Ginny Gall полностью

“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.”