Delvin introduced Mr. Rome, who was pressed up against the front wall of the car. The waning daylight shone through the boxcar’s open door.
Mr. Rome said he might return to his home base up in Roanoke. “I miss the smell of the hemlocks,” he said.
The man Frank was traveling from the west—Phoenix, he said, where he had a wife and two children.
At the other end of the car a few white men sat with their bindles. There was race mixing on the trains, but without much friendliness. People sought those they took to be their own, were nervous about other races. Negroes were called dinges, shines, skillets, by the whites, the whites, ofays, slicks, jeffs, by the negroes. Bindlestiffs, beefers, zips—the criminal element—were enough of a concern without adding racial confusions to the mix. Delvin, no longer an angelica or a gonsil, no longer a reg, was now a stamper, maybe a jack, so taken by some or would be soon enough.
Frank, this new fellow, a jack, settling his back carefully against the warped boxcar wall, said last week he’d seen a fight where a jeff—“big pink-faced monstrosity”—had thrown an africano man off a train. The fight had got more than one hurt, on both sides, Frank said. “Like you couldn’t trade out of it,” he said, raising a grimy cap that reveled a lighter tan forehead, “like you got somebody there—some colored man—who all of a sudden lost his everything, you know, like some magic act done took away his humanness—Get dis sack off the train. You look at it, think I got to the wrong world. It’s a mistake.”
“I steer clear,” Mr. Rome said.
“Can’t always do that,” Frank said picking at his bottom teeth with a split twig he’d fished from the inner pocket of his tattered salt-and-pepper jacket.
“That is true,” Mr. Rome said with a sigh.
Josie had not come into the boxcar. He was up top or riding on one of the empty flatcars. He said he preferred the open air. Delvin half wanted to go with him, but then he decided to get in the boxcar and try to sleep. He’d felt tired lately, as if the complications of the world outside prison were too much for him; he figured he had to build up a tolerance. When he mentioned this to Mr. Rome, the little man told him he was just feeling the burden of the colored man.
“These white folks are unrightly the black man’s burden,” he said. “Their foolishness and ignorance.” He sat up straighter and looked around, a tiny person of color alone in the kingdom. Delvin asked—off-handedly—if Mr. Rome could give examples of some of his more interesting messages. He was thinking about a bath, a tub somebody’d told him about, carved out of rock in a far island stream under shaggy trees.
“Sans names,” Mr. Rome said. “Nor revealing details. That way it’s not really divulging secrets.” He straightened up and his face brightened. “I am standing under this here tree holding a hatful of cherries,” one began, he said; it was, like many of the others, a plea for a lover’s return. “I can’t sleep at night without you by my side,” another declared, a plea from an older woman—“You’d think she might be young,” Mr. Rome said—to her wandering husband of nearly fifty years. Another time a one-legged man stranded in a town by a frozen lake in Minnesota pleaded for his sweetheart to relent. “‘Your love could melt this icy world and set me free,’” Mr. R quoted in a hushed and passionate voice.
“What you talking about there?” the man Frank said, friendly, working a bit of string between his fingers like a weave. “You some kinda—”
“Oh, no, my son,” Mr. Rome said, and Delvin chimed in that Mr. O. P. Rome was a professional message carrier.
“Yes,” Mr. Rome said. “Declarationist, full-throated pleader and issuer of challenges and stomp-footed assertations. No word spoken too softly or too loudly for me not to be able to carry its full weight. Nothing loses a ounce on the journey—to whoever, or whatever—I once carried a message to a speckle-faced mule—is able to pay the fee. For a dime I’ll carry a message across the room or up to four blocks away. Higher prices the farther I have to go, but I will not only carry an exact rendition of your missive, I will provide the appropriate—that is to say, your own, or what you wish to have as your own, feelings, complete with intonations, speech quirks or added gustatives, per message, limit three to a customer.”
“You aint never heard of Western Union?” Frank said, shuffling himself into a better seat.
“Primitive upstarts,” Mr. Rome said. “I follow a profession as old as talking itself.”
Frank began to peel a potato with his thumbnail. “Yall want some?” He eyed the little man. “Much money in that old racket?”
“Not enough to buy freedom from the white man, but I get by.”
“None of us gon make enough to buy that kind of freedom,” Frank said. “Though I’s heard they’s a town down in Florida populated entirely by negro folk—no whites allowed.”
“Says the white man,” Mr. Rome said.
“You don’t think we are free?” Delvin said. Maybe I am haunting this world, he thought, a fluttered-up spirit on the loose. Down the way a knobby little man said, “I got a misery in my leg’s been hounding me for three years—”
“Hell, we don’t even look free,” Frank said. He leaned forward and studied the tiny Mr. Rome. “You probably make your best money when they’s a calamity,” he said.
