“They was whores,” Bonette Collins said. He was a short, nearly square man, Little Wall by Wall he was called, a carpenter, he said, not even part of the group—if you could call them that—traveling out of Chattanooga. Billy thought of the families of these boys, the eight boys, how back home the word would go around the community—rape—of white women. The awfulest crime. Lengths of knotted manila rope rolled out from such accusations. We sit here among the dead. Two boys leaned on their hands, others had their hands on the table turned up like offerings, a couple clutched themselves in their arms; Walker patted one fist on top of the other. Everything for them was changed for good. They might as well have not gotten up, not drawn breath that morning. Back at home everybody would downface it. You couldn’t tell what the truth was. But he had found that juries seemed often able to choose between truth and falsehood. At least in the little trials for theft and robbery or threats or fraud. Except with negroes. Rarely did a negro get off. No matter how innocent he was. And now we have rape and murder—no, just rape. We’ll handle the murder.
He smiled at Davis Pullen, who was busily questioning Bonette as to where he was exactly at the time of the rapes.
“They have to establish a time for these occurrences,” Davis said. “We can refute em on that point. Anybody own a watch?” he said, and chuckled. Nobody did.
Harris listened without seeming to. He gazed around the room. These bleak, sullied rooms never bothered him. The facts in these cases were where the power was. The facts like stones set into a wall. The power in the wall and what was behind it, in the lives lived in the grease and stink of poverty pressing forward through time. The power was in the weight of these lives laid against the wall, and for him the subtraction of life breath by breath leading all the way back to the beginning of time, something more powerful than anything else he knew, a weight of reason and choices, a strength right now implacable from some toothless oldtimer long ago reaching out his hand for the piece of pre-masticated meat a child put into it, the look in the old man’s eyes meeting the look in the child’s eyes, and over there the breeze touching an old woman’s face, engendering an irresistible thought, and that man over there listening for the cry of a baby in the other room where his wife lay sick on a pallet on the floor, something hard and inescapable coming for him. He dismissed none of what he loved about these scenes, the million-year history of people roughed up and knocked down by the ones slightly stronger. He never talked about this, hardly brought it into his own mind, but he felt the weight of a righteousness laid against him, pressing into his days and into his sleep.
And, too, he was a man, wearing a suit snagged with a hook from a sidewalk wire outside a haberdasher’s on Orchard street, who wanted people to know who he was. And as the people he was hired to help wished they could do, he gathered influence like a golden grain.
The facts of the case, so these lawyers thought, were chits on a string, gaps here and there, adding up to not much. Delvin looked into their self-regarding, lurid faces, at the ructating misery that had not settled, sensing the complex lies they told themselves so they would not—so they thought—bring trouble down on their children, the way each was an official of this great empiric power they thought they were the checkers and refusers of, these freightless carriers and silly boys, these men with tickets, who would never suffer, or if they did, the suffering would be in passing, some condition or reversal that would consume a few days or years of their lives and then drop them and wander off in another direction. None of them lived in a state of fear or tyranny. He saw this, and as he saw he heard inside his head the voices saying that for these people Delvin and his compadres were only troublesome beasts caught momentarily in the chute. We are good-hearted and for fame and money we will get you cattle turned around the right way. Thank you, suh. But he was not cut off from his own heart by, or even from, his interceders, he was not yet disattached—that wasn’t the word—nor was he threaded through or aligned with them, none of that, he was only inseparable from the curiosity he felt looking at them, that was where the life was, his curiosity, and he knew this. What was it they were up to? Besides rattling along in their own peculiar version of a train ride?
It just wont right, was what they said in Red Row back in Chattanooga. That was closer to the truth of things than anything he could come up with.
Suddenly he was scared to death. His bowels loosened and he bent over, gripping himself.
“You all right, boy?” Pullen said.
“I got to go to the little house.”
“You can do that in a minute.”
“I mean right now. Suh.” But as he said the words his insides tightened up and he was all right.
Harris started to signal the guard but Delvin stopped him. “Thank you, suh, I guess I’m fine.”
“You trying to game us, boy?” Pullen said.
“No, suh. I felt a flash of sickness is all. I’m better now.”
“Well. That’s okay,” Harris said. “Now—”
“Yes suh,” Delvin said quickly, “I was in the fight, but I never saw either of those two women. Not til the end.”
“None of you boys did,” said Pullen.
The stirring in Delvin’s bowels returned but he fought it down. He looked Pullen in the eyes. These white folks thought they had escaped the restrictions law and custom had placed on black skin. They were the new model human—an advance on the old dark model—built for politics and money. No stoop labor. Masterminds who were also generous, so they saw themselves. Why, if you keep to your place we will pat you on the head and give you a soup bone. And a kick to keep you honest. Well. Best to steer clear of crazy people like that. Just go widely around them in this alien land. But, once in a while, a misstep. Or a misstepped upon. And a door opened onto misery, anger, terror, watchfulness, confusion, ricky-tick submitting, echoes of overheard jokestering, wild wandering figments and destitutions of the spirit, thumps of excruciation and succorless moaning, strutting, argufying, testification, and power and regret and wondering and a rattling panic—all these in his eyes looking straight into lawyer Pullen’s.
