Ginny Gall полностью

In these situations usually the africano elders of the town would explain to the white fathers the value they placed on the museum, on enterprises of this sort, if not this particular enterprise, and hoped and pleaded, Your Honor, that you might let us enjoy this celebration of simple american negro life. The fathers, sometimes more jocosely than not, would liberate the van, not because they believed in the efficacy of nigra museums but generally because they didn’t want to get these black fools in a stir. But this time, in Haplessburg or Muttstown or whatever it was called, they were not so quick to see the good side of the museum’s existence.

“You are already stirring up trouble with that vexacious tribunery,” they said. “If we release it, you might cause even more trouble.”

“We receive so little in the way of education about our people. .,” the professor began, but one of the fathers, a usually genial druggist named Mames, stared at the pencil he was holding as if it might be a magic wand of some kind and said, “What you talking about — your people? You aint got no people. You’re a nigra — am I right?”

“Yessir, I am.”

“The nigras are not a people. They are just — what’s the word I’m looking for, Monk? Not a herd—”

“A flock?” Monk Wilkes, the florid owner of the hardware store, said.

“No, damn it!”

“That’s a quarter for swearing in the meeting,” the mayor, a disputacious little lawyer and landlord, said.

“Not a flock,” Mames said, “no, they’re just — well, there is no name for what you are. You’re just an ordinary part of the life of folks in this area, like junebugs or dirt daubers or possums. Wait — okay: Folks is what you are, just folks. The Israelites, they are a people. The Chinese are a people. Americans are a people. You are folks.”

He smiled complacently at the professor who stood before him in what he called his presentation clothes, a pair of faded but very clean black broadcloth pants with a yellow shirt and cream-colored canvas jacket, waiting patiently for a chance to speak. When it came, he said calmly that he believed the exhibit helped colored folks — folks, he said — to appreciate how good their lives were down here in the rural south. Let them know how rich and pleasant it is. (Truth was he believed that, despite all this nonsensical fuss, it was a good life — a good life being possible under almost any conditions. This was one of his major philosophical points.)

The mayor screwed up his little empty blue eyes and said, “We will take this matter under advisement and let you know.”

The professor attempted to plead further that the museum was his life’s work and only means of earning a living and so forth, but these pleadings did not sway the fathers. They waved him out with the disinterested courtesy of retired mule skinners seeing an oldtime customer onto a bus, and the chief of police ushered him from the room.