Ginny Gall полностью

It’s becoming ghostly. We’re the ghosts of present, past and future, slipping through the towns. In the morning sometimes when there’s fog the truck disappears and no one can find it. It’s as if all this huge collection of photographs, of pictured history, was erased, as if it never existed at all. Something makes me want to cry. Not just for my own troubles, which are pointed and rolling right on, but for everybody’s. Each photographed face is something true about the world. The happy ones, the sad ones, the lost ones, the found, each one telling its story. The truck hauling this great assembly through the towns. The people, the dazed and the suffering. .

and then he quit the writing. It was becoming too grandeed. He had a tendency in this direction that he recognized. Everybody got to do something, the professor said. He got the canvas bucket and hauled water from a well in the front yard of a slanted negro cabin and washed the truck. It didn’t come back to shiny black; it still was gray.

They were in Cullen, then Astor, then Cumming, then the old coal town of Radsburg. How did they, two negroes in a shabby van filled with photographs, escape destruction by the white race? In each town the strict divide between the races was carefully and forcefully maintained. Place was most important. Remember your place, boy, the instructions lettered invisibly but legibly on every sign and attitude and takeout window and coldwater shanty said.

The professor said, “When your own unholiness gets you burned down, shot, cannonaded, trampled, your close relatives killed, and the victors dig up the dead and drunkenly dance with them by bonfirelight, which is just what happened to these white folks, what you want is a world or a section of the world where what was lost can be rebuilt, and, most important, none of those you wronged can make a move on you. You want a world that stays still. ‘We will live not in a spinning remnant,’ they say, ‘but in a world in which what stands for who we once were can be reconstructed and preserved without the shadow of death falling across it.’ But this is impossible to do. Life, snorting and fretting and sniffing around for something sweet, once loosed, can’t be fetched up. Even if it’s not loose, it will get loose. That’s the thing about life that makes it different from the stones: it moves around.”

But alien negroes driving a large truck — it was a kind of truck, built by the Ford Motor Company — bringing a celebration of things negroid, was pushing the limit. How did they get by without being lynched or at least beaten senseless, their van confiscated and their pictures burned with the yard trash?

The professor first thing when he arrived in whatever settled nervous burg they visited (they didn’t stop in every one) dropped by the police station and paid a bribe, made a donation, to the chief, yes, as said. And he made sure the chief and the city government understood that they — the alien purveyors — knew how stupid these dark folks were, showing each other photographs of their comic faces. They made it clear to the authorities that the exhibit was a folly, a cunning joke on the negro race, a lampoon and antic burlesque designed to humiliate and poke fun at every one of them. Make sure, Your Honor, these simple folk are in their place. What a hoot. He showed them examples of those feckless, half-wit darkies, granddaddy or some youngun napping in a porch swing or grinning big or a look on his face, as he stared off at the sun slipping down behind the pines, of foolish wonder. The police grinned and patted their bellies and laughed, mostly. Other times the professor cut it close, sometimes a little too close. But few wanted trouble, with negroes or any other group. (Times some defeated person, some sap that hatred had knocked down so many times until he had to use a grudge to build himself back up, some fool who didn’t know better, some ex-tormented-child who wanted revenge, a self-despiser, would swing his feet back under him, rise up and knock the black man down. “But you always apologize,” the prof said, “and then you get back up.”

“I know about that,” Delvin said, remembering his scrape in the dress shop, and other venues.)