense lawyers, the uncoddled and spiritually mutilated accused—they want to live happily. Even the white boys who got their asses kicked. Even the two
violated
women. Or even one of them.” He has promised his wife he will retire from the law in the spring. “There is still a woman,” he says, “this adiposal Cypriot from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and points north and south, who holds to her story that Delvin Walker and Carl Crawford and Little Buster Wayfield, among others, committed the crime of rape on her body and must be punished for it.”

He looks heavily at his listeners, a couple of beat reporters plus loafers and afternoon drinkers and ex-preachers—the common habitues of the Constitution Bar on State street. He wishes he was singing Schubert lieder in a choir. He signals the barkeep for another.

“The exasperated gents sitting at their restaurant tables ordering without menu or leaning back in Adirondack chairs under the scuppernong arbor drowsy with the heavy wine of ripe grapes and the soothing hum of honeybees, or jumping from a third-story window to escape the Meredith Hotel fire on Custom street, or sitting on a doughnut cushion to ease their hemorrhoids at the Melody mule and horse auction in Loris, or watching their young daughters
dive from the ten-foot board into the clear green waters of Aucilla Springs, or walking or fighting or sleeping or arguing with an associate or straining on the crapper or praying or whining or crying out to God or cursing the day they were born—these men, who by circumstance or personal effort have become embroiled in this calamity, cannot quite get this dear woman, lying snoring on her back, I expect, as we speak, through the balmy hours of a late spring Saturday morning, say—have not been able to prevail, or suggest with enough persuasiveness, or lean against with appropriate gesturing, or outwait or outwit, to retrieve from her a recantation that would set them free.

“This is a true story,” he says, sipping assertively from his iced whiskey. “Of course it is human nature to buy into positions that claim the means to solve problems of assault against the well-being of the one buying. So there are those deeply disposed to carry the hurt forth and onward.”

His listeners have mostly turned away.

Gammon knows that later in the afternoon about dusk, even drunk, he will begin to wish he was dead. It is something he has almost grown used to.

These are some of the factors Delvin struggles against at this time.

The latest trial, its facts rubbed, squeezed and twisted to produce enough juice to quench the mortal thirst of its participants, lurches wheezing to its end. Coover Broadfoot’s sentence is reduced to three more years, to be served in the restful conditions of Burning Mountain prison. Bony, who has shanked his cellmate, and Delvin Walker, the chosen, will go on as if these extra trials haven’t happened. Delvin is not however returned to Uniball, where he would be thrust back into his punishment conditions, but sent onward like a dupe in a prank to the next skookum house on the list of houses for Uniball troublemakers, down on the Salt Plateau in the middle of the state.

After a few years in the soppy heat—after another trial in which the by-now-wobbling parties, as the day fades to sunset, fight like weary and desperate, numbed and baffled dogs—he is shunted on to Acheron, a raw spot in the woods in the southern regions.

From there he has just now escaped.

He sits hunched against his knees, looking out at the slowly flopping meager surf. The inshore water is the color of weak coffee and the combs of the surf too are stained a faded brown. Down the beach the blackened
stumps of stubbed-off trees protrude from the gray sand. Through a thin rain he can see woody islands out in the bay. He looks up at the tops of the tall pines stirring faintly in breeze. The rain falls softly. It is mild, soothing; weather without malice. A freeboard rain. He has come a long way and he has a long way to go. But for this moment there is nothing but easily drawn breaths. He wishes Mr. Oliver was here and the Ghost and Polly and Elmer the assistant and Mrs. Parker and everybody from those days. Wherever they are, pressed down by life or sweating over some difficult task or running for their lives in a dream, let them step aside for a time and come sit on this sandy beach and rest.

He pushes up to his feet and takes a few small steps. He feels like a child, a lopsided novice, manhandled into the world. They said back in Chat-town that he was a zigzag baby. Zigzag by way of his irregular birth, by way of his wayward mother, needing all the luck he could get from the caul. They would say now that the zag had put him in prison and sent his life off into the briars. But here he is. For a moment he is here, free under these big pine trees. The wind soughs and shudders, a mild wind bringing with it hints and foretelling. He dances a few steps, swinging his shoulders, bending down, straightening his back as he moves.
Under the hard hand a life moves.
Somebody wrote those words and he read them. Words come all the way from some room in some city up north, some dreamer sitting alone at a table, who drew them off the reels of mystery and power in himself.

