Mr. Pullen had laid out the case, and though he said it was clear as day that the men hadn’t committed the crime, Delvin couldn’t see one good thing about what was coming. Even Little Buster, a child who didn’t know how to read and had to count on his fingers, saw that the joke was on the africano boys. “Might as well get to training for jail,” he’d said. “That is if they don’t light us up.” “We in that training now, fool,” Carl Crawford told him. But two of the boys were so ignorant they hardly realized they were in jail.
In his bed at night Delvin lay on his belly pushing his face into the cotton pallet, coughing up tears until his stomach cramped. My everyday path a road of fire. He jammed his fist into his mouth and bit down so hard the pain made him shiver and cry out. “That you, Delvin?” Bonette Collins called out. Delvin didn’t answer, but then when he saw in the dark that Bonette was getting out of his bunk he told him to stay where he was. “I’s all right,” he said. He tried not to let them see him crying, but they could each see the dismals in the others’ faces, the torment. They looked like their best friend had died. Or more, as if something promised — so ordinary and inevitable and such a sure thing they didn’t have to give it a thought — had suddenly been taken away. Something — slide of blood in the veins, the world’s itinerant sweetness — that you didn’t even know could be taken away, something you hardly even knew you had. But, gone. . you were broken and scattered. The white folks made you feel small, sure. They made you feel you were wrong to be. . yeah, to be. But this that was snatched away now was none of that. This was something else. “It’s like we was walking along,” Coover Broadfoot said, “and a mule fell out of the sky and hit us.” “I know which mule it was, too,” Bonette Collins said and the others laughed; they all knew. When you thought about what was happening — what was going to happen — you got so scared you couldn’t think straight.
This is grief, Delvin thought. We’re in mourning.
He wrote some of this down in the little notebook Gammon had told the jailer he needed for the case — not really a notebook but one somebody’d torn crossways in half; enough to write on. It had a mud stain on it and the pages were hooped where they’d gotten wet and dried out. You want to run right through the walls. Sometimes you can hardly draw breath; sometimes you can’t get any air in your breath. Carl said he thought he was drowning. We all think we are drowning. But we aren’t drowning and we have to breathe and we can’t. . He tried to stick to what was going on right this minute. I am chewing a piece of hard yellow cornbread, he wrote, one chew, two, three. . my fingernails are turning brown. . and on he went, but his mind wouldn’t stay on bread chewing or his nails — or walking up and down or staring at the tin-sheathed wall where a window ought to be.
