The room smelled like a field in the country. Delvin was on his back on his own pallet. He heard a small chirping sound—a cricket—and stayed still, listening. The cricket was nearby. He raised himself and waited in the half-lit dark. The cricket chirped at the edge of his mattress. It was caught inside, in the fresh timothy hay stuffing, near the top that was closed with two big Bakelite buttons. Delvin couldn’t undo the buttons but he could still reach his hand inside. He lay quietly waiting for the cricket. When it chirped again he had its location. He slipped his hand under the canvas and caught the insect. It was a shiny black handsome creature with a swashbuckling set of feelers.
“Hidy, bug.”
He wished he had something to keep the cricket in, but there was nothing, not even in the little bundle of clothes he had been allowed to bring with him from the house (“What the hell you wearing?” one policeman said). He held the cricket loosely in his hand. His face scrunched with worry. “I’m sorry I caught you.”
Despite himself he was getting sleepy.
“All right,” he said.
He put the cricket in the pocket of the frilly dress shirt he had taken off to get into the coarse nightshirt the home made all the children wear. He lay down but almost immediately raised up to check on the cricket. It was already gone, sailed off into the dark. Delvin felt a pang in his heart.
“Oh me,” he said and lay back. “Mama,” he said into the dark, his lips barely moving, “where are you?”
On his back, looking up into the dark that was dimly lit by high long narrow windows, he felt the tears start, brim, spill and trail down his cheeks. He didn’t think to wipe them away. I wonder how tall I am, he thought. Wonder how tall Mama is. And then he was asleep.
Cappie did not reappear, and after the pumping of informants and interviews of the girls over at the Emporium and a few neighborhood householders and the personal searches and tracking expeditions into the woods and bulletins issued to surrounding states, the police department decided they probably wouldn’t find her. Delvin, if anybody had looked for him, spent the next year and a half living the orphan’s life, first in the local foundlings home and then out in the Homeless African House in Tullawa where he spent mornings at school and afternoons working in the apple orchards pining springlings. Despite his willingness to prove he could he was informed that he did not know how to read and was forced to learn all over following the confusing Boatwright method taught at the time in Tennessee schools. He chafed but went along and relearned or overlearned first his ABCs and then the puny words and pitiful sentences printed under the pictures of white children in the books passed out each afternoon by Moneen Butler, a cinnamon-colored girl originally from the high mountains in east Tennessee.
He fell in love with Moneen and was smartly rebuffed and ministered his heartbreak by zipping through the little brown biographies of famous americans he got from the school library. He discovered books, real books, as rideable transports into habitable territory. He tried to enter the town library but was turned away. He tried to enroll in the regular colored primary school, walking two miles along Fallin street under the long line of oaks and sycamore trees and past the garages and metal shops and appliance stores, but he was turned away there too; he had no parent or guardian except the state, which paid him little mind, other than being the ready agent of preventing little homeless darkies from getting too fresh. Nobody at either school recognized him as the son of the infamous murderer Cappie Florence, though her crime and flight were an oft-told tale in the negro and white communities.
On the day he showed up at the public school dusty and barefoot carrying in his pocket a case dollar folded small as a quarter, a bill he’d lifted from a drawer in the back office of the Muster General Goods store, and was turned away hurt in his heart, instead of returning to the orphanage he crossed town and walked along Overlook street, the north boundary of Red Row. There, beyond its edge, white enterprise dribbled along past the meatpacking plant and the old deserted fertilizer plant on Supline road to the dusty red-earthed pebbly field used for traveling circuses and revivals. This day the field was occupied by the Clyde Beatty circus. Delvin paid ten cents of his dollar to sit in the africano section, a bank of seats high up under the eaves and far from the band. He was just beginning to enjoy the performance, especially the midgets on unicycles, when the clown parade began. As they began their sniggery stroll, waving and juking and shooting at each other with flower pistols, he grew agitated. He was far away from the sawdust rings, but not too far to see, underneath the clowns’ ribald paint, the faces of watchful, unamused white men. This sight frightened him in a way that made him sick to his stomach. He jumped up and fled the swooping gray tent.
