The Atlanta streets were full of soldiers and he had to be careful he was not stopped to produce a paper saying why he was not in uniform. Word had gotten around that a man was living at Minnie May’s house and yesterday a frog-faced fellow with a heavy limp had stopped by the house to say they were talking down at the store about he was a deserter. Delvin thought the man might be lying but now he was scared. He thought of stealing Feveril’s card or paper or whatever it was but he didn’t have the strength for it right now. This world out here was a mystery to him; he was shadowed by a fragile and dessicate past and bewildered by the rackety present. It was best to keep his mouth shut and just watch carefully.
He’d bought a notebook and a pencil out of the two dollars Minnie gave him each week and started keeping a record of what had happened to him in prison; he could remember that. He was scared to write openly about prison life, scared of getting caught that way, so wrote in a squinched script. He read some of the childhood parts to Feveril who said they brought back his own raising in Atlanta. “’Cept I didn’t have no mama who killed a man. Why’d she do that?”
“Man tried to shame her.”
“They wont nothin else?”
“Something mysterious.” He didn’t want to say more, he never did. The old man she killed had been her regular Saturday-night date for years. That’s what he had heard over at the Emporium. But there was more. An unavoidable dark hand stretching forth unsuspected by her in a world where a black person had to stay alert at all times. He carried not only the shame of her crime, but the surprise, and the dread of its perplexing circumstance. “Got stretched out past what she could take,” he said.
Feveril had a job sweeping at the Jeep plant over in Riverdale, but he was bad about missing work. “I got a sister,” he said when Delvin asked about this, “and she brings me goodins in from the country when she comes. I aint going to serve in no army I can tell you.”
Delvin enjoyed Feveril’s stories about his sister, about farm folks and the long country days, and he thought of heading out that way, but he had a journey to make to Chattanooga and then it was on from there to the northland. This had fixed in his mind by now. But he was taking his time about getting started. He liked living with Minnie May. He enjoyed cleaning house for her and cooking and hoeing in the garden out back and rolling in the bed with her, and that wasn’t all. Maybe he would marry her. She had a frightful temper. She was always blowing up about little things, things Delvin didn’t even see. It was like she had magnifying eyes. Feveril said she’d been that way since she was a little girl.
“I think she’s mad about being so plain — excuse me,” he said in deference to Delvin’s situation.
“I aint missed that part,” Delvin said. “She’s got other good qualities.”
“I know she do.”
“How you know?”
“I’ve knowed her all my life and she’s a big woman — you can’t miss em.”
“Hmm.”
Delvin didn’t think homeliness was what was bothering her — or not the only thing. “She just hadn’t fulfilled her purpose,” he said.
“Depends on what it is, I guess.”
“That’s right.”
When Feveril went in to pour himself another from from his kitchen jug, Delvin wandered out of his yard. On Lester street on his way to Minnie’s he heard the strains of a song he was familiar with, “Der Stürmische Morgen,” coming from the little one-man barbershop. He peeked in as he passed by and saw the barber, Mr. Eulis, sitting in his tipped-back porcelain chair listening to the Victrola with his eyes closed and moving one finger the way Mr. Oliver did when he played the same Schubert song on the wind-up machine in his bedroom. Down the street outside Leary’s grocery a tan dog stood on its hind legs trying to lick one of the hams Mr. Leary had hanging from the porch eave. A little boy dressed in white stumped slowly on crutches back and forth along the walk in front of a house on Bee way. A large man wearing pressed overalls without a shirt sat in a tree swing staring at the soft dust under his feet. Delvin wished the man would look up so he could hail him and smile. He’d started hanging a smile on his face since he left prison, making himself appear friendly. Wherever he got a chance and figured he could take a chance. Stella Burkle, a fine-looking woman but crazy, walked along on the other side of the street, swinging her big white patent leather pocketbook. If you spoke to her she would hit you with it.
Maybe a limp, he thought, maybe I ought to go back to that — throw the marshals off. But it was too late. People knew he had been sick, but that was all they’d heard of that might exclude him from military service. The penitentiary would keep you out. ’Cept they were probably putting prisoners now on work gangs for the good of the country. Well, the country needed cotton and the prisons he’d been in were good at producing that. The war was one more fright jabbing at men in prison. Negro men locked up in a lost corner of the white man’s world. What’s gon become of you? Who are you? Who you be? And here comes Mr. Billy Camp and his goat cart. The old man, walking beside his two-wheel cart pulled by two billies and accompanied by half a dozen outwalker goats, passed by going the other way. He gave Delvin a friendly wave with his leafy mulberry stick and Delvin waved back. Maybe he could join up with him, see the country at goat speed, pass as a friendly colored crazy man. Back at Minnie May’s white cottage home he sat on the back steps wearing a stained derby with a hole in the back the size of a peach, a hat he had picked out of the trash in Jacksonville. The warden at Burning Mountain had worn a derby with two scuffed marks on the front like the white eyes of a ghost. He had picked up his notebook on the way through the bedroom. The little slip of blue paper he put in it to mark his place was gone; Minnie May had looked through it. So now she knew he was an escapee — probably. But why had he left it for her to easily find? In the book he had taken note of the tin washtub hung on the shed wall, the beans coiled around their strings in the garden. A leaf on a spicebush that spun crazily in no wind he could feel, white as the wing of a cabbage butterfly. He’d studied the soft slim prints of Minnie May’s bare feet in the dust by the back steps, prints that reminded him of his mother’s. First thing his mama did when she came home was to take off her shoes. Walked around all day in her bare feet, leaving tracks he’d followed like a detective. He didn’t think about her as much as he used to. But still in dreams she came to him, laughing or crying, mute and determined, one time yelling at him with her thin arm raised like he was a dog she was bound to beat on.
Sitting now on the back steps, tracing with one finger his mother’s name, Cappie, looking at Minnie’s footprints that might have been his mama’s, he began to cry. He shaded his face and choked down the sounds, careful still of prison dangers. His body shook. It wasn’t all grief. Mingled with the pasty, durable, extenuated sadness was a happiness, a new one, a stretching out of himself, long-shanked and agile — he was, in this moment of American time, free, a misplaced man, overlooked, drifting on the breeze, a wanderer amid the garrison of interlockedness, sunk deep enough in negro life for a while not to be missed, uncounted by any census, omitted by the tax man, skipped by the army. Only the cross-Dixie skookum boys were looking for him.
He wiped his eyes.
If they were looking. Maybe they’d. . but he knew they hadn’t forgot. Couldn’t down here afford to neglect for too long any unaccounted-for colored man. Colored man — the rules he had to follow — was the linchpin of the whole business down here. Lynch pin.