Delvin didn’t think homeliness was what was bothering her — or not the only thing. “She just hadn’t fulfilled her purpose,” he said.
“Depends on what it is, I guess.”
“That’s right.”
When Feveril went in to pour himself another from from his kitchen jug, Delvin wandered out of his yard. On Lester street on his way to Minnie’s he heard the strains of a song he was familiar with, “Der Stürmische Morgen,” coming from the little one-man barbershop. He peeked in as he passed by and saw the barber, Mr. Eulis, sitting in his tipped-back porcelain chair listening to the Victrola with his eyes closed and moving one finger the way Mr. Oliver did when he played the same Schubert song on the wind-up machine in his bedroom. Down the street outside Leary’s grocery a tan dog stood on its hind legs trying to lick one of the hams Mr. Leary had hanging from the porch eave. A little boy dressed in white stumped slowly on crutches back and forth along the walk in front of a house on Bee way. A large man wearing pressed overalls without a shirt sat in a tree swing staring at the soft dust under his feet. Delvin wished the man would look up so he could hail him and smile. He’d started hanging a smile on his face since he left prison, making himself appear friendly. Wherever he got a chance and figured he could
Maybe a limp, he thought, maybe I ought to go back to that — throw the marshals off. But it was too late. People knew he had been sick, but that was all they’d heard of that might exclude him from military service. The penitentiary would keep you out. ’Cept they were probably putting prisoners now on work gangs for the good of the country. Well, the country needed cotton and the prisons he’d been in were good at producing that. The war was one more fright jabbing at men in prison. Negro men locked up in a lost corner of the white man’s world. What’s gon become of you? Who are you? Who you be? And here comes Mr. Billy Camp and his goat cart. The old man, walking beside his two-wheel cart pulled by two billies and accompanied by half a dozen outwalker goats, passed by going the other way. He gave Delvin a friendly wave with his leafy mulberry stick and Delvin waved back. Maybe he could join up with him, see the country at goat speed, pass as a friendly colored crazy man. Back at Minnie May’s white cottage home he sat on the back steps wearing a stained derby with a hole in the back the size of a peach, a hat he had picked out of the trash in Jacksonville. The warden at Burning Mountain had worn a derby with two scuffed marks on the front like the white eyes of a ghost. He had picked up his notebook on the way through the bedroom. The little slip of blue paper he put in it to mark his place was gone; Minnie May had looked through it. So now she knew he was an escapee — probably. But why had he left it for her to easily find? In the book he had taken note of the tin washtub hung on the shed wall, the beans coiled around their strings in the garden. A leaf on a spicebush that spun crazily in no wind he could feel, white as the wing of a cabbage butterfly. He’d studied the soft slim prints of Minnie May’s bare feet in the dust by the back steps, prints that reminded him of his mother’s. First thing his mama did when she came home was to take off her shoes. Walked around all day in her bare feet, leaving tracks he’d followed like a detective. He didn’t think about her as much as he used to. But still in dreams she came to him, laughing or crying, mute and determined, one time yelling at him with her thin arm raised like he was a dog she was bound to beat on.
Sitting now on the back steps, tracing with one finger his mother’s name, Cappie, looking at Minnie’s footprints that might have been his mama’s, he began to cry. He shaded his face and choked down the sounds, careful still of prison dangers. His body shook. It wasn’t all grief. Mingled with the pasty, durable, extenuated sadness was a happiness, a new one, a stretching out of himself, long-shanked and agile — he was, in this moment of American time, free, a misplaced man, overlooked, drifting on the breeze, a wanderer amid the garrison of interlockedness, sunk deep enough in negro life for a while not to be missed, uncounted by any census, omitted by the tax man, skipped by the army. Only the cross-Dixie skookum boys were looking for him.
He wiped his eyes.