In Pullen’s eyes under a moist filigree of power churned an unsorted mess of helpless degradation, hope, dishevelment, spite, useless muttering asides picked up from relatives and the stupidity of his kinfolk over in New Hall, endurance and pluck and delight in the quick free-heartedness of his children, boredom and a weasely shrewdness brimming—the combo—rocking in a sea of rage plastered over with a foolish smile quirky as a circus poster on the side of a burning barn.
The man despised him, Delvin could see this.
3
He stands on the low infirmary porch swaying faintly to a rhythm that has risen up from the earth and overtaken him. All these boys here with their necessary arrangements. Solomon over there working a yard broom, ready to run any errand. Little Croak, who wore a pink verbena blossom in his hair to please Winky Raffin. And Winky, who got down on his knees to please the LT, those stormy nights when Delvin watched him cross the yard in the rain to enter the LT’s pineboard shack. Carl Crawford, one of the boys from the train, stands waiting for him. He has a scrap of straw hat that he saved for when Delvin would come out of the infirmary and he gives it to him now.
“What’s next, Mr. Del?” he asks, a muscular boy, not a boy now after four trials and all these years in the white man’s penitentiaries. Even in the penitentiary the races are kept separate. A white man isn’t going to eat off a plate he sees a black man eat from. Nor put a black man’s spoon in his mouth, no matter how well washed it is. Lord, they wouldn’t breathe the same air as us if they didn’t have to. Off to the west is the river that runs along the edge of the swamp, but no one ever escaped that way. Patrols and outposts and towns in either direction, hamlets, solitary farmhouses—it would be like running a gantlet, each fouler armed and ready to shoot. That is the policy. Local folks might shoot escapees on sight and nobody would mind. One less mouth for the state to feed.
He puts the hat on and sticks his head out into the sunlight that hits him like fire flung from the roof. His body bends and his vision clouds and a dizziness spins up from the ground and envelops him; his insubstantial strength gurgles away and he sags. Though Carl tries with both arms to hold him, the two of them fall to their knees. Carl bounces up and begins to drag him to his feet.
“It’ll be all right, Mr. Del,” he says, ducking his head under Delvin’s arm.
They struggle up, and stand blank and unsure in the porch shade.
“They be watching us, Mr. Del,” Little Carl says. Carl is thick-bodied and strong as a bull and despite the battering he has taken still somewhat kindly. He nods toward the stilt tower cornered into the fence. Two guards equipped with pump-action scatter guns, 30.06 bolt-action Winchesters and a Thompson submachine gun gaze at them, not fondly. Delvin can see them talking, the words, he thinks, like doughy little thoughts with stones inside them. His mind drifts and he is again picturing Celia (or somebody he called Celia, some ragdoll fragment) floating through a field of march flowers. His knees are bloody. He raises his knees and does a little slow-motion dance stomp and almost tips over backwards. The two guards laugh. He waves, the wave an eloquent mix of woofing and bouncy-in-his-deuce-of-benders. It is one of the many hand gestures for dealing with white folks. Every hand carries danger. White folks prefer vocal salaams, bent backs. Any movement of the hand by a black man can become threatening. But the gestures of looniness, of imbecility, of fealty—are tolerated.
This is his fourth prison. He described (in earlier notebooks) the concrete floors at Burning Mountain, the red dirt floors at Uniball, the stone at Columbia, now the packed blue-clay floors at Acheron. Here when it rains, the floors became so slick you can hardly stand on them. In each prison he placed himself in this or that nook, in fields, under roof, walking across a dusty yard, standing under a graybeard tree looking out at rain pouring down in bright sunlight, squatting in a cotton field or tucked in his own deck address and darkest corner, and looked out at the world and wrote it down. They took the notebooks away, but he got more, bought more, that is, from whoever was selling them. He paid in whatever coin he could muster. Load-humping, errand work, decoying, the wealth accumulated at three cents a day from chopping cotton or picking vegetables, trade or capital turned over at the store. One of those, he would tell the clerk, one just like that one you’re scribbling into. The clerk each time had to be talked into it, sometimes paid extra or traded. But this was easy. No one can hold out against anything in prison, that is prison’s secret. No bit of information, no treasure secreted away, no practice, no escape plan or ruinous bit of felony behavior was secure. It is impossible to protect these safes and mental cashboxes. What held fast out in the world unraveled and fumed away in prison. Everybody walks around with fluxed, soggy insides. It’s okay. It is simply what you have to live with. No friend will protect you, no believer, no hard ass. They can’t even protect themselves. And it isn’t the various holes, pits, cabinets, closets, unheated tin sheds, Bake Houses and hotboxes the butchers stick reluctant or rowdy prisoners into. It isn’t beatings or starvation or forced labor in the killing sun. It is hopelessness. Delvin’s own sense of it, the crude stalled massing in his gut, comes back. This time not just in here. By now the disease has spread like a personal plague into all the corners of his mind. The world itself has in this way become infected. The long gray dirt road out there, slick as a gullet, running for miles through the sloppy, beat-down fields, the ragged (free) men they pass standing in ditches pushing gobs of clay into their mouths to quell hunger and for the minerals in it, the little boys shitting grease in the thin grass, the skinny, lacerated women not even turning to look at the truck passing. You see a griffe squinting into the sun and realize he isn’t seeing anything. One man has a goiter on his neck the size of a citron. He has to rip his shirts to be able to wear them. Country women humpbacked with rheumatism, children bowlegged with rickets and red-faced and slimy from pellagra, wasting from hookworm. Nobody has the money to fix anything that can make life endurable. Hammer toes and bunions and busted elbows and broken wrists and stomachaches that eventually turn out to be cancer except nobody learns that is the name for it because nobody calls the doctor and even if they did he would be the negro doctor just now dying himself of tuberculosis over in the little negro clinic in Sharpsburg; he’d be dead before they could piece together where it was you lived. In the whole prison no africano man who has ever lived on a street or a road that has a sign on it saying its name. Down these streets the drag-footed go.
