The circus was in the big field across the street from the Constitution Funeral Home, the leading negro funeral home in Chattanooga. Cornelius Oliver, mortician and the proprietor of the Home, the richest africano man in town, a man who even during the Great War bought a new Cadillac every year, which he rode in driven by his chauffeur Willie Burt Collins — Mr. Oliver to the community, Ollie to the white folks — was sitting in his side room speaking in a genial but uncompromising voice to his assistant secretary, Polly, about the perfidy of white folks, and especially the white folks in city government who had promised him that the circus would be moved to a lot on the other side of the quarter, when he caught sight of Delvin in his cropped overalls and the navy sweater he’d pulled off the pile at the H(omeless) A(fricano) house.
“Who is that little boy walking down the middle of the street?” he said. “Come look out here.”
Delvin was trying (unsuccessfully) to light a kitchen match with his thumbnail as he walked.
“Hey you, boy,” Oliver called, but Delvin ignored him. “Run get that boy,” he said to Polly.
A fast runner herself and a girl who hoped every day for something different from yesterday, she set down the pitcher she was using to water the fading begonias and leapt out through the open study window.
“My lord, child,” Mr. Oliver said, but Polly didn’t hear him. She was already sprinting across the narrow patch of close-cropped lawn to intercept Delvin, who saw her coming and veered over to the other side of the unpaved red clay street.
“You, boy!” Polly cried. She had no trouble catching him. It was the holding of him that was difficult. “I got something for you,” she said.
“Many’s spoke of such as that,” Delvin said, “but few’s delivered. Let me go.”
“This is something good. Mr. Oliver wants to speak to you.”
“That your name for the devil?”
“You dumb little clodhopper, don’t—”
“I aint no farmer, I’m from. .” He couldn’t remember the name of his street.
“Don’t you know who Mr. Oliver is?” She was dragging him by the arm across the street. Down the way a breeze shuffled leaves in a big beech tree. A white man in a large straw hat pushed an automobile with a small boy behind the wheel. “Like I said, the devil uses many a false appellation.” This last word he’d picked up from a book he’d found back at the HA house. Or maybe he’d heard it in the street. He was a sharp one for listening in.
She continued to drag him back to the funeral home.
“You taking me into that place — that undertaker’s?”
“Mr. Oliver is a funeral director.”
“Whoo, you looking to bury me?”
“I might, but Mr. Oliver wants you for his charity work, I expect.”
“I don’t need no charity.”
“No, I reckon you are beyond anything charity could do.”
She reset her grip and dragged him into the house, which was cooler than outside and dim and hushed. The last few steps he had gone along with her, curious to see what a bonecracker was up to. Down a hallway paved in soft red carpet she knocked on the paneled white door of Mr. Oliver’s study and was invited by a grave tenor voice to enter. The big room with its vast oak desk with inlaid green felt top, its green leather couch and rug-upholstered armchairs, its tables with fresh flowers in clear vases and assorted mementoes from Mr. Oliver’s customers, its painting on the wall between the two tall windows of Wolfe Dying at Quebec, its rugs in painted patterns of red and green, was the fanciest room Delvin had ever been in. . if he set aside the front parlor of the Emporium. Recalling the fancy swags and silk bunting, the mural of the Queen of Sheba dancing for the enthralled King David — or was it Solomon — and the rose settees with the working ladies lounging on them like perfumed cats, a pang of longing for his mother touched Delvin.
Oliver, a discerning man, voluminous in his physical being and not without concern for others, said, “Boy, you’ve suffered a loss, haven’t you?”
Delvin didn’t want to discuss this with a stranger. “I’m doing fine,” he said.
“Why were you running?”
“To get away from that circus.”
“Rightly so, my young man.”
This made Delvin feel a little better. It troubled him that he would be frightened of the clowns, especially when no one else appeared to be. “What was it you wanted?” he said.
“I need an errand boy and a helper,” Mr. Oliver said.
“How much you pay?”
“Two dollars a week and keep.”
Delvin liked being in the room. He liked Mr. Oliver’s round fat face. Except for Long Dog Wilkins, The Negro Giant, Mr. Oliver was the largest man he had ever seen.
“Who’s your mama and daddy?” Mr. O inquired.
“I got none.”
“You’re on your own, son?”
“Been since I was near to five.”
Mr. Oliver laughed, a bubbly, analgesic laugh. “How old are you now?”
“Six and a half.”
“Where do you live?”
“At the Bell Home.”
“Oh, of course.”
Oliver contacted the home and made the arrangements for Delvin to stay at the mortuary. He had done this before, following a vague impulse to help little boys. He himself had been a little boy set out on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. At eight he had hoboed a train from Montgomery to Chattanooga where he had been pushed off a boxcar ladder, breaking his ankle on a switch tie. An old yard worker had come on him crying and taken him home and with the neighborhood healerwoman’s help straightened his ankle and put it in a poplarwood boxsplint. He stayed with this gentleman and his wife for three years before he began working for Mr. Duluth Mathis, the former owner of the funeral home. Mathis, who had no children, had eventually passed the business on to him. A bachelor, he looked now for other little boys he might fling a lifeline to. It loops back around to me, he would think as he sat in the big tub in his tile bathroom, feeling not so lonely, not so lost.
Delvin accepted the job and went to work, uneasily at first, fetching items from the pantry, doing light cleaning, digging in the garden and watering the flowers, hauling out trash and burning it in the metal drum out back, picking up pecans and bringing them in a yellow enameled bowl he wondered if stolen from kings, and staying close to Mrs. Parker, the cook, and to Polly, in case they needed a quick boy for anything. It offended him to work in such a place, and scared him and made him sad in a way he didn’t quite understand, but they fed him copiously at the big pine table in the kitchen where with the sidemen and the maids he had his meals, and he liked sleeping out in the little barn or shed behind the house, in a room beside the stalls that smelled of sweet hay and leather (that is, before he moved into the house to a small square bedroom off Mr. O’s big bedroom).