4
From the moment he was in the hands of the police Delvin experienced tides of nausea that rolled in carrying his expectation of discovery of his Tennessee crime and rolled out with any sort of courage he might have. He stayed by himself as best he could and thought distractedly of escape. He watched the fields of corn that stretched away from the central compound. He walked the fence line and gazed at the play of fat cumulus drifting across the blue sky. Trapped, he thought, I’m trapped. Each day, when any of the officers spoke to him or came near him or appeared around the deckle-braid corner of the barracks or hollered for the prisoners to truck it up and climb into the rickety dust-splattered bus that carried them out to work in the vegetable fields, a tension gripped him by the shoulders, stiffened his face and bent him down and robbed him of readiness to confront what he was sure was coming. The other prisoners noticed his state of mind. A couple tried to calm him, pointing out that his sentence was short and the work at the farm was not any harder than it would be on the outside. “You gets three squares and clean bedding every two weeks,” Sully John Baker, a short gray-headed man, told him. Delvin thanked him for the info and continued his distracted wandering around the compound. It would have been easy enough to escape (in the cornfields they were often out of sight of the guards), but he didn’t want to take the chance. And he didn’t want to get the professor into any further trouble. After a week he began to calm down. He began to believe that if they were going to discover him they would have done it by now. He relaxed enough to be able to sit in the little shed they used as a dining hall and eat a healthy portion of his cornbread and stew beans. It was at this point that twin brothers from the west side of the county, also in for fighting, decided to test Delvin along these lines. Delvin pointed out that he was not a fighter at all but simply a man who had been assaulted by white men (they were in the colored section of the county farm). The brothers did not consider this a sufficient disincentive and waylaid Delvin at the outdoor washing area and knocked him down. He slid half under the sidewalk-like boards before the washstands, cutting and twisting his ankle. This laid him up for five days in the farm hospital where he spent his time reading religious tracts. He considered himself lucky not to have had to suffer more of this material. The Bible had been always too bloodthirsty for his taste, a mix of self-glorification and sideshow magic that led only to feeling bad about yourself.
When the cut on his ankle healed a little and the swelling from the sprain went down Delvin was given light duty checking equipment in the work shed. He checked and handed out hoes and mattocks and the cane poles used to knock pecans out of the farm trees as well as the canvas picking sacks for the apple orchard. The work was not onerous and he had ample time to jot descriptions and compose letters to Celia into his notebook that the professor had brought him. He posted his letters in the wooden box nailed to a post by the camp store. He was nervous about them going out stamped with the return address of the work farm, but he figured Celia would understand his situation, which he explained in his second letter; I have nothing to be ashamed of, he wrote. She said as much in her first letter. It’s hard to live without getting stung by a bee once or twice in your life, she answered. He read this sitting on the screened back porch of the potting shed where he was working, potting geraniums for the farm shop in Mooksville. His hands even after he washed them in the big galvanized sink still smelled of the sludgy potting soil that was made from mule manure and vegetable compost. He held her letter with the tips of his fingers. It smelled of her orangey perfume.
Segregation on the farm was strict. There was no mixing of the races, at work or at meals or in the barracks. The white folks, determined and nervous, felt better when it was like this. Delvin didn’t mind. He’d had only a slight and glancing contact with white people; he never missed them, busy as they were organizing themselves and battering the world into shape. He was happy sitting on the bench among the spindly young geraniums. A slight breeze eased through the screen, cooling him. He wished he could swing the flimsy door open and walk out to meet Celia. He thought of the small indentation on the right side of her nose. He thought of this place often. He could remember it when he could not remember (without his crib sheet) the other parts of her. He wanted to sit in a cool place and talk with her about the books they were reading and about the tiny flat pressed-in place on her nose. He had proved slow in the fields, weak really, knocked back by the heavy sunshine, and fell behind early. It made sense to transfer him to the potting shed, and after he was wounded to check-out and -in duty. Much of his time was spent in the shed alone. Here he wrote his letters.