And you lie on your back in the dawnlight pulled like a gray washrag up out of dumps and poisoned dews, listening to the little hermit thrushes and the killdeer and the meadow lark’s wakeful remarks, a man with a pure knowledge of himself like the philosophers and the alienists wish they could somehow come by, a knowledge gained not through manipulation and secondhand tittering but through means of the simple quest each of these imprisoned men is on, the standard issue of jail life: you are, in the end, only men: in the end you break: in the end you will not be able to hold out against even the least of it.
Here, now, as he moves from the infirmary porch out into the tireless sunshine, Delvin feels the truth of himself like a surplus malaria settling in. It is not all right but it is all right. Now Milo taking his hand—Carl has drifted away—pressing his forefinger down the row of knuckles sweetly and back as is his way, patting the fleshy place at the bottom of his palm. Except for scattered lumps of aching bone he can barely feel his hands, barely feel his arms; his feet have a life of their own and a great delicacy. He wants to lie down in the dust and roll slowly in it. Across the way at House Number 2, from the sterile shade of the overhang, Shorty Willis gazes at him. He’d have come out to knock him to the ground, if he didn’t have the dog. The cons think it is catching. They think all ailments are contagious and shrink from them, wounds, cripplings, maimings as well. In the dining hall they yelp from distant tables that the place ought to be cleared of these infect rats. In the barracks he will generally find his rack in an island of its own, the others shoved away from a teeming nobody wants to touch. Maybe find it in the yard.
Yet there are those who relish disease. The crazy boys and some of the lap nuzzlers will cozy up to him, asking if there is anything they can do. One, Dizzy Placer, will lick your sores if you have any to spare. Years ago the doctor cautioned him. “Don’t go letting any of these yardboys out here apply their treatments,” old Dr. Willy told him. Dr. Willy died of a busted ulcer none of the white doctors around Covington wanted to treat, groaning and calling out the name of a woman nobody had heard of—so Donell Brakage told him three years ago when he was resting up from an earlier malaria attack with the other kings of misguidance in Columbia penitentiary. That was before the last trial that let all but Delvin and Carl and Bony and Little Buster go free, pardoned for their crimes. Other lawyers reaped the crop the first lawyers sowed.
The sun is getting cozy on his neck, kittenish. He leans his head forward so the beam can find more flesh. Ripe sunlight a treasure beyond counting. So bright you have to look through your lashes to see. The heat seeps under his clothes, spreading along his back like a feather cape. In November they ride in wagons on top of the cotton to the gin. He always burrows in deep, loving the encasement and, if it was possible without being torn to pieces, would let himself be lifted up into the suction tube and tossed through the machinery to come out the other end mashed in the press inside a bale. Lying there like a caterpillar in his cocoon, waiting for some chinaman across the sea to jack the bale open and lookee here what I found. Oh knit me back up. He hasn’t started sweating yet.
Milo works his little trad on his knuckles. Delvin can smell the lime stink of the latrines. Last week it rained all week, but three days of sun this week has brought up the dust. A week of straight sun, and dust will whirl up in clouds the size of a county, wind-hauled a hundred miles to set an inch of topsoil down on top of some other county’s dirt.
He still thinks of Celia, but she is a cattercorner, endways Celia now. And why shouldn’t she be? Once he raged and spit on the ground and beat his hands into the dirt as his insides crumbled and splintered to bone in his chest. He moaned like a dog, and far out in the Babylon field at Burning Mountain he hollered his sorrow into the wind that blew everything lost into the black pine woods. At Uniball he got down on his knees and pushed his face into the streaked dirt. Loss become unified grief breathed in the dirt until he was swimming down through the richness of soil and drifting among the big limestone plates and the secret caves of pure water that washed him clean of everything but his humanness. You could lose your mind, lose your soul, lose your day count, but you couldn’t lose that. He had cuts on his forearms from trying to. In Uniball he slashed his own face with the heated edge of a file and the cuts had ridged up so tight his face for a year felt pulled to one side. Somewhere he picked up a limp. He limped into the courtroom for the last trial; the limp hadn’t changed anything.
