Up ahead he sees the snub boat and then he loses it in the night haze and distance and rides quietly until maybe four or five miles on as they come down on the town he sees the boat again far ahead amid lights and what appear to be a string of boats. The boats have motors attached and when the white men in them see the little boat coming toward them they rev up and head toward it. The boys in the overloaded escape boat try to paddle to shore but they don’t have the power for it. The white men begin shooting even before they are close to the boat. By time they have gotten to it one of them shouts back that there aint anything in here to shoot at cause these niggers is all dead already.
Delvin comes right down on the guard boats. Before he gets there he slides off and stays low in the water, just touching the log enough to keep hold of it, and in this way drifts by the picket line of jailers and sheriff’s deputies and local men both hired and freely come for action. For several minutes they are all around him, heavy shapes in dark clothes. One small boatload pushed by a little motor pokes at the log but Delvin has gone under and though he keeps his grip on the mossy skin they do not see him in the dark and the log turns in the current and is away downstream. Somebody fires a shot anyway and Delvin feels the bullet slap the heavy wood.
Then he is free of the boats and free of the lights and he travels along holding on to the log, trying to keep from falling asleep. He wants to let go and drift away but he catches himself. A barge stacked with cotton bales, pushed by a squat tug, chugs past and he hears the white men on it shouting at each other. It sounds as if they are having a fight. They curse, making threats; it is like hobo life, and thinking this his spirit wakens or shifts in a new way, or an old way recalled, and a sadness cuts into him. But there is happiness mixed with it, a sense of life going on in a world he is part of, not this world of battering and futility but the other — pinched as it is — smelling of churned water and living things moving through the air. It’s natural to him and he realizes this, the world that can’t really be taken away from him, no matter the prison they put him in. He watches the stacked bales disappear ahead and listens to the voices, rich with unimprisoned life — anger edging into sorrow and bafflement and an exculpatory meekness that touches him through his skin — fade into the night.
