BOOK TWO
1
He was walking one fall day along an unpaved side street in the dark quarter in Yellow Cross, Mississippi, when he passed a black-painted truck the size and shape of a small moving van. The truck was parked in front of an African Holiness church. On the side in dusty gold letters were the words Negro Museum of the Americas. In back was a door and a fold-down set of steps. A slim middle-aged africano man in a long tan canvas duster shiny at the elbows and a soft black felt hat sat on the step eating cantaloupe chunks out of a white bowl. Delvin asked him what this was, this museum. The man cocked his head, continued chewing until he could swallow good and then turned and squinted up at the high back of the vehicle.
“You mean this here?” he said, smiling, showing flat white teeth. “This is the only traveling museum of the american negro in existence.”
Delvin felt a jolt of pleasure. “A real museum,” he said.
“Exactly right. Photos mostly, but in fact a record of the negro’s trials and sufferings and joys on this side of the Atlantic ocean.”
“Could I take a look?”
“Why certainly. Only cost you a nickel.”
Delvin allowed as he had an extra nickel at that time and would be pleased to spend it on such an operation.
The man put the bowl down on the steps, took out a large yellow handkerchief and with gestures ceremonial wiped his mouth and hands.
“You produce the cash and I’ll open her up for you.”
The man had an accent like a northern white man, and his facial features—narrow nose, thin lips, soft green eyes—were those of a white man, but he was as black nearly as he was—sealblack, they called it.
The man—Professor Carmel, he called himself—produced a flat brass key, opened the back door and ushered Delvin into the van, stepping ahead of him to raise the canvas shades on one side. Along the back and other side walls were photographs, hundreds of them. On a table running down the long closed side were stacks of objects, jumbled together, among them skulls and batons and whisks and feathery headdresses and flutes and what looked like a gilded chamber pot. The photographs dominated the exhibit.
Delvin walked around the room that was as large nearly as the house he was born in, looking at the pictures. The man lit a kerosene lamp that made no impression on the daylight streaming under the rolled-up canvas shades and hung it from a brass hook in the ceiling. Delvin studied the photographs. Flat black-and-white representations, the stillness of each, the caughtness, gestures trapped, looks riveted to the paper, people turning and never getting there, the placements, the issuance of cries uncried, the smiles or grim looks, the sadness in a boy’s eyes, the girl looking at her mother who was fixing her hair with what looked like a gold bobbin—these only gradually touched him. Records of a moment pressed on either side by what came before and what was coming after. They all—all the africanos—knew what had been, had a pretty good idea of what was on its way. The proprietor, bent down under the table, fiddled with something, made a quick frantic motion and suddenly the scratchy voice of Bessie Smith flew up like a big yellow bird filling the van. Hurt and desolation, the crime of being black, the uselessness of fighting back, fear like a grime covering every surface, the tremors and quakes, a softness in the heart you couldn’t obliterate. He saw the hoes lifted in cotton fields like the specialized instrumentation of an anonymous and preposterous camarilla, men poised like dancers in barn rafters lifting long sticks upon which were strung the limp assegaial tobacco leaves, children standing waist deep in dew-drenched fields of cotton tobacco corn beans and peanuts bushy as gallberry shrub, or men posed in ditches over a dark infrangible corpus with pickaxes raised like the ceremonious antlery of some white man’s loony pestiferation. He had seen much on the roads, much that wasn’t found here, or not on this day. Old men battered until their faces looked like a coal seam turned inside out. Boys used for the smoothness of their bodies. Women squatted by the tracks, heads and shoulders powdered in coal dust, waiting like mail sacks containing no good news for the next hard hook to snatch them up. Some of this was here. The music pressed him on, pressed the pictures as if they were leaves of a tree gathered again in reverse progeneration into the big armory of leafage.
He couldn’t take in half of these photos, not a tenth. Many were stuck like markers in big books. He liked the books themselves, the large folios, cloth and leather bound, stuffed with progeny. He ran his hands over their covers as the keeper showed them to him. The music scratched itself out. Suddenly he had to get away.
He rose up qualmous and shaking, abruptly overfretted in his mind. No not that exactly—scared he had for a second lost his sense of where he was, like the time he’d dreamed a moment longer than he needed to and almost pitched headfirst off the ladder of a Baton Rouge–bound freight car.
He set the book down (he had been by now sitting on the lowest of the van’s two back steps, out in the air) and staggered across the dust-charged street into a field grown up in plantains and pokeweed. He thrashed through these greeny drifts and pulled up in a little cleared space where somebody had once made a campfire. Some wanderer. “That is what I am,” Delvin said. Said and slumped to his knees and over, passed out, like somebody graved into by the heat.
He came to with the professor man dripping cold water in his face.
“Come on boy, you’re not all right but you will live.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Delvin said.