For a while Celia wrote him and then the letters fell off. He pictured words like leaves sailing in a chill fall breeze. “What has become of you?” he asked. Asked the last address he had for her. The letters came back stamped in red: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Oh but, Mr. Postman, she is known. “I know her,” he cried. “I know her better than she knows I know her.” He built her from the scraps available. Scraps was all they were. Curls and shreds and discards. But enough. Her five foot six of blueblack body. A sheen on her like the dew on a butternut bush. Her hair crisp and shining, catching the light so the blackness turned into a coppery gleam like the gleam of the world in its earliest days. Her eyes black as pieces of the night saved uncut for the day. Quick-mindedness. A quietude about her. Wondering at the world. Feeling around. A jump-upness. She smiled and he held this smile in an enterprise of the heart that was ever growing. Now gone. He wrote her family but they didn’t write back. PLEASE OPEN THIS, he wrote on the envelopes and underlined it, hoping in a way that somebody would open the letter, maybe a passerby who knew her, knew who she was and would answer him. Finally somebody did. Her sister, Sheila, whom she almost never mentioned. Wrote him a few words on a sheet of pink paper. “My sister was married a year ago, to a man from Shreveport, a doctor. They have a lovely little baby boy. She does not need to hear from you again.” He wrote back to the sister, asking for more and thought maybe I will leapfrog over her to Celia and knew this could not be. He lay down under a big hickory tree and cried until his throat was sore. For a while he continued to write letters but one day he stopped. He started a letter and quit in the middle. He sat at the edge of Big Egypt field waiting for Tulip to bring up the mules. The stub of pencil was worn down so small he could hardly grip it. He wrote: “I watched a big old redwing hawk take a pigeon in the air . . .” and stopped. He decided nothing, he only quit. Since then not a missive word on paper.
But still, fading as they go, the words come to him. He writes stories about her now. Stories about some woman, some slipping-away woman, who runs barefoot into a sliding surf and laughs until she makes herself sick.
Up ahead the round, stuccoed and whitewashed well with its crosstree and six buckets on separate ropes. Once at Burning Mountain he tried to escape by jumping into the well. Those were his crazy years.
Not that the escapements have stopped. He has a list: fires set in the drying corn of fall, bullfrogs thrown into the supposedly electrified fence to short-circuit it, tunnels sworn to lead to open fields of sweet grass beyond the woods; he hid under mounds of green peppers and piles of cotton seeds, crouched in garbage, jumped off the back of trucks, lit out across fields, faked sick, attempted to bribe guards, simply turned away from the group crowded around the captain and ran for it.
But the well. That is legend. He tried to swim his way out through tunnels Bennie Combers swore were there. A great underground river Bennie said that would take him quickly to the big river. Plenty of room to draw breath. But there was no river, no room for breath. He got turned around and nearly lost his life, swimming downward in the dark. They hauled him out with a scrap of net he was barely able to crawl into.
No, well, no, not today, he thinks, the sunlight like warm cream on his bare arms. Not today a swim into the dark.
He wore himself out on those early escapades, wore out the craziness. He got a reputation, and cognomen, as a willful, uncooperative prisoner, UNC in capital letters on the yellow manila folder that goes with him as he makes his way around the state prison system. The sun is sticky on his face. He could wipe it off like sap from his arms and hands and clean it from his face but he doesn’t want to. The light and heat soak into his body. He unbuttons his shirt, pulls it away from his chest. The spray of scanty corkscrewed hair soaked in sunlight. You can take your shirt off if you want to, but nobody with any sense takes his shirt off under a sun like this. A black man burns just like a white one. He pulls the blue-and-gray-striped cloth away from his chest. He smells his body odor, sour as oakwood and comforting. Just working a button through a buttonhole gives him a sense of freedom. So does walking across the yard with nowhere the white man told him to go, returning by his own will to the barracks.
He steps along to the well. Milo lets go his arm, grabs one of the long galvanized buckets and lowers it. Delvin listens to the bucket clank hollowly against the sides. He feels a generation older than the boy who jumped into that other well. He leans over the parapet far enough to dip his face into the column of cool air the bucket stirs up. Leaning slightly to the side he can see the sky reflected in the black water. He jumped not toward that pinned-down blue but toward the stars. When you bring the water up it is neither blue or black, it is clear as crystal. They say it tastes of sulfur, but the taste is more like the mold on a old piece of hoop cheese.
Milo pulls steadily on the rope. The bucket, spilling water as it comes, reaches the top.
