In Salisbury, Alabama, in the northwestern part of the state up near the Tennessee line, one clear night lit by stars, he walked by a church where choir practice was being held.
The choir was singing one of the old sorrow songs, a jubilee called “The Ship of Zion.” He stopped and stood under an open window to listen. Someone in the choir kept making a mistake, a woman. Each time, the director, a man, would stop the singing, crying out in a frustrated voice, “Halt!”
After a few busy-sounding and angry words from the director the choir would take up the song again. Again a mistake was made. With the same word—“Halt!”—the director would again stop the singing. This went on and on. A brief patch of silence, just a moment, followed each time at the quittance. In one of these empty moments, someone, a woman, maybe the erring singer, let loose a small, despairing cry. Her voice was like the voice of a child and maybe it was, but he didn’t think so and, studier of many faces, he thought hers was probably the face of some reedy girl, just in from the country probably, some plain-faced young person who just wanted to join a choir to praise the Lord and maybe meet people, maybe meet some boy who might like her, but who was finding out that she couldn’t really sing. Or maybe she just couldn’t please this stern master.
The choir started up again and once more the director stopped it with the same word; again Delvin heard the thin small wail.
The director spoke harshly again, this time ordering the woman out of the group. There was another silence and then came the sound, very quietly, of weeping. Gradually the weeping faded, as if the woman was leaving the room.
The choir started up again. This time the old jubilee went sweetly by without a hitch. But it seemed to Delvin there was a gap in the song, a little hole or gouged-out place where the young woman’s voice had been. He could hear this place. It was an emptiness like the silence inside the narrow circle of a well.
He shivered. He was cold though it was a warm June night. A desolate feeling came over him and he thought he couldn’t bear what it meant to be a human being on the earth. This feeling welled up and slowly ebbed as he walked on thinking of it.
Back in the van, lying on the floor on his cotton pallet in front of the door, he could still feel a little of this impression or inclination, and he carried with him for days the recall of a faint sadness. It became something he didn’t completely forget. He returned to study and wonder about it, the singular occasion of reprimand and the grief it uncovered and the moment of silence it revealed and how this silence or space with nothing in it seemed so important.
Nothing where everything is, he would think and draw tiny circles in his notebook and make dots.
The professor, who dressed generally in the same clothes every day (so he didn’t get distracted, he said, by sartorial concerns), continued to instruct him by way of books and disquisitions on the meaning of existence, and Delvin found this education to be interesting and informative, but he preferred other written words, stories he found mainly in books in the small libraries he encountered. These libraries were mostly in churches. Many of the town libraries were not open to colored, and not many people in the quarter had books, but some churches had collected a few and he read many with inspirational themes. These, together with the books from the professor, formed the basis of his education at this time.
He thought of Celia daily and told her of his reading in the letters he wrote, listing the books he read and telling her his hopes for exotic travel. He sent her his itinerary as he learned it as well as his address in Chattanooga; he would occasionally receive a note from her. She was in her third year at college and found it more difficult than the first two. She was studying literature, but found herself pulled more strongly by her science studies. She was lonely often, but she met regularly with a circle of young women to talk politics and literature and social life (Quite often we get bogged down in the last), but still, afterwards, she said, on the walk home through the campus or after she was supposed to be asleep, she would feel a loneliness. Maybe it’s only something trying to tug me into another kind of life, she wrote, but she didn’t know what it was. I sense the world standing ready for me like a big feast, but I feel scared and unsure of where I want to start. I’d like to find some work that is so demanding that I won’t think of anything else. Isn’t that crazy?
I wish you would write some about us, you and me, he thought, and added this to the bottom of the letter he was writing. I think of all sorts of things we could do together. He told her about the little zoo they visited down in Treesburg, Louisiana, that had several goats and snakes and raccoons and a panther with the mange and a skinny bear that slept all the time. In Suberville he had climbed an abandoned fire tower and looked out at the country that seemed hapless and dull in its monotony. I want to see the world, he wrote, but only the parts that are surprising. In a note he read on the worn stone steps of the post office in Mooksville, she said she was the same.
It was in Mooksville that he got in a fight with a couple of white boys. Negro on the run, he should have known better. The boys had mocked him on the street for receiving a letter. The letter was written on green stationary and smelled of Celia’s cunning perfume. He had it spread out on one hand as he stood under a big live oak tree.
“Look at that nigra acting like he’s getting mail,” one of them said. “Hey so and so [some derogatory racial term and why repeat it], who you think’d be writing a dumb whatchamacallit like you etcetera etcetera. Who you know anyway who can write?”
“And what you doing pretending to read?” the other, a towheaded skinny boy with a slight limp, chimed in.
“You hang around I’ll teach you to read and write,” Delvin said. He didn’t want to be bothered by these silly boys. Celia was speaking in dark blue ink about a jar of pickled peaches her roommate received from her family. She was also describing her Freud studies, which she found gloomy and a kind of outrageous European voodoo. It’s a lot of wishful thinking, she said. But really smart. Even if there is a lot more mystery in the world than this man has any idea of. White people always like to put their thumb on everything, Delvin thought. They were scared not to.
The boys were like yellow flies stuttering about. He shooed them with the letter. The nearest, a stout boy about his age with coal-black straight hair cut short and a lopsided evil smile, came up close and slapped him in the face.
Delvin was so startled he lost his footing and fell, or half fell, onto his side. He pushed up, jumped to his feet, and backhanded the boy across the forehead, hurting his hand slightly.
The other, more slender, but with a strange, sterile look in his eye, hit him hard in the face. He again lost his sense of things. But didn’t go down. Then the other walloped him and he was instantly numb on the left side of his face and to his surprise revolving slowly, wondering where Celia had got to.
Right after this the police came by and he was thrown into the back of a Ford automobile, driven to the jail and locked up in it. The whole ride to the jail he shivered and wanted to cry out, sure this was his fallen day in which the clamps of white men’s justice would take hold in his life. The long rope that stretched from Chattanooga to this village in Alabama had tripped him. What was he thinking, to hit that boy?
But he was wrong about the ubiquity of the law. And it wasn’t the last time he hit a white boy.
The professor found him in the whitewashed brick jail the next day — after Delvin had been brought before the judge and given thirty days for fighting and assault. Justice was a quick and handy business for africano folks in that town. As Delvin stood before the judge, who wore not robes but a red-striped collarless shirt and black suspenders, he thought he could smell the citrus perfume on Celia’s letter and looked around wildly for her come to help him but she wasn’t there. The letter was gone and this hurt him in his heart. Just then the judge was speaking directly at him.