He wants to tell him about his plans for writing a book, but he hesitates. To say the words—he is afraid they’ll curdle it. And hell—a book—he is just talking, just dreaming on his feet.
“I want to see something I hadn’t ever seen before.”
“You can see that right here. We just had a display there in the house.”
“I’m sorry about that. I know how a passing can cut deep.”
“Not too deep—not this one.”
“Yeah, and I know you got a promising life here and all, but I’m thinking of my personal plans.”
“Sure you are. I got plans too. Sometimes I can see em right out in front of me. At least up to a point.”
That point being, so Delvin knew, the one where you give up because you have to admit to yourself that every day is going to be like the one you just finished. It is why things around here like weather and holidays and births and deaths and the mysteries of religion are so important. Harmless fun. Constant pressure from the white folks until you got to bust out. So you rob a store or kill somebody and here you go down into the hole. Big Broadus back at Burning Mountain said he ought to just settle down and do his time. Well, that is what everybody with sense or asleep out here is doing too. In him is something scratchy and moving. Good or bad he doesn’t know. Something clucking at night or whispering to him or pleading. Maybe that is the way the gods have come back. The professor said conscience is as close as we get anymore to the gods. But in prison his conscience has become strained and elaborated with unusual amendments and declarations. He doesn’t know anymore what kind of voice speaks to him. He can hardly sit here now with this farm boy talking. He wants to leap up and run off, just keep running.
“I think I want to move around for my whole life.”
“I was in New Orleans once,” John Paul says, “but it knocked me down and trampled on me. I was lucky to get back here with any hide left on my body.”
“You didn’t uncover anything you liked?”
“Sholly I did. That’s what got me runned over.” He scratches his temple with the end of a twig. “I guess after you sit in the jailhouse for a while even a section of dirt road with nobody on it starts to look good.”
“I reckon.”
“I don’t want to get into no jailhouse.”
“No you don’t.”
He doesn’t either want to get in a jailhouse and feels the press and cluster of an excisement only partial, ragged in his body as he moves about the homestead. He is shy of the porch and the steps and the rooms filled with the smell of fatback and corn mush and the smells of women and he is shy in the yard where they have set out wild rose bushes in buckets and shy too even in the backhouse where an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue serves as paper. He sidles away, drifting along a line of diminishing notification, and finds a little spot among myrtle bushes back behind the house where he feels most safe and sits on the grass there thinking. He can think about anything and so he thinks of the Gulf and the wide world beyond it and he’s done this before even though the cons told him not to but this time it seems close enough to touch almost. Space. That’s where they keep it. So get down to the Gulf. His heart beats faster than usual and he knows already his loneliness has extended out into the world, following him like a dog. It is still there. I am a common man, he thinks, and on this day I am free to walk around loose but I am still lonely and maybe there is no cure for it. He wonders what Milo is doing, if he is alive, and Ralph Curry and Peaches and Still Run Siems and Bony and Carl and the preacher and his minions. He leans over his knees with his hands gripped together as the worshippers do and says a few words about the wideness of the world and finding a place in it, just general commentary and wondering. He is still tired but a new energy has poked up in him like a fresh growth. He is tapping along like a blind man, looking for a way to open up. The sun streaks his shoulders with a softening light. He begins to cry and he lets himself go with this until he hears himself making noise and stops. He leans over his knees and presses his hands flat on the grass and holds them there like he is holding the world down. Or gripping it by the handle. Nobody comes along and tells him to move on.
Two days later he catches a ride on a wagon heading down to Salt Town to pick up a load of oysters and fish. Every so often this run is made and the seafood brought back under croaker sacks piled with cracked ice to sell in the communities, white folks first. The bed of the wagon gleams with fish scales. The man who carries him, Billy Foster, wears a pair of washed-out overalls and a patched gray shirt buttoned at the wrist and all the way to the Gulf he talks mournfully about his wife who has recently taken up with another man. There are fish scales on his cracked boots and his small flat fingernails gleam like scales. He seems at every minute about to cry but he doesn’t.
“You can’t make em do what they won’t,” he says glumly, clucking at the hammer-headed mule over the cotton plowline he uses for reins.