He scoops up a handful of beach sand, lets it pour through his fin
gers. The sand is soft, mixed in its coloring like something halfway between dirt and sand. With his gritty fingers he dabs his forehead. He knows he no longer looks as young as he is. He’s seen men in prison who look like Methuselah. A sadness, his own, the one he located early, pushes in among the hopefulness. A mournfulness—the miseries they call it in Chattanooga. Chat-town. Where people come and go. He wants to go back there, slip through like a will o’ the wisp, touch down here and there. Then he’ll see.

He lies back and listens to the surf lightly flop and sizzle, the brown Gulf water sliding up and sinking back again.

He walked east on the Old Spanish Trail, sinking to his ankles in the soft gray sand, and getting rides from africano folk passing in mule-pulled wagons. The road was paved in stretches now (and in those spots marked with small signs with the number 90 and the words D
IXIE
H
IGHWAY
stamped on them in black lettering), and among the wagons, flatbed trucks and a few autos made their way under mossy live oaks and through the pine barrens between the little board-and-brick towns. He stole a two-dollar bill out of a church basket in Chipley and was caught by the preacher’s nineteen-year-old son who was home from the war Delvin had barely known was going on, but the preacher took pity on him and let him keep the money and fed him at the kitchen table and gave him fresh clothes to replace the tatters he had been given by the Drovers off their own washline back on the banks of Aufuskie river and with the money and resurrected feelings a full belly gave him he bought fishline and hooks and a cane pole and fished his way across Florida in ditch creeks, branches and rivers, pulling in croakers and bream and roasting them on fires he built off the road among the circulating night creatures and bugs. Carrying the fishing pole fed him and made him inconspicuous, a colored man with a harmless purpose trudging the highway.

In August he was in Jacksonville, living with three other men in a dirt-floored cabin on the river where he idled on his plans and worked shifting sacks in a coffee warehouse and one early morning without discussing anything with himself or saying goodbye caught a freight headed to Atlanta. The passenger compartments were crowded, but the rods were emptier than he remembered except for the old men and the crazy boys running from imaginary pursuers and he pretended to be one of the lost and blubbering crazy ones,
telling a story of wild men from the west riding huge machines that chased after him.

“Hell, boy,” an old cross-eyed white man who claimed to have once been manager of a streetcar company in Long Beach, California, said, “you just been seeing them tanks.”

He knew vaguely what a tank was but he knew little else about down-to-date life in the fall of 1943, but that didn’t matter because he was playing crazy. Around him in the car men talked of war and of mighty personages and of great battles fought with big guns and these matters got into his nap dream and tore loose big chunks of space from the sky and from cities that loomed like vast archipelagos over his tiny sleeping body and in his sleep he shuddered and whimpered and cried out and the men mocked him. In the Atlanta yards a white man wanted to fight him but he knocked him down with a single backhanded punch to the face and he felt a surge of killingness shoot up inside him and he could sense himself losing dominion and he staggered sideways and anybody who looked into his eyes would think he was looking into the eyes of a hellion. The experience frightened him. It was caused by the accumulation of poisons acquired in the penitentiary, he figured, but he was not sure how to make the poisons go away and he sat in the tall sooty grass thinking until he had to get up and go because another man, a stranger with marcelled hair, had come up to him and said he knew him. He ran away from this man as fast as he could.

Later he found himself in an area of the hilly city where those of his own kind lived in shanties beside dusty red clay streets and he met a woman there and lived with her for a couple of months. At night this woman washed vegetables and ran the pea sheller at the big farmers market out on Airline Road, and in the mornings she would slide into the big bed in her pleasant back bedroom and they would make love and she would talk a little about the night’s work before going to sleep. He would get up and sit on the back steps looking at the goldenrod flowering down by the back fence and at the big hooped-over
tomato plants in the garden filled with ripe fruit and the corn stalks just streaking brown and watch the little red-throated hummingbirds buzz around the statice bushes and he would think he had come into a kind of heaven. The woman wanted him to marry her but he didn’t want to do that. It was no longer because of Celia, but he didn’t want to stay in Atlanta and he couldn’t bring himself to ask this woman, Minnie May Layfield by name, to come with him. He wanted to get out of the Southland entirely. That is, after he had visited Chattanooga one more time.

