Ginny Gall полностью

He got up and went outside into the mid dark of night. People who at first had stayed away for fear of the police and the angry white folks had begun to collect in the alley. Small groups clustered across from the back gate and around the garage that let onto the alley and onto the curved drive at the side of the house. Men and women from the neighborhood and others he didn’t know, relatives probably of the deceased. They had brought the body in the back of a box-nosed Ford truck that kept breaking down, they said. The men had worked on the motor with the body wrapped in a quilt in the back as cars passed on the unpaved road at the junction into US 83, and they had felt the weight of the curiosity, of the snoopiness and greed in people’s glances, seen in their faces the hatred and disgust and fear (and seen the desire to feel something strongly enough to wrest them free of their own misery); and how hard it was to know they were thieving our own hopes, someone said, from the dead body of this son or brother or nephew, feeding like buzzards on the dear remains. And some of those white folks spit from the windows of their automobiles, and others, you could see, one said, were gloating and making ugly remarks among themselves—sho nuff, someone said — and others turned away in shame, but even these looked again—they wants to see the blood of the black man, another said and others agreed: yessuh, yessuh—staring, and you could see how hard it was for them not to stop they cars, one said, and get out and beat this poor child some more — oh, Lord—and desecrate his body further — He’s whole before Jesus someone said — Yes, I guess he is, but we are left here with the mortmain and the grief, the voice said.

All the time, so Delvin noticed, a cool breeze was softly blowing—Lookout breeze, they called it in Red Row — flowing down from the big mountain carrying with it the scent of sweet laurel and woodbine blossoming in the cuts and protected places. Mostly these people were silent. But then one or two asked him about the Harolds, mother and father. He’d not seen the father, he said, but the mother was grieving deeply.

He stepped away, walked to the end of the alley and looked out at the big field across the road. The wisteria looped and trailing from telephone and electric wires running along poles out on the old circus ground had bloomed for a second time this year, but the flowers were gone now, and the leaves were turning gold early, before fall had near come. Each year the wisteria, that was to him like some tropical effusion, bloomed early in May, surprising him, and each year Mr. Oliver, laughing, asked, “Where is your head, boy?” and he wanted to say, “Where it ought to be,” but he just laughed too because Oliver wasn’t mad, it was just his way of drawing him close, and both of them liked that.

But now, standing under the sweet gum listening to the heavy leaves make their swishing sound like big skirts rustling, he didn’t know what to think. There didn’t seem to be any happiness in any direction. Before him, the big rusty and ragged field and the meat packing plant and the dusty fertilizer plant, the auto shops and the foundry and the smelting plant, and then the public road running through the mountains and Tennessee into Kentucky and Ohio and Indiana and Canada — all of it — was a wilderness and unsettled; it was all a land of monsters. He shuddered. The wind was cold. It tasted of unvisited streams and rock. He wondered again how it had been for his mother making her way in the dark over the mountains. Had she forgotten him? He couldn’t sense her out there in the wilderness, but he believed she was there. But where was he? And what was he, standing at the end of a leafy alley in Chattanooga, Tennessee? His hands were still attached, his face uncut, his side unburnt. But for how long? How easy it was to step off into ruin. He wanted to slip into the crowd and stay there in its midst, jostling and petting and sliding body to body, smelling and tasting and touching. And he wanted to haul off by himself, crawl up under a bush and roll into a ball like a possum, sink down into a musty hole like a gopher, hide deep in the rocks like a bear.