Ginny Gall by Charlie Smith
BOOK ONE
In front of the Celestial Theater sat an old africano woman who covered her long bald pate with a yellow scarf that trailed down her back like a tail. Each morning she washed the scarf in the Collosso Fountain in Mecklenburg Square and put it on again, wet, over her brown, speckled head. Across the city she pulled a small cart stacked with books, every page of which was crossed out in heavy charcoal strokes. She sang church songs to herself and lived on pieces of fruit and chunks of stale bread she picked up behind groceries. On her arm she carried a basket filled with worked-over letters she’d written to her daughter who had died years before of the Spanish flu. An old black man with a leg stump worn white as snow hailed her every day from the courthouse steps but she would not speak to him. The old man begged pennies from passersby and ate raisins one by one from a paper sack. Down the street at the old stone jail an aged white lady in clothes made of rice sacks waited for her son to be let out but her son had been burned up in the jailhouse fire years before. A deaf man who passed her every day yelled at everyone he passed that it was too late to save themselves, from what he never said. He carried a sleek black duck under his arm. A young girl sold conjuries from a bucket. She gave the money she received to her father who got drunk and crawled on all fours before her begging forgiveness. An old man in a nappy top hat, an ex-opera singer whose voice one night on stage disappeared like a raccoon into a thicket, tried in a whisper to explain to a skinny man looking for his no ’count son that time would embellish and modify all things. “The Executioner,” as he was called, a remittance man from the Maritime Provinces, condemned everyone he met to a gruesome death. He prided himself on never sentencing anyone to the same death twice (he was mistaken about this because he easily lost count and didn’t remember who was who). He carried on his belt a noose that was blackened with years of grimy handling. He pressed the drunks and streetwalkers he passed not to hurry, for the Reaper, he said, was the only one at home. An old man each evening tried drunkenly to sell his mule a hat. His friend, with a face pop-eyed like a victim of strangulation, also drunk, explained to any who asked that the mule was an old friend from childhood. In the lobby of the Peacock Hotel the goldfinches sang their tinny songs. Each was attached to the perch with a thin silver chain. An old woman, sad for years, stared into her hands. In those days we were all birthed into a world of make-believe, so profoundly and intricately conceived that we took it for real, and lived accordingly.
1
He was born on the shaded back porch of the board and batten house, cabin really, that smelled in every room of pork fat and greens and of Miss Mamie’s Coconut Oil Soap his mother used to wash down the floorboards. The back porch because that was as far as his mother got on the hot July day in 1913 exactly fifty years after the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a day uncelebrated in Chattanooga. His mother, Capable Florence, called Cappie, a good-time gal who worked sometimes as a domestic but hated the work and made most of her money processing one of the back rooms at the Emporium—former slave quarters of the old grocery exchange, then a cookshop and hotel for negro folks passing through Chattanooga, and now the city’s main brothel—in a big narrow vestibule divided by curtains into a half dozen smaller rooms that could be rented for two dollars an hour.
When her water broke as she was coming through the backyard carrying a sack of oranges given to her by a oldtime customer, her children had tried to help, but the gushing stinking swirling unexpected secret waters of her body—her agony and the way her eyes momentarily rolled back in her head—had scared them near to death. As she hauled herself up the back steps they stood out in the yard screeching. Cappie didn’t have time or the inclination to tend to them. As she staggered on the first step, feeling the animate, resolute, massacree push of her own body ejecting itself or attempting to, experiencing in this moment the extremity of panic as her body told her—shouted—that such crudesence was in fact impossible, followed immediately by the give in her muscles that let her know that was a lie, the gummy little bushy-haired head poked forth. She was still climbing the steps as the baby’s shoulders jimmied their way through, yelling as she came (while Coolmist yelled Git down! git down! and the twins crouched at the base of the little chinaberry tree, clasping hands around the trunk), not willing anything but surrendering to some power in herself that compelled her, or allowed her, she said later, to raise herself, like a wreck being raised off the floor of the Tennessee river, some old wedding cake of a riverboat, lifted streaming and creaking—and bellering, her daughter said later—and keeping her feet like a woman wading through biting snakes, crouched, bowlegged, staggering on the sides of her delicate high-arched feet, making the top step, her trailing leg weighing suddenly a thousand pounds so that she felt as if the cradle of her hips was cracking as she raised her foot and lurched forward, attempting to make it to the big rocker—why was it leaned face-first against the side of the house with its skinny legs sticking up like an old man praying?—yelling at Coolmist to pull the God almighty chair out, that she never made it to, at least not before the full compact bundled body of her fourth child squirted out, falling not straight down but in a slant off to the side but not so quickly that she wasn’t with one hand able to catch the baby by the arm and keep it from hitting the floor, which at the time was the most important thing.