The sky is cloudy for the ten miles down and as they arrive in Salt Town it begins softly to rain. Delvin bids the man farewell and walks along the sandy main road out to the beach that is gray and littered with pine straw and forbidden to a person of color and stands under the tall longleaf pines looking out at the chopped-up gray Gulf. The water seems to be moving steadily toward him and this bothers him and he retreats farther back among the trees. Three or four short roads run in from the main road to the water. A few white men are standing out in the low brown surf working a long net. He walks back closer to the waves, but not far, not even out from under the pines. He doesn’t like the shaky look of the water, doesn’t like how big and empty it is, and the white men spook him. Getting out into that world of salt and waves and white men pulling on nets like they think they are back on the shores of Galilee or someplace; it is too much for him. He’ll just stand a while under these whishing pine trees, he thinks, and enjoy being a free man.
7
Gammon entered the visiting room that was only a squared-off bit of an old holding cell that had bars over a single taped-over window with one little corner scraped away so if you put your eye to it you could see across the street the corner of the Miller Finery sign and the screen-door entrance to the Collins Bakery and a set of cement steps leading where you couldn’t tell, and told Delvin that he had found the woman he saw in the gallery and she said she was not his mother.
“Maybe she is lying to protect herself—and me.”
“Maybe that is true,” Gammon said, “but she says it isn’t—I asked that too—and says that she dudn’t want to come to the jail.”
“Maybe I will just have to go see her,” Delvin said and laughed a dry laugh. He could feel a mercilessness rising in his soul. Soul, he thought, I don’t know what that is.
Gammon looked at him with mixed compassion and and aggravation and said he didn’t think things were going very well.
“I thought it was your job to keep everything hopeful.”
“Yes, that is what I am supposed to do and I am sorry I have failed.”
“Don’t worry your head with it,” Delvin said. “I won’t be long for this place whatever you do.”
“I hope that dudn’t mean you are going to try to escape.”
“You are a foolish person,” Delvin said without heat. He felt things flattening out, sliding away. He knew his mother was gone, but just one little (maybe) glimpse and it was as if she was back. Something peeled off in his heart. He grimaced.
“It’s not cause of you,” Gammon said.
“What’s that?” Delvin said, startled.
“The trial.”
“I sho didn’t help the truth along though.”
“Truth’s a stone these folks don’t want to swallow.”
“It was just so clear to me that we done nothing. And before I could say a word the bottom fell out.”
“Nothing you could do really.”
“I might as well have just got up and danced and capered.”
He wanted the boy to shut up, stop talking so much.
“The truth,” he said, “no matter what they do with it, is now in the court record. That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah. For the historians.”
The boy was smart and he knew the story but he hadn’t been able to tell it. Like all of them he didn’t believe what was happening to him. Three hundred years of teaching, and they still didn’t get it.
“We’ll do all right.”
“Yes, a foolish person,” Delvin said, smiling a plain, uninflected smile. In his mind he said Let them be brought before me: I will deny every one. He didn’t know what this meant or where the words came from. Back in his cell later he whispered the words again: I will deny every one of them.
Billy Gammon returned to his three-dollar-a-night hotel room and lay on his bed. He had spoken to Miss Ellen Bayride from Birmingham that night and she had looked at him as if he had got some black on him. That was what happened to lawyers who put up a rigorous defense for negro men. Such negro men as this. Well, that part of it was all right. But he was sorry she felt that way, disappointed, and dismal. He pictured her walking to her house where she stayed with her aunt, Mrs. Walter Shrove, after sending her story by wire to the paper in the capital. She would sit in the kitchen eating supper and talking about the WCU with her aunt. Her aunt was a big wheel in the WCU, the Baptist women were the ones, so they claimed, who really ran the state. This was probably true, he thought. They are the ones who want most to keep the colored folks from getting ahead. Ahead they turn around and start rustling the women. Would they think that was bad or secretly good? Jesus, he thought, sat up and poured himself a drink. He wished he was a man of heroic character. He was not, he knew that. If you put your heart into it you are going to get a chance to see what you are really made of. So said his uncle Henry who had contributed to his raising, overcontributed. He had stood outside the telegraph office looking at her through the dusty picture window as she sent her story off to the capital. In the dust with his finger he wrote I am what you don’t think I am and she had turned around and seen the words—written backwards in the white dust—and acted as if she didn’t see them and went back to speaking to the clerk and after a while he had walked away.
Slippery, bendable stuff, that’s me, he thought, and plumped his pillow and lay looking up at the ceiling.
