“Yes. I’m looking for somebody.” He hadn’t let this simple thought come forth before now but it was true.
“I’d like to go over that way.”
“You want to gawk?”
“I guess I do — or no, I just want to see what that life’s like.”
“Like any other, I guess.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t get mad.”
“I’m not.”
“I want to see what folks over there. . are featuring. . in themselves. I think people can’t help but be curious.”
“That’s rightly so,” he said.
“Will you take me?”
“Okay.” He blurted this out but a second later it felt like a mistake. He was weighing himself down, whichever way he moved. But then he guessed he was bound to make mistakes.
A thin breeze angled in off the street, cooling their skin. A depressed feeling came over him. He wanted to ask at the bedhouse about his mother. He wanted to be alone with what he felt about that. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think. .”
“It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to take me.”
“It’s not that.”
“No,” she said, turning away.
She had a fading, falling quality to her, a weight of promises and needs that troubled him. Every knock at the door felt like all the pressers come to get him. He said, “I want to see if anybody there has heard anything about my mother.”
She looked at him, paying out the line of kindness. “Some odd girl’s not what you need at this time,” she said.
“I’ve come a long way,” he said, “just to take a look-see.”
“These nights lately,” she said, scanning the high parts of the sky, “since the big storm, have had such a deep blue to them. They say the blue only goes up for a few miles but it makes me feel good that we’re wrapped up in it.”
“Buttered in blue,” he said, smiling.
She smiled back at him. Her broad face was open and friendly, without guile.
“I’m going to shade off this way,” he said, indicating the direction — right, east — with his thumb.
“Born and raised in Chattanooga,” she said, still smiling. “Shouldn’t be hard to find your way back this way.”
“Maybe I’ll slip by. .”
She seemed to be fading into the dark, but it was just a cloud passing over. The moon hadn’t come up yet. He moved off. When he looked back he couldn’t see her, wasn’t exactly sure where she’d been standing.
The Emporium was lit like an ordinary house. Soft lamplight in the windows, a single lightbulb in a large lantern above the big white double front doors. He went around the side through the arched wooden gate to the back that had been partially paved with bricks and set up with a barbecue grill and tables under colored lights on strings swept up into two of the big fruitless mulberry trees. A couple of white men were sitting in mission chairs drinking beer. An africano woman sat on a bench near them. They looked up when he came through the garden area. He nodded to them, and exchanged pleasantries. He was bound up with nervousness. He asked for Miss Ellereen, the proprietress he remembered, but the woman told him she had died six years before.
“Ate herself to death,” she said, grinning easily.
“Who is the principal these days?” Delvin said.
“Miz Corona,” she said. “You selling something?”
“Not at the moment.”
One of the men was giving him a long, studious look. “You got a familiar face,” he said.
“Everybody says that.”
“Yourn, boy, has a peculiar aspect.”
Two white men, secured by alcohol. They had pudgy, half-collapsed faces, that rucked, white-person skin. They were wearing parts of army uniforms; lost soldiers maybe.
“How you ge’men doing?” Delvin said remembering the protocol, more important, and lasting, than the army’s.
“Especially fine,” one, the slightly fatter, said.
He was thinking how strange it was to speak to white men out in the world. In prison or out he had to call them mister.
“You a fighting man?” the other white man asked.
“Nosir. Cause of my bad leg.”
“You a lucky boy.” He elbowed his partner. “Aint he a lucky boy, Snell.”
“Luckiest boy I seen today,” the other, a red-haired man, said.
“Who you looking for?” the first man asked.
“I was looking for Miss Ellereen, but the lady says she died.”
“I don’t remember her. You must be from around here.”
“Yessir, I is.”
“You a Red Row boy?”
“Born and bred.”
The girl was studying him too. “What’s your name?” she said.
“William,” he told her. “Mind if I step in the kitchen to see after Miz Corona?”
“Sho, it’s all right,” said the girl, just a farm girl skidded this far and no farther.
“Thank you. If you ge’men will excuse me.”
“Oh yeah, Poke, go on, go on,” said the bigger man, waving his wide fish-belly hand at him.
In the kitchen he came on Ostella Baker who had been a helper here years ago. She didn’t seem to remember him. He asked about his mother — he couldn’t keep from it — and every word of asking sounded foolish, backward in his mouth, but still necessary, still a kindness he could do for her. He felt exhausted just trying to keep up.