As for Delvin, though he didn’t remember this episode until they told it to him, first his sister Coolmist and then the twins and then his mother when he came crying to her, he always had a sensation of falling or of being about to, an emptiness in his gut as if he had just let go or been let go of. The little twitch that comes to everyone just at the border of sleep and wakefulness, the start or jump, was for him a powerful kick; he felt himself thrown backwards from a height, falling into a deep pit that had no happiness at the bottom of it; and he lashed out from it; he fought back.
“Shoo, it was just this world snatching at ye,” the old man John William Heberson, called J W, told him, clucking his stony laugh, speaking of the fall from his mother’s womb. “But she cotched ye, didn’t she?” he’d add, his eyes sparkling. J W was the old africano storekeeper down the road who paid his mother to visit him, every Saturday evening after he closed up. “Yessir,” he said, “she cotched ye.”
And she did, Delvin would think, marveling. He liked to walk off by himself along the grassy ravine that separated Red Row from white town. The ravine or gully was deep and craggy with outcroppings of gray mica-flecked granite. At the bottom flowed a constant stream that ran thin and rusty in dry times and heavy, clumsy and milky with mountain runoff, after a rain. The ravine ran up through neighborhood and woods until it folded itself back into the mountains where among the sassafras and laurel slicks Delvin liked to lie down and dream about his life. His mother read to him from a book of French kings—another customer gift—and he saw himself not as one of them exactly but as one of their company, a gallant lieutenant of kings, the one sent out into the wilderness to find a place for people to settle, some sweet land that had grapevines and wild strawberries and blueberry bushes growing in clumps and sweet apple trees you could pick little striped apples from and carry around in your pockets to munch on. In the dusk of a summer afternoon he would walk down the center of the street carrying a stalk of sugar cane or a bottle of buttermilk given to him by Mr. J W for his mama and he would caper as if the street was a rope he was balancing on—he was always teaching himself how to stay upright, keep from falling—and he didn’t want to tell his mother that the good things he brought her were gifts from somebody else.
All around him was a world intricate and rich with smells and sounds that fascinated him. He loved the look and feel of the rusty dust kicked up out in the street whenever an automobile passed and he loved the smell of the mules parked with their wagons in front of Bynum’s and he loved to sit on the wooden bench out in the yard in front of the Azalea Bethany church on Slocum street to listen to hymns being sung and he loved the smell of baking in Miss Consolia Dikens’s outdoor oven that was big as a little cabin and stoked with wood from a pile that smelled of apples and he loved the swaying of the bulrush cane down in the gully and he loved the other kind of cane, sugar cane, that was stacked like broom handles in the big wooden barrel outside Heberson’s and liked to buy a stalk for a penny and strip the snakegreen hide off with his teeth and gnaw off a chunk and chew the sweet iron-tasting juice into his mouth. He loved the sound of the little girls’ voices as they passed on their way to school and even liked the way they mocked him as he sat in his tiny yellow rocking chair on the little front porch. Four years old and rocking up a storm and telling his little two-year-old neighbor about how French kings lived in the hills up the gully and kept great castles and palaces stocked with fresh fish and sweet potato pudding and big jars of strawberry soda.
“What’s the difference between a castle and a palace?” his older brother Whistler asked, laughing at him.
He was teaching himself to read from the funnypapers he got from stacks at the back of Heberson’s store, getting old J W first to read them to him then again while he moved his fingers through the words. After that he could read the panels himself.
“He’s got em learnt by heart,” J W said to Cappie, who was sitting beside Delvin on the plank back steps of the store eating canned oysters out of a little white china dish, giving every fourth one to Delvin who didn’t care for them and surreptitiously put each one in his pocket. She was fascinated by what her chappie could do, even if he was reciting. Reciting was even better than reading. Any fool could read—she could read and wasn’t a fool, but many others were—but how many got the natural head power to keep all those words in order inside his brain?
