So life went; they had stew beans every night for supper and some kind of pig meat, usually sowbelly, and a corn dish, usually grits, and cornbread. These were among Delvin’s natural favorites. Nobody was sentenced here for more than a year, though some had their sentences lengthened for what the white men called misbehavior. Sentences of over a year went to state prison. This is a work farm, they said, not a prison. What did they know?
By time he got out there had been no word from Tennessee and he hadn’t heard from the professor for over two weeks. A man Josie got out with him and the two of them walked into town together on the dirt road that ran through the corn and tomato fields and the fields of sweet peppers. Delvin appreciated the company, but he wasn’t interested just then in any more lectures about philosophy or racial politics, which this man Josie was known for. Josie said he didn’t mind and then launched into a monologue about general restrictions placed on negroes and what this fact represented in the larger scheme of things. The negro’s hidden superior strength was what the gist seemed to Delvin.
On a little rise Josie stopped and told Delvin to turn around and look and he did and the two of them gazed back down the long slope at the farm, a shabby, roughhewn settlement among its vegetable fields.
“A place you could rub out with the bottom of your hand,” Josie said, “a ridiculous congregation of punishment for forgetful or over-energetic colored men, a crushed, upended heap lying like a dog exposing its spotted belly to the high-class sunshine pouring down upon it.”
On a wide leather band he was wearing one of the first wristwatches Delvin had ever seen and he had a faded straw panama set back on his head and he snorted through his gob of a nose and spit a white fleck that snagged on a pepper leaf. He stretched himself and worked his shoulders — throwing off the shame and degradation, he said. “I can feel it sliding back down this hill,” he said, smiling his snaggle-toothed smile.
Delvin had been returned a short gray pencil and his old blue flip-top notebook as well as a copy of the passing novel
He mentioned this to Josie, who began to make crowing noises, flapping his arms with his hands tucked under his armpits as he jumped around him.
“Well, all right,” Delvin said. Jim Crow — he got it. “Where you headed now?” he asked.
Josie paused mid-crow and shook his head. “I’ll just trot off in one direction or the other as the incitement takes me,” he said with a softened inflection.
Delvin thought about offering him a ride in the van but he wasn’t sure the professor had gotten the van back or what he might say about the non-owner offering a stranger a ride. He had been in the past a little testy about such behavior on Delvin’s part.
He poked around looking but the professor was nowhere to be found. He could hardly believe he had gone off and left him. With Josie he walked across town to the negro barbershop. He waked the single barber in his porcelain chair and asked him — fat, unshaven, with a merry manner — if he’d seen Professor Carmel, the spare-set gentleman in a long canvas coat and so forth.
The barber said he had indeed and that many like himself — meaning in the negro establishment — had been given a message to pass on to Delvin when he showed up.
“What message was that?”
“Let me see,” the barber, a Mr. Floris, said and rummaged in a small counter drawer among combs and hair nets and various pieces of old dismantled hand clippers until he found what he was looking for, a folded piece of blue paper with Delvin’s name on the outside in the professor’s florid script.
