He was walking one fall day along an unpaved side street in the dark quarter in Yellow Cross, Mississippi, when he passed a black-painted truck the size and shape of a small moving van. The truck was parked in front of an African Holiness church. On the side in dusty gold letters were the words
“You mean this here?” he said, smiling, showing flat white teeth. “This is the only traveling museum of the american negro in existence.”
Delvin felt a jolt of pleasure. “A real museum,” he said.
“Exactly right. Photos mostly, but in fact a record of the negro’s trials and sufferings and joys on this side of the Atlantic ocean.”
“Could I take a look?”
“Why certainly. Only cost you a nickel.”
Delvin allowed as he had an extra nickel at that time and would be pleased to spend it on such an operation.
The man put the bowl down on the steps, took out a large yellow handkerchief and with gestures ceremonial wiped his mouth and hands.
“You produce the cash and I’ll open her up for you.”
The man had an accent like a northern white man, and his facial features — narrow nose, thin lips, soft green eyes — were those of a white man, but he was as black nearly as he was — sealblack, they called it.
The man — Professor Carmel, he called himself — produced a flat brass key, opened the back door and ushered Delvin into the van, stepping ahead of him to raise the canvas shades on one side. Along the back and other side walls were photographs, hundreds of them. On a table running down the long closed side were stacks of objects, jumbled together, among them skulls and batons and whisks and feathery headdresses and flutes and what looked like a gilded chamber pot. The photographs dominated the exhibit.
Delvin walked around the room that was as large nearly as the house he was born in, looking at the pictures. The man lit a kerosene lamp that made no impression on the daylight streaming under the rolled-up canvas shades and hung it from a brass hook in the ceiling. Delvin studied the photographs. Flat black-and-white representations, the stillness of each, the caughtness, gestures trapped, looks riveted to the paper, people turning and never getting there, the placements, the issuance of cries uncried, the smiles or grim looks, the sadness in a boy’s eyes, the girl looking at her mother who was fixing her hair with what looked like a gold bobbin — these only gradually touched him. Records of a moment pressed on either side by what came before and what was coming after. They all — all the africanos — knew what had been, had a pretty good idea of what was on its way. The proprietor, bent down under the table, fiddled with something, made a quick frantic motion and suddenly the scratchy voice of Bessie Smith flew up like a big yellow bird filling the van. Hurt and desolation, the crime of being black, the uselessness of fighting back, fear like a grime covering every surface, the tremors and quakes, a softness in the heart you couldn’t obliterate. He saw the hoes lifted in cotton fields like the specialized instrumentation of an anonymous and preposterous camarilla, men poised like dancers in barn rafters lifting long sticks upon which were strung the limp assegaial tobacco leaves, children standing waist deep in dew-drenched fields of cotton tobacco corn beans and peanuts bushy as gallberry shrub, or men posed in ditches over a dark infrangible corpus with pickaxes raised like the ceremonious antlery of some white man’s loony pestiferation. He had seen much on the roads, much that wasn’t found here, or not on this day. Old men battered until their faces looked like a coal seam turned inside out. Boys used for the smoothness of their bodies. Women squatted by the tracks, heads and shoulders powdered in coal dust, waiting like mail sacks containing no good news for the next hard hook to snatch them up. Some of this was here. The music pressed him on, pressed the pictures as if they were leaves of a tree gathered again in reverse progeneration into the big armory of leafage.
He couldn’t take in half of these photos, not a tenth. Many were stuck like markers in big books. He liked the books themselves, the large folios, cloth and leather bound, stuffed with progeny. He ran his hands over their covers as the keeper showed them to him. The music scratched itself out. Suddenly he had to get away.