“He’s a wonderanemous child,” she said licking the small plump body of an oyster before forking it into her mouth.
Not that time, but three times later, reading the adventures of the Katzenjammer Kids, he told his mother what was true—that he really was reading. He went more slowly and his mother at first didn’t like it—she liked better the zippy way he had when he memorized the words—but he explained to her that now he could take a piece of paper with writing on it and didn’t have to have somebody read it to him first before he could tell her what was there. “It’s like I can tell the secrets now,” he told her. She lay in her bed late at night after she came in from the Emporium thinking about this. She had long believed that life was a secret thing, built on secrets, most of which she had no idea how to learn. That boy’s building him a key, she thought. He’s going to establish hisself.
Just beyond the crossing of Bynam and Adams streets was the oakwood bridge that led to the world of the white folks. Huge and ponderous, all powerful, it squatted over there.
“Like a big old hog,” Cappie told her children. “It’ll eat you up—unless you’re quick. And eat anything else it takes a mind to,” she said, her dark yellow eyes burning. “You got to be mindful every minute,” she told them. “You got to study their ways and not slip up. Or they’ll get you.”
But Delvin felt called to the territory on the other side of the gully bridge. He was sure he could make his way.
One day he sneaked out of the yard and crossed over—he could see the bridge from the house, and see the church steeples and the big square commercial buildings and the indecipherable flags on top of the Courtney Hotel—and made his way along Adams street past the Sinclair station and the printing plant and the big white stone post office that looked like a fortress and past the other buildings of stone and brick masonry with their big glass front windows behind which were potbellied washing machines and silver tubs and birchwood iceboxes with big silver handles and couches like the ones over at the Emporium except without the gold tassels and buckets and dynamic-looking water pumps and big glass-covered pictures of people riding horses.
What particularly drew him was a store he came on that had spangly colorful dresses in the front window, dresses that were buttoned onto dummy bodies with small painted white women’s heads on them. These dresses were yellow like sunshine and sky blue and honeydew green and had tiny colorful stones sewn into them. The stones were like the precious gems in the stories of kings, the booty and priceless possessions of kings and queens right here in this mar velous place just over the bridge that after all was like a bridge in the story of great King Charlemagne that he had to cross in the Alp mountains to get to the terrible vandals who were demeaning the empire, and here he was, nearly five years old and feeling fine, looking right at such preciousness.
Though he could hear his mother’s voice saying no, he could not keep himself from climbing the two white marble steps and ducking into the store.
He headed straight for the dresses and knew no better than to scramble up the little wooden step into the window. He began to run his fingers over the jewels. One of them, a green shiny wonder he hadn’t even noticed from outside, the size of his thumbnail, came off in his hand. He slipped it into his pocket. There were so many who could mind? He ran his hands over the soft fabric. It made a faint hissing sound under his fingers. He would like to take this dress home to his mama. Maybe there was some way. But then there were jewels on this other cascade of smooth green cloth, jewels of dark yellow like his mother’s eyes, red jewels and a few that were clear—diamonds he knew they were called, the most precious of all, though not the prettiest. He began to pick the stones like berries and put them in his pockets.
He thought his heart might give out. It was hard to draw breath. His body tingled. But he was a brave boy and would not falter. He believed he had strength in him.
He slid to his left, eyes on the glitter of the brightest of the yellow stones, a stone that caught light of different colors in its depths. He rustled through dresses that very well could be the dresses of magnificent royalty, the shimmery fabric hissing and whispering as he brushed by until he was able to reach his small hand out and nearly . . .
At that moment he felt a sharp pain in his back. At the same time he heard a voice shout out, a white voice.
“You damn little dickens!”
He was snatched up into the air by his shirt, hauled out of the window and flung down onto the carpeted floor of the shop. He was dazed and couldn’t place himself. Loud white voices filled the air. Through a haze he saw contorted white faces glaring down at him. Ugly faces, sickly red and furrowed, with misshapen noses and tiny nostrils clotted with snot. Demons. He shrunk from them, or would have if he’d been allowed to, but he was held down by a foot on his chest.
“You quit squirming, you pickaninny booger.”
He was hit again, this time with the flat of a broom. His mother had once hit him with a broom. He began to cry, he couldn’t help it. He was jerked to his feet, but he didn’t have the strength to hold himself up. He fell to the floor.
