As he bent to look at the bodies, some broken-necked, some burned so their arms were tapered stumps, some denatured, some with whip marks showing on their blood-greased naked backs, some gutted, one wearing high top shoes with the laces still tied in immaculate bows, another looking like the man who used to sell parched peanuts on the courthouse square — every one somebody, looking like somebody — he experienced a collapsing sensation as if he had soiled his pants, but he hadn’t. His private self shrank from the surface of his body, yielding inward like walls falling in on once safe rooms. He didn’t like it that Carmel had held these for last. Crippled, scarred, half-skinned, mutilated — still it was the faces that held him. Lonesome negro faces surrounded by the upturned faces of white men. No, not lonely, he had it wrong. He hadn’t been looking close enough; he had hardly been looking at all. But he saw it now: the faces of those no longer there. But not even that. No. He saw it: only the white men were there. All alone in the world they made. They were the ones who lived again in a universe made up of only their kind. Not again, but for once, finally. He shuddered. Many of the white faces were blank. No, not blank — he couldn’t get it right at first either—: addled, sated, entranced. But not that, no, not even that. They had the look of the rapturously crazed. Something tucked way down behind their souls had leapfrogged to the front. Yes. But not so quickly — and this is what he saw — that he couldn’t make out the shocked and hopeless expression still visible behind the stuporous glee. And this, the pictures whispered, to his face or behind his back as he turned away, is your fate. He shuddered as a chill flashed across his body and he staggered, catching himself against the table. He coughed into his fist.
“You see how human beings really are,” said the professor.
“White men,” Delvin said. He just said that. It was like saying “The devil.” No need to mention him.
The professor went to pull another sheet out, but Delvin stayed him with a touch of his hand on the tray. He turned back to the pictures on the walls. The van smelled of onions and sweat and of another, chemical, odor which the professor said was ferrous sulphate, from developing the photos. He stared again at the faces of the living. A little boy trailed a cotton sack behind him like a long fat grub. In his face a guilelessness, a comfortableness, you could call it a happiness. Shirtless, in overalls, and wearing a huge sombrero style hat, he looked back at Delvin with a gentleness that nearly brought tears to his eyes. Crying not for the dead — he’d learned this in the funeral business — but for the lifebound living. This wasn’t the only face that held him. There were others, skips and jumps of faces, expressions, dull and crisp and bloated or filled with a fierceness that stirred him and scared him and made him feel a churning in his guts and even deeper. An old woman with a wide fleshy gleaming face and flared nostrils looked out with an eagerness to please and so much. . it was sorrow. . that he laughed outloud, himself shocked. In many faces fright mingled with a desire to please. Others were as nearly blank as the faces of the lyncherous white men, though not so often erased. A man caught for murder (so a hand-lettered tag said) looked at him with cold eyes in a grimly smiling face; his lower lip looked as if it had been bitten in two and sewn roughly back together. Stunned faces, terrified faces, smashed and reconstituted faces, organized faces and the faces of the holy and the hustling, the light-complected face of a man in a high white collar and thin tie who looked as if nothing in the world could touch him. Faces that wanted to shame him and faces that made him want to slap them. A little girl with a high wide forehead and small intense eyes he wanted to kiss. Two old men sitting on the front steps of a grocery store laughing fit to bust.
And behind him the white faces of men looking up from the lynching field at the body of a black man or gazing at the camera as if they didn’t know what a camera was.