“That I do. Folks get talkative when there’s trouble. I once carried a message made up entirely of groans and whizzing sighs. But you can’t count on calamity’s always being in town when you are.”
“Profiteer.”
“I wouldn’t call anything I do very profitable.”
“You ever been in a calamity? A big one?”
“A few,” the little man said cheerfully.
“Like which?”
Mr. Rome pressed his thumb against his cheek, a fond gesture. “I was in the Boveen, Missouri, tornado last year. You read about it in the paper. And year before that I was in that big hurricane that wiped out the whole east side of Texas. I almost drowned in that monstrosity. And I was in Houston for the big Whiteside warehouse fire where thirty blocks went up in flames. I carried three dozen messages after that one. Mostly in-town, but one I carried by rail and bus and dusty aching foot all the way to Shield, Saskatchewan—Canada—to a little white house in a walnut grove where an old woman lived with her thirty-five-year-old deaf and dumb son.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Wadn’t for her. The message was for the boy.”
“What was it?”
“I’m not free to repeat messages where you might be able to tell who they were from or for. I’ve let slip too much already. My customers rely on my discretion”—diskretchen, he said—“as you can understand. They’re only for those paid up to receive em, but I can say it was one of my greatest challenges.”
“You just write it out for him?”
“I figured writing the words down was not giving full service on the dollar. And I’d had to charge extra for the stretch and general botheration.”
“So what did you do?” the man Frank said, tapping his narrow forehead with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand. He had a sharp vertical crease running down the center of his forehead.
“Well sir,” Mr. Rome said—he was collecting a little pile of corn kernels in the brim of his hat that he held before him in his lap—“I of course had to act it out for the boy. I call him a boy even though he was a solid sturdy gentleman with big rough hands he kept flexing like he was working up to break something, but he had a manner that was like that of a child and his mother treated him like one. He may have been mentally slow as well as D and D, but I realize that is no excuse for treating any of God’s creatures as less than precious. Anyhow, I had a cap the man had given me in Houston, a greasy, faded red cap he’d passed to me for just this situation. I’d been studying all the way across the country (I was on the Espy, then the Falls & Canadian) about what it was I ought to do and I’d come up with a good show. I went to whooping and hollering and swooping and rolling on the ground and beating on my chest like a wild man, repeating the message as I went. This boy—this bald-headed near gray-headed man—started to shrieking. It was one of the most peculiar noises I ever heard in my life, that shriek. He began to mimick my actions, jumping and swooping and rolling on the ground and throwing dirt up in the air and making this shrieking noise like some kind of demented soul—just an awful sound—until he had me so worked up that I’m embarrassed to say I busted out into tears. Right there in front of both of them. I just sagged against this big wire rabbit cage they had there by this old walnut tree we was standing under, sobbing like my heart was broke, which it nearly was. Hell, the man I was reporting on was alive and here I was bringing the happy word to his family and I was crying like a baby. And fool thing was, when we all finally got calmed down, the woman told me her boy read lips. Just like he was hearing what you said. Damnness.”
“Maybe you aint exactly cut out for the work,” Frank said.
Mr. Rome eyed him. He sucked his gray lips in and puffed them out.
“Fact that I have continued on after that particular episode might tell you I am. Oh, I’m a natural for it, that’s for sure. It was something else, the weeping.” He looked off to the open boxcar door where the day’s sliding-away blue sky shone brightly in its last moments on earth. His looking extended in time, seconds ticking along. The clack of the wheels came up through the floor. Somebody down the way, a white man, made through cupped fingers a bird call like a lonely thing. Mr. Rome peering off somewhere. Like he was hearing words. “So freedom can never be taken fully from us,” he said finally, “who knows if even death can do it.” This man maybe not even noticing the sky but soaring through the wild prairies of his own mind, voiceless.
“Well, what was it?” the man Frank said, pulling gently at his bottom lip.
“What was what, son?”
“What something else was it that made you sob like a baby.”
“Oh. Fatigue. Mere fatigue.”
To that Delvin wanted to say suddenly no. No. It’s all right, he wanted to say, to be sad. You don’t have to be ashamed of it. Go on and speak. But he didn’t. He too was tired, and not sad enough, felt ghostly, as if his foot, his hand, his whole body, could sift right on through the bottom of this car and disperse.
“What about you, my fine young man,” Mr. Rome said, addressing him. “What interesting tale have you to tell?”