“Look at that,” a voice cried, “look what that little sneak’s got in his hand.”
“Oh, don’t touch it!”
“Open your hand, you little pirate.”
The yellow jewel fell from his fingers. He could hear the soft noise it made when it hit the floor. Was it a dream? He was pulled back to his feet and held while the broom was applied to his buttocks, four, five, he lost count how many times. He was sobbing now, and no longer knew where he was. He had never known, he guessed.
Pulled by the shirt, his favorite, pale green, worn for the occasion, that had torn all the way down one side, he was lifted and carried as one would carry a shot animal by the tail, and deposited in the street. An automobile blew a blast on its horn. He heard the shuffling of a mule and then its sneeze and a string of mucus blew over him, wetting his face.
Voices were speaking to him, but he could not tell who they were, which of the white folks addressed him.
He pulled himself to his feet as a car honked a long squealing blast. He staggered to the curb, shakily climbed the speckled granite rim and was swept back into the street. Above his head the leaves of a large beech tree shivered and rushed in the breeze. He got to his feet, and, startling himself and maybe the white people who still squeaked and blatted around him, he began to run.
“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.
The children were marched into a small room lit by kerosene lamps. A long table wrapped in tin sheeting with squared-away corners. The regulars, the long-termers, led the way to a back window of the same kitchen that served the white children in the larger, electrically lit hall on the other side. Into a tin bowl was scooped grits, stew beans with gravy and a chunk of cornbread hard as a schoolbook.
Back at the table they ate with spoons attached by thin lengths of chain to an iron firedog screwed into the tabletop. It was the oldest child’s job to sort out the chains and pass the spoons to the children. They were supposed to sit quietly, but this quiet was almost impossible to maintain.
During the week Miss Pearl read to them at meals from the Bible. This was Delvin’s first experience with the famous old legends and tales. As time passed he found himself enthralled with the stories, especially the ones concerning wars and killing. The story of Joshua, who stopped the sun and knocked down the walls of Jericho with a bugle shout, was his favorite. He daydreamed of great victories won by obscure means such as horns and freakish powers. He was impressed with the Lord. The French lords were familiar to him from his home study. The lord the old Israelites called upon seemed mighty capable though he liked mostly to hang back in the shadows. This appealed to Delvin, who liked to lay low himself.
He mentioned to Miss Pearl that when he grew up he wanted to go after the Lord’s job.
“That job’s not for us human beings,” she told him, with no smile in her hard black eyes. “All we can do is follow him.”
“I’d like to get up close to him.”
Misunderstanding, she was pleased with the little boy.
At night the children trooped into a long high-ceilinged room behind the dining room. Two wide low platforms ran the length of the room on either side. Canvas mattresses filled with hay were laid widthwise on these platforms, one side for the boys, the other for the girls. A ragged green curtain ran down the middle partway, giving a little privacy. Delvin and his brothers and sister arrived on the day the mattresses had just been stuffed with fresh timothy hay, a hygienic procedure that took place every month or so if the guardians thought of it and if there was any hay available (donated). The timothy was newly cured and smelled spicy and welcoming. At home he slept on a cotton tick on the floor of the second bedroom when his mother wouldn’t let him into her bed.
He missed the house, missed its smells of rich perfume and cornmeal and grease and silver polish—missed the streets of Red Row that smelled of dreaminess and stewed collards and deep green shade and mica and ashes and kerosene and a hundred kinds of panbread—but mostly he missed his mother. At supper, listening to the little orange-haired boy, Winston, he had experienced the sinking, falling sensation in his chest. His whole body tingled and what was usually compact and strong inside him began to dissolve. He drank water and ate the hard bread in an attempt to replace it. If his mother had been there he would have thrown himself into her arms and made her hold him tight. Every day at home, sometime during the day, maybe more than once, she would grab him up and squeeze so tight he couldn’t take a breath. In her arms there was no need to breathe.
He got out of his bed and ducked under the curtain and got into his sister Coolmist’s bed. Coolmist was crying and at first seeing her little brother made her ashamed of her tears. But she couldn’t stop and she liked anyway to have little Delvin to snuggle in with her. They clasped each other in their arms. Down the row the twins were hugging each other. Miss Pearl as she walked the rows saw this and left the lamp burning longer than usual. Whimpering and moaning and sobbing, even yells, shrill cries and yips, were a common feature of foundling home nights.