Harris listened without seeming to. He gazed around the room. These bleak, sullied rooms never bothered him. The facts in these cases were where the power was. The facts like stones set into a wall. The power in the wall and what was behind it, in the lives lived in the grease and stink of poverty pressing forward through time. The power was in the weight of these lives laid against the wall, and for him the subtraction of life breath by breath leading all the way back to the beginning of time, something more powerful than anything else he knew, a weight of reason and choices, a strength right now implacable from some toothless oldtimer long ago reaching out his hand for the piece of pre-masticated meat a child put into it, the look in the old man’s eyes meeting the look in the child’s eyes, and over there the breeze touching an old woman’s face, engendering an irresistible thought, and that man over there listening for the cry of a baby in the other room where his wife lay sick on a pallet on the floor, something hard and inescapable coming for him. He dismissed none of what he loved about these scenes, the million-year history of people roughed up and knocked down by the ones slightly stronger. He never talked about this, hardly brought it into his own mind, but he felt the weight of a righteousness laid against him, pressing into his days and into his sleep.
And, too, he was a man, wearing a suit snagged with a hook from a sidewalk wire outside a haberdasher’s on Orchard street, who wanted people to know who he was. And as the people he was hired to help wished they could do, he gathered influence like a golden grain.
The facts of the case, so these lawyers thought, were chits on a string, gaps here and there, adding up to not much. Delvin looked into their self-regarding, lurid faces, at the ructating misery that had not settled, sensing the complex lies they told themselves so they would not — so they thought — bring trouble down on their children, the way each was an official of this great empiric power they thought they were the checkers and refusers of, these freightless carriers and silly boys, these men with tickets, who would never suffer, or if they did, the suffering would be in passing, some condition or reversal that would consume a few days or years of their lives and then drop them and wander off in another direction. None of them lived in a state of fear or tyranny. He saw this, and as he saw he heard inside his head the voices saying that for these people Delvin and his compadres were only troublesome beasts caught momentarily in the chute. We are good-hearted and for fame and money we will get you cattle turned around the right way. Thank you, suh. But he was not cut off from his own heart by, or even from, his interceders, he was not yet disattached — that wasn’t the word — nor was he threaded through or aligned with them, none of that, he was only inseparable from the curiosity he felt looking at them, that was where the life was, his curiosity, and he knew this. What was it they were up to? Besides rattling along in their own peculiar version of a train ride?
It just wont right, was what they said in Red Row back in Chattanooga. That was closer to the truth of things than anything he could come up with.
Suddenly he was scared to death. His bowels loosened and he bent over, gripping himself.
“You all right, boy?” Pullen said.
“I got to go to the little house.”
“You can do that in a minute.”
“I mean right now. Suh.” But as he said the words his insides tightened up and he was all right.
Harris started to signal the guard but Delvin stopped him. “Thank you, suh, I guess I’m fine.”
“You trying to game us, boy?” Pullen said.
“No, suh. I felt a flash of sickness is all. I’m better now.”
“Well. That’s okay,” Harris said. “Now—”
“Yes suh,” Delvin said quickly, “I was in the fight, but I never saw either of those two women. Not til the end.”
“None of you boys did,” said Pullen.
The stirring in Delvin’s bowels returned but he fought it down. He looked Pullen in the eyes. These white folks thought they had escaped the restrictions law and custom had placed on black skin. They were the new model human — an advance on the old dark model — built for politics and money. No stoop labor. Masterminds who were also generous, so they saw themselves. Why, if you keep to your place we will pat you on the head and give you a soup bone. And a kick to keep you honest. Well. Best to steer clear of crazy people like that. Just go widely around them in this alien land. But, once in a while, a misstep. Or a misstepped upon. And a door opened onto misery, anger, terror, watchfulness, confusion, ricky-tick submitting, echoes of overheard jokestering, wild wandering figments and destitutions of the spirit, thumps of excruciation and succorless moaning, strutting, argufying, testification, and power and regret and wondering and a rattling panic — all these in his eyes looking straight into lawyer Pullen’s.
In Pullen’s eyes under a moist filigree of power churned an unsorted mess of helpless degradation, hope, dishevelment, spite, useless muttering asides picked up from relatives and the stupidity of his kinfolk over in New Hall, endurance and pluck and delight in the quick free-heartedness of his children, boredom and a weasely shrewdness brimming — the combo — rocking in a sea of rage plastered over with a foolish smile quirky as a circus poster on the side of a burning barn.
The man despised him, Delvin could see this.
3
He stands on the low infirmary porch swaying faintly to a rhythm that has risen up from the earth and overtaken him. All these boys here with their necessary arrangements. Solomon over there working a yard broom, ready to run any errand. Little Croak, who wore a pink verbena blossom in his hair to please Winky Raffin. And Winky, who got down on his knees to please the LT, those stormy nights when Delvin watched him cross the yard in the rain to enter the LT’s pineboard shack. Carl Crawford, one of the boys from the train, stands waiting for him. He has a scrap of straw hat that he saved for when Delvin would come out of the infirmary and he gives it to him now.
“What’s next, Mr. Del?” he asks, a muscular boy, not a boy now after four trials and all these years in the white man’s penitentiaries. Even in the penitentiary the races are kept separate. A white man isn’t going to eat off a plate he sees a black man eat from. Nor put a black man’s spoon in his mouth, no matter how well washed it is. Lord, they wouldn’t breathe the same air as us if they didn’t have to. Off to the west is the river that runs along the edge of the swamp, but no one ever escaped that way. Patrols and outposts and towns in either direction, hamlets, solitary farmhouses — it would be like running a gantlet, each fouler armed and ready to shoot. That is the policy. Local folks might shoot escapees on sight and nobody would mind. One less mouth for the state to feed.
He puts the hat on and sticks his head out into the sunlight that hits him like fire flung from the roof. His body bends and his vision clouds and a dizziness spins up from the ground and envelops him; his insubstantial strength gurgles away and he sags. Though Carl tries with both arms to hold him, the two of them fall to their knees. Carl bounces up and begins to drag him to his feet.
“It’ll be all right, Mr. Del,” he says, ducking his head under Delvin’s arm.
They struggle up, and stand blank and unsure in the porch shade.
“They be watching us, Mr. Del,” Little Carl says. Carl is thick-bodied and strong as a bull and despite the battering he has taken still somewhat kindly. He nods toward the stilt tower cornered into the fence. Two guards equipped with pump-action scatter guns, 30.06 bolt-action Winchesters and a Thompson submachine gun gaze at them, not fondly. Delvin can see them talking, the words, he thinks, like doughy little thoughts with stones inside them. His mind drifts and he is again picturing Celia (or somebody he called Celia, some ragdoll fragment) floating through a field of march flowers. His knees are bloody. He raises his knees and does a little slow-motion dance stomp and almost tips over backwards. The two guards laugh. He waves, the wave an eloquent mix of woofing and bouncy-in-his-deuce-of-benders. It is one of the many hand gestures for dealing with white folks. Every hand carries danger. White folks prefer vocal salaams, bent backs. Any movement of the hand by a black man can become threatening. But the gestures of looniness, of imbecility, of fealty — are tolerated.