Ginny Gall полностью

This is a crazy man, Delvin thought as he sat in the shed, but he was excited by what he’d told him. He missed the professor. He missed riding along dirt roads in the van hauling photographs around the states. There was a foolish bit of activity. But he loved sitting out behind the van on summer twilights with citronella oil burning in the little china dish for the mosquitoes, letting the world row darkly along beside them. Time creaked by on those wandering days.

A few nights later Jim was caught trying to escape. They hauled him down off the wire fence, took him into the guard shed and beat him until he couldn’t stand and threw him into the box. He might not get out of this simple work farm alive. The farm grew corn and tomatoes and field greens and a little cotton for market and squash and butterbeans for the table. A small community of men working the sandy fields of west Dixie. Every one there except for three or four would go back to homes in the county. Some of the men were related. The white men knew the colored men and vice versa. Delvin was one of the few strangers. Everybody knew his place. Life here was unstirring. Fixed. Moldy, Delvin thought. The white folks hoped they would not have to make another big fight, but they were prepared if one came. Nobody gave up land and power without a fight. Well, what to do? The quiet in the evening here, he thought, is peaceful. It can’t help itself. Even in a war they can’t be firing the guns all the time. There has to be these quiet moments. In these moments I am refreshed. He had read these words somewhere. He remembered: Stanley Terrell, the negro philosopher from Harlem, a man known only by negro folks, who wrote that in the clamor and frenzy of the white-run life they were being hustled through, there were still times when we could take our rest, find peace and happiness. We do not even have to seek them out. There are already here, in moments by the well or behind the barn or walking back from the store carrying a ten-pound can of lard. In the city you can look up: above you is the endless wilderness of sky, a promised land and free to every man, a country unsullied and unclaimable, yours as well as any other’s. He had started looking at the sky more often, studying it, at least for a while. What was that old song Mrs. Parker sang in the kitchen? Yeah: “Before I’d Be A Slave,” also called, she said, “Oh Freedom.” Oh, freedom. Terrell said freedom was everywhere. In these songs, in the quiet of the day, in the sky when you stop at the washboard and feel the softness of a piece of cloth in your hands, in the eyes of your loved ones. But of course that didn’t stop the whip from coming down.

He didn’t feel too bad sitting in the shed stuffing flowers into the brown clay pots. He waked each day with a feeling of possibility, a sweet joyous feeling sometimes. The white guard was just outside the door beating a train rail with an iron bar. The prisoners slept side by side on their rough cots and had very little to their names in this place, like sailors out at sea, and in a way this suited Delvin. He had written the professor care of general delivery and got a single answer that he was working in the kitchen of the Gold Flower restaurant on Main street washing dishes and doing a little of the short work. They are still pondering, he said, whether or not to release the museum. Maybe watching to see if it will sprout arms and legs and jump on them. Nothing to do but sit and wait.

One of the prisoners had a mouth harp that he played the old songs on. Others mocked this music and called out for something more timely. But the player, a small man with close-set lively eyes, refused. So somebody took the harp away from him. Others rose up and tried to get the harp back from the robber, a short man with muscular forearms. He in his turn refused, so they beat him. In the struggle the harp was crushed on the concrete floor, smashed by the heel of a Georgia Logger boot. Now the owner of the instrument cried in his sleep. Delvin wasn’t the only one who heard him.