Delvin sat all night on the floor of the holding cell pressing his back against the tin-sheathed wall, falling asleep and waking in a start, coming out of sleep like coming out of a fit, only quieter. He imagined he could press right through the metal and timber and brick and bust out into the night. Everything’s already moved off and left me, he thought. And he thought I got one dip and that’s it, and a heavy pain entered his body and he lay on his side thinking where are they?—who are they and where are they?—remembering the time in Jackson, Mississippi, when he rode in a cab for the only time in his life, hurrying to the hospital where the professor had gone when he thought he was having a heart attack. He wasn’t but they had him in bed in the colored ward and he was sitting up looking out the window. Just now, he said, I saw a man try to hand a sandwich to a squirrel. He was smiling and the smile was held close to himself, a personal smile he had for his own private joys. I got to get me one of those smiles, Delvin had thought. He told the professor about riding in the cab that smelled of hair preparation and the window handle didn’t work but was choice anyway, but the professor wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t get my story across to him then either. The professor had a better one. But he knew he had stories inside him that were like silver fish swimming in fresh cool water. I got to keep em alive, he thought. Don’t let time to come chisel down and take em. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could do that, maybe not. Bonette and Little Buster Wayfield whimpered in their bunks. That was all right. Carl slept soundly, emitting little puffy snores that sounded like rain falling softly on the plank floor. These boys he didn’t even know really. Chattanooga boys he would probably never even have talked to, n’ar would they have talked to him. He leaned his head back and pictured riding on a train to Celia’s house. His mother was there waiting for him too. And maybe his father who he couldn’t picture from life but looked, so his mother had told him once, like a photograph of John Wilkes Booth, except he was colored. He had been embarrassed to tell anybody that his father looked like President Lincoln’s assassin. But he would write it down in his book. The night lay its hand on him like an ordination, he didn’t know for what salvation, and pressed him down into sleep. In a dream he saw his father, and his father was bending down to look at his face in the smooth surface of a stream, only there was no reflection. He tried to get out of the dream and thought he woke but he didn’t, not yet, but he didn’t remember what came after except it was too dark.
As he settled onto the board seat in the enclosed back of the state truck carrying them to Burning Mountain penitentiary, Delvin tried to picture what he was missing out on that day but he got only as far as rice pudding and the copy of Joe Bakerfield’s Boston speeches that he’d left in the professor’s truck.
I’m just a sweetback, he told himself, which was what they called those just sampling the hobo life, passing by on the cob.
His first escape attempt would not be his last; he had promised himself that.
Beside him Bony wept steadily, like a tiny seep. He had cried all night in his sleep and he was crying when he woke up. He leaned against Delvin and from time to time Delvin put his hand on his shoulder. Bony had pissed his pants when the pharmacy clerk jury foreman Bivins, with the warrant held up in both bony hands, had read the verdict in his cramped and wheezy voice.
All you bastards, you menless men, you hopeless negroes, are sentenced to forced familiarity and slave labor and a stab in the eye. You are all condemned to hell.
So this is where you keep it, Delvin thought when he heard the man read the sentence. He hadn’t expected anything different but still he was shocked. You think somebody’s going to wake up, some bit of religion or hope or human reason or kindness is going to kick in, but then it doesn’t and you stop thinking that. His knees had wobbled. He’d thought he was going to vomit and he swallowed back down a mouthful of bitter juice. Rollie had cried out and behind them in the balcony reserved for colored a few women had shouted out—not his mother—and a few had called for Jesus or Mary or Elijah. The judge told them to shut up. He had no kindness in him, this judge. “We will appeal,” Billy Gammon had whispered to him. “Don’t worry.”
But then the road of your life forked and you were being dragged down the dark one. For the rest of my life I’m going to be trying to get out of something. Everybody had lied. The white boys, the women, the doctors, even two of the boys in his gang. It wasn’t a gang, but two of them, Bony and Little Buster, had begun to believe they had assaulted the women. On the stand, squirming in the big brown chair, they had said they might have broke in—Little Buster said it and Bony confirmed—on those two women.
Suddenly the whirlwind dips down, picks you up and throws you against the rocks. No wonder all those women cry out in church. Where do you turn then?
Well, you sit down here and you start thinking how you are going to get loose.
