Delvin sat all night on the floor of the holding cell pressing his back against the tin-sheathed wall, falling asleep and waking in a start, coming out of sleep like coming out of a fit, only quieter. He imagined he could press right through the metal and timber and brick and bust out into the night. Everything’s already moved off and left me, he thought. And he thought I got one dip and that’s it, and a heavy pain entered his body and he lay on his side thinking where are they? — who are they and where are they? — remembering the time in Jackson, Mississippi, when he rode in a cab for the only time in his life, hurrying to the hospital where the professor had gone when he thought he was having a heart attack. He wasn’t but they had him in bed in the colored ward and he was sitting up looking out the window. Just now, he said, I saw a man try to hand a sandwich to a squirrel. He was smiling and the smile was held close to himself, a personal smile he had for his own private joys. I got to get me one of those smiles, Delvin had thought. He told the professor about riding in the cab that smelled of hair preparation and the window handle didn’t work but was choice anyway, but the professor wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t get my story across to him then either. The professor had a better one. But he knew he had stories inside him that were like silver fish swimming in fresh cool water. I got to keep em alive, he thought. Don’t let time to come chisel down and take em. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could do that, maybe not. Bonette and Little Buster Wayfield whimpered in their bunks. That was all right. Carl slept soundly, emitting little puffy snores that sounded like rain falling softly on the plank floor. These boys he didn’t even know really. Chattanooga boys he would probably never even have talked to, n’ar would they have talked to him. He leaned his head back and pictured riding on a train to Celia’s house. His mother was there waiting for him too. And maybe his father who he couldn’t picture from life but looked, so his mother had told him once, like a photograph of John Wilkes Booth, except he was colored. He had been embarrassed to tell anybody that his father looked like President Lincoln’s assassin. But he would write it down in his book. The night lay its hand on him like an ordination, he didn’t know for what salvation, and pressed him down into sleep. In a dream he saw his father, and his father was bending down to look at his face in the smooth surface of a stream, only there was no reflection. He tried to get out of the dream and thought he woke but he didn’t, not yet, but he didn’t remember what came after except it was too dark.
As he settled onto the board seat in the enclosed back of the state truck carrying them to Burning Mountain penitentiary, Delvin tried to picture what he was missing out on that day but he got only as far as rice pudding and the copy of Joe Bakerfield’s Boston speeches that he’d left in the professor’s truck.
I’m just a sweetback, he told himself, which was what they called those just sampling the hobo life, passing by on the cob.
His first escape attempt would not be his last; he had promised himself that.
Beside him Bony wept steadily, like a tiny seep. He had cried all night in his sleep and he was crying when he woke up. He leaned against Delvin and from time to time Delvin put his hand on his shoulder. Bony had pissed his pants when the pharmacy clerk jury foreman Bivins, with the warrant held up in both bony hands, had read the verdict in his cramped and wheezy voice.
All you bastards, you menless men, you hopeless negroes, are sentenced to forced familiarity and slave labor and a stab in the eye. You are all condemned to hell.
So this is where you keep it, Delvin thought when he heard the man read the sentence. He hadn’t expected anything different but still he was shocked. You think somebody’s going to wake up, some bit of religion or hope or human reason or kindness is going to kick in, but then it doesn’t and you stop thinking that. His knees had wobbled. He’d thought he was going to vomit and he swallowed back down a mouthful of bitter juice. Rollie had cried out and behind them in the balcony reserved for colored a few women had shouted out — not his mother — and a few had called for Jesus or Mary or Elijah. The judge told them to shut up. He had no kindness in him, this judge. “We will appeal,” Billy Gammon had whispered to him. “Don’t worry.”
