In New Orleans a waitress he meets puts him up in her cottage in the sixth ward, where he gets a job washing dishes at the Empire restaurant, famous for redfish stew and an étouffée made with six kinds of seafood all caught locally. It is there that a vacationing prison guard named Elder Watkins spots him. Watkins doesn’t at first recognize Delvin, but then on his way back to town, where his wife and brother wait in a French Quarter hotel, he becomes convinced that the scowling boy he glimpsed through the open kitchen door was none other than the escapee Delvin Walker, had to be. He stops in a rain squall with water dripping down his neck to use a police call box on Charles street that his brother, a New Orleans cop on furlough for taking kickbacks from restaurants such as the Empire, has lent him his key to and asks for help.
The nearest station house sends two cars and the cops capture Delvin who has not noticed Watkins; he is sitting on the steps out back, eating a bowl of crab stew and drinking from a bottle of Cuban rum with some of the busboys and the waitress Corleen Bell, who’s been soaking the male influence out of his body for the past two weeks, and he thinks he is, if not safe, free, and is beginning to feel comfortable at Corleen’s house, where as soon as he gets a little ahead he is planning to start his book of factual experience that he is calling at this time
The cops come trotting down the fly space between the restaurant and the Pearl Box Factory fence on the other side and scoop Delvin up before he hardly knows what is happening. As they begin to beat him, he says calmly, “I am all right about going with you.” He says this three or four times before they knock him senseless.
Concussed, his left arm (the stronger one) broken, he is carried across state lines back to Uniball, where the arm is splinted using untreated pine flats and he is ushered into the disposal cell, one of several rooms in the basement under the former gymnasium from when Uniball was a private school for the wayward sons of rich planters. These rooms that were once storage bins have been enclosed and set with stout cross-braced metal doors, new this year, painted yellow.
Delvin is flung into the second bin from the right as you look down the hall. The throw half unsets his arm, a problem he is forced to correct on his own, which he does with his right hand pushing his back hard against the mortar wall to try to counterbalance the stabbing pain.
He screams, but then who, thrown battered and broken-armed into moldy darkness, does not scream from time to time? The guards ignore him.
It is here he discovers that his spirit has the kind of amplification and reaching toward far places that allows him to lie still while snakes crawl over him.
Ginny Galled, you might say — a negro name, Ginny Gall, for the hell beyond hell, hell’s hell — he begins to tell himself his book.