Delvin rubbed silky corn dust between his fingers. Down at the other end of the car the white men were playing cards. In the middle space, leaned against the opposite closed door, a man mended with a needle and thread a pair of sky-blue pants. Delvin had never seen trousers that shade of blue, and satiny, shining. He wanted to touch the cloth. “I think I want to get you to carry a message to a friend for me,” he said.
“Say and it’s done,” Rome said.
They settled on a fee, and Mr. Rome promised to carry a message to Celia if Delvin could come up with the two dollars.
“I don’t see how you can make any money at all,” Frank said. “Mail a letter for two cents.”
Mr. Rome agreed. He was an agreeable man.
“Back in Tulsa they could have used you,” Frank said.
The little man shuddered. “You talking about that lamentable time, aren’t you?”
“I can call myself doing that,” Frank said. “I just come through there is why I do, day before yesterday. Tulsa’s where I’s born and raised. And it brought it back to my mind.”
“Were you there during the massacre?” Delvin asked. Everybody’d heard about that. He wanted something to eat, but he had nothing beyond Frank’s shared potato. Just then Mr. R pulled a squished ham and mustard sandwich out of his coat pocket, tore it in three pieces and handed two off to his fellow passengers. They sat quietly for a minute or two chewing. Somebody down on the other end was whistling “Barbry Allen,” the sound clear and fresh over the clack of the wheels.
“Yeah,” Frank said, “exactly.” As if they had been conversing all the time—words moving about, arranging, preserving, stacking in his mind. “Riot the white folks called it, but massacree it was.”
They all knew the story, even Delvin, who had heard it from the professor. Three hundred negroes killed, eight hundred wounded, all because a white girl had gotten upset when a black boy tripped and grabbed her arm for support.
“Yessir, I know all about it,” Frank said. “That boy, Dickie Do Rowland, was one of my cousins. He wadn’t nothing but a shoeshine boy in that office building downtown. The white woman—she was just a seventeen-year-old girl—operated the elevator. When old Dickie Do—he was nineteen but you would have thought he was still just a child—when he took a break from his shoeshine stand to use the restroom upstairs he tripped coming into the elevator and grabbed this girl—her name was Sarah something—”
“Page,” the little man said, “it was Sarah Page.”
“That’s it. And the one who really caused it, this white clerk in a close-by clothing store, this dumb jeff, heard her scream—I guess she was just a nervous person, scared of colored people—and rushed to her and saw Dickie leaving the building—running, the man said, as who wouldn’t if a white woman started screaming—and he come on this girl and said she was all shook up—about being assaulted, when it was just a case of a poor chuckleheaded boy grabbing to hold on. That’s how it started. The police come and took him the next day, little Dickie Do. He was sitting at home eating his breakfast and talking to this little puppy dog he used to have, little black and white spotted feist that could do tricks—he talked to that dog like it was a human being—and they came up on the porch and hollered for him to come out, Dickie Do, and talk to em. He knew right off what it was. He maybe could have turned tail, but he didn’t, even though my auntie said he’d been up worrying hisself, about what she didn’t know, for half the night. She had to get up and make him a milkroot punch to get him off to sleep. But they took him down to the courthouse and put him in jail. Somehow the word on the affair got in the paper—”
“The negro paper,” the little man said, “won’t it?”
“Yes, it was, the African Tribune. They’d got the word that the white mens was coming to lynch him. That’s when it started. My uncle and a bunch of other mens put on they uniforms—
“This was right after the Great War, wasn’t it?” Delvin said.
“Yes, it was,” Frank said, “pretty near. And a whole bunch of em put on they army uniforms and got they guns and marched down to the courthouse to protect Dickie Do.”
He reached between his spread knees and patted the dusty floor with both hands. “Well, the white boys heard about this and they grabbed they guns and they marched down to the courthouse. There was a standoff, getting nowhere, and after a while some of the colored boys went home after the sheriff told them he would protect Dickie. Everybody was scared because just the month before these white boys had lynched a little jew man because they didn’t like something he was doing. They didn’t like nothing they wont doing theyselves.”
Frank sifted a little corn dust from one hand to the other. “Well, it rocked back and forth with some folkses leaving and more coming and the sheriff and his boys up on the roof and hiding in the office behind tipped-over desks and such at the top of the courthouse stairs and outside the white boys pumping themselves up and the colored boys scared—everybody scared about to pop—and then the city police and the National Guard showed up and they went over to the quarter and began rounding up our boys and taking them over here to the fairgrounds where they had fences to stick em behind. All the while the white boys down at the courthouse kept trying to make our boys leave, but they had already left and come back once and won’t leaving again. It was night by now. And then they started shooting at each other and that was it.”