Running is all he thinks about. He thought about it on the truck ride carrying him fully sentenced into the heart—no, the liver, no, the excremental bowels—of Dixie, and he thinks about it as the gray-suited guards walk them through the wire gantlet to the back of the Burning Mountain prison where there is a cleared space behind the big mess hall that stinks of stew beans and carbolic acid and march them up a flight of steel steps and in through a door above which is a sign that says WELCOME TO YOUR BURNING MOUNTAIN HOME and lock them inside where the concrete walls have sweated through and the place clangs and bellows with blows flung against metal and stone and they are welcomed by no one. And he thinks about it when they make them strip and place their hands against the wet stone wall and spread their legs and he feels the probe of a round-headed stick up his ass and then they make them shuffle into the dip pool where a mixture smelling of kerosene and sulfur and some other foul substance kills the lice and and all traces of civilized life so they come out burning with their new skin (that is still black) and are hustled to the showers where the water stings like acid—even then, among the piercing proofs of grief, he thinks of how to break free; and he thinks of jumping as he walks to the holding tank, where Butter gets in a fight with Rollie Gregory and almost chokes him to death; and later on that afternoon in his cell, which holds three men who are not happy to see him though they are curious and they touch and pat him and pump his muscles like stringy lions testing the new calf—they consider him a fool and causer of trouble for negroes in general because he raped those white women; and he thinks about it the first night as he crams the end of his wool blanket into his mouth to stifle his cries.
Every day in Burning Mountain prison he thinks of how to get out and joins a group that fashions shanks of sufficient quality and plans to perforate the guards—as Ricey Fleming put it—and flee from the cotton fields into Big Panther woods. He never has a shank in his hand but when the time comes he runs as hard as he can, a fleet boy with thin hard calves and narrow hips, and reaches the woods where he wanders around for four days before they find him hiding in an earth cave below a big chestnut tree blown down in a cyclone the year before. He is dirty and hungry and bitten by deerflies and after they keep him for a day and a half chained to an iron hoop jammed into the red dirt in front of the metal shop he is thrown into and left lying on his belly in the Wire Room which is a cage out in the exercise yard open to weather and to the gaze and taunts of the inmates. He remains there for a month like a half-habitated carcass under fall storms and drying spells swirled about with the rich alluvial dust of the fields and environs, crouched for a time like a cat waiting to spring away, then sprawling, attempting to tell himself stories that he half makes up about traveling into a strange country by boxcar train. The woods a distant slum of leaves, he says, untended quarter of loneliness and peril. He dreams of banditries worked on his close person and aches in the dreams for the touch of a woman whom he never knows, never can even see—she isn’t Celia—but one who speaks in the hollow, coughing voices of animals penned up for life. On the afternoon they come to get him again he is standing like a soldier facing the wire, seeing if he can with his mind lift himself to the other side of the prison wall. “Thought I’d go get a Orange Crush,” he says when somebody asks him about it.
They put him with the death row prisoners and he doesn’t get off his cellblock again for two years, except for the afternoon escape trial conducted at the prison where ten years are added to his life sentence, until he goes before a judge—a new one—for a new (same old rape) trial in which the witnesses are a little more shaky this time and the prosecutors just a little more tired.
Like leaves falling from the tree of knowledge, the group, the old KO Boys, sheds members. The years knead them, cuff them, crease their backs, spit into the open pit of their skulls, and let them go. Bonette and Butter Beecham are released—called too incapacious to perform the acts they were accused of. They weep with their faces on the table. When Butter raises his head, Delvin sees a man blind with joy and relief, and he thinks he will be sick from despair. The letter he gets from Butter (penned by his aunt in florid, looping script) thanking him for his care of him during their time together is like a trick that nearly drives him to kill himself. Placer Wilkes gives him a little triangular piece of glass in the exercise yard to do it with. The shard is cloudy green like runoff water and brings back the memory of Jim’s Gully in Chattanooga, the one separating the negro life of Red Row from the whites. The only private prisonwise place is his bed, and late in October he lies in the half light under the thin covers, drawing the glass across his throat. Humped under the blanket like a jackoff artist sunk in a dim wretchedness and ignorance, he feels like a fool. A shaky, choked, exasperated laugh catches in his mouth. He wants to explain himself. A fly has gotten in under the blanket with him. He can feel it crawling on his back. Explain? It’s a burning palsy, he says silently. He probes with the glass. Where does this instrument come from? From under the earth maybe, incised by an ocean turning and forgetting. He can smell the water in the stone walls. He can hear distant cries, men calling out under the weight of smothering dreams. He curls up tight and a little at a time lets himself go into tears, stopping and starting, catching himself each time just before falling over the brink. For a second he loses hold, grabs himself back, jabbing the point of the glass against his forehead. This scares him, but not badly, not enough to change how he thinks. There are tears on his face. He scrapes them off with the flat of the glass. Slowly he comes back around. The fly has crawled down to his waist and he tries to trap it there but it gets away.
The next day he returns the shard to Placer who loses it in a game of two punch to a man who breaks it against a bone in his hip trying to stab a vein. “He never meant to go tits up either,” Placer says, disgusted.