Delvin presses his hand and then his face against the chilly wet galvanized metal. The feel of it sends him back into his dreams. Celia speaking to him from the rainwet front steps of her friend’s house. She is telling him to read—who was it? Douglas? No. Freeman. This goes by in a zip. He hasn’t thought of Freeman for years, has forgotten him. A writer first mentioned by the professor. Well, these books, these volumes written to prove the black man deserves his freedom, are all right. They make you, while you read them, free. Books come in packed in sacks of rice, sacks of salt. They are directed to particular inmates but the included instructions are ignored. Once in a while the inmates get visitors, wives and mamas and shamed weeping daddies gathered in the fenced-off portion of the yard under a big live oak. You can socialize. In gunny sacks they bring pies and apples and kumquats and pieces of molasses candy wrapped in a wax paper twist. These bits of food are all that is allowed in. No books, no hardware, no toiletries, not even soap. There are no chairs, people sit on the ground or squat on their heels, men who will be back to work Monday morning in sharecropped cotton fields, women who will be cooking for a dozen or stooping with the men in the fields hoeing cotton or picking it or in summer cropping tobacco. They bring fresh-squeezed cane juice in glass jars, blue jars children hold to the light to see the colors in.
He dips both hands in the bucket—forbidden, but he’s forgotten this rule, for now—and splashes water on his face. He holds his face up to the sunlight and feels the cool burning as the sun takes the water back.
With Milo’s help he tips the bucket and pours the well water over himself. He wears the sulfurous shirt and pants and coarse heavily washed canvas underwear issued to all those who survive a stay in the breakdown ward. The water will leave its residue of sulfur stink but sweat will soon enough wash that out. The old yearning flares again, a piece of it, the edging of the spirit toward freedom that in prison you have to nub off short, most men have to. It roots in him like a sweet potato raised in a glass jar. He feels himself listing. His joints ache and he has a headache, but the crushing chills are gone. They piled gunny sacks on him. He begged them to lie on top of him, but they wouldn’t. In his mind a big bearskin black and stinking of bear lay on him, but later when he asked after it nobody knew what he was talking about.
From the well a spokeway of paths radiates. In some past now lost prisoners were required to walk a certain line to the well. Now these paths each barely a foot wide are sunk in the clay; everybody naturally follows them. “A lesson for you and me,” he says to Milo, pointing this out to him.
“You don tol me,” Milo says, grinning.
“That’s okay,” he says. “I forget what the lesson was.”
Milo places the empty bucket back in its little wooden slot at the foot of the well and they proceed on their way. They take the slightly curv ing path he named Lope. He named all the paths. Chicago, New York, Bright Leaf Trail, Dixie Highway, Salvation; he keeps the names to himself. Shielding his eyes, he looks at the nearest tin-sheathed tower. One of the guards, Hammersmith, idly watches him. He is the one brought his last letter, one of the four he has received in the last six years (since he left from Uniball), from his old train riding friend Frank. The letter was stamped Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Patches, long rectangular strips, were cut out of the pages. The religious fervor of our time is, then blank, a hole letting the air in. Must have been some fiery words. Then the sentence: Apples are America’s most loved fruit, then more air. Then: but what can we know of another’s anguish? then air, then the words: anyone whose suffering is one grain worse than our own is one we can’t, then more air. The words the heat of them, and then Frank’s fervor and cool distancing sliced away. Five other pages were similarly rejigged. The pages looked like paper cutouts. Here and there a partial sentence (in our own selves we have to find . . .; confused and broke we embrace . . .; cancer for . . .; a tenderness most . . .) scraps of words, a litter really, somebody’s fresh trash. He had memorized every bit, even the odd words (reddish, conservationist, river’s, unoffered) they were like gates, buckles, fasteners, letting life in, or out; there were dozens of them. He dug a hole in the clay under his bunk and hid the letter there, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. It would be all right if it wasn’t there the next time he looked. Frank was trying to tell him something important; the guards saw that. There was no return address: that too was turned into an air hole, escape vent.
He leans heavily on Milo’s thin strong arm. They roll as they walk, pals airing it out. Milo chatters about breakouts, about the new man, a gingercake named Arthur Fowler who, so Milo says, has tattooed a portrait of his superior court judge on his chest in an attempt to get a mistrial.
“I love the way courtrooms smell,” Milo says.
Two years ago Milo was thrown by a guard into a pyracantha bush and one of the thorns pierced his left eyeball. He can see light and shadow with that eye—enough in this world, he says, to tell what’s what. An escape attempt carried him to the bush. “Got to get me some wings,” he says now when asked about it.
Both of them crossed miles of marsh and desert and cleft mountain track and leagues of wintry windswept fields to reach this spot. In the exact center of his body Delvin sways like a stem of billygoat grass. His body held up now by a boy. You can say he loves the boy. He pictures the slips and strips of yellow paper from Frank’s letter fluttering on the breeze. The suffering of those not ourselves. Milo’s narrow ridged forehead. The broad, mashed-in nose with the elegantly flaring nostrils. The thin lips with the encircling perimeter line like something chiseled into flesh. The cheeks broad and flat and the eyes set under their ridges of fine bone gleaming like lamps. Shine me home.
