What up north they called the Depression circled like a flight of buzzards over every town. People still thought business would pull the country out even though business, since 1863, had not been able to pull the South out of anything and the new Depression was just a doubling up, locally.
“Yall just keep that race nonsense off among yourselves and don’t bother nobody,” the suzerains said to the professor, “we got real worries now.” Anyway, they had, since the war, quickly tied the black race back up in knots and they didn’t have to worry about them. Nor any fake professor and his truckload of comic photographs.
Into the negro half-towns and sham-cities Delvin began to go at night. He walked the streets of the Overtowns and Undertowns and the Congos and Mississippi and Louisiana quarters. The Lands of Darkness. Unpaved, they were often hardly streets at all. More like lanes in medieval towns of Europe or villages in Africa — streets filled with the smells of woodsmoke and spices and antique sensories made of bits of prehistoric matter and dried long-extinct flowers. On the creaky lopsided porches vague lights shone like bits of webbing or mist, casting huge shadows on the bare lopsided front walls of the little frame houses. Under the trees the tiny diastolic glimmers of lightning bugs ticked, becoming whiter the higher they rose. Up among the branches pinches and bits of gleaming too faint to cast shadows stayed on for hours. Up ahead, in the middle of the street, human shapes dipped and swooped in unhasty dances as the barely perceptible music of guitars and hand organs made their soundings in the deeps of night. Cries and hoots and whisperings. There seemed always to be a bit of fog at the end of the street. Cats moaned in their long nights of suffering. Dogs barked with a sound like consumptive muted coughing. As he walked the streets in the deepest parts of the night he could hear people talking in their beds. Old men confessed to their snoring wives the secret affairs of their youth. Old women spoke of masked riders galloping furiously down the roads on huge dark horses. Children spoke of boogeymen with hands growing out of their knees and bellies. In dreams girls whispered to kindly lovers. Boys answered questions with wit and intelligence.
In the shadows by a boarded-up livery stable, in a little town so small the africano section was only half of two streets next to the town dump, he waited as one would wait for a carriage called to take him to the far places of the world. The air smelled of pine smoke and rotten apples. Down the street a man in a long white nightshirt stepped out of his door and looked at the sky that was still dark. He waved at something in the sky and Delvin wondered who it was, or what, and thought he knew. What is coming? he wondered, but no one and nothing in the world could tell him. The man made a large sweeping gesture, turned back in and slammed the door behind him. The sound was like the last clap of a civilization closing up.
In Salisbury, Alabama, in the northwestern part of the state up near the Tennessee line, one clear night lit by stars, he walked by a church where choir practice was being held.
The choir was singing one of the old sorrow songs, a jubilee called “The Ship of Zion.” He stopped and stood under an open window to listen. Someone in the choir kept making a mistake, a woman. Each time, the director, a man, would stop the singing, crying out in a frustrated voice, “Halt!”