He told her a little about his life, eliminating the prison part, speaking of his time on the cotton plantation and his years on the rails before that and his travels with the professor and a little about his life in the funeral home in a small city he didn’t name. Minnie May loved him and didn’t mind his falsifying—she knew it for what it was—but she thought he was foolish not to marry her and told him so.

“We are supposed to enjoy the bounty that is offered us,” she said as they sat in the afternoon on the back steps sipping iced tea with a piece of lemon in it she had brought home from the market, his first lemon since he was a child. His teeth were loose in his head (like seeds in a gourd, he said) and his bones ached from the residual malaria but he was delighted to receive the bounty of these small touches, ice and citrus fruit, and he told her so.

“I mean some of the larger style bounties that have come your way.”

“I am also happy to have received the gift of your hospitality in much greater ways, I can promise you that,” he said, and rubbed along her strong smooth thigh. “I don’t mean just this either, though I do enjoy it.”

“Where in Ginny Gall’d you learn to talk like that?” Minnie said, looking off into the sweet gum that was beginning to soak up yellow.

He blushed in his deep black skin, and the blushing was new, or new again, and ran his knuckles lightly over her up-turned palm that was pink and hard as a workingman’s.

He found a woman’s body—this woman’s body—to be voluminous
and swampy, massive, without end, a colossal force that threatened to sweep him away, that crammed against him, making him think of the Gulf that time off Sunny Point and of dreams and of the strange rolling affections that came on the darkest of prison nights. Touching her set off alarms that the touches themselves quieted.

“Well,” she said, “what
do
you mean?”

A flight of fast airplanes moved across the sky to the south, headed toward the big military airfield out that way. He counted them with his finger: eight. Nearer, half a dozen crows circled something interesting. A breeze picked at the leaves of a yard maple where she said redbirds had nested in the spring before blue jays stole the chicks.

He said he didn’t know what he meant, but she had more to say and he listened and then his mind drifted off to the early years with Mr. Oliver out on the side porch as Mr. O made up names for the constellations, fashioned from the speckling stars the constellations themselves, and told stories about these chariots and kings. They were always stories of fortunes lost and found and long journeys hauling the remains of heroes. Never love stories. Delvin’s favorite was the story of the invisible leopard. A giant cat that leapt from hiding to eat passersby in the upland jungles of old Africa. No one could kill this leopard. One day a man claimed he had captured the beast. He produced a large cage in which he said he had the leopard. He charged people a quarter to view the big cat, and many paid to see the leopard that was in fact not there. Some people said the exhibit was a hoax, but many other people came away satisfied. One day a young boy, a brave boy from a nearby village, said he didn’t believe the leopard was in the cage. Nobody ever hears it roar, he said. The man said it was a silent leopard, everybody knew that. Silent my eye, the boy said. He said he would go into the cage to prove it was empty. Fine, the man said, but you got to pay a quarter like everybody else. Here it is, the boy said. The man said, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you get in the cage. I couldn’t live with myself if that leopard tore you to pieces. It’s all right, the boy said, I was getting nervous about it anyway. They became friends and after a long time the man
admitted to the boy that there was no leopard. The boy said, I knew you was lying. And I’m gon tell everybody. Then he threw open the cage door and leapt in. The leopard ate him up.

That was a great story, Delvin thought, very scary, and he wished he could hear Mr. O tell it again. But this woman was talking.

“Gettin what?” he said. “Married?”

“Why, you aint even listening.”

“Yes I am, I just got caught in a dream. It’s a ailment I have.”

“You don’t have no ailment, you just wont paying attention.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Everything out here in the busy world catches hold of me sometimes and I forget what is happening.”

She gave him a long look. He had told her about the red dog and she believed him, but in Atlanta at that time there were few such cases and she knew only two people, a machinist and a peach sorter, who had caught the disease and it didn’t seem too much of a bother—if it was the same thing he was talking about—for either of them. She was sad because she knew she couldn’t keep him around. Sooner or later she asked each of the boys she took in to marry her and they always turned her down. She was not pretty and she had a rough temperament but she knew herself to have a tender heart if they could just stay around long enough to find it. It was easy to find.

