and then he quit the writing. It was becoming too grandeed. He had a tendency in this direction that he recognized. Everybody got to do something, the professor said. He got the canvas bucket and hauled water from a well in the front yard of a slanted negro cabin and washed the truck. It didn’t come back to shiny black; it still was gray.
They were in Cullen, then Astor, then Cumming, then the old coal town of Radsburg. How did they, two negroes in a shabby van filled with photographs, escape destruction by the white race? In each town the strict divide between the races was carefully and forcefully maintained. Place was most important. Remember your place, boy, the instructions lettered invisibly but legibly on every sign and attitude and takeout window and coldwater shanty said.
The professor said, “When your own unholiness gets you burned down, shot, cannonaded, trampled, your close relatives killed, and the victors dig up the dead and drunkenly dance with them by bonfirelight, which is just what happened to these white folks, what you want is a world or a section of the world where what was lost can be rebuilt, and, most important, none of those you wronged can make a move on you. You want a world that stays still. ‘We will live not in a spinning remnant,’ they say, ‘but in a world in which what stands for who we once were can be reconstructed and preserved without the shadow of death falling across it.’ But this is impossible to do. Life, snorting and fretting and sniffing around for something sweet, once loosed, can’t be fetched up. Even if it’s not loose, it will get loose. That’s the thing about life that makes it different from the stones: it moves around.”
But alien negroes driving a large truck — it was a kind of truck, built by the Ford Motor Company — bringing a celebration of things negroid, was pushing the limit. How did they get by without being lynched or at least beaten senseless, their van confiscated and their pictures burned with the yard trash?
The professor first thing when he arrived in whatever settled nervous burg they visited (they didn’t stop in every one) dropped by the police station and paid a bribe, made a donation, to the chief, yes, as said. And he made sure the chief and the city government understood that they — the alien purveyors — knew how stupid these dark folks were, showing each other photographs of their comic faces. They made it clear to the authorities that the exhibit was a folly, a cunning joke on the negro race, a lampoon and antic burlesque designed to humiliate and poke fun at every one of them. Make sure, Your Honor, these simple folk are in their place. What a hoot. He showed them examples of those feckless, half-wit darkies, granddaddy or some youngun napping in a porch swing or grinning big or a look on his face, as he stared off at the sun slipping down behind the pines, of foolish wonder. The police grinned and patted their bellies and laughed, mostly. Other times the professor cut it close, sometimes a little too close. But few wanted trouble, with negroes or any other group. (Times some defeated person, some sap that hatred had knocked down so many times until he had to use a grudge to build himself back up, some fool who didn’t know better, some ex-tormented-child who wanted revenge, a self-despiser, would swing his feet back under him, rise up and knock the black man down. “But you always apologize,” the prof said, “and then you get back up.”
“I know about that,” Delvin said, remembering his scrape in the dress shop, and other venues.)
What up north they called the Depression circled like a flight of buzzards over every town. People still thought business would pull the country out even though business, since 1863, had not been able to pull the South out of anything and the new Depression was just a doubling up, locally.
“Yall just keep that race nonsense off among yourselves and don’t bother nobody,” the suzerains said to the professor, “we got real worries now.” Anyway, they had, since the war, quickly tied the black race back up in knots and they didn’t have to worry about them. Nor any fake professor and his truckload of comic photographs.
Into the negro half-towns and sham-cities Delvin began to go at night. He walked the streets of the Overtowns and Undertowns and the Congos and Mississippi and Louisiana quarters. The Lands of Darkness. Unpaved, they were often hardly streets at all. More like lanes in medieval towns of Europe or villages in Africa — streets filled with the smells of woodsmoke and spices and antique sensories made of bits of prehistoric matter and dried long-extinct flowers. On the creaky lopsided porches vague lights shone like bits of webbing or mist, casting huge shadows on the bare lopsided front walls of the little frame houses. Under the trees the tiny diastolic glimmers of lightning bugs ticked, becoming whiter the higher they rose. Up among the branches pinches and bits of gleaming too faint to cast shadows stayed on for hours. Up ahead, in the middle of the street, human shapes dipped and swooped in unhasty dances as the barely perceptible music of guitars and hand organs made their soundings in the deeps of night. Cries and hoots and whisperings. There seemed always to be a bit of fog at the end of the street. Cats moaned in their long nights of suffering. Dogs barked with a sound like consumptive muted coughing. As he walked the streets in the deepest parts of the night he could hear people talking in their beds. Old men confessed to their snoring wives the secret affairs of their youth. Old women spoke of masked riders galloping furiously down the roads on huge dark horses. Children spoke of boogeymen with hands growing out of their knees and bellies. In dreams girls whispered to kindly lovers. Boys answered questions with wit and intelligence.
Who dat dar? a woman’s voice called, but not to him. He carried in his heart the drubbed and muzzled love of a disallowing woman through the faintly whispering, crepitant streets. He believed this walking eased him and made him able to go about without so much fear he had to run away. He was scared all the time. What have I come to? he whispered in the dark caverns under oaks, and he was old enough — had been born old enough — to ask this question. He believed that whatever he was had to be played out in the world. He couldn’t hold off from it. What he was scared him. What he believed he was. Seventeen and strong, not very strong, but strong enough and able and filled with beef, with get-up-and-go, with pep, zip, vim — with lifting power, which the professor said was the greatest thing, lifting power — and he had an inexhaustible need to exercise himself on the earth.
In the shadows by a boarded-up livery stable, in a little town so small the africano section was only half of two streets next to the town dump, he waited as one would wait for a carriage called to take him to the far places of the world. The air smelled of pine smoke and rotten apples. Down the street a man in a long white nightshirt stepped out of his door and looked at the sky that was still dark. He waved at something in the sky and Delvin wondered who it was, or what, and thought he knew. What is coming? he wondered, but no one and nothing in the world could tell him. The man made a large sweeping gesture, turned back in and slammed the door behind him. The sound was like the last clap of a civilization closing up.