He leaned back against the pale wooden bulkhead and then he sunk his head and looked at the floor. He stayed that way for a long minute. The train hooted at a crossing, long singlethroated dying wail. Lights far off at some settlement or other. Then he raised his head and looked at his listeners.
“I was down in a ditch behind the Lazarus department store talking to my friend Hoster about getting on to the courthouse when came a wave of colored men running the other way through the alley and out into the lot where the ditch was. I got down in a big old pipe that stuck out of the ditch and I watched those men, colored men, come leaping over that ditch like they was horses galloping, just leaping. Some of them stopped to fire their rifles back the way they’d come. And then a little later here come the white boys. They was crouching and running. Ducking down and kneeling down to fire they rifles. It was dark enough . . . flames shot out of the end of their guns. One white man stopped in the ditch right in front of me and he knelt down and fired. It was a double-barreled shotgun with rust on it. He had white hair and he was pink like a albino and he fired that gun two times. Sweat was pouring off his face. I could see it in the moonlight. After him I scrooched farther back in the pipe.”
Frank looked at Delvin. There was sweat on his face.
“Things died down,” he said, “but they didn’t die out. You could hear the gunshots over in Greenwood—”
“The quarter?” Delvin said.
“That’s right. You could hear the whomp whomp of the shotguns and the kee-rack! of the rifles, but they died down some and I was about to think the trouble was over. But it was just getting started. I’d fallen asleep in the pipe, but the whistle of an early morning train waked me up. The day was coming up clear with a few clouds, looked like big white soft pillows stacked up in the west. I crawled out of the pipe. In the ditch were three or four bodies of white men. They were dead, all but one of em, sprawled out in the bottom where they was a little rusty stream and up the side where two of em looked like they’d been trying to crawl out. There was a colored man dead too, but I didn’t know him. He was lying on his back with one fist balled up under his chin like he was about to strike a blow. I picked up a pistol I found and climbed out of the ditch. There was a white man lying over next to a sticker bush crying. I didn’t know him either and I didn’t stop for him.”
Delvin started to ask about the lynching party, but Mr. Rome shushed him. It was Frank’s time to speak.
“Whoo,” Frank said making a low brushing motion with his right hand, “whoo.” His eyes moved back and forth between the listeners. “I slipped along the alleys and made my way into Greenwood where they was already shooting going on over on the north side. Fires had been started up all over. They had burned the Holy Mount church and Stanton’s grocery and all the windows had been shot out of Shorty’s African Cafe. There were dead people lying in the street. A couple of em had been runned over. Houses was burning and a few people was standing over near em. I don’t know what they was doing—taking a goodbye look I reckon. Just then there was the sound of a bugle blowing. A tall woman wearing a man’s shirt over her dress shouted, ‘Oh Lord it’s the vengeance,’ and started running down the street. Cries started up and out of the houses came whole families of people. There was shouts everywhere. All the peoples was running. There was the sound of shooting and it was coming closer. There was cars overturned in the street and a couple of em had dead white men spilling out of em. We was fighting in a war and the war was taking place right where we lived. I couldn’t hardly believe it. I felt so bad I wanted to sit down somewhere by myself and cry, but I couldn’t take the time to. Nobody had no time.
“Well, just then I ran up on Ralph Tompkins—I don’t know where Hoster had got off to—and we rushed down the street together. Some of the trees done been burnt. And front porches too and there was burn marks running up the house faces. One house was still burning. It smelled like a woods fire. Ralph had a double-barrel shotgun tied together with wire. The butt of the gun had blood on it. Ralph was sucking air through his mouth as he ran. I probably was too. Everybody was headed over to the westside away from downtown. We could hear the shooting coming closer and sometimes it sounded like they was firing off cannons. Then we saw these white men in they cars. The cars was coming slow down the street. White mens was walking beside the cars and they was shooting into the houses. Some of them went in-to the houses—the unburnt ones—and these men were pulling people out and they were shootin em. We ducked down behind the steps of Rum’s Fish Shop and fired back at em. I think I hit one of em because I saw him snatch at his chest high up like he’d been bit hard. But we didn’t stay to make sure. We ran down behind the houses, popping up where we could to fire at the white men. This activity kept up during the morning. I found another pistol lying in the street and took that. After a while I found another stuck up in the fork of a sweet apple tree and I took that too. I had this desperate feeling like I had to get more guns. I had one stuck in my belt and I was carrying two and I wanted three or four more and more bullets. I didn’t have enough bullets. Two of the pistols was .38s and one was a little silver .22. Ralph had a canvas bag full of shotgun shells. Buckshot.
