Delvin couldn’t help but laugh, it all sounded so comical. But he also couldn’t help being excited by what he heard and what he read in the slim floppy books. He’d agreed by then to come along more or less permanently with Carmel and work as his helper. After a week on the road he was driving the van and doing the cleaning work on the exhibits. The prof had not only photographs but a small collection of artifacts that included woven baskets, quilts, pipes, drums, fired bowls, woodcarvings, a few painted pictures (of well-dressed, healthy negro folk giving speeches, preaching or gathered together by a river talking among themselves), two Union army uniforms, a few bushee sticks for warding off evil at night and goofer bags and other conjur potions in little blue bottles and a collection of ty-ty seed and claystone necklaces.
“I intend to rustle up more of these curios,” he said, “when I get more room.”
“Are you looking for a home for all this?”
“I am and I am not,” the professor said. “I want to transfer this knowledge into as many minds as possible and in these dreary days it is best to bring the knowledge to the people instead of the other way around. But one day. . one day,” he said, smiling his wide, thin-lipped smile. He began to laugh as if everything he was saying and everything he was doing was a pleasant joke he was playing on the world.
They drove from town to town, parked in the africano sections and opened for business. A nickel per, able to accommodate ten people at a time, the money added up. They ate at colored restaurants or stood in line behind white restaurants at the window for colored folks or supped in people’s homes when invited (which happened not as often as the prof would have liked) and slept on the floor of the van or out beside it under a canvas awning. They were usually not bothered by the police and the local white population because the professor generally stopped off at the station first thing to offer a contribution to the police general welfare fund. He was well known and genially mocked in most towns and usually left alone. Since he stayed in the africano areas only he did not interfere with the dreams and illusions of white folks and trouble if it came was usually uncoordinated and of the variety that included fruit or hand-sized vegetables thrown at the big black van. Once a bucket of limewash was thrown from a passing vehicle, but the bucket missed and splashed across the front steps of the Pisgah AME church in New Constance, a town that over both east and west entrances had white-painted filigreed rose-climbing arches welcoming all good christian folk.
Delvin met stern-mouthed gents and audibly sighing women and little boys carrying big bandanas in their back pockets and fishermen who propped their cane poles on the side of the van and left their shoes outside and harmonica players and anonymous connivers and scoundrels and a tubercular essayist visiting from Boston, who mocked them both, and a retired sideshow Wildman of Borneo and various cute girls and several wanted men and loquacious clerks and bosomy, chuckling women; and he met some of his own kind — as he saw them — boomers and breezers of the great continental railroads, hoboes and angelinas like him (formerly) who flapped dust from their shirttails, laughing and telling stories about wild rides on the gunnels. He met buckheads and jeffs and caledonias pretending to be upright women and drunks and wine drinkers and some on dope ingested by way of syrups and elixirs, and he met bright-skinned dancing women and conjurers — all of whom, travelers and squinchers both, so the professor said, were on their way to Bee-luther-hatchee.