The circus was in the big field across the street from the Constitution Funeral Home, the leading negro funeral home in Chattanooga. Cornelius Oliver, mortician and the proprietor of the Home, the richest africano man in town, a man who even during the Great War bought a new Cadillac every year, which he rode in driven by his chauffeur Willie Burt Collins—Mr. Oliver to the community, Ollie to the white folks—was sitting in his side room speaking in a genial but uncompromising voice to his assistant secretary, Polly, about the perfidy of white folks, and especially the white folks in city government who had promised him that the circus would be moved to a lot on the other side of the quarter, when he caught sight of Delvin in his cropped overalls and the navy sweater he’d pulled off the pile at the H(omeless) A(fricano) house.
“Who is that little boy walking down the middle of the street?” he said. “Come look out here.”
Delvin was trying (unsuccessfully) to light a kitchen match with his thumbnail as he walked.
“Hey you, boy,” Oliver called, but Delvin ignored him. “Run get that boy,” he said to Polly.
A fast runner herself and a girl who hoped every day for something different from yesterday, she set down the pitcher she was using to water the fading begonias and leapt out through the open study window.
“My lord, child,” Mr. Oliver said, but Polly didn’t hear him. She was already sprinting across the narrow patch of close-cropped lawn to intercept Delvin, who saw her coming and veered over to the other side of the unpaved red clay street.
“You, boy!” Polly cried. She had no trouble catching him. It was the holding of him that was difficult. “I got something for you,” she said.
“Many’s spoke of such as that,” Delvin said, “but few’s delivered. Let me go.”
“This is something good. Mr. Oliver wants to speak to you.”
“That your name for the devil?”
“You dumb little clodhopper, don’t—”
“I aint no farmer, I’m from . . .” He couldn’t remember the name of his street.
“Don’t you know who Mr. Oliver is?” She was dragging him by the arm across the street. Down the way a breeze shuffled leaves in a big beech tree. A white man in a large straw hat pushed an automobile with a small boy behind the wheel. “Like I said, the devil uses many a false appellation.” This last word he’d picked up from a book he’d found back at the HA house. Or maybe he’d heard it in the street. He was a sharp one for listening in.
She continued to drag him back to the funeral home.
“You taking me into that place—that undertaker’s?”
“Mr. Oliver is a funeral director.”
“Whoo, you looking to bury me?”
“I might, but Mr. Oliver wants you for his charity work, I expect.”
“I don’t need no charity.”
“No, I reckon you are beyond anything charity could do.”
She reset her grip and dragged him into the house, which was cooler than outside and dim and hushed. The last few steps he had gone along with her, curious to see what a bonecracker was up to. Down a hallway paved in soft red carpet she knocked on the paneled white door of Mr. Oliver’s study and was invited by a grave tenor voice to enter. The big room with its vast oak desk with inlaid green felt top, its green leather couch and rug-upholstered armchairs, its tables with fresh flowers in clear vases and assorted mementoes from Mr. Oliver’s customers, its painting on the wall between the two tall windows of Wolfe Dying at Quebec, its rugs in painted patterns of red and green, was the fanciest room Delvin had ever been in . . . if he set aside the front parlor of the Emporium. Recalling the fancy swags and silk bunting, the mural of the Queen of Sheba dancing for the enthralled King David—or was it Solomon—and the rose settees with the working ladies lounging on them like perfumed cats, a pang of longing for his mother touched Delvin.
Oliver, a discerning man, voluminous in his physical being and not without concern for others, said, “Boy, you’ve suffered a loss, haven’t you?”
Delvin didn’t want to discuss this with a stranger. “I’m doing fine,” he said.
“Why were you running?”
“To get away from that circus.”
“Rightly so, my young man.”
This made Delvin feel a little better. It troubled him that he would be frightened of the clowns, especially when no one else appeared to be. “What was it you wanted?” he said.
“I need an errand boy and a helper,” Mr. Oliver said.
“How much you pay?”
“Two dollars a week and keep.”
Delvin liked being in the room. He liked Mr. Oliver’s round fat face. Except for Long Dog Wilkins, The Negro Giant, Mr. Oliver was the largest man he had ever seen.
“Who’s your mama and daddy?” Mr. O inquired.
“I got none.”
“You’re on your own, son?”
“Been since I was near to five.”
Mr. Oliver laughed, a bubbly, analgesic laugh. “How old are you now?”
“Six and a half.”
“Where do you live?”