But what could you do, he wrote, when you find people you cleave to who are up to things you don’t go for?
I guess you get used to what’s unnatural to you, she wrote back, if you can, or try to, but sometimes maybe you can’t and I guess that’s one of the places grief comes from.
He could tell she was edging away from him. He mentioned this in a letter, but in the return she didn’t address it.
Afternoons in the potting shed he looked out of the half-painted window, thinking of the people he knew, calling their names in a low voice. His mother was first, then his brothers and sister, then Mr. Oliver, then Polly, then the professor and Celia, and on down the line through the boys from the alley and the others he ran with in the woods and climbed with into wild cherry trees in June and the children from the homes and people he had met traveling on the trains and working in the museum, to finally the crew he had met at the farm. He had met a man named Jim here, a limping solitary prisoner, aloof and with eyes that carried an assurance that irritated the white guards and the white prisoners he encountered. Tuesday before, a guard had knocked him down, but he got right up and stood in front of the shabby overweight functionary who had only his outrage and the whole white nation to depend on, looking him straight in the eye.
“You don’t sass me, jig,” the guard said and hit him in the face again. The lieutenant stopped him from beating Jim further, but he was sent forthwith to the box, a large freestanding tin-roofed closet behind the barracks they used for unreasonable prisoners. A small closed room with a slot in the door for food. Jim stayed there a week and was no different when he came out. He excited Delvin because he seemed able to survive with only—as he saw it—his determination for company. The older man, red-haired like some odd negroes, including the Ghost back home, was not interested in Delvin until he found out he could read and write. He asked Delvin to write a letter for him, which he did, a letter filled with pleading and sadness.
Dear Zee, he dictated as they sat on Jim’s narrow cot,
I can not go on no longer in this foolish world without you, not a minute it’s likely sometimes, and the dust chokes me and the foul food and the whole wretched disorderly world of provocation and misery. There is no light, no place to rest in this world. I am alone with only the hope of your caress. Come to me. I am alive, trapped behind wire like an animal in a cage built on a sand hill. The sun beats down on us with a force that makes me think the god who designed this world was a madman. I must find shade or some way to believe there will someday be shade. It is not through power or money or arms that this can be achieved. I am left only with love. What a meager portion that seems some days. But it is great and endless, I know it. The love I mean between a man and a woman and through them to the children. This is my only hope in this bitter world.
There was more and Delvin’s hand grew tired trying to keep up. Jim would stop, hold his face to the light, sniffing like a hunting dog on a scent, and wait impatiently for him to catch up. “Yes,” he said, “the word is dereliction, spell it as best you can. It means wreckage.” It was strange that he would know so many unusual words and not know how to write. Or read either. Jim said this was because he had been read to in his youth by an actor traveling the vaudeville circuit out west. This actor, a black man, a feeder in a crow act generally but a sometime comedian himself, had found him wandering on a street in Dallas and taken him in.
“I had something like that happen to me,” Delvin said.
“Not like this,” Jim said. The man had raised him and he had traveled with him as his factotum for several years. The man had held him in the thrall of an iniquitous sexual relationship it had taken years to extricate himself from. He had finally had to beat the man half to death and throw him down the stairs of a boarding house in Kansas City and leave him for dead to get free. “Free,” he said smiling sarcastically. “There is no damn freedom for the likes of me in this damn world.”
He believed everything in the world was corrupt and diseased.
“Except for family love,” Delvin said.
“Yeah, that,” Jim said smiling grimly. “There’s that, thank God; if you can get to it. This world,” he said, looking around as if it was sneaking up on him, “is crooked and defiled. Yet still, right down to the smallest speck and scurrying roach, it runs just fine. Which leads you to the conclusion that crooked and corrupt is how the world likes it.”
His glance then from his cot where he sat scrunched up against his knees was haggard and determined, winded.