In the sky to the south a yellow biplane tats its way west. The small stiff steadily fading sound is beautiful. As are all sounds connected to the outside. Despite the fitful delirium of four hundred men you get used to the noise until the prison seems a quiet place. There are the clatters from the kitchen, the scrape of feet moving over hard clay, the shouts of the guards, the clank of chains, the cries from the dreams of low crawling sleepers, the guzzle of water from the shower tank, these familiar dead-end sounds. But there are also the sounds of rain clattering on the barracks’ tin roofs, the drips onto clay, the rush of wind, the pattering of dust along the walkways, the keen up-piping of killdeer and mourning doves from the fields, the distant bombilation of the gin machinery, trucks gearing down on the rise through the cotton fields and the whisper of breeze passing over the cotton on its way from faraway to here—ordinary, fadeaway sounds to those not held down behind wire but to him treasures ladled secretly out, hoarded and prized. Some nights they can hear the radio from the warden’s quarters, playing live music from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. White man’s music: a thin, bobbing line of melody from which are hung chicken feathers and costume jewelry. Even the old square-jawed mountain music is better, the dancing rhythms scooting along like they are on their way somewhere not here.
When somebody escapes—tempted by the free airs outside, some body who has something to do out there, or somebody to meet, or a contemptible crisis, a hurt, a face laughing in a dream, life itself he has to flee—the duty guard cranks the handle of a big silver round-mouthed siren. The crank is as big as a pump handle and hard to turn unless you are strong, and they are strong. From the horn spews a metallic whine like a castaway mimic of the olden times when the gods and the earth itself spoke to human beings . . . but now is only a mockery, a falseness and scorn pounded into the brain, screeching proof of how far from dignity and brotherhood they have fallen. You want to crawl under a rock and hide. Men hunch their shoulders, muttering or staring mutely into the distance. Some cover their ears, others try to go on as if nothing is happening. But Delvin—and a few compadres—use the occasion to scream as loudly as possible. A wild vehemence, a whirling, jarring power breaks loose from him with these shouts. And a joy, if he can call it that. The guards know they scream, he and Muster and Calvin Schuler and Willie P from Hattiesburg and a few others—lifting their singalong, repealing lies and broken connections and loss—and sometimes they yell back. Maybe one or two filling the air with his own despair and loneliness. But soon the quiet returns. The low hum of prison whispering that makes up the regulation silence, carrying the iniquitous sound of guile and slander that passes for air in this place. So they lean back in their bunks or stoop low to pluck a burst cotton boll, or stretch their arms out in the dark, or crouch in the latrine over a febrile shit—listening for the woodsy, row crop silence of breeze rustling the three-pointed cotton leaves, scraping among pine needles in the dark woods; listening for the barn owls in the sycamores asking their questions of the field mice and voles and half-grown rabbits; for crows winging across the open expanse of fields the prison sits in the center of, crows croaking naw naw, as if testing their voices to make sure they still have them.
Across his path now steps Lionel Ansley, a gaunt man, a preacher who holds one of the services on Sunday mornings. He’s been after Delvin for a while to quit his escape attempts. He is impatient with his unwillingness to attend church. Lionel visited him in the infirmary and Delvin appreciated his not visibly gloating over his condition. The preacher told him his running ways would get him into trouble and Delvin knows that as far as Lionel is concerned the red dog has come on as a result of his jumpiness. He isn’t the only one tired of his scampering; the guards, who like to make the whole prison pay for one man’s flight, are getting worn out too.
The preacher nods at him, smiling, his bony head bobbing like a chicken’s. Despite his narrow-mindedness he is a kindly man. You never can tell where kindness will come from. The preacher with his little commentaries never goes too far into damnation. Delvin appreciates this.
“Come on, boy,” he says now, “come on over to the one place you can let what’s balled up in you go.”
He doesn’t stop walking as he says this.
Delvin nods at his back. The preacher’s abruptness makes him think of his shock when the jury foreman back in Klaudio, Elmer Suggs, said he was guilty. It had been as if Suggs himself—druggist, father of a girl with a polio-crippled leg, a stranger—had simply stood up from a passing crowd and for no reason on earth but meanness had announced in his slightly elevated voice that he, Delvin Walker, common-law son of Cornelius Oliver and Professor Clemens John Carmel, diverted lover of Miss Celia Cumberland, was guilty of raping two white women. Even after the four weeks of testimony (and thirty minutes of deliberation) he couldn’t believe his ears. Surprise didn’t cover it. Shock didn’t. For a second he had ceased to exist. A short circuit of being in which not only body and mind vanished but all record of his having been on this earth as well, leaving a vacuum that held the shape of a human being. It was quicker than a rifle shot. He was sure none else (outside his cohorts in loss and betrayal, though he never polled them to find out) experienced this or noticed.
But he’d returned in that moment from wherever it was he’d gone (not heaven or hell, not some other planet or system of whirling rocks and gas)—nonexistence was all he knew—to a world that was subtly and completely changed. Every person, every animal, every object in it had been replaced by a duplicate, facsimile so cleverly contrived that the replaced would never suspect what had happened. He too had been replaced. The Delvin Walker who sat on an oakwood bench wearing a white cotton shirt and khaki trousers provided by the Song of Ruth AME church over on Suches street in the Congo Quarter (same for the other boys) was not the same Delvin Walker of a moment before. The boy he had been, the young man who, like his mother—so they told him—could whistle through his slightly gapped front teeth, who had begun reading Shakespeare as a boy of six and knew everything there was to know about laying out a body and getting it respectfully into the ground, a man sweet on Celia Cumberland, a partaker of life in an alien land, quick to laugh, slow to take offense, curious about everything, note-taker, writer of things down, adventurer by railroad and foot and hitched ride, lover of vistas and the sour fruit of the quince bush, museum keeper, this boy/man was gone.
