Celia’s stepfather was a doctor — as her father had been — trained in Chicago. (“My favorite town,” Delvin crowed, though he allowed under questioning that he’d never been there—“but I have read much about it,” he said.) Her family lived in the little town of Shelby in Louisiana just south of the Mississippi line, and also in Chicago. She found the South strange and scary (“Like living in a perilous fairy tale,” she said), but the people, “the africano people down here,” she said, were warmhearted, even if they were nosy and gossipy and often chuckleheaded folk; they gave you the feeling they had found a way to some happiness about themselves that she missed up north.
“Everything there split up?” Delvin wanted to know. “Between the white folks and the colored?”
“You could say yes,” she said, but it wasn’t quite so open. The races could sit together in the picture show or even eat together in some restaurants, but there was a feeling that was always there that you might at any minute be called for trespassing. People didn’t pay attention to colored folk like they did to white; you were overlooked, left out. They didn’t mind if you got a little successful, but they didn’t want you getting too close to them.
“Down here we’re all jumbled up together,” Delvin said. He didn’t know why he said that, but it seemed so as he said it.
“Long as you return to the Land of Darkness,” Celia said and laughed. That was what everybody called the quarter, in most every town.
They had stopped under a big oak that had a peltlike green moss growing on its limbs.
“What are you going to do with yourself?” he said. She was at least two years older than him and he could see she looked on him as a boy or tried to. Long streaks of pale cloud ran east to west. Near one a little double-winged airplane chugged along. Only last year, he thought, he had begun to notice airplanes flying; before last year you never saw them, except maybe at fairs and exhibitions.
“I guess I’ll be a doctor too,” she said, switching the end of her pole against some dusty tickseed plants.
“Can you do that?”
“I don’t know for sure. There are places in the east maybe, but I don’t know.”
“You don’t sound too red-hot about it.”
“I know. I’ve always thought I would be a doctor like my father. .” She bit her lip. “I used always to say
“It’s natural, idn’t it? My mama ran off when I was little, and I always say my. .”
Her silence stopped him. She stood looking down at the little brush-tangled creek.
“What does your mother do?” he asked.
“She teaches in the negro women’s college in Shelby, english literature.”
“I knew it. I knew she had a job too. I’d like to meet her.”
Celia’s nose was long and straight, her lips had a thin sculptured rim. She opened her mouth but didn’t speak.
“You were talking about being a doctor.”
“No, I’m not. .”
“It’s all right. I want to know.”
“I think about going to medical school, but when I do — think about it — it seems as if I’m just marching. . you know, as if I am following orders.”
“Does your stepfather want you to be a doctor?”
“No, I don’t think. . well, he never speaks of it. I guess he would like. . I don’t know. . it’s some feeling I get that I ought to be doing something important, when I don’t know if I really want to do anything at all.”
She looked at him in a slightly embarrassed way and he could see in her shining black eyes that she thought she’d said too much.
“Nothing’s clear to me,” he said and laughed.
“Well, you’re young.” Saying this her mouth turned down in something like chagrin and she touched his wrist, lightly, a touch he would later recall, little pats not of electrical fire but of restoration.
“It’s not that,” he said. “I mean I know what I want to do, but. .”
“What’s that?”
“What do I want to do?”
“Yes.”
“I want to write books.”
She didn’t laugh but her face became serious and she turned her head away. A flock of blackbirds streamed westward. They were walking again, passing in and out of shade. The grass where the sun touched it was the color of brass. The earth under the trees gave off a musty smell, smell of mushrooms and the drifting underworld.
“A couple years ago I started keeping a notebook,” he said.
“Do you write stories?”
“Mostly I take notes, write down facts, the names of things. I make a lot of lists.”
“Of what?”
“The names of railroad companies. Flowers. Different kinds of rocks. People’s names, their accents, hometowns, words they use a lot.” It sounded silly as he said it.
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye — something wild in there — turned abruptly and said she had to go back. Had she changed — what was it? He wanted to stop her, to kiss her, but he couldn’t believe she’d let him.
“Wait—”
“No. I can’t.”
He reached out his hand — as if it was the last, the only thing he could do — and touched the sleeve of her cotton shirt, but she was already turning away, already walking.