“At the Bell Home.”
“Oh, of course.”
Oliver contacted the home and made the arrangements for Delvin to stay at the mortuary. He had done this before, following a vague impulse to help little boys. He himself had been a little boy set out on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. At eight he had hoboed a train from Montgomery to Chattanooga where he had been pushed off a boxcar ladder, breaking his ankle on a switch tie. An old yard worker had come on him crying and taken him home and with the neighborhood healerwoman’s help straightened his ankle and put it in a poplarwood boxsplint. He stayed with this gentleman and his wife for three years before he began working for Mr. Duluth Mathis, the former owner of the funeral home. Mathis, who had no children, had eventually passed the business on to him. A bachelor, he looked now for other little boys he might fling a lifeline to. It loops back around to me, he would think as he sat in the big tub in his tile bathroom, feeling not so lonely, not so lost.
Delvin accepted the job and went to work, uneasily at first, fetching items from the pantry, doing light cleaning, digging in the garden and watering the flowers, hauling out trash and burning it in the metal drum out back, picking up pecans and bringing them in a yellow enameled bowl he wondered if stolen from kings, and staying close to Mrs. Parker, the cook, and to Polly, in case they needed a quick boy for anything. It offended him to work in such a place, and scared him and made him sad in a way he didn’t quite understand, but they fed him copiously at the big pine table in the kitchen where with the sidemen and the maids he had his meals, and he liked sleeping out in the little barn or shed behind the house, in a room beside the stalls that smelled of sweet hay and leather (that is, before he moved into the house to a small square bedroom off Mr. O’s big bedroom).
He was not shown the working areas right off. Oliver’s experience led him to believe that the living so feared and hated death that only a special sort of person was fit to work in a funeral parlor. The first time he brought Delvin into the viewing room where the embalmed corpse of Mrs. Fretwell Jenkins lay in repose in double-ruffled collars, the boy cursed and ran out of the room. They did not have that many departed put on view. People usually kept their deceased at home after the embalming. Only the very poor, or those who for private reasons did not want the body in the house—some of those reasons being superstition, panic, hatred, flaunting of wealth, neglect or simple grief—left the deceased entirely to Mr. Oliver. If the truth be known, he liked to keep the dead close by him. Taking the body in hand, like a prodigal returned, he pampered and coddled the former person, bringing him or her into the gentleness and beauty that most lacked in their living lives. He wished for them to remain with him as long as possible. It hurt him to have to release them to the rocky soil of the Appalachians.
This affinity made Mr. Oliver one of the most effective mourners a departed soul could wish for and was one reason he had been able to build up the business so well after Mr. Mathis’s demise. He himself had handled the embalming of the not so old man, who had died of a stroke as he sat at the kitchen table eating a slice of vinegar pie. A tenderness had flooded him as he intimately handled the remains. Mr. Mathis’s sloped shoulders, saggy breasts, spindly hairless legs, horny toes, big speckled belly, his crisp private hair and tiny genitalia had fascinated him. He sat in a white kitchen chair alone in the embalming room beside the corpse as a son might sit beside his father waiting for him to wake. Oliver had no illusions about the dead awakening, but he felt in his vigil a sense of the enormity of death that was subsumed usually in his experience of loss when the embalmed and dressed-up carcass was taken from him. He placed his hand on Mr. Mathis’s cold hairless breast and did not move it for half an hour. He knew what meat came to, but he knew too that this heap of flesh was the last of what he could look to in memory. It was like a faint echo, fading gradually as he listened. As he had done for no other dead person in his life, he leaned over the plumped-out, yellow-skinned face and kissed his benefactor gently on the lips, thinking as he did how he loved him and also that the corpse needed a little more solution.
He had dressed Mr. Mathis in the suit he wore to direct funerals, an off-the-rack black broadcloth suit purchased by mail from Brooks Brothers in New York City. In the pockets he had placed the small gilt-framed picture of his mother that Mr. Mathis kept by his bed, a silver penknife, a small blue marble he had carried since childhood, a tiny gold medallion presented to him by the Negro Benevolent Society for his service to the community, a paperbound copy of Shelley’s poems marked with a small red bookmark at Mr. Mathis’s favorite poem, “Ode to Dejection,” and an ivory locket containing a photograph of a fair-haired young white woman, the secret love of Mr. Mathis’s life, unrequited. Mr. Mathis had been buried out of the Mother Holiness church over on Barlow street and it had taken all of Oliver’s strength for him not to break down during the service.
