Ginny Gall полностью

I wish you would write some about us, you and me, he thought, and added this to the bottom of the letter he was writing. I think of all sorts of things we could do together. He told her about the little zoo they visited down in Treesburg, Louisiana, that had several goats and snakes and raccoons and a panther with the mange and a skinny bear that slept all the time. In Suberville he had climbed an abandoned fire tower and looked out at the country that seemed hapless and dull in its monotony. I want to see the world, he wrote, but only the parts that are surprising. In a note he read on the worn stone steps of the post office in Mooksville, she said she was the same.

It was in Mooksville that he got in a fight with a couple of white boys. Negro on the run, he should have known better. The boys had mocked him on the street for receiving a letter. The letter was written on green stationary and smelled of Celia’s cunning perfume. He had it spread out on one hand as he stood under a big live oak tree.

“Look at that nigra acting like he’s getting mail,” one of them said. “Hey so and so [some derogatory racial term and why repeat it], who you think’d be writing a dumb whatchamacallit like you etcetera etcetera. Who you know anyway who can write?”

“And what you doing pretending to read?” the other, a towheaded skinny boy with a slight limp, chimed in.

“You hang around I’ll teach you to read and write,” Delvin said. He didn’t want to be bothered by these silly boys. Celia was speaking in dark blue ink about a jar of pickled peaches her roommate received from her family. She was also describing her Freud studies, which she found gloomy and a kind of outrageous European voodoo. It’s a lot of wishful thinking, she said. But really smart. Even if there is a lot more mystery in the world than this man has any idea of. White people always like to put their thumb on everything, Delvin thought. They were scared not to.

The boys were like yellow flies stuttering about. He shooed them with the letter. The nearest, a stout boy about his age with coal-black straight hair cut short and a lopsided evil smile, came up close and slapped him in the face.

Delvin was so startled he lost his footing and fell, or half fell, onto his side. He pushed up, jumped to his feet, and backhanded the boy across the forehead, hurting his hand slightly.

The other, more slender, but with a strange, sterile look in his eye, hit him hard in the face. He again lost his sense of things. But didn’t go down. Then the other walloped him and he was instantly numb on the left side of his face and to his surprise revolving slowly, wondering where Celia had got to.

Right after this the police came by and he was thrown into the back of a Ford automobile, driven to the jail and locked up in it. The whole ride to the jail he shivered and wanted to cry out, sure this was his fallen day in which the clamps of white men’s justice would take hold in his life. The long rope that stretched from Chattanooga to this village in Alabama had tripped him. What was he thinking, to hit that boy?

But he was wrong about the ubiquity of the law. And it wasn’t the last time he hit a white boy.

The professor found him in the whitewashed brick jail the next day — after Delvin had been brought before the judge and given thirty days for fighting and assault. Justice was a quick and handy business for africano folks in that town. As Delvin stood before the judge, who wore not robes but a red-striped collarless shirt and black suspenders, he thought he could smell the citrus perfume on Celia’s letter and looked around wildly for her come to help him but she wasn’t there. The letter was gone and this hurt him in his heart. Just then the judge was speaking directly at him.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Delvin said, “I didn’t hear you.”

The judge added five days to his sentence for impertinence.

The prof wasn’t on the crime scene, but by nature of his relationship to Delvin he was implicated in the offense; the town took custody of the van (it wasn’t the first time the museum had been taken in) and planned to hold it until the authorities made sure the professor was not up to any illegal activity on his own.