He had stood up and started to walk out of the courtroom. A shout arose and some guard, some man he didn’t even know, had clubbed him in the ear. He still had a little cauliflowering from the blow. With the blow (it had been as if) his mind had been knocked out of his body into the street two floors down. He couldn’t believe it—that was putting it mildly.
All these years later he has come to believe it. His mind has filtered on through that.
This man, Preacher Ansley, who himself stuck a knife in the gizzard of some man he thought cheated him, wants him to believe in some alien god. Well, he will get to that when he has finished with this other project, thanks.
He watches the preacher as he walks, swinging lightly a spring of sorrel grass against his leg, and enters the shade of the barracks. Each barracks has two lanterns. There is no real protection against night life. Men lie awake in the dark listening to the mosquitoes whine and the little house lizards chirp. His own steps are lighter now, but not from happiness. Or not only from that. He has told the doc he is better. The doc has made it clear that he isn’t cured but he’s accepted his claim to feeling well enough to get out. Delvin wants to be free of this extra imprisonment. At least he can escape from the infirmary. His clothes smell of sulfur and citronella. He stood in the shade on the eastern side of the infirmary shaking the outdoor smell into his shirt. But he can still smell the pesthouse on his body.
His step is trivial and untrustworthy, the step of a sick man. He wants to lie down in the dust. He stops walking and Milo offers another drink from the tin cup he carries, an act of love since he too thinks the malaria is contagious. The blood sluices in Delvin’s veins; he can feel it washing back and forth, a heatedness picking up speed. The top of his back feels as if a hot board is pressing against it. He staggers; it takes both of them to catch him up. Steadies, he pauses and takes the cup. The sip of water brings with it a yearning for mountain air, for water that tastes of granite, of iron. Often these delicacies of his past revisited. At first he thought they might be helpful in sustaining his drive to escape but they aren’t. He tries to avoid them, but sometimes, as now, they come unbidden.
Up ahead, on the wooden bench encircling the big water oak, Bulky Dunning sits weaving a length of grass rope. Bulky never weaves lengths longer than two or three feet. Any longer and the guards will confiscate it. Some of these lengths he is able to secrete in various cubbyholes around the prison. He plans to go over the wire using one of the joined-together ropes. Delvin knows all about this. Bulky offered to take him with him and Delvin is glad to see that during his period of incapacitation he hasn’t run off. They met at Delvin’s second day at Uniball, when Bulky asked if he was familiar with the negro writer Zora Hurston. No, he said, he wasn’t. “How do you spell that,” he asked. Bulky carefully spelled the name. “Never met anybody named Zora,” Delvin said. “Oh,” Bulky, a bright-eyed little man with a thin mustache, said, “I know several. Down in Florida where I come from they’re all over.” The remark made Delvin laugh. Bulky went on to describe her work, light-footed stories that caught the flavor of negritude without its being stained with white folks’ life. “Some kind of dream?” Delvin had asked. “Better,” Bulky had answered. “‘I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal.’ That’s her.” Delvin had let out a low whistle. “Well, no wonder I never heard of that woman.” “Yeah,” Bulky said. “Spoken by somebody who’s found a way out of the general disrespectfulness.” Delvin laughed again. The words had pricked him; he experienced a sulky, sullen shame that evaporated as quickly as it came. “I want to read one of her books.” But Bulky didn’t have one and he couldn’t remember any of the titles.
He looks up now from plaiting his eternal rope. He stretches the rope through his fingers and flicks the tail of it, smiling calmly at Delvin he gets up and enters the barracks. He wanted that first day, or the day after, to slide into Delvin’s bed, but Delvin shooed him out. “I’m spoke for,” he whispered, which was what he said from the beginning though it hadn’t always worked; he hadn’t always wanted it to; Sandy Suber up at Uniball he loved like he’d never loved a man before, but Sandy died of diphtheria, moaning and blind and crying for his sister. Crouching beside his bed in the dark, Bulky said he didn’t really mind and appeared not to. They talked occasionally when their paths crossed out in the fields and sometimes after supper Bulky would sit with Delvin on the steps behind the kitchen and talk about his boyhood in Florida. He had swum in the Gulf of Mexico, the first colored person Delvin had met who’d done that, and he’d raked oysters and fished for speckled trout with his uncle who owned a boat. These stories charged Delvin up. He wanted to dive into that big blue water even though he hardly knew how to swim. Delvin knows where Bulky keeps his rope. It is coiled in a little rack under the floor of one of the old deserted barracks where it juts over a latrine. The fit is tight and smelly. The officers never poke up there and the prisoners they send feeling around come back saying there wont nothing but black widow spiders. Bulky won’t speak about what is or isn’t under the floor.