On a sunny morning in late September when the cattails in the road ditches are starting to fray Delvin and three of the leftover KO Boys are shipped to Uniball, a brick and wire stronghold out in the western part of the state, and there, a month later, Delvin is raped for the first time. The rapist, a metal worker from Missouri named Big Cordell Owlsley, decided Delvin was his kind of boy, and one afternoon in bleak weather he shoves him against a stack of wet lumber and holds him there while Delvin tries to knock his hand away and can’t. God save me, he silently says. They are in the shadows in back of the carpentry shop where nobody can see them except those who could spy on them from the slit windows of their cells. It is a show. The lumber has a sour smell. My stage, Delvin thinks, pitying himself and angry. Cordell spins him around and pins him against the raw boards and holds him until he stops squirming. The big man wants first to get across to him that Delvin is not strong or able and he does this. He pulls Delvin’s stripes down, and as he does so Delvin recalls somebody doing this years ago when he was a child in the foundling home and he feels now as he did then, helpless and brokenhearted. It is near dark, fall going on wintertime, and cold on his bare ass and the wood is wet against his thighs and he thinks I got to dry off and he says this like a prayer but the man pays no mind. Big C’s stiff wrinkled penis bangs against him, knocking on the door that he forces open, lifting as he does so. He’s smeared grease on himself that he got from a thick streak on the leg of his uniform. Searing pain skeets up into Delvin’s chest and down his legs and then, like a wave, slackens and he can feel it rolling back in a slow decline that becomes more fantastical and sustaining as it goes. He leans forward against the wood and the hardness and sourness of the logs do not bother him so much. A humid disgust rolls sloppily through him. Then he presses back hard against the man’s belly that he can feel jamming his spine and this is fantastical too, impossible to believe and somehow encouraging, and for a second he feels safe and without much to care about and then the humiliation and the shame build a putrid radiance and he knows himself hopeless and desolate like a child hurled down into muddy water, except more helpless and smaller than a child, and he wishes the man would go ahead and kill him.
In a few seconds Big Cordell is through. He turns Delvin around and embraces him and leans with him against the sour lumber so their two bodies are heaped together like spillage left over from a botched organic process, some feral disaster and murderous unoxidized carnage, something done now for good, and then as Cordell gets his strength back he cuffs him in the temple with the heel of his hand and tells him he is lucky not to be dead.
“Yeah, dead,” Delvin wheezes and Big C cuffs him again.
Everybody who didn’t see it says he did and they are all for it, or close to all because they knew what was up when they saw it. The three KO boys who came with him to Uniball look pityingly at him, scared near witless, he thinks, and one, Carl Crawford, mocks him to his face. For three days he walks with a limp and then for some reason extends it in duration until he becomes known for his limp, a made-up thing, something private to himself no one else knows the truth of. Shame turns his face at first and he knows he is hurt deep and this shakes him but in prison each day is the same, you can count on that and he begins to merge with the sameness, the eat and sleep and work of it and the walk and the muttering and the lights on all the time and nobody your brother but everybody your kin and he returns slowly to himself despite the shame. Nobody cares how he feels about it and he waits for that time to come for him too.
The curtain raiser rape is the initiation. Tidal, hurried at first then less so, the ushering frenzy never quite gone from it, the drear and loneliness underneath it not ever quite obscured, the sense he gets not of endearment or even of partnership maintained like a necessary toll, the distancing, the forsaken man standing in rain at the edge of a muddy field part of it, a regular feature, still times come when he reaches back and strokes the man’s sleek body. Occasionally Big C pulls him around so he faces him. He holds his forearm over Delvin’s eyes. “Got me some,” he says, maybe those words or others drowned in the corrosions of his own energy, but mostly there are no features at all beyond the squeak and slap of flesh and his greedy eyes looking. “You get out of here,” Big C says when it is over and pulls him back and kisses him sloppily on the mouth and then half throws him away. He wants Delvin ripely and keeps him handy like a ripped-away branch stuck in a bucket of water, until one day Delvin, grown stronger, sprouts, coming into himself fully despite delays, more steely in his mind, and without caring much about what happens, turns suddenly in the big man’s arms and batters his skull half in with a piece of angle iron.
He leaves him lying evermore only partially alive, in a pile of wooden boxes used to ship the fruitcakes the prison bakery is famous for.
Everybody sees that too.