For a few weeks afterward he considered selling the business (that had been left to him outright) and moving away. But in the end he knew he was where he belonged. He wished to pass this experience and knowledge on but the child scooting around his property quick as a little roach was probably not the one he was looking for.
Delvin didn’t reappear until dinnertime. He smelled of tobacco smoke and his breath reeked of liquor like a loafer. “You are a foolish and wayward child,” Mr. O told him. Delvin grinned at him and said he might be but he sure wadn’t wasting his time petting dead folks. Mr. Oliver was ready then to whack him one and send him on his way. But something stopped him. Maybe it was a ray of late sunshine catching in the boy’s springy hair. Maybe it was an evening bird letting loose a frail sweet cry that touched his heart. Maybe a blip in his brain just then. Maybe only the sturdy-legged boy and the quickened light in his eyes. But he sighed and told Mrs. Parker to get the boy some food. After supper he invited him into his bedroom and they read the newspaper together and then Mr. O gave him a book of stories about explorations in the cold countries and the Arctic. In these stories were plenty of dead men, starved or bear-bitten or shot. Many different ways of disposing of the dead were offered. He thought this would help the boy to revise himself.
He took the boy along when they exhumed the old Harmon woman after the family decided to rebury her remains up north. Coloreds from Red Row, they had gotten rich in Chicago and wanted to dig the old matriarch—the last of them buried in this part of the world—out of the South’s bloody ground. A coroner’s assistant and a great-grandson down by train and himself and the diggers had driven out there. He and the boy had ridden in the big squared-off Cadillac carved-panel hearse. When they dug down through the yellow, black, gray and red sectionated earth they found the coffin broken through—sometimes after time the weight of the soil itself would collapse the casing—and the body decayed away to the bones. They had brought the remains up in pieces. The grandson had gotten sick off in a tea olive bush. But the boy had been spellbound. He wanted to touch the fragments. A belt buckle, the lapis lazuli necklace she was buried in, were intact. The skull lay in its nest of white marcelled hair. Here and there bits of curled tissue like wispy fried pork skins.
She had spent the last fifty years in the ground. Since shortly after the Civil War when for a moment it seemed black folks might have a living stake in the world’s bounty. But that had been only a dream that faded in the hot sunshine of a Dixie June.
As the fragments lay on a white cotton sheet in the tinlined box they would be transported to Chicago in, the boy had reached into the box and taken the skull into his hands. The grandson, a lawyer from Cedar Park, had been too busy upchucking to pay any mind. But Oliver let slip a quivery whistle of alarm. A small outcry, smothered by his habitual discretion. The boy hadn’t noticed. He turned the skull in his hands, examining it. Nothing disrespectful, Oliver realized; the boy just wanted to study it.
“Boy,” he said, “you’d probably better put that bit of holiness down.”
The boy looked at him with a wise and wondering expression. His eyes were lighter colored than usual in one with skin so dark. They were almost hazel.
“Did they stitch her up?” he asked.
“No, son, the lady died of old age.”
“But what are these?” he said, indicating the scantlet seams where the skull plates joined.
“That’s just where the skull grows together.”
“When does it grow?”
“Inside the mother’s body, and later when we’re little.”
“We’re just a bunch of pieces, aint we?” He laid the skull gently back in the box. The remnants had a dry smell like unbrushed carpet.
“Why holiness?” he asked, getting to his feet. He skeeted the soil off the knees of his overalls.
“Cause the minister prayed over her,” Oliver said. The grandson was wiping his hands on a piece of shaggy green moss.
“What about the ones he didn’t pray over?”
“The preacher’d say they are on their own.”
“Aye.” A tear welled in the boy’s eye.
He was remembering something, Oliver thought.
