After a while Delvin got up and walked around the camp. He thought he recognized a few of the men, but he wasn’t sure. These days he often saw folks he thought he had seem somewhere before.
He walked down the eroded slope into the ditch and sat by the milky waters of the little creek and thought about Celia. Her cheeks had a slant to them that made his heart break like an egg. Her eyes were fully black, and shiny like something brand-new, and she had looked out of them as if she’d never had a chance to use them before. She had to live with her father being killed by white men. But it didn’t seem she’d been turned to hate. You couldn’t always tell. Had she glimpsed her father’s picture in the museum? They had pictures of drowned men; maybe he was one of them, maybe the ashy-mouthed man, naked but for a torn white shirt, hauled up by three men from the dark waters of a country pond, was him. Or the man snagged on a grappling hook and lifted like a big fish out of the Tamal Canal onto a wooden bridge. Or the half-burned man lying in the reeds west of New Orleans. It seemed like life could suddenly snatch you up and kill you, this life could. But the professor said every step we take leads us to our destiny. We never make one false step, he said. Delvin stretched his foot out and flattened it against the hard sand. Next step, he said and brought the foot back. Does that one count? A man squatting in a little clearing on the other side of the creek waved but he wasn’t waving at him. A breeze stumbled around in the gallberry bushes, ruffling the flimsy tops. Back at the camp somebody hooted and another voice broke into a clumsy out-of-tune song and stopped. Celia had slim hands, long fingers that slid along like she was about to poke them into something. Her shoulders were square. He wanted to go on a long walk with her, tell her about his travels, hear what she had to say about her life.
He got up, stepped across the creek, climbed the low bank and headed back to the van.
Over the next few days he spent time with her. Due to his putting together a small concession with the negro primary and elementary schools that brought their classes over to look at the exhibits, the professor wanted anyway to stay over.
“It’s a sure two maybe three dollars a day,” he said.
He planned to head northward, summer coming, the wild magnolia trees already blossoming in the woods.
Celia seemed to like walking with Delvin. They drove to the country in her car (she was the first africano woman he had met who owned her own car, a small Chevrolet coupe). They had to be mindful of where they went; they didn’t want to upset the white folks by alarming them with a couple of out-of-town africanos in an automobile. You got along if you smiled and said yessir and put on a humble front. But even so, the white folks were sometimes spooked by the appearance of a strange africano person. Her cousin Samuel had been beat up in Shelby, where she was from, because he let his irritation at the dumbness of a white store clerk show through.
They had put a couple of cane fishing poles in the rumbleseat, and when they wanted to walk some they would carry the poles with them. Fishing negroes were a familiar and reassuring sight in this part of the world. Delvin had never fished in his life, except for the comical trip he took to a pond with Mr. Oliver, where they both fell in, but he enjoyed walking along with Celia carrying a pole.
It would be pleasing to catch their dinner, maybe sometime they would do that. But neither had brought bait and they didn’t know how to find any. Worms, Delvin had read, or grasshoppers, were good, but where might they be? It was early in the summer for grasshoppers anyway. Celia was no help and they chided each other in a familiar way that made them tense and happy and they tossed their unbaited lines into this or that murky body of water nonetheless. They had remembered hooks and the bobbers made of bits of cork. They liked best, as today, simply to walk along the side of a stream with the poles on their shoulders, and Celia didn’t seem to mind the water dripping off the wound fishing line onto her blouse; he liked that. They spoke of the lives they lived — the traveling in his case, school in hers — and of the towns they were from and each told the other little almost secret details that thrilled them to say and to hear and their skin tingled and their eyes shone and each more than once felt a sudden joyful weepiness come on that each stalled and then rushed past, scattering details and sudden declamatory claims about life and themselves.
Celia’s stepfather was a doctor — as her father had been — trained in Chicago. (“My favorite town,” Delvin crowed, though he allowed under questioning that he’d never been there—“but I have read much about it,” he said.) Her family lived in the little town of Shelby in Louisiana just south of the Mississippi line, and also in Chicago. She found the South strange and scary (“Like living in a perilous fairy tale,” she said), but the people, “the africano people down here,” she said, were warmhearted, even if they were nosy and gossipy and often chuckleheaded folk; they gave you the feeling they had found a way to some happiness about themselves that she missed up north.
“Everything there split up?” Delvin wanted to know. “Between the white folks and the colored?”
“You could say yes,” she said, but it wasn’t quite so open. The races could sit together in the picture show or even eat together in some restaurants, but there was a feeling that was always there that you might at any minute be called for trespassing. People didn’t pay attention to colored folk like they did to white; you were overlooked, left out. They didn’t mind if you got a little successful, but they didn’t want you getting too close to them.
“Down here we’re all jumbled up together,” Delvin said. He didn’t know why he said that, but it seemed so as he said it.
“Long as you return to the Land of Darkness,” Celia said and laughed. That was what everybody called the quarter, in most every town.
They had stopped under a big oak that had a peltlike green moss growing on its limbs.
“What are you going to do with yourself?” he said. She was at least two years older than him and he could see she looked on him as a boy or tried to. Long streaks of pale cloud ran east to west. Near one a little double-winged airplane chugged along. Only last year, he thought, he had begun to notice airplanes flying; before last year you never saw them, except maybe at fairs and exhibitions.
“I guess I’ll be a doctor too,” she said, switching the end of her pole against some dusty tickseed plants.
“Can you do that?”
“I don’t know for sure. There are places in the east maybe, but I don’t know.”
“You don’t sound too red-hot about it.”
“I know. I’ve always thought I would be a doctor like my father. .” She bit her lip. “I used always to say Father, but now I say my father. . I just realized that a couple of months ago.”