The man rocked back on his heels and laughed. He raised the white china bowl that now contained water. “Here.” He held the bowl to Delvin’s mouth and let him drink. The water tasted pleasantly of cantaloupe.
He told Professor Carmel that he had for many years worked—was raised actually—in a funeral home, and when the prof asked which one and he told him he said with a broad smile that showed off his fine large teeth that he knew old Oliver well.
“A bit spendthrift with his emotions, but honorable and a fine consistency of service,” he said.
It made Delvin less lonely to hear this. He had been lonely for several days, maybe longer. Riding freights was generally a social activity of a kind, but due to a sweep by railroad detectives along the Southern line, he’d had to lay low in a canebrake by himself for three days before catching a local freight out of Metusa, a rattling train empty of cargo but for some loads of furniture and no other rail companions.
“You know something about the departed,” Prof Carmel said in a friendly way.
“I know something about how to prepare a body.”
“Fancy up the meat,” Carmel said.
“Most folks consider it showing respect for what’s coming. Don’t want to meet the Lord in your work clothes—”
“Worms and beetles are what’s coming,” the prof said.
Delvin believed pretty much the same thing, cosmologically speaking, but he didn’t generally like anybody else pressing on him in some righteous way that he had to believe this too. It didn’t matter what side of the theological fence people were on, they got hard-shelled about it quick enough. But the professor had given his correction or opinion in a genial way.
“Yall photograph up there?” he said.
“You mean the deceased? No, we don’t. Some do it by their own arrangements, but we don’t encourage it.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t discourage it either, but I think Mr. Oliver would rather people mourn by way of living memory. He’s not pushy about it though. He just doesn’t promote the service.”
“People are interesting no matter what shape they’re in, don’t you think?”
“Yes I do.”
“Look at these,” he said and pulled a long drawer out from a flat cabinet under the table.
Attached to big sheets of thick black paper were photographs of negro men hanging from the limbs of trees by their necks. Here we add to the number, he thought. Here we add to it. He wanted to turn away again. A nausea gripped him. Good lord, good lord. That boy out in the country, hanged and chopped and burned half away. It had been too much. It was still too much. This was too much.
As he bent to look at the bodies, some broken-necked, some burned so their arms were tapered stumps, some denatured, some with whip marks showing on their blood-greased naked backs, some gutted, one wearing high top shoes with the laces still tied in immaculate bows, another looking like the man who used to sell parched peanuts on the courthouse square—every one somebody, looking like somebody—he experienced a collapsing sensation as if he had soiled his pants, but he hadn’t. His private self shrank from the surface of his body, yielding inward like walls falling in on once safe rooms. He didn’t like it that Carmel had held these for last. Crippled, scarred, half-skinned, mutilated—still it was the faces that held him. Lonesome negro faces surrounded by the upturned faces of white men. No, not lonely, he had it wrong. He hadn’t been looking close enough; he had hardly been looking at all. But he saw it now: the faces of those no longer there. But not even that. No. He saw it: only the white men were there. All alone in the world they made. They were the ones who lived again in a universe made up of only their kind. Not again, but for once, finally. He shuddered. Many of the white faces were blank. No, not blank—he couldn’t get it right at first either—: addled, sated, entranced. But not that, no, not even that. They had the look of the rapturously crazed. Something tucked way down behind their souls had leapfrogged to the front. Yes. But not so quickly—and this is what he saw—that he couldn’t make out the shocked and hopeless expression still visible behind the stuporous glee. And this, the pictures whispered, to his face or behind his back as he turned away, is your fate. He shuddered as a chill flashed across his body and he staggered, catching himself against the table. He coughed into his fist.
“You see how human beings really are,” said the professor.
“White men,” Delvin said. He just said that. It was like saying “The devil.” No need to mention him.
The professor went to pull another sheet out, but Delvin stayed him with a touch of his hand on the tray. He turned back to the pictures on the walls. The van smelled of onions and sweat and of another, chemical, odor which the professor said was ferrous sulphate, from developing the photos. He stared again at the faces of the living. A little boy trailed a cotton sack behind him like a long fat grub. In his face a guilelessness, a comfortableness, you could call it a happiness. Shirtless, in overalls, and wearing a huge sombrero style hat, he looked back at Delvin with a gentleness that nearly brought tears to his eyes. Crying not for the dead—he’d learned this in the funeral business—but for the lifebound living. This wasn’t the only face that held him. There were others, skips and jumps of faces, expressions, dull and crisp and bloated or filled with a fierceness that stirred him and scared him and made him feel a churning in his guts and even deeper. An old woman with a wide fleshy gleaming face and flared nostrils looked out with an eagerness to please and so much . . . it was sorrow . . . that he laughed outloud, himself shocked. In many faces fright mingled with a desire to please. Others were as nearly blank as the faces of the lyncherous white men, though not so often erased. A man caught for murder (so a hand-lettered tag said) looked at him with cold eyes in a grimly smiling face; his lower lip looked as if it had been bitten in two and sewn roughly back together. Stunned faces, terrified faces, smashed and reconstituted faces, organized faces and the faces of the holy and the hustling, the light-complected face of a man in a high white collar and thin tie who looked as if nothing in the world could touch him. Faces that wanted to shame him and faces that made him want to slap them. A little girl with a high wide forehead and small intense eyes he wanted to kiss. Two old men sitting on the front steps of a grocery store laughing fit to bust.
