He walked down the eroded slope into the ditch and sat by the milky waters of the little creek and thought about Celia. Her cheeks had a slant to them that made his heart break like an egg. Her eyes were fully black, and shiny like something brand-new, and she had looked out of them as if she’d never had a chance to use them before. She had to live with her father being killed by white men. But it didn’t seem she’d been turned to hate. You couldn’t always tell. Had she glimpsed her father’s picture in the museum? They had pictures of drowned men; maybe he was one of them, maybe the ashy-mouthed man, naked but for a torn white shirt, hauled up by three men from the dark waters of a country pond, was him. Or the man snagged on a grappling hook and lifted like a big fish out of the Tamal Canal onto a wooden bridge. Or the half-burned man lying in the reeds west of New Orleans. It seemed like life could suddenly snatch you up and kill you,
He got up, stepped across the creek, climbed the low bank and headed back to the van.
Over the next few days he spent time with her. Due to his putting together a small concession with the negro primary and elementary schools that brought their classes over to look at the exhibits, the professor wanted anyway to stay over.
“It’s a sure two maybe three dollars a day,” he said.
He planned to head northward, summer coming, the wild magnolia trees already blossoming in the woods.
Celia seemed to like walking with Delvin. They drove to the country in her car (she was the first africano woman he had met who owned her own car, a small Chevrolet coupe). They had to be mindful of where they went; they didn’t want to upset the white folks by alarming them with a couple of out-of-town africanos in an automobile. You got along if you smiled and said yessir and put on a humble front. But even so, the white folks were sometimes spooked by the appearance of a strange africano person. Her cousin Samuel had been beat up in Shelby, where she was from, because he let his irritation at the dumbness of a white store clerk show through.
They had put a couple of cane fishing poles in the rumbleseat, and when they wanted to walk some they would carry the poles with them. Fishing negroes were a familiar and reassuring sight in this part of the world. Delvin had never fished in his life, except for the comical trip he took to a pond with Mr. Oliver, where they both fell in, but he enjoyed walking along with Celia carrying a pole.
It would be pleasing to catch their dinner, maybe sometime they would do that. But neither had brought bait and they didn’t know how to find any. Worms, Delvin had read, or grasshoppers, were good, but where might they be? It was early in the summer for grasshoppers anyway. Celia was no help and they chided each other in a familiar way that made them tense and happy and they tossed their unbaited lines into this or that murky body of water nonetheless. They had remembered hooks and the bobbers made of bits of cork. They liked best, as today, simply to walk along the side of a stream with the poles on their shoulders, and Celia didn’t seem to mind the water dripping off the wound fishing line onto her blouse; he liked that. They spoke of the lives they lived — the traveling in his case, school in hers — and of the towns they were from and each told the other little almost secret details that thrilled them to say and to hear and their skin tingled and their eyes shone and each more than once felt a sudden joyful weepiness come on that each stalled and then rushed past, scattering details and sudden declamatory claims about life and themselves.
