“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
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
Slippery, bendable stuff, that’s me, he thought, and plumped his pillow and lay looking up at the ceiling.