And behind him the white faces of men looking up from the lynching field at the body of a black man or gazing at the camera as if they didn’t know what a camera was.
But then here were others, pinned to the opposite wall, spilling out of other big flat books, flows and gatherings—of silliness, of running and jumping, of yelling and delight. A woman laughed open-mouthed, a man beat time with sticks on a porch floor as two other men out in the dust before a spurt of campfire danced an ebullient jig. A congregation lustily sang. A man petted a horse’s face, the look in both of their eyes, horse and man, compelled and kindly. A boy called across a river to other boys rising like dolphins from the glassy water. Children rode a mule, old men played dominoes, gripping their laughter like it was a great fish they were landing by hand. A band marched, brass raised, down a sunny street. A little boy on a top step contemplated his stretched-out feet. An old woman whelmed with glee. A girl in a checkered headrag wiped sweat off her forehead, grinning over a big bowl of ice cream. A man in a dark suit bent over a tablet. Cascade of fellowship, of tickling or guffaws or brimmed-up festiveness. Children on top of a wagonload of cotton high as a house. Chuckling babies, women shouting in joy.
He turned away with tears in his eyes.
“Yessir,” Carmel said as he tapped the flats with the heel of his hand to straighten them, “you can see the true life of the race in these pictures.”
It took a minute for Delvin to draw himself together. A coolness came into his mind, and it was only then that he realized how tired he was.
The museum keeper had turned away, giving him time, rustling among his photos, gathering, careful to keep his fingers from the impacted centers of the paper.
“Ah, lord,” Delvin said.
“Yes, sholy. Like a mashed-up sweet potato.”
Delvin smiled. He indicated a photograph of men and women standing in front of a white-painted church with a half-finished steeple.
“That’s over in east Tennessee,” Carmel said. “That church has since been burned to the ground.”
It was the church where the funeral for the slain boy was held. “I’ve been there,” he said. “I was there.”
He told Carmel about the fire (set by unknown white men) and a little about his life as an undertaker’s assistant, parts of a past he rarely talked about for his aging but still lively fear of Chat-town police.
“That’s quite an education,” Carmel said. He looked at the boy who was disheveled and needed a haircut, but who had the gleam of intelligence in his fine brown eyes. “You just touring around the country?”
“You might say that.”
“They kick you out of the funeral business?”
“No, ’twern’t that.”
“You don’t have to go into it. We all from time to time stick our foot into the dung heap.”
“I’m looking to further my education,” Delvin said. Said it and meant it—had said it before—even though he was tired out by all the instruction he’d received in the van. But he liked the smell of the place, liked the old man puttering about.
“Racewise you got a full education gathered right here in one location, my boy.”
Delvin on the spot decided to postpone his rod-riding travels. He spent the night in a hobo camp outside town and returned the next day and the next. On the third the professor invited him to hang around and gave him little chores to do. On the fifth day he proposed that Delvin join him on the road.
He saw that Delvin carried a little blue notebook and a couple of cedarwood pencil nubs and told him to take notes if he wanted to.
“In fact,” he said, “I recommend it.”
He spoke to him of the great power and destiny of the African peoples. The Wandering Negro, he called them.
“That’s us,” he said. “We are loose in the world, free to wander the earth poking our noses into whatever interests us. Many will complain and grieve about our plight, and it’s true it looks, especially in certain areas, as if the white man has the upper hand, yes. But this is only appearances. In the kingdom of the spirit, we are so far ahead of these lily-livered folk that it is really our job to take care of them. Look at us. Stolen from our homes and sold into slavery, mistreated, raped and lynched, and still we find a way to love the work of the Lord, if you want to call it that, or the natural creations of the universe if you don’t. That church you are familiar with. It’s not just a house of worship—rebuilt, by the way—it’s a depot, a trolley stop, a way station and refreshment stand for those traveling this world of pain and struggle. In religion after religion you find at the heart of God a mystery. That same mystery is in everything, every rose—it’s in every dog or pig, every human being. In that mystery is the power of life. Not only the existence of life, but the purpose as well. The mystery is at the heart of life itself. A perplexity, a boggler. Everywhere you turn you find it. Who are we? Who is that lovely young woman over there? What did you mean by saying that? Who are you? A life of questions. Well, we don’t need so many questions really. Our job, son, through living, through love, through helping one another along in this wilderness, is to snug up with it. Simply that.”