“What’s a man like me to do?” he asked. He looked around as if a crowd was waiting for his answer. He blew his breath out, not a sigh but so he could draw in a strong one behind it. “I conclude it is me who is out of step. I am a foolish man bound for ignominy. But I too it appears have a right to the tree of life. How do I know this?” He twirled his right hand as if he could spiral it through to the truth. “Because I am alive. If I wasn’t meant to be here I wouldn’t be able to suck breath, I’d be like a fish when you snatch it out of the water. Smothered by air. But I am not, am I? I draw breath and breathe and my heart beats and food sustains me, so I must belong here too. What do you reckon that means?”
He hadn’t waited for Delvin to answer any of these questions.
“It must mean that the opposition I bring to the facts of life is necessary too. So it doesn’t matter what these dumb white boys have to say about me because I belong here just like they do. And my opposition to them is just as right as theirs is to me.”
Delvin said, “I don’t think their opposition is right.”
“That’s because you haven’t got the heart yet to look at the world as it is,” Jim said. “Maybe that day will come, maybe not. For many it never arrives. Most, really. They see only their side of the struggle.”
He blinked into the dimness and made a smacking sound with his full lips. “Well, I am getting tired,” he said, and with that he turned on his side and went to sleep.
This is a crazy man, Delvin thought as he sat in the shed, but he was excited by what he’d told him. He missed the professor. He missed riding along dirt roads in the van hauling photographs around the states. There was a foolish bit of activity. But he loved sitting out behind the van on summer twilights with citronella oil burning in the little china dish for the mosquitoes, letting the world row darkly along beside them. Time creaked by on those wandering days.
A few nights later Jim was caught trying to escape. They hauled him down off the wire fence, took him into the guard shed and beat him until he couldn’t stand and threw him into the box. He might not get out of this simple work farm alive. The farm grew corn and tomatoes and field greens and a little cotton for market and squash and butterbeans for the table. A small community of men working the sandy fields of west Dixie. Every one there except for three or four would go back to homes in the county. Some of the men were related. The white men knew the colored men and vice versa. Delvin was one of the few strangers. Everybody knew his place. Life here was unstirring. Fixed. Moldy, Delvin thought. The white folks hoped they would not have to make another big fight, but they were prepared if one came. Nobody gave up land and power without a fight. Well, what to do? The quiet in the evening here, he thought, is peaceful. It can’t help itself. Even in a war they can’t be firing the guns all the time. There has to be these quiet moments. In these moments I am refreshed. He had read these words somewhere. He remembered: Stanley Terrell, the negro philosopher from Harlem, a man known only by negro folks, who wrote that in the clamor and frenzy of the white-run life they were being hustled through, there were still times when we could take our rest, find peace and happiness. We do not even have to seek them out. There are already here, in moments by the well or behind the barn or walking back from the store carrying a ten-pound can of lard. In the city you can look up: above you is the endless wilderness of sky, a promised land and free to every man, a country unsullied and unclaimable, yours as well as any other’s. He had started looking at the sky more often, studying it, at least for a while. What was that old song Mrs. Parker sang in the kitchen? Yeah: “Before I’d Be A Slave,” also called, she said, “Oh Freedom.” Oh, freedom. Terrell said freedom was everywhere. In these songs, in the quiet of the day, in the sky when you stop at the washboard and feel the softness of a piece of cloth in your hands, in the eyes of your loved ones. But of course that didn’t stop the whip from coming down.
He didn’t feel too bad sitting in the shed stuffing flowers into the brown clay pots. He waked each day with a feeling of possibility, a sweet joyous feeling sometimes. The white guard was just outside the door beating a train rail with an iron bar. The prisoners slept side by side on their rough cots and had very little to their names in this place, like sailors out at sea, and in a way this suited Delvin. He had written the professor care of general delivery and got a single answer that he was working in the kitchen of the Gold Flower restaurant on Main street washing dishes and doing a little of the short work. They are still pondering, he said, whether or not to release the museum. Maybe watching to see if it will sprout arms and legs and jump on them. Nothing to do but sit and wait.