“Well, dreamer,” she said, “I’ll give you the rest of the week to make up your mind and then you got to go—or if you—you know . . .”

“About the marrying?”

“What you think I’m talking about?”

She got up and went back into the house.

Delvin sat on the steps, unsure of what had just happened. She had wanted him to say how pleased he was but there was this other and it had scared him. He sensed her plans, her configurations of desire underneath her simple demands and he had shied. But he had crossed this woman’s threshold, eaten her baked bread and frolicked in early morning recreation in her big bed, and even simplified it was too much for him. He had known many men who thrived in prison
because prison asked so little of them. But he didn’t think he was one of those men or if he did he thought still he was the boy—the man now, thirty years old—he had always been. He was finding out this wasn’t so. A redbird hung half upside down in the little chinese elm at the side of the yard. Life was coming steadily back to him. Often it hurt. He had watched the natty mockingbirds hopping around on the grassy margins outside the prison wire and he had thought about how easy it was for those birds to go anywhere they wanted. Birds, rats, toads, bugs, even skeeters, could dash away free creatures beyond the fence. And now he had dashed away and was skittering around loose in the so-called free territory. But each step or shake of the wrist baffled him. And he hadn’t thought it would hurt so much to be free, at least loose.

He walked over to Willie Feveril’s place and sat out in the backyard listening to him talk about the war. Willie, a tall man with a craggy face and a look in his eye as if he was warding off blows, had been kept out of the war by his clubfoot.

“I darsent go anyhow,” he said, sipping from a beer bottle filled with screech liquor. “It aint my business what these white folks get stirred up about. None of em like each other much and every so often the not liking spills over into the killing.” He spit between his feet. They were sitting on an unpainted bench under a big butternut tree. “When they gets they fill of killing they go back to the not liking. Not one damn thing changes.”

The Atlanta streets were full of soldiers and he had to be careful he was not stopped to produce a paper saying why he was not in uniform. Word had gotten around that a man was living at Minnie May’s house and yesterday a frog-faced fellow with a heavy limp had stopped by the house to say they were talking down at the store about he was a deserter. Delvin thought the man might be lying but now he was scared. He thought of stealing Feveril’s card or paper or whatever it was but he didn’t have the strength for it right now. This world out here was a mystery to him; he was shadowed by a fragile and dessicate past and bewildered by the rackety present. It was best to keep his mouth shut and just watch carefully.

He’d bought a notebook and a pencil out of the two dollars Minnie gave him each week and started keeping a record of what had happened to him in prison; he could remember that. He was scared to write openly about prison life, scared of getting caught that way, so wrote in a squinched script. He read some of the childhood parts to Feveril who said they brought back his own raising in Atlanta. “’Cept I didn’t have no mama who killed a man. Why’d she do that?”

“Man tried to shame her.”

“They wont nothin else?”

“Something mysterious.” He didn’t want to say more, he never did. The old man she killed had been her regular Saturday-night date for years. That’s what he had heard over at the Emporium. But there was more. An unavoidable dark hand stretching forth unsuspected by her in a world where a black person had to stay alert at all times. He carried not only the shame of her crime, but the surprise, and the dread of its perplexing circumstance. “Got stretched out past what she could take,” he said.

Feveril had a job sweeping at the Jeep plant over in Riverdale, but he was bad about missing work. “I got a sister,” he said when Delvin asked about this, “and she brings me goodins in from the country when she comes. I aint going to serve in no army I can tell you.”

Delvin enjoyed Feveril’s stories about his sister, about farm folks and the long country days, and he thought of heading out that way, but he had a journey to make to Chattanooga and then it was on from there to the northland. This had fixed in his mind by now. But he was taking his time about getting started. He liked living with Minnie May. He enjoyed cleaning house for her and cooking and hoeing in the garden out back and rolling in the bed with her, and that wasn’t all. Maybe he
would
marry her. She had a frightful temper. She was always blowing up about little things, things Delvin didn’t even see. It was like she had magnifying eyes. Feveril said she’d been that way since she was a little girl.