3
From time to time, but regularly, after the museum closed, after he wrote his letter to Celia and posted it, he studied the photographs. Looking at them—for signs, clues, entryways into mysteries, facts, solutions—he wondered if his own face were not a collection of hidden messages, like one of the notes posted on signboards at crossroads stores and post offices, readable by all, telling stories, revealing secrets, offering humorous bits or pitiful revelations; in the triangular piece of mirror they hung on the back door each morning for washing he began to study his face to discover what was there, what hidden messages or revelations were posted for the searchers of the world and the passersby . . . and not just the traditional indicators such as a weak chin (his was short but square) or ferrety eyes (his were large and hazel), but others, the special sign in the slightly curled and hard-edged upper lip that he was a man who dreamed of silver flying fishes and an empty caleche on a tropic shore . . . and a crease at the corner of his mouth that revealed the love of a duplicitous but comely woman who would leave him for a mule trader, say, who was losing his business to the tractor companies . . . or a level gouge above his short chin that revealed his susceptibility to the taste of quince and vinegar pie . . . a tiny curving indentation, a hook, at the edge of his left eyebrow that foretold hard days in the cotton and sweet pepper fields above the Acheron river (unknown to him as yet), as well as the throbbing soreness in his chest on evenings smelling of rust and sour pecans . . . and the tiny indentation below his left nostril, put there by a wasp sting when he was three months old (he’d been told by Coolmist), that signified the suffering of humankind . . .
The future, like a purple martin swooping in the last light of day, was almost near enough, clear enough, to see, to fix . . . but then it was gone.
His face collapsed back into a pudding of dark lumpy skin. It had no character, he thought.
He went back to studying the faces of the mostly anonymous photographed negroes. These faces were fascinating to him. He had asked the prof why they didn’t take more pictures themselves, and the professor had said creation was not his line and besides he was baffled by some of the complex workings of that craft. Delvin himself was not particularly interested in taking pictures but it bothered him that they didn’t add more of their own manufacture to the lot. But they didn’t have money for a new camera and the one they had was busted when the professor threw it at a rabid coon.
Despite all this Delvin had begun to study the faces of those who came to view the exhibits.
He began to jot down descriptions of the clientele. He looked for signifying features, marks, signs. In this one he saw by the slant of a nose the confusion and the name-calling that was coming. In another down-shaded mouth he thought he perceived the impotent attempts to shift blame. In a drooping earlobe he saw bitterness against children. He liked the bumpy spots in faces. The knots and swellings. He himself had two small knots on his forehead and another just back of his chin on the left side. What they were caused by he didn’t know, but they worried him; he hoped they weren’t infant goiters. The hen’s egg on the forehead of a workman in Bayless fascinated him. He described it as a hen’s egg, duck’s egg, eagle’s egg, as a marble under the skin or a lump of custard. He wanted to run it between his fingers; squeeze the juice out of it, he wrote. The left half of one woman’s lip was swollen and droopy. She wanted to hide it with her hand (he wrote), but she’d decided not to. Bravely, she entered the museum with her head high. It was only as she re-entered the brilliant waxy sunlight that she ever so slightly flinched. He wanted to kiss her lip and tell her not to be ashamed and thought of Celia whose lips looked carved, long lips with the narrowest ridges running along their edge and tiny lines stroked vertically into them—lips he wanted more than anything to kiss. He described her face before he forgot. He kept the written-down description of Celia’s face and returned to it in the night, adding a little, taking a little away, raising her cheekbones slightly, tapering her eyebrows and plucking them. She was fading. Without the description he couldn’t picture her.
He turned to describing what was around him. The truck was once black: but now it’s gray, he wrote.