One of the prisoners had a mouth harp that he played the old songs on. Others mocked this music and called out for something more timely. But the player, a small man with close-set lively eyes, refused. So somebody took the harp away from him. Others rose up and tried to get the harp back from the robber, a short man with muscular forearms. He in his turn refused, so they beat him. In the struggle the harp was crushed on the concrete floor, smashed by the heel of a Georgia Logger boot. Now the owner of the instrument cried in his sleep. Delvin wasn’t the only one who heard him.
So life went; they had stew beans every night for supper and some kind of pig meat, usually sowbelly, and a corn dish, usually grits, and cornbread. These were among Delvin’s natural favorites. Nobody was sentenced here for more than a year, though some had their sentences lengthened for what the white men called misbehavior. Sentences of over a year went to state prison. This is a work farm, they said, not a prison. What did they know?
By time he got out there had been no word from Tennessee and he hadn’t heard from the professor for over two weeks. A man Josie got out with him and the two of them walked into town together on the dirt road that ran through the corn and tomato fields and the fields of sweet peppers. Delvin appreciated the company, but he wasn’t interested just then in any more lectures about philosophy or racial politics, which this man Josie was known for. Josie said he didn’t mind and then launched into a monologue about general restrictions placed on negroes and what this fact represented in the larger scheme of things. The negro’s hidden superior strength was what the gist seemed to Delvin.
On a little rise Josie stopped and told Delvin to turn around and look and he did and the two of them gazed back down the long slope at the farm, a shabby, roughhewn settlement among its vegetable fields.
“A place you could rub out with the bottom of your hand,” Josie said, “a ridiculous congregation of punishment for forgetful or over-energetic colored men, a crushed, upended heap lying like a dog exposing its spotted belly to the high-class sunshine pouring down upon it.”
On a wide leather band he was wearing one of the first wristwatches Delvin had ever seen and he had a faded straw panama set back on his head and he snorted through his gob of a nose and spit a white fleck that snagged on a pepper leaf. He stretched himself and worked his shoulders—throwing off the shame and degradation, he said. “I can feel it sliding back down this hill,” he said, smiling his snaggle-toothed smile.
Delvin had been returned a short gray pencil and his old blue flip-top notebook as well as a copy of the passing novel Flight by Walter White of Chicago and printed in that city by the Constant Press. As he read the book—as he did with every book—Delvin had turned back often to study the title and copyright pages, wondering about the world that had produced the volume. He was touched by the county’s willingness to return his property. He had thought the authorities would simply throw his belongings away, or at least complicate their retrieval, but it had them ready in a paper sack with his name scribbled in black ink on the side. They even gave him the sack.
He mentioned this to Josie, who began to make crowing noises, flapping his arms with his hands tucked under his armpits as he jumped around him.
“Well, all right,” Delvin said. Jim Crow—he got it. “Where you headed now?” he asked.
Josie paused mid-crow and shook his head. “I’ll just trot off in one direction or the other as the incitement takes me,” he said with a softened inflection.
Delvin thought about offering him a ride in the van but he wasn’t sure the professor had gotten the van back or what he might say about the non-owner offering a stranger a ride. He had been in the past a little testy about such behavior on Delvin’s part.
He poked around looking but the professor was nowhere to be found. He could hardly believe he had gone off and left him. With Josie he walked across town to the negro barbershop. He waked the single barber in his porcelain chair and asked him—fat, unshaven, with a merry manner—if he’d seen Professor Carmel, the spare-set gentleman in a long canvas coat and so forth.
The barber said he had indeed and that many like himself—meaning in the negro establishment—had been given a message to pass on to Delvin when he showed up.
“What message was that?”
“Let me see,” the barber, a Mr. Floris, said and rummaged in a small counter drawer among combs and hair nets and various pieces of old dismantled hand clippers until he found what he was looking for, a folded piece of blue paper with Delvin’s name on the outside in the professor’s florid script.
