“Still, I don’t think I quite would be. .” She stopped talking. They were passing a small cane syrup mill. The press turned by a single gray mule attached to the end of a long pole. A white man wearing overalls and no shirt fed stalks of purple cane into the mill.
“You want some syrup?” Delvin asked.
“Oh, I’d love some. . but I don’t know.”
“Sho. Pull on in.”
She parked on the road shoulder just beyond the cooking shed and they got out and the man watched them walk back to him as he continued to stuff stalks into the press. He was a thin white man, his skin clammy pale where it showed under the overalls.
“Could we buy a jug of your syrup, mister?” Delvin asked.
The man went on feeding the long purple stalks into the press. Delvin could see his left nipple, like a dark brown button, slip in and out of view as he worked.
“Excuse me, suh.”
The man just looked at them and went on feeding in the stalks. The mule, head down, had nothing on his mind but muleness.
“Do you sell cane syrup, mister?”
The man stopped feeding, stepped to the press, unsnagged the full bucket of dark juice from under the slot and walked with it past them to the cooking shed. He poured the juice into the kettle, stoked the fire with a billet of whiteoak wood and then stood looking across the fields that were planted in cotton. He did not appear any longer to be aware of their presence.
They got back in the car. They drove a couple of miles down the road before Delvin said, “Sometimes a white man will act like a human being, sometimes he won’t.”
“He didn’t like to see negro folk riding around in their own fine car.” She laughed and then they both laughed. It seemed so funny and ridiculously humiliating to be treated like that, so crazy to them both, that they couldn’t help but laugh. He reached over, fumbled with her face, managed to turn it toward him and kissed her partially on the lips.
She smiled again, the fond now slightly askew distant smile, and said, “That’s sweet.”
He drew instantly back and looked straight ahead at the road that seemed to be running through exotic green country. He didn’t feel any more like laughing.
Soon they were back in town, bumping along the main street of the quarter. The day was hot. Two lines of sweat ran down her face as she laughed at his story about a peg-legged man who, in Fitzgerald, Georgia, had challenged him to a foot race and beat him.
“He wanted to wrestle,” he said, “but I told him I didn’t think I could take being mortified twice.”
They parked behind the van, through the open door of which the prof could be seen sitting in his collapsible canvas chair drinking from a tall glass. Without getting up he waved at them. They didn’t get out of the car.
“You think you want to have children anytime soon?” Delvin asked.
Instead of mocking or laughing she looked searchingly at him and said, “I’m troubled about all that.”
“How so?”
She made a discarding motion with the gathered fingers of one hand and said, “I sometimes feel this yearning for children — it’s like, I don’t know, a searchlight of happiness has found me out in some swamp of myself and I think a child is that light, but then I feel very calm and cool about the whole thing and believe I have so much to do in this life that I am not interested in children or not interested right now or in this situation or in that person and I just let it sink away from me. Like when you’re thinking about eating a peach and don’t for some reason and you just forget it.”
“What is that?”
“Oh, I’m not making sense, am I?”
She was speaking rapidly and almost frantically, as if she had herself caught on to something and wanted to elude it.
“The professor says it’s good to marry early and have children early and all that — get started,” he said, “on what life’s really about.”
“I don’t think you can avoid that — or avoid the opportunity.”
“Shoot. You ought to ride the trains. Wasted lives. Ruined folk. And then you come to town and you see most people — those that got a chance — white or colored — can’t get away from that study quick enough.”
He too was talking fast. He didn’t want her to go away, that was why. Probably she wouldn’t come back. Maybe if he tried everything she would go for one something. But he was going too fast.
“Can I buy you a lemonade?” he said.
