Ginny Gall полностью

The morning came up sunny, with only a few shredded clouds in the south. They weren’t high enough in the mountains to miss the humidity. It lay like a film of grease on everybody’s skin. In his notebook he had written sun plowing the night under. . day touching itself everywhere. . Were they his words, or had he copied them from somewhere? Tapping at the page, he couldn’t remember now. He looked around for familiars. Maybe one would show. He recognized a boy from over on the west side, Calvin Binger, and he waved to him. Calvin gave him a slow sweep of wave back, which was his style. They both kept their seat. A man standing in the grass scratching his thigh through new blue jeans looked familiar, but not from here. He looked like a yegg he’d run across, or no, somebody, maybe it was the line foreman Trobilly had pointed out to him in Baton Rouge. They had been eating coon meat sandwiches, a first for Delvin, over near the closed-down rendering plant in the Larusse district near where Molly Picone got killed that time in November when the weather turned foul and her hincty boyfriend turned foul with it. That had been a rough time for everybody. They had tried to pull her out of the rot-choked slough she’d been thrown into — coax her out — but she was more scared of her boyfriend than she was of drowning and wouldn’t come. She was wearing a long yellow dress like a wool nightgown and the dress spread out all around her and as she went under she was singing the Bessie Smith song “One More Good Time with You.” They had stood on the bank crying like babies. That was where that man he was looking at now, hunched up under a peaked gray cap, had been pointed out to him — not the first such a one — as somebody to stay away from. They were the ones you wanted to avoid on these trips. Wolves and high jackets and crazy men, desocialized tramps of evil intent and slimy ways, the rail fighters, croakers who traveled the circuit looking for somebody to whale away on, beat to death and then stomp on the corpse. Few were like that, but there were always those good sense and kindness had never reached. It wasn’t always easy to tell, not at first anyway, not until you got a feel for it.

Delvin took out his volume of Du Bois essays and began to read. Du Bois was writing about the threads that bound a people together. Delvin stopped. He was thinking about skin color. The photographs in the professor’s museum. Black-and-white photos sure, the mix like out here, but not like out here because here the colors didn’t mix, or if they did you were still only the one color, no matter how you fractionalized it; if there was any negro in you, you were negro only. Just a drop would do. Like we were tainted, he thought. But him, Delvin the Dark, he loved the rich deep colors best. His own face was among the blackest. But even among africano folks the light-skinned got the biggest portion. They were treated with more respect. As a tiny child he had sometimes been laughed at, called a dewbaby.

He shivered, and a thin string of anger pulled tight in him. Then the soft drop into gloom. These passed. He liked being dark-skinned. Some of the faces in the photos — he could see all the way back to the African beginnings. It stirred his body strangely to find himself peering through time at faces that carried in them a million years of life and history. As he looked he could feel the wind slipping up a river, turning little dust devils on the dry bank. He could smell the rank stink of a sun-rotted pelt. The people in these faces — what had they been doing out there?

Then he was thinking of Celia. Oh, he shouldn’t have left the letters. Maybe he had misread them; he was capable of it. Mr. Rome had not shown up as promised in Chattanooga. He had looked out for him every day, but the reciter had not appeared. Maybe he hadn’t reached Chicago, where he was to deliver his message to Celia. In the train yard he had asked about him, but no one coming in had seen him. He didn’t know what had happened. He’d written Celia about him coming, but in her return she said the little man had not appeared. He’d asked her to write him in Memphis, general delivery. That was where he was going too, before — maybe — he headed out west. But what was there now in Memphis? His insides clutched. He was a fool. He thought of her dark african face. Even close to her he was looking into time. He wanted to run his fingers over her face, like a blind man, a man who saw the world as black. Maybe he could go find those letters again. Maybe they were still there.