Time passed and the closer to Chattanooga they got the more scared Delvin became. He had tried to forget his predicament but he couldn’t and now it flopped out onto him like a bitter truth. The closer he got the surer he was that he couldn’t go back. The police were waiting. Delvin knew what the penalty was for shooting a white boy. His mother had fled a killing herself, taking to the woods after she had brained that old haberdasher in the hallway behind his shop. No forgiveness for her in this world. And none for him. He felt a rush of feeling for his mother, and tears rose in the corners of his eyes. He trembled and he put his hands on the dashboard to steady himself. His hands looked wrinkled and old and this frightened him more. As they passed through a small railroad hamlet he asked Mr. Sterling to stop the truck. You all right, boy? the man asked. I think I changed my mind — I forgot something back yonder. Well too late to go back for it. I got to, Delvin said. The old man pulled over in front of a small hardware store on the main street. Behind the store the train tracks ran north and south. Thank you, sir, Delvin said, and he gave the man his one case dollar left. The man didn’t want to take it but then he took it anyway. Delvin got down and stood in the dust watching the truck go on up the road. A crow, passing from here to there, croaked as it flew. He headed around back to the tracks to wait for a train.
So his real travels began. He rode the trains that passed through dinky towns and entered big cities through the back doors and he rested on the top of boxcars smelling of rotted grain and rode the gunnels when he had to and swung onto the metal porches of gondolas and spoke with men who had wandered so far that they had almost outdistanced their own bodies and become ghosts, and he learned to dodge the bulls and the rough riders, and he picked up what he could working here and there, baling hay and hoeing bush beans and winding tobacco leaves onto sticks, and everywhere he went the stories collected and the unpainted domiciles of black citizens stood before him like memories of olden times and he entered new worlds life by life and gathered there his tares and offered what he could and the days passed clanking or whispering along the chain of his life. At night sometimes a loneliness like a lost letter found him in his bed in a cottonhouse or on a forest floor or inside the patternless wooden walls of a boxcar and it tried to explain to him that he would never find a home but he refused to listen and turned his back and gazed out at the moonlight standing in wet grass like an angelina too shy to come inside. Time sang its cracked songs in rail yards and along the edges of the fields and passed on, leaving half memories and slights and a false heartiness and belly laughs and cold suppers on somebody’s sagging back steps: the poor-mouthings of a crass deceiver he took little count of and rarely worried about.
The dots of blackness on each calendar date, marking another day when the police did not come pulling at him, rousting him from a hobo jungle or barn or back steps, added time, freedom from what he knew was awaiting him. He carried this knowledge of the pursuit like a stranger, dark man, darker than he was, accompanying him into whatever town he passed through, whatever road he walked along, slipping with him at night into open fields or woods or along leafy riverbanks. It was in this flight, in these days, that he touched his mother again. Beside a stream in Louisiana choked with rusty foam he found himself dreaming of her so profoundly that he thought he lay with his head in her lap listening to her sing “Old Johnny Jones,” one of the songs she had sung to him under the little peach tree in their backyard in Chattanooga. He too was a runner, he had wanted to say, he too knew pursuit, but she faded before he could get the words out. In dawns of swirling fog he called silently to her, but she never answered. The days came up, wintry or steaming with heat, and in them he felt the press of the law. But always he felt the reassurance of his mother, escapee and wanderer, out ahead of him somewhere on the roads or crossing a river on a hand-pulled ferry, sitting by a campfire or dancing on a stage before admiring crowds, and gradually in these dreams, these fantasies or reveries or boy’s make-believe, she bent toward success, toward kindness and elaboration, rosy with life, resting as a free woman in a happiness that was the happiness of dreams, and in these dreams he too was free.