I would have squatted naked in the rain in the public square waiting for you son but they threatened me with the whip and the pains of pitch fire if I did not get out of this town and put at least thirty-five miles between myself and it or that is between the museum and their ignorant dishonorable asses. So I have hightailed it. I am headed to Haverness and will wait if allowed for you there. Don’t fret or be low spirited any more than you have to. Obstacles are only a means for sharpening the wits. Glory to you, boy.
It was signed with the professor’s full name, Professor Clemens John Carmel MS, a name the first part of which Delvin had not heard the professor call himself before.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I need you to tell me how to get to Haverness.”
“Haverness,” the barber said. “I can not only tell you how to get there, but also where you might find yourself a ride with a gentleman going that way.”
He got a ride with Arthur Turnbill, who was hauling a load of sweetgrass hay to Mr. J. B. Suber, a white man up in Conniston county. Josie said he’d like to come along. In the truck Josie squirmed, fidgeted, popped his fingers on the gray metal dash and talked all the time until Mr. Turnbill asked him to take a little time off from it. He then commenced to humming. The humming was tuneless and this drove both Delvin and Mr. Turnbill crazy until Mr. Turnbull, a narrow-faced man with large fleshy lips, asked Josie to get in the back with the hay. Josie looked as if he’d been asked to swim with alligators.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just the naturally jumpy type. They say it was because my mother spilt hot grease on me when I was a baby, causing me not to trust in the given supports of this life, but I am working hard to get over—”
“Please,” Mr. Turnbull, himself a nervous man, said, jerking his head and his eyes to the left. He had pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the truck when he performed this pantomime. The sky was gradually filling in the southwest corner with bruised shadow-gray clouds like big balled fists. Delvin could smell the sweet dry scent of the hay. Off in the distance two red cows stood in the shade of a large oak tree. They didn’t appear to be concerned by any circumstance in the world of human beings. Delvin experienced a small quiet flood of happiness. What a thing it was to be alive. The sky was the glossy blue of turquoise jewelry. He started a popping little finger tune on the dash. Turnbill eyed him. “Yikes,” he softly said and apologized. “You want me to get in the back too?”
“I want both of you to be still before I put you out walking on the road.”
Except for a small burst of song from Josie they both remained silent unless spoken to—both still in the cab—for the rest of the way into Haverness.
In Haverness a row of houses on the highway opened into a district of shops and stores around a courthouse square that pushed up on the far side against a long cotton warehouse. They didn’t find the professor, but there was a note from him held by the minister of the Walls of Jericho Baptist church that said he was called away to attend the funeral of his cousin up in Rance City but would wait there for a week to see if they were following. They traveled by freight to RC, but there too they missed Professor Carmel. He left word with another minister, Caleb Jenkins of the local AME church, housed in a green-painted low wooden building behind the Rance City peanut mill. In the note, scrawled nearly illegibly on a scrap of greasy paper bag still smelling of fried chicken, he apologized but said against his will he was forced to leave RC due to complications with the local officials concerning a fracas over some allegedly pilfered property.
Delvin was ready to push on, but Josie was by this time exhausted.
“Our time on this earth is by its nature a trial to the endurance of human beings,” he said, “but I see no need to make things worse.”
He said he thought he might tarry a while in Rance City.
Delvin said he was sorry to see him leave the expedition, but he understood.
Josie then changed his mind half a dozen times before flopping down on the side of remaining in town.
“I can find work here,” he said, “maybe picking plums or some such thing.” It was long past plum season and the only plums Delvin had heard of in this part of the world anyway were of the sour yellow variety that flourished beside the roadways throughout. They were free for the picking, but few were known to want to pay money for any amount of them.
“I have notions to become a cook,” Josie said. “Cooks have time on their hands and are known for their eccentric and sometimes foolish-seeming ways. My off hours will give me time to work on my book.”