It’s becoming ghostly. We’re the ghosts of present, past and future, slipping through the towns. In the morning sometimes when there’s fog the truck disappears and no one can find it. It’s as if all this huge collection of photographs, of pictured history, was erased, as if it never existed at all. Something makes me want to cry. Not just for my own troubles, which are pointed and rolling right on, but for everybody’s. Each photographed face is something true about the world. The happy ones, the sad ones, the lost ones, the found, each one telling its story. The truck hauling this great assembly through the towns. The people, the dazed and the suffering . . .
and then he quit the writing. It was becoming too grandeed. He had a tendency in this direction that he recognized. Everybody got to do something, the professor said. He got the canvas bucket and hauled water from a well in the front yard of a slanted negro cabin and washed the truck. It didn’t come back to shiny black; it still was gray.
They were in Cullen, then Astor, then Cumming, then the old coal town of Radsburg. How did they, two negroes in a shabby van filled with photographs, escape destruction by the white race? In each town the strict divide between the races was carefully and forcefully maintained. Place was most important. Remember your place, boy, the instructions lettered invisibly but legibly on every sign and attitude and takeout window and coldwater shanty said.
The professor said, “When your own unholiness gets you burned down, shot, cannonaded, trampled, your close relatives killed, and the victors dig up the dead and drunkenly dance with them by bonfirelight, which is just what happened to these white folks, what you want is a world or a section of the world where what was lost can be rebuilt, and, most important, none of those you wronged can make a move on you. You want a world that stays still. ‘We will live not in a spinning remnant,’ they say, ‘but in a world in which what stands for who we once were can be reconstructed and preserved without the shadow of death falling across it.’ But this is impossible to do. Life, snorting and fretting and sniffing around for something sweet, once loosed, can’t be fetched up. Even if it’s not loose, it will get loose. That’s the thing about life that makes it different from the stones: it moves around.”
But alien negroes driving a large truck—it was a kind of truck, built by the Ford Motor Company—bringing a celebration of things negroid, was pushing the limit. How did they get by without being lynched or at least beaten senseless, their van confiscated and their pictures burned with the yard trash?
The professor first thing when he arrived in whatever settled nervous burg they visited (they didn’t stop in every one) dropped by the police station and paid a bribe, made a donation, to the chief, yes, as said. And he made sure the chief and the city government understood that they—the alien purveyors—knew how stupid these dark folks were, showing each other photographs of their comic faces. They made it clear to the authorities that the exhibit was a folly, a cunning joke on the negro race, a lampoon and antic burlesque designed to humiliate and poke fun at every one of them. Make sure, Your Honor, these simple folk are in their place. What a hoot. He showed them examples of those feckless, half-wit darkies, granddaddy or some youngun napping in a porch swing or grinning big or a look on his face, as he stared off at the sun slipping down behind the pines, of foolish wonder. The police grinned and patted their bellies and laughed, mostly. Other times the professor cut it close, sometimes a little too close. But few wanted trouble, with negroes or any other group. (Times some defeated person, some sap that hatred had knocked down so many times until he had to use a grudge to build himself back up, some fool who didn’t know better, some ex-tormented-child who wanted revenge, a self-despiser, would swing his feet back under him, rise up and knock the black man down. “But you always apologize,” the prof said, “and then you get back up.”
“I know about that,” Delvin said, remembering his scrape in the dress shop, and other venues.)
What up north they called the Depression circled like a flight of buzzards over every town. People still thought business would pull the country out even though business, since 1863, had not been able to pull the South out of anything and the new Depression was just a doubling up, locally.
“Yall just keep that race nonsense off among yourselves and don’t bother nobody,” the suzerains said to the professor, “we got real worries now.” Anyway, they had, since the war, quickly tied the black race back up in knots and they didn’t have to worry about them. Nor any fake professor and his truckload of comic photographs.