In a way he was. His mother, fled into the wilderness, was always with him, the sadness was, but this sadness had spread out, like a creek flooding the woods, until it soaked everything. He was thinking about all those folks traipsing around in the world, falling over dead or knocked down or sinking into deep waters, who never had anybody to pray for them. These others—they had somebody. Even Mr. Buster Carrie he read about in the paper, knocked down by a heart attack as he purchased a pork roast at Cutler’s Butcher shop, or Miss May Wetherburn, whose dress caught fire as she bent over the stove to stir a pot of caramel candy, or Scooter Ellis, visiting from Arizona, the negro paper said, who fell off the mule he was attempting to ride and busted his head open on the iron foot scraper on the steps of the Masons’ hall; he expected that each of them had plenty of folks ready and willing to shoot prayers up to heaven or wherever they went.
He watched as the grandson peered at the remains with a look of distaste on his tan, freckled face. “Why aint you sad?” Delvin asked.
The man looked at him with the same urbane distaste. He hated this world down here, restolen from negro folks by Reconstruction, these pitiful luckless helots, still grubbing in the dirt for Ol Massa.
“Time’s worn sadness out,” he said.
Off across the rolling ground of the negro section of Astoria Cemetery, tucked in between the foundry and the book bindery, beyond the line of blue pines to the west, the sky was filled with a gray pudding of clouds. A vaporous string of red along one seam.
“Time’s not going to do that to me,” the boy said.
He had just turned seven and had faith in who he was and would become.
“You wait,” the man said.
Delvin liked the young man’s clothes that were soft gray and had gleaming black buttons. He remembered the gems he had stolen from the shop on Adams street. Where had they gone to? He had carried them in his pocket but somehow they had fallen out, all but the diamond and the cat eye. These two had disappeared as well, lost on the way to the orphanage, or somewhere after he got there. Only a yellow piece left that had somehow by now disappeared too. He felt helpless. Unable to save himself.
He wondered where his sister and brothers were.
As the workers cleaned up and the dismantled body was placed in the hearse and the reclamation party made their way back to the funeral home where the body would be prepared for shipping, by train, to Chicago, and the young man, who knew that the cycle of time is endless, turned his back without sentiment on the green fallen world of east Tennessee, Delvin continued to think of his siblings. The twins had been adopted from the orphanage by a family, so the director had told him, who took them to their farm in Texas. Colored folks owned land out there, she had said, not just little garden plots but whole ranches. They raised beef cattle and grew wheat on the north Texas plains. Delvin wished he could fly out there and see them. Whistler had a little scar on his knee where he had fallen under the bumper of a car he was teetering on trying to hit a horse fly with a rag. Warren liked to sing a little song he called “Homeward” that he said he learned from a woman in a gold dress at the Emporium. Coolmist had picked the song up and she sang it some nights as she washed up out on the back porch. He liked to listen to her splashing water and singing the song in the savory darkness as he lay in bed. Where his sister was he didn’t know. She had been standing on the running board of a dusty Ford truck the last time he saw her, wiping her face with a huge red bandana. Had she gone to Texas too? Nothing really seemed to get her down. He was afraid something would. It amazed him how people could get lost in the world.
Soon enough in his early years of dreaming Delvin discovered the second floor, shut off behind a switchback staircase, and climbed up there. The doors along a dim, sullenly carpeted hallway were shut so tightly they seemed at first to be locked, but they weren’t. They opened on bed and sitting rooms each fully appointed, everything, including the beds, mummified under big wheat-colored dust cloths. He slapped a bed to see the dust rise in clouds and stood gazing, halfway in a dream, at the motes and powdery fluff slowly resettling. The light coming through the thick, wavy glass windowpanes seemed ancient. It brought to mind his mother’s stories. He wished that if he looked closely he might catch sight of her cavorting in a red shiny dress in an antique world, but he knew such thinking was a lie. In one of the bathrooms he stood before a bleached mirror, choking himself with both hands. He pulled his hair, drawing it out above his head. He crossed his eyes and made faces as grotesque as he was able. Once he brought Mrs. Parker’s kitchen shears up there and cut his hair short on top, almost down to the skull. Why he did that—when they asked—he couldn’t say, but he liked staring into one of the second-floor mirrors at himself. He lay on his back on one bed or another, gazing at the ceiling, trying to slow his heart down to a stop. He wanted to jump into eternity, poke around, see what was there, and jump back quick before the devil caught him. He sprang up and danced wildly. His bare feet slapped the floor. He whirled and capered. “Oh, oh, oh,” he cried, “I am nobody’s child.”
Before long he was eight, then he was nine; in another minute he was twelve.