“Everywhere we looked there were these gunfights going on. People was up on rooftops firing and they was collected in little gangs behind cars or piled-up furniture, couches and such, that had been dragged out into the streets. There was too many white men. Some of em was wearing army uniforms. We heard later it was the whole National Guard fighting alongside those crazy white men. Over where I was they had us backed up against this old brick fire station where a bunch of men had ducked in behind a fire engine and some wagons they’d turned over in the street. Behind the station everything was on fire. It didn’t look like there was any way to get out through there and so we was making the best of it by shooting at the boys that was coming at us. We must’ve killed a dozen right in the street. There was some whooping and hollering, but that was mostly on the white side. Them crackers thought they was back at Bull Run or someplace still trying to win that old war. We wadn’t hollering much. Everybody was sad and scared and some looked like they didn’t care who it was won they was just shooting because there wadn’t no way around it. We had dust on us from the street, this powdery light gray dust that made us look like ghosts. But we was fighting hard.
“Ralph had found a carbine rifle to go with his shotgun. A couple of little boys was loading guns for people and there was even a girl, this high school girl wearing an old brown army coat and a straw hat, who was running around carrying ammunition and seeing to the ones that’d got hit. A lot of us got hit, but not me. The bullets came whizzing by, real insolent-sounding. A boy stood up on a roof across the street and he was waving a piece of white cloth, surrendering, I guess, but they shot him anyway. He just pitched on his face and slidded down the roof. He knocked up some shingles as he fell and they spilled off the roof with him. He dropped into a big holly bush. Some more of our boys came around the corner and one of them had one of those big repeating rifles, a BAR. No telling how he got it. Somebody said the armory’d been busted into, I guess that was it. He set this big gun up behind a pile of kettles from I don’t know where—they was piled up on a couch—and he started shooting. He hit a man in the head, a big man in a bright blue shirt, and it looked like his head just snapped off. The bullets kicked splinters off this big church pew some of them was hiding behind. He looked at me once and he had a grin on his face like it had been stuck there last night and forgot about.
“Then just about a minute after he started firing we saw the airplanes. They was two of em, double-wing planes flying right down the street. Men was shooting rifles out of both of em. One plane was painted bright yellow and it had the word SKY KING on the side. The other was a army plane, you could tell by the target it had painted on it. They wobbled as they came. They wadn’t too high up but high enough so it was hard to get a bead on em. A few peoples at that point started running. The planes flew right at us and when they got close up over us, this man in one of them hung out the side and threw a jug of gasoline with a fuse in it that busted right over the left side of the hideout and spilled fire on everybody over there. That set people to hollering and running.
“One of the ones got hit by the gas was the girl. I was watching. This big tongue of flames shot right up over her back and caught her head and hat both on fire. She tried to run, but she tripped and fell, not ten feet from me. I had jumped back and didn’t get nothing but the scorch. The girl was burning all over the back of her and her hair and that hat mixed in was burning bright red like a halo. She wadn’t saying nothing. Me and Ralph started throwing dirt on her to put the fire out, but it didn’t help much, at least at first. Then we got it out. Her army coat had melted right onto her skin. She was smoking and crusty and the back of her head—maybe it was the crust of that hat—was like a black leather helmet. In one place you could see through to the skull bone. She was still restless. She kept trying to draw up her legs but she couldn’t quite. She never had said nothin. She opened her eyes real wide and looked at us, but she didn’t seem to recognize us, and then she shut her eyes tight.
“The other plane had gone by and then it circled back, the yellow one, the Sky King, and when it got over us this man in a army uniform threw out a stick of dynamite. You could tell it was dynamite because it was burning on a fuse. The stick missed and blew up in the street. The shock was like somebody shoving against you. We all—the last of us standing—hightailed it then. There was nothing else for it. We ran for our lives, what lives we had. Amazing how beat up you could get and still want to live. That girl died while we was looking at her. She was squirming, trying to get up, til all of a sudden she shuddered, let out a little sigh, and stopped dead. That was it. There was tears in her eyes but you could see she wadn’t looking at nobody, least none of us.
“I got out of there and on out of town and hid in the big woods on the other side of the brass works. They say that most of the people in Greenwood was rounded up and taken out to camps over toward the old fairgrounds. Put inside wire fences like they was beasts and left there in the hot sun to suffer. The white boys walked around town, they said, just shooting at will.”
He stopped talking and sat quietly, patting the corn dust, leaving with each pat a new print of his palm. Delvin saw in the traces that his two middle fingers were the same length and knew this meant something to fortune-tellers but he couldn’t recall what.