Into the negro half-towns and sham-cities Delvin began to go at night. He walked the streets of the Overtowns and Undertowns and the Congos and Mississippi and Louisiana quarters. The Lands of Darkness. Unpaved, they were often hardly streets at all. More like lanes in medieval towns of Europe or villages in Africa—streets filled with the smells of woodsmoke and spices and antique sensories made of bits of prehistoric matter and dried long-extinct flowers. On the creaky lopsided porches vague lights shone like bits of webbing or mist, casting huge shadows on the bare lopsided front walls of the little frame houses. Under the trees the tiny diastolic glimmers of lightning bugs ticked, becoming whiter the higher they rose. Up among the branches pinches and bits of gleaming too faint to cast shadows stayed on for hours. Up ahead, in the middle of the street, human shapes dipped and swooped in unhasty dances as the barely perceptible music of guitars and hand organs made their soundings in the deeps of night. Cries and hoots and whisperings. There seemed always to be a bit of fog at the end of the street. Cats moaned in their long nights of suffering. Dogs barked with a sound like consumptive muted coughing. As he walked the streets in the deepest parts of the night he could hear people talking in their beds. Old men confessed to their snoring wives the secret affairs of their youth. Old women spoke of masked riders galloping furiously down the roads on huge dark horses. Children spoke of boogeymen with hands growing out of their knees and bellies. In dreams girls whispered to kindly lovers. Boys answered questions with wit and intelligence.
Who dat dar? a woman’s voice called, but not to him. He carried in his heart the drubbed and muzzled love of a disallowing woman through the faintly whispering, crepitant streets. He believed this walking eased him and made him able to go about without so much fear he had to run away. He was scared all the time. What have I come to? he whispered in the dark caverns under oaks, and he was old enough—had been born old enough—to ask this question. He believed that whatever he was had to be played out in the world. He couldn’t hold off from it. What he was scared him. What he believed he was. Seventeen and strong, not very strong, but strong enough and able and filled with beef, with get-up-and-go, with pep, zip, vim—with lifting power, which the professor said was the greatest thing, lifting power—and he had an inexhaustible need to exercise himself on the earth.
In the shadows by a boarded-up livery stable, in a little town so small the africano section was only half of two streets next to the town dump, he waited as one would wait for a carriage called to take him to the far places of the world. The air smelled of pine smoke and rotten apples. Down the street a man in a long white nightshirt stepped out of his door and looked at the sky that was still dark. He waved at something in the sky and Delvin wondered who it was, or what, and thought he knew. What is coming? he wondered, but no one and nothing in the world could tell him. The man made a large sweeping gesture, turned back in and slammed the door behind him. The sound was like the last clap of a civilization closing up.
In Salisbury, Alabama, in the northwestern part of the state up near the Tennessee line, one clear night lit by stars, he walked by a church where choir practice was being held.
The choir was singing one of the old sorrow songs, a jubilee called “The Ship of Zion.” He stopped and stood under an open window to listen. Someone in the choir kept making a mistake, a woman. Each time, the director, a man, would stop the singing, crying out in a frustrated voice, “Halt!”
After a few busy-sounding and angry words from the director the choir would take up the song again. Again a mistake was made. With the same word—“Halt!”—the director would again stop the singing. This went on and on. A brief patch of silence, just a moment, followed each time at the quittance. In one of these empty moments, someone, a woman, maybe the erring singer, let loose a small, despairing cry. Her voice was like the voice of a child and maybe it was, but he didn’t think so and, studier of many faces, he thought hers was probably the face of some reedy girl, just in from the country probably, some plain-faced young person who just wanted to join a choir to praise the Lord and maybe meet people, maybe meet some boy who might like her, but who was finding out that she couldn’t really sing. Or maybe she just couldn’t please this stern master.
The choir started up again and once more the director stopped it with the same word; again Delvin heard the thin small wail.
The director spoke harshly again, this time ordering the woman out of the group. There was another silence and then came the sound, very quietly, of weeping. Gradually the weeping faded, as if the woman was leaving the room.
The choir started up again. This time the old jubilee went sweetly by without a hitch. But it seemed to Delvin there was a gap in the song, a little hole or gouged-out place where the young woman’s voice had been. He could hear this place. It was an emptiness like the silence inside the narrow circle of a well.