As Delvin counts it this is the night Bulky plans to make the slip; thus the occasion of his early release from the infirmary. Bulky isn’t afraid of the red dog, but he is worried about taking along a sick man. He visited Delvin in the infirmary and though no words were spoken on the subject, Delvin understood Bulky to be giving him the high sign on the decampment.
Delvin straightens up. He can bring himself to bear in whatever way is needed—this is what he always tells himself even though it isn’t always true. But now the sweet lift of floating, of drifting through the hot afternoon, calls him. He nods at Bulky and with Milo supporting him makes his way along a path that curves around behind the barracks. Milo directs him into a wide turn toward the barracks door. The shade is no cooler than the sunlight and this pleases him. He squeezes Milo’s arm to make him stop. Over beyond the next barracks, in a chokecherry tree that still has a few black berries in it, before Delvin was hauled off to the pesthouse, a mockingbird took up early morning residence. Bird won’t be there now, but he wants to make sure. The tree is the tallest of three skinny chokecherries just beyond the barracks. The mockingbird lit each morning in the highest branches of the tallest tree, the one on the right. Mockingbirds always like to be as high as they can get. Early, just after the gray light was split open by the morning’s first coloring, the bird took up its trill and its rising and falling forays, imitations of robins and bobwhites and the old brown thrasher bird, cats and even the screek of squirrels. Each morning on the way to breakfast Delvin stopped to listen. The bird is gone now. Maybe Milo’d noticed him, but he doesn’t want to be told the bird no longer comes around. Looking, staring really—no sir.
“No, sir,” the boy says as if he heard, “I aint seen him.”
And they stand gazing like communicants at the empty trees.
After the fight, the ruinous fight, all those years ago now—twelve years by today’s count—he climbed up on top of the boxcar, a blue Tweetsy car, and sat on the catwalk looking at the country. He felt strong and alive, he felt like singing outloud. Off beyond the tailing run of a big grain field the train had passed a small zoo. The zoo had a camel and a bear and a stringy panther cat, some raccoons and possums. He had seen it before on this run. The camel had two humps, one of which flopped over like a half-empty sack. The bear looked dazed. As the train passed the bear rose up on its hind legs and holding to the cage wire gazed at the train. He looked like he knew all about the fight. Delvin felt sad for the bear locked up in a cage and he remembered how the sadness mingled with the satisfaction and easy fatigue from the fight. Then it seemed, just at that moment, as if something was about to be explained, or fall into place, as if he and the bear and everything else living in the world suddenly knew about it and expected it and would be glad when it happened, but the moment slipped by like the zoo slipping by around the long bend and a salient of dark green pines.
“I missed that mockingbird,” Delvin says.
He feels all of a sudden cast down, burned through by the sun, broken up and scattered. Fool loneliness, that’s what it is, and what is he doing thinking about that?
In another minute they are in the barracks and Milo is trying to help him into bed.
“I don’t need none,” Delvin says. He wants to look strong.
He does a couple of jumps just to make Bulky, sitting on his rack three bunks away, think he is a springy character. Is Bulky paying attention? He can’t tell; maybe he is looking at him through his private mosquito net.
Delvin lets himself down again, leans back and after telling Milo to wake him in an hour goes to sleep.
Two hours later he wakes with Milo shaking him and telling him to come to supper. Bulky passes the bed as Delvin is getting up. He leans down without fully stopping, or only stopping for a second—Delvin drowsy still, hot and sweaty—and says “I’ll catch you on the right side,” and passes on smiling in that sideways way he has so he is actually smiling at something off to the other direction.
After supper and after a walk around the compound in the Sunday dusk that smells of green pecans, after a few short conversations with this or that wise or feckless one, he heads back to his bed. The sheet still smells faintly of his body. Milo squats next to him.
“We’ll wake you,” Delvin says.
The boy’s eyes shine. He lets his hand fall on the boy’s; the pull of his flesh that always smells faintly of wood smoke is strong; he grips the two middle fingers and lets go. He wants to grab the boy’s shirt collar and pull him down, smash his face right into his own. The boy’s fine soft lips are sweet. He wants everything in him, wants the weight of flesh on him, wants to feel his hands, the ingenious fingers, the energy that leaps into him from Milo’s touch. But he is too tired. He wants to sleep and he wants to be alone even more than he wants the boy. He wants to escape into oblivion. His shoulders ache deep in the sockets.
Milo runs his hand over Delvin’s knuckles.
“You feel like you coming back to life,” he says. “I like that.”
He grins. Around them others are getting ready for their night’s endeavors, alone or with a friend. The bell rings for lights out. Little Boy Dunlap blows out the lanterns. He makes a little funny squealing sound after he blows out the last one. Sam Brown, Little Boy’s protector, laughs as he always does. The prisoners can hear guards out in the yards talking. They will be walking around all night. They have a routine not difficult to keep track of. Delvin lies listening to the footfalls. He recognizes Blubber Watts’s heavy step. Blubber will beat you to death if you give him half a reason. Or no reason at all, Delvin thinks just before he vanishes into sleep.