In days to come the professor gave Delvin books to read: novels, poetry, polemics, race stories, histories, uplift books and books designed to probe the ways of men on the earth. Many of these books were written by black authors, and not just the big-timers like Du Bois and Washington and Sojourner Truth. There were slim softbacks printed on flimsy paper written by men sweating away, so Carmel said, in Manhattan and Brooklyn tenements, and books written by africano men living over in Europe, and men in Chicago, and even Memphis. Why, in Memphis, he said, there was a small publishing house that specialized in literature written by negro men — and women — for the negro race only. He owned some of these books. They tended to be long arguments concerning the superiority of the negro race, most of them, as well as a few that counseled brotherhood and love. In one Carmel showed him, the author Seneca Wilson — a nom de plume, Carmel said — wrote of the vacancy in white men’s faces and the “digested fullness” in black faces (“This goes right along with what I’ve pointed out to you in the photographs,” Carmel said, smiling). The faces were empty, Wilson said, because white people, by way of their long defense of their “rightness,” their right to consider themselves the top dogs in life, had lost touch with faithfulness. This showed in the wrenched-up greed in their faces (“When the disease of corruption has reached the bone, there’s nothing left but greed and self-importance,” he said), whereas the negro man, who lived in a disheveled and turmoil-filled state, one he was constantly having to call for help with and constantly getting knocked around by, had thereby come on a much deeper understanding of the great mysteries of being. As you could plainly see in the face of every negro person you met.
It wore Delvin out to read all this.
Other books proclaimed the day when the negro man would rise up and by force of simple righteousness take his rightful place at the head of the table. It scared Delvin to read these and gave him a guilty thrill. He had not thought particularly of these matters. The world belonged to the white man. Delvin and his kind were merely scumbling through it. They were stranded in a country whose language was not theirs and whose customs were foreign to them. They did their best under these circumstances. Nothing he knew of had corrupted the spirit of negro folk, not in any significant way. Even the lynchings. Sojourner Truth said it was most important to show love and concern for those around us, colored or white. This was the only way to show our love of God, she said. Love meant freedom from oppression. Somehow it soothed him to read this. But many of the negro writers appeared to be girding up for a fight.
He spoke of this to Carmel who listened with his small cropped head down. They were parked behind the Bethlehem Baptist church in the african quarter in New Hope, Mississippi.
“If it’s their country, then where is our country?” Carmel asked.
“I thought you saw our greatness as being people not tied to any place.”
“It
“And though we are become a wandering people,” Carmel said, “we nevertheless come from somewhere.”
“Yeah — Africa.”
The professor held up his hand. The butterscotch palm was crossed by a wild hatch of lines.
“Wait. I know a couple of those books say we arrived here in big ships swung down from the heavens — from outer space somewhere parked on the backside of Jupiter — but truth is we come from the great empires of Africa.”
“I just said—”
“Wait. We are the descendants of mighty rulers.” He went on to explain how the stepped-on negro folk of the US of A were the natural children of great chiefs who had ruled vast African empires. “Just imagine how much fortitude and imagination it took to rule a continent as fierce and wild as Africa. That’s not one of those puny so-called civilized countries of Europe. No sir.”
He went on to explain how this fact was not so much the important consideration as the fact that Africa was the cradle of life, home of the original Garden of Eden and other great gardens and general stomping places, the most ancient of lands on the earth and thereby the place not only black people but all people must one day return to. “Except this time when the white people show up,” he said, “they will find the colored folks in charge. They will have to ask us about how the proceedings are supposed to go.”
“And what will we tell them?” Delvin said.
“Why, we will tell them to pick up a hoe and get to chopping that cotton.” He laughed. “Go forth,” he said, waving his hand, “that’s what we will tell them — and get yourselves a little first-class suffering.”