He shivered. He was cold though it was a warm June night. A desolate feeling came over him and he thought he couldn’t bear what it meant to be a human being on the earth. This feeling welled up and slowly ebbed as he walked on thinking of it.
Back in the van, lying on the floor on his cotton pallet in front of the door, he could still feel a little of this impression or inclination, and he carried with him for days the recall of a faint sadness. It became something he didn’t completely forget. He returned to study and wonder about it, the singular occasion of reprimand and the grief it uncovered and the moment of silence it revealed and how this silence or space with nothing in it seemed so important.
Nothing where everything is, he would think and draw tiny circles in his notebook and make dots.
The professor, who dressed generally in the same clothes every day (so he didn’t get distracted, he said, by sartorial concerns), continued to instruct him by way of books and disquisitions on the meaning of existence, and Delvin found this education to be interesting and informative, but he preferred other written words, stories he found mainly in books in the small libraries he encountered. These libraries were mostly in churches. Many of the town libraries were not open to colored, and not many people in the quarter had books, but some churches had collected a few and he read many with inspirational themes. These, together with the books from the professor, formed the basis of his education at this time.
He thought of Celia daily and told her of his reading in the letters he wrote, listing the books he read and telling her his hopes for exotic travel. He sent her his itinerary as he learned it as well as his address in Chattanooga; he would occasionally receive a note from her. She was in her third year at college and found it more difficult than the first two. She was studying literature, but found herself pulled more strongly by her science studies. She was lonely often, but she met regularly with a circle of young women to talk politics and literature and social life (Quite often we get bogged down in the last), but still, afterwards, she said, on the walk home through the campus or after she was supposed to be asleep, she would feel a loneliness. Maybe it’s only something trying to tug me into another kind of life, she wrote, but she didn’t know what it was. I sense the world standing ready for me like a big feast, but I feel scared and unsure of where I want to start. I’d like to find some work that is so demanding that I won’t think of anything else. Isn’t that crazy?
I wish you would write some about us, you and me, he thought, and added this to the bottom of the letter he was writing. I think of all sorts of things we could do together. He told her about the little zoo they visited down in Treesburg, Louisiana, that had several goats and snakes and raccoons and a panther with the mange and a skinny bear that slept all the time. In Suberville he had climbed an abandoned fire tower and looked out at the country that seemed hapless and dull in its monotony. I want to see the world, he wrote, but only the parts that are surprising. In a note he read on the worn stone steps of the post office in Mooksville, she said she was the same.
It was in Mooksville that he got in a fight with a couple of white boys. Negro on the run, he should have known better. The boys had mocked him on the street for receiving a letter. The letter was written on green stationary and smelled of Celia’s cunning perfume. He had it spread out on one hand as he stood under a big live oak tree.
“Look at that nigra acting like he’s getting mail,” one of them said. “Hey so and so [some derogatory racial term and why repeat it], who you think’d be writing a dumb whatchamacallit like you etcetera etcetera. Who you know anyway who can write?”
“And what you doing pretending to read?” the other, a towheaded skinny boy with a slight limp, chimed in.
“You hang around I’ll teach you to read and write,” Delvin said. He didn’t want to be bothered by these silly boys. Celia was speaking in dark blue ink about a jar of pickled peaches her roommate received from her family. She was also describing her Freud studies, which she found gloomy and a kind of outrageous European voodoo. It’s a lot of wishful thinking, she said. But really smart. Even if there is a lot more mystery in the world than this man has any idea of. White people always like to put their thumb on everything, Delvin thought. They were scared not to.
The boys were like yellow flies stuttering about. He shooed them with the letter. The nearest, a stout boy about his age with coal-black straight hair cut short and a lopsided evil smile, came up close and slapped him in the face.
Delvin was so startled he lost his footing and fell, or half fell, onto his side. He pushed up, jumped to his feet, and backhanded the boy across the forehead, hurting his hand slightly.