This book fascinated Delvin. Josie had twice shown it to him as they traveled, but though he (or his scrivener) had covered both sides of many pieces of scrap paper he carried wrapped in oilskin in his county-issued paper bag, Delvin had been unable to make any sense of it. This, Delvin figured, was the case with many a would-be writer. He himself might be among that unfortunate number. This thought dashed him slightly, but he remembered that he was still very young. This, so he figured, weighed in his favor; he had many years of energetic effort ahead of him, and even if his novice attempts made little sense and were hardly more than notes, quotations and lists of people and items he had encountered on his travels, he believed he would someday have the skill to shape these materials into a narrative stunning in its force and clarity, or at least readable.
“Fruit preserves,” Josie said when he asked about the interest in plums. “Fruit preserves are the secret passion of many a soul. Loved everywhere. You ever seen anybody turn down a helping of fruit preserves? Of course you haven’t. And what better way to start as a chef than with concoctions the main ingredient of which is free for the picking.”
Delvin pointed out that they had missed the plum season by two months at least.
“Gives me time to gather my materials and procure use of a kitchen,” Josie said with a ferocious and sly and somewhat doggish grin.
They were both dressed in faded overalls, Josie in a strap undershirt and carrying a greasy leather jacket and Delvin in a soft-collared red shirt that along with his underwear he washed every night and hung up to dry. His shoes were getting old and cracked but he hadn’t the money to replace them.
They walked around town looking in shop windows. Josie preferred the hardware stores where he could peruse cookware and other kitchen paraphernalia and Delvin enjoyed office supply stores. They both enjoyed the mule barn. In Rance City mules were sold out of a brick barn attached to a hardware and farm supply store. They worked their way over there past the sewing shop, the department store, the pharmacy with the spinning pinwheels in the window, the dime store (where they stopped off and walked the undulate wooden floors looking for pocket knives which they found and couldn’t afford but enjoyed studying through the glass case window), the men’s shop, dress shop, red brick hotel and restaurant, paint store, granite bank with recessed windows and big brass door, appliance store with the washing machines and new Frigidaires standing out on the sidewalk ready for purchase, a couple of insurance offices, two car dealerships (Ford and Packard), the movie theater showing a double bill of Constant Motion and The Flamingo Kid Goes to Paris, starring Manfred Boudin the Dancing Cowboy. He thought occasionally of the life of movie stars, tickled that at the moment he was thinking of Gloria Swanson or Ramón Navarro they were at that same moment, possibly, sitting down to supper in their dining nooks or washing their socks in the upstairs bathroom, maybe cutting pictures out of a magazine to paste into a scrapbook. Movie stars, soldiers, famous negro writers and artists excited him. He was prone, if not to hero worship, to affection for successful people. He felt some of this affection for Josie who seemed far ahead of him with his plans and accomplishments. In one part of himself he knew Josie was scatterbrained and bootless, but still he wanted to believe in his writing plans; he was the first person he’d met who was writing a book, and Josie had encouraged him to begin one too. Plenty of room in that profession, he said.
They talked often of books and were in fact talking of the book Smashed Idols, written by the negro thinker Davis Stuckey, who lived, so the flyleaf said, on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, when they entered the Harding Hardware and Sale Barn on Stomont street across from the city waterworks. A boy Delvin’s age was leading three mules down the low wooden ramp from the barn into the street. He tied the mules to an iron post ring and went back inside. The smells of equine matters reminded Delvin of the stable shed back in Chattanooga. He wondered how the Ghost was doing. Probably by now riding the horses around town with a feather in his hat. And felt a shiver when he thought of what still lay in wait for him there, police lurking, his face most probably still on a wanted poster at the post office (though he’d never seen it out in the world), men growing old but still on standby, keeping an eye out for the cold-hearted shooter of white children, hands ready to reach out quick as a cat to catch that boy should he reappear in the oldtime streets. He shuddered. Nights he had lain awake thinking of the trouble to come. They entered the store and poked around for a while among the metal and leather and wood items. A white man looked hard at them and Delvin smiled a friendly smile. “Cooking equipment,” he said. “Over yonder,” the man said, indicating with his chin some low shelves. “Thank you, sir.” He had never cared much for these stores. In Harding’s the equipment, tools, the bulbous or spirally or contorted or bent metal and other work minutiae, baffled and oppressed him so that in a short time he began to sweat and feel as if he needed air.