And he knows after they don’t come for him that he’ll be left alone now to walk the halls and climb and descend the steel stairs and go out the big double doors to the trucks and ride to the fields and bend his back over a hoe or drag a sack or pile the cotton in the cotton house or into the wagons for the mules to haul to the gin and he will get to eat his meals in peace and sit on his bunk scribbling into his little torn notebook (sky like a dense gray blanket; somebody left a scrap of pink ribbon tied to a gallberry branch; for ten days the water has tasted of sulfur) and time with him in it will pass until he can run again.
It isn’t long before he finds a sweet boy of his own. Gal boy. Frankie Overstreet, from Caning Bay, Louisiana, a strong boy who is steady and can take direction. Together they work on the next escape, which means nothing more than on Juneteenth afternoon while the cicadas shrill in the hard maple trees the two of them walk away from the work gang sent out in the aftermath of the Tull river flood. They are cutting brush and pulling it away from a two-story house that floated off its foundation and across a field into a slough behind the Mercantile Appliance factory outside Covington when Delvin, followed by Frankie, steps off a thigh-sized maple limb into a second-floor bedroom, walks through the open bedroom doorway, along the hall and down the stairs, through the living room and out an unwatched west-facing window on the other side and slips into the woods.
He is gone this time for three days shy of a month. During this time Frankie leaves on a truck hauling oysters to Texas.
In New Orleans a waitress he meets puts him up in her cottage in the sixth ward, where he gets a job washing dishes at the Empire restaurant, famous for redfish stew and an étouffée made with six kinds of seafood all caught locally. It is there that a vacationing prison guard named Elder Watkins spots him. Watkins doesn’t at first rec ognize Delvin, but then on his way back to town, where his wife and brother wait in a French Quarter hotel, he becomes convinced that the scowling boy he glimpsed through the open kitchen door was none other than the escapee Delvin Walker, had to be. He stops in a rain squall with water dripping down his neck to use a police call box on Charles street that his brother, a New Orleans cop on furlough for taking kickbacks from restaurants such as the Empire, has lent him his key to and asks for help.
The nearest station house sends two cars and the cops capture Delvin who has not noticed Watkins; he is sitting on the steps out back, eating a bowl of crab stew and drinking from a bottle of Cuban rum with some of the busboys and the waitress Corleen Bell, who’s been soaking the male influence out of his body for the past two weeks, and he thinks he is, if not safe, free, and is beginning to feel comfortable at Corleen’s house, where as soon as he gets a little ahead he is planning to start his book of factual experience that he is calling at this time Layaway Dixie.
The cops come trotting down the fly space between the restaurant and the Pearl Box Factory fence on the other side and scoop Delvin up before he hardly knows what is happening. As they begin to beat him, he says calmly, “I am all right about going with you.” He says this three or four times before they knock him senseless.
Concussed, his left arm (the stronger one) broken, he is carried across state lines back to Uniball, where the arm is splinted using untreated pine flats and he is ushered into the disposal cell, one of several rooms in the basement under the former gymnasium from when Uniball was a private school for the wayward sons of rich planters. These rooms that were once storage bins have been enclosed and set with stout cross-braced metal doors, new this year, painted yellow.
Delvin is flung into the second bin from the right as you look down the hall. The throw half unsets his arm, a problem he is forced to correct on his own, which he does with his right hand pushing his back hard against the mortar wall to try to counterbalance the stabbing pain.
He screams, but then who, thrown battered and broken-armed into moldy darkness, does not scream from time to time? The guards ignore him.
It is here he discovers that his spirit has the kind of amplification and reaching toward far places that allows him to lie still while snakes crawl over him.
Ginny Galled, you might say—a negro name, Ginny Gall, for the hell beyond hell, hell’s hell—he begins to tell himself his book.
. . . born on the back steps of a sporting girl’s house in Chattanooga and from there travels a crooked way through the cobbled streets of that town and into the woods and back to the visiting circus and then to the undertaker’s house where as a six-year-old boy he liked to sit on the back of the hairy-footed dray horse Old Bob. The horse was so wide he believed he could sleep on his back, get a mattress and blanket and move onto him. He asked Mr. Oliver if he could and Mr. O laughed his high sweet laugh and said why sholy you can my boy and it wasn’t until they caught him dragging the mattress from his little sleigh bed out the back door that he was stopped from trying. “But you told me,” he said to Mr. O as tears streamed down his face. “Yes, I did, and I was wrong to tell you you could do something that I couldn’t really let you do.” Mr. O was tangled up. “I’ll have to keep an eye on myself from now on,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on you too,” the little boy said. Mr. O said, “I’m sorry, Slip,” which was what he was called around the house in those days.