The other, more slender, but with a strange, sterile look in his eye, hit him hard in the face. He again lost his sense of things. But didn’t go down. Then the other walloped him and he was instantly numb on the left side of his face and to his surprise revolving slowly, wondering where Celia had got to.
Right after this the police came by and he was thrown into the back of a Ford automobile, driven to the jail and locked up in it. The whole ride to the jail he shivered and wanted to cry out, sure this was his fallen day in which the clamps of white men’s justice would take hold in his life. The long rope that stretched from Chattanooga to this village in Alabama had tripped him. What was he thinking, to hit that boy?
But he was wrong about the ubiquity of the law. And it wasn’t the last time he hit a white boy.
The professor found him in the whitewashed brick jail the next day—after Delvin had been brought before the judge and given thirty days for fighting and assault. Justice was a quick and handy business for africano folks in that town. As Delvin stood before the judge, who wore not robes but a red-striped collarless shirt and black suspenders, he thought he could smell the citrus perfume on Celia’s letter and looked around wildly for her come to help him but she wasn’t there. The letter was gone and this hurt him in his heart. Just then the judge was speaking directly at him.
“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Delvin said, “I didn’t hear you.”
The judge added five days to his sentence for impertinence.
The prof wasn’t on the crime scene, but by nature of his relationship to Delvin he was implicated in the offense; the town took custody of the van (it wasn’t the first time the museum had been taken in) and planned to hold it until the authorities made sure the professor was not up to any illegal activity on his own.
In these situations usually the africano elders of the town would explain to the white fathers the value they placed on the museum, on enterprises of this sort, if not this particular enterprise, and hoped and pleaded, Your Honor, that you might let us enjoy this celebration of simple american negro life. The fathers, sometimes more jocosely than not, would liberate the van, not because they believed in the efficacy of nigra museums but generally because they didn’t want to get these black fools in a stir. But this time, in Haplessburg or Muttstown or whatever it was called, they were not so quick to see the good side of the museum’s existence.
“You are already stirring up trouble with that vexacious tribunery,” they said. “If we release it, you might cause even more trouble.”
“We receive so little in the way of education about our people . . . ,” the professor began, but one of the fathers, a usually genial druggist named Mames, stared at the pencil he was holding as if it might be a magic wand of some kind and said, “What you talking about—your people? You aint got no people. You’re a nigra—am I right?”
“Yessir, I am.”
“The nigras are not a people. They are just—what’s the word I’m looking for, Monk? Not a herd—”
“A flock?” Monk Wilkes, the florid owner of the hardware store, said.
“No, damn it!”
“That’s a quarter for swearing in the meeting,” the mayor, a disputacious little lawyer and landlord, said.
“Not a flock,” Mames said, “no, they’re just—well, there is no name for what you are. You’re just an ordinary part of the life of folks in this area, like junebugs or dirt daubers or possums. Wait—okay: Folks is what you are, just folks. The Israelites, they are a people. The Chinese are a people. Americans are a people. You are folks.”
He smiled complacently at the professor who stood before him in what he called his presentation clothes, a pair of faded but very clean black broadcloth pants with a yellow shirt and cream-colored canvas jacket, waiting patiently for a chance to speak. When it came, he said calmly that he believed the exhibit helped colored folks—folks, he said—to appreciate how good their lives were down here in the rural south. Let them know how rich and pleasant it is. (Truth was he believed that, despite all this nonsensical fuss, it was a good life—a good life being possible under almost any conditions. This was one of his major philosophical points.)
The mayor screwed up his little empty blue eyes and said, “We will take this matter under advisement and let you know.”
The professor attempted to plead further that the museum was his life’s work and only means of earning a living and so forth, but these pleadings did not sway the fathers. They waved him out with the disinterested courtesy of retired mule skinners seeing an oldtime customer onto a bus, and the chief of police ushered him from the room.