Delvin turned his head, galled. He started to say something, to tell the Ghost that no kind of mustafina child would be white — no way to wash a black man enough times to make him white — and why would he want that anyway, but he was tired of such arguments even before they started. The world bulged with information, with a full baggage of crumbled-up bits and pieces and you could grab out as big a handful as you wanted and make whatever suited you out of it. Half-facts and letters of intent and unspoken questions and rumors and whispers of vanished lives and snubbed-off growing things that would never be spoken of again. ’Cept you couldn’t make yourself white. Maybe he couldn’t make himself free. He stuck his hand out and took the Ghost’s small pink fingers in his thick flat black ones and shook. His broad hand had softened over the last couple of traveling months but there was still a hardness under the softness that he could tell the Ghost felt. He could recall everything from years ago that included them both, but he didn’t mention any of it. He looked him straight in the eyes and in the pale colorless eyes that couldn’t bear sunlight and shied from whoever was looking at him but looked back at Delvin now, sly but bashful too, scared, too, and worshipping, he saw that the Ghost loved him. And the Ghost could tell he saw. Winston,
He smiled at the Ghost who was only half looking at him now. The Ghost’s eyes were like a kind of crystal. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you over there,” he said, and he was smiling, in as friendly a way as a man who’d just skipped on twelve years in the penitentiary could.
After he walked back to Mrs. Cutler’s and talked some more with Mr. Oliver and sat with him as he slept in his chair on the shady porch while the breeze pried at a chinaberry tree by the eave and shook the little bunchy leaves that hadn’t yet turned, he thought about where he was headed — as far north as he could get before Canada (or maybe on into Canada) — and pictured a grassy yard and a house among trees and him out on the porch in a rocking chair under a blanket like Mr. Oliver, working on a book, and he felt a sadness sliding along, sloshing along with the thoughts and the little quivers of knowledge that came along too, the ones that confirmed that he would never be sitting on a porch in this town again, that he was a ghost himself come back briefly to haunt the old venues. Again the tears rose, but again he didn’t cry them.
In his padded rocker Mr. Oliver snored loudly.
Delvin got up and kissed him on the forehead and stood looking down at him. His old smell was gone, replaced by a sour mucky stench not quite overpowered by the odor of wintergreen. People got so they didn’t want to visit somebody who was dying, but they loved to show up to look at a corpse. So the old man had told him years ago as they sat on the side porch watching a thunderstorm come in over the mountains. Mr. Oliver had ridden the train from Alabama to this place and made a life out of nothing but his clever self and hard work. And now he was sleeping his way toward death on an old christian lady’s porch. Well, all right. On the Gulf shore he had walked into the ocean and stood up to his waist in salt water that had never been swum in by africano people. Only africano ones ever in it were those bodies swabbies had rolled off the decks of the slave ships crossing from Africa. He had pushed his face into that salt water. A white woman walking with a big brown dog had called for him to get out of there, but he ignored her. At least until she walked off. Then he high-footed it out of the pale, lank surf and ran for his life.
He wanted to stop people on the street and say that once he left here he’d never be back. Yall come too, he wanted to say — cry out — all of you, you’re free now.