He stared at Delvin with an expectant expression in his cool green eyes as if he had just explained everything.
Delvin looked him straight back. “With the mystery?” he said.
“Damn, you’re right,” Carmel cried, chuckling. “That must be what I mean.” He laughed, a croaky, slappy laugh. “Yes, son, with the mystery. We are the ones supposed to get up close and hug it till it squeaks.”
“You mean, colored folk?”
“I do indeed. We are the only ones got the heart for the job.”
He went on to explain that this wandering life—plus, he said, the willingness to bear burdens without complaint—was—“were,” he said—exactly the recipe for getting down to the heart of said mystery.
This last was spoken at a dinner they ate at Fanny’s Hot Shop over on Washington street in the quarter. Carmel informed Delvin that he was on the run from forces that were dedicated to the elimination of the negro race in general and him in particular.
“The materials I carry in my little traveling museum are a threat to the well-being of certain elements that will not be deterred until they have put out of existence the truths these materials contain. And I have to admit, it is true that in some quarters what I carry has the eliminatary aspects of a bomb. Built to blow the foolish, sanctimonious notions of these folks right out of the water. In a generous, in a kindly, way,” he added, his eyes twinkling.
As it turned out, Carmel had received this caravan of truths from a white man, his former employer, Dr. Haskell Sullivan, the famous ethnologist from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sullivan, with whom Professor Carmel had worked for many years as driver and helper of all kinds, and finally as partner, “in the ethnological enterprise you see before you” (they were back with the van, parked now in a field next to a little brushy river), had passed the outfit on to Carmel when he was taken with spasms and became too ill to continue.
“What kind of spasms?” Delvin asked.
“Hard to say. Gut mainly. He’d also lost a bit in the head department. I had to put him in a home over in Jackson. I left him on the front steps of the Berrins Home for the Aged with a note pinned to his coat.”
This was six days into their association. Delvin sat in sweet-smelling roadside grass on a rice mat provided by Carmel. By then Carmel had told him to call him Professor. They were drinking sugar cane juice from white china mugs.
“It was five years ago this September,” the professor said, “that I said goodbye to that fine white man on the steps of the charity home. When I am in the area I stop by and check on him. He is still alive, but only in body. His mind has become part of the great mystery.”
This mystery the professor spoke of hung like a misty picture in Delvin’s mind. His life was filled with mystery. Everywhere he looked he was baffled and diverted.
In days to come the professor gave Delvin books to read: novels, poetry, polemics, race stories, histories, uplift books and books de signed to probe the ways of men on the earth. Many of these books were written by black authors, and not just the big-timers like Du Bois and Washington and Sojourner Truth. There were slim softbacks printed on flimsy paper written by men sweating away, so Carmel said, in Manhattan and Brooklyn tenements, and books written by africano men living over in Europe, and men in Chicago, and even Memphis. Why, in Memphis, he said, there was a small publishing house that specialized in literature written by negro men—and women—for the negro race only. He owned some of these books. They tended to be long arguments concerning the superiority of the negro race, most of them, as well as a few that counseled brotherhood and love. In one Carmel showed him, the author Seneca Wilson—a nom de plume, Carmel said—wrote of the vacancy in white men’s faces and the “digested fullness” in black faces (“This goes right along with what I’ve pointed out to you in the photographs,” Carmel said, smiling). The faces were empty, Wilson said, because white people, by way of their long defense of their “rightness,” their right to consider themselves the top dogs in life, had lost touch with faithfulness. This showed in the wrenched-up greed in their faces (“When the disease of corruption has reached the bone, there’s nothing left but greed and self-importance,” he said), whereas the negro man, who lived in a disheveled and turmoil-filled state, one he was constantly having to call for help with and constantly getting knocked around by, had thereby come on a much deeper understanding of the great mysteries of being. As you could plainly see in the face of every negro person you met.
It wore Delvin out to read all this.
Other books proclaimed the day when the negro man would rise up and by force of simple righteousness take his rightful place at the head of the table. It scared Delvin to read these and gave him a guilty thrill. He had not thought particularly of these matters. The world belonged to the white man. Delvin and his kind were merely scumbling through it. They were stranded in a country whose language was not theirs and whose customs were foreign to them. They did their best under these circumstances. Nothing he knew of had corrupted the spirit of negro folk, not in any significant way. Even the lynchings. Sojourner Truth said it was most important to show love and concern for those around us, colored or white. This was the only way to show our love of God, she said. Love meant freedom from oppression. Somehow it soothed him to read this. But many of the negro writers appeared to be girding up for a fight.