“I’ll be over in the barn,” he told Josie and started out of the store.
As he exited through the front door he saw a small towheaded man pass—foolishly—behind the tied mules. One of the mules, in a motion quick as a snake, lashed out with his back feet and caught the man in the forehead. The man went down as if he’d been shot. He lay in the dirt street crumpled on his side with his arms stretched out ahead of him like he was running. But he wasn’t moving. His eyes were open and his eyeballs were red with blood.
The stable boy who had come back outside and a white man who leapt suddenly past Delvin both pulled at the mules. The man struck the offending one, a blocky gray, on the side of the head with his fist. The mule’s knees buckled and he almost went down.
“Goddamn you beast,” the man cried. He then turned and struck the colored boy. The boy skittered away, with the man chasing him for a few steps before he turned and came back.
Delvin was shoved roughly aside by men rushing from the store, but he gathered himself and pegged into the street to look. The downed man, wearing overalls and a gray suit coat, had a fresh red quarter moon mark sunk into his forehead. The mark ran up into his stiff yellow hair. There was no blood and except for his red eyes no other sign of wounding.
“God, Clarence,” someone said over and over, “God, Clarence.” Speaking apparently to the felled man.
Josie, breathing heavily, joined Delvin. With a loud clatter that made people jump, a big wooden barrel containing rakes and shovels by the door was knocked over. The implements spilled onto the sidewalk. A large man stepped on a shovel and stumbled and fell to his knees. “Oh, Jesus,” another man said. Two women in light summer dresses had tears in their eyes as they rushed up. “Help him,” one of them said, like she was ordering schoolchildren, even though people were already bending to the fallen man. The men had pale or red or red and pale mottled faces. The faces of the africano men watching darkened.
“Get back,” a large white man yelled. “Get back, you”—as if everybody was trying to assault the man on the ground.
Somebody spoke from the crowd to the fallen man as if he were only sleeping, telling him to get up. “Get up off the ground, Clarence,” the calm clear male voice said. “Get up now.”
A man in a dark suit knelt beside him. Another man knelt on the downed man’s other side and raised his limp hand and massaged it. Another negro boy led the mules back into the barn. They too had an agitated look, and one kept stepping sideways. The boy hit the stepping mule with the flat of his hand and the mule dropped its head and came along. Delvin couldn’t see where the first boy had gone. He hoped he was all right.
Police arrived in a car and then the boxy ambulance hauled up just ahead of a dust cloud that rolled over the assembled. A woman began coughing and couldn’t stop; a large man in a checked coat started to pull her down the street but she resisted until he quit and then they stood looking at the ambulance attendants as they bent over the man, who hadn’t moved.
One of the attendants, a slim man wearing a white coat over a gray long-sleeved jersey, carefully straightened the man’s arms and then, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them, folded them over the man’s stomach. The man’s eyes were open and he was looking straight up. It was clear that the fallen man was dead. This fact spread through the crowd. People gasped and somebody—it sounded like a man—began to cry.
The limp body was lifted onto a stretcher, placed in the ambulance and carried away.
Delvin and Josie stayed until the area had begun to clear. Far down the street, under a large sycamore tree, two colored boys stood in the street, pulling a piece of rubber between them as they watched the dispersing crowd. A policeman asked Delvin if he had seen the accident.
“Nawsuh,” he said, “I didn’t. I come out and saw the gentleman on the ground.” He’d known he was dead though, he said.
“How is that?’ the policeman, a man with white-blond hair and a creak in his voice, asked.
“I use to work in a funeral parlor.”