Across his path now steps Lionel Ansley, a gaunt man, a preacher who holds one of the services on Sunday mornings. He’s been after Delvin for a while to quit his escape attempts. He is impatient with his unwillingness to attend church. Lionel visited him in the infirmary and Delvin appreciated his not visibly gloating over his condition. The preacher told him his running ways would get him into trouble and Delvin knows that as far as Lionel is concerned the red dog has come on as a result of his jumpiness. He isn’t the only one tired of his scampering; the guards, who like to make the whole prison pay for one man’s flight, are getting worn out too.
The preacher nods at him, smiling, his bony head bobbing like a chicken’s. Despite his narrow-mindedness he is a kindly man. You never can tell where kindness will come from. The preacher with his little commentaries never goes too far into damnation. Delvin appreciates this.
“Come on, boy,” he says now, “come on over to the one place you can let what’s balled up in you go.”
He doesn’t stop walking as he says this.
Delvin nods at his back. The preacher’s abruptness makes him think of his shock when the jury foreman back in Klaudio, Elmer Suggs, said he was guilty. It had been as if Suggs himself — druggist, father of a girl with a polio-crippled leg, a stranger — had simply stood up from a passing crowd and for no reason on earth but meanness had announced in his slightly elevated voice that he, Delvin Walker, common-law son of Cornelius Oliver and Professor Clemens John Carmel, diverted lover of Miss Celia Cumberland, was guilty of raping two white women. Even after the four weeks of testimony (and thirty minutes of deliberation) he couldn’t believe his ears. Surprise didn’t cover it. Shock didn’t. For a second he had ceased to exist. A short circuit of being in which not only body and mind vanished but all record of his having been on this earth as well, leaving a vacuum that held the shape of a human being. It was quicker than a rifle shot. He was sure none else (outside his cohorts in loss and betrayal, though he never polled them to find out) experienced this or noticed.
But he’d returned in that moment from wherever it was he’d gone (not heaven or hell, not some other planet or system of whirling rocks and gas) — nonexistence was all he knew — to a world that was subtly and completely changed. Every person, every animal, every object in it had been replaced by a duplicate, facsimile so cleverly contrived that the replaced would never suspect what had happened. He too had been replaced. The Delvin Walker who sat on an oakwood bench wearing a white cotton shirt and khaki trousers provided by the Song of Ruth AME church over on Suches street in the Congo Quarter (same for the other boys) was not the same Delvin Walker of a moment before. The boy he had been, the young man who, like his mother — so they told him — could whistle through his slightly gapped front teeth, who had begun reading Shakespeare as a boy of six and knew everything there was to know about laying out a body and getting it respectfully into the ground, a man sweet on Celia Cumberland, a partaker of life in an alien land, quick to laugh, slow to take offense, curious about everything, note-taker, writer of things down, adventurer by railroad and foot and hitched ride, lover of vistas and the sour fruit of the quince bush, museum keeper, this boy/man was gone.
He had stood up and started to walk out of the courtroom. A shout arose and some guard, some man he didn’t even know, had clubbed him in the ear. He still had a little cauliflowering from the blow. With the blow (it had been as if) his mind had been knocked out of his body into the street two floors down. He couldn’t believe it — that was putting it mildly.
All these years later he has come to believe it. His mind has filtered on through that.
This man, Preacher Ansley, who himself stuck a knife in the gizzard of some man he thought cheated him, wants him to believe in some alien god. Well, he will get to that when he has finished with this other project, thanks.
He watches the preacher as he walks, swinging lightly a spring of sorrel grass against his leg, and enters the shade of the barracks. Each barracks has two lanterns. There is no real protection against night life. Men lie awake in the dark listening to the mosquitoes whine and the little house lizards chirp. His own steps are lighter now, but not from happiness. Or not only from that. He has told the doc he is better. The doc has made it clear that he isn’t cured but he’s accepted his claim to feeling well enough to get out. Delvin wants to be free of this extra imprisonment. At least he can escape from the infirmary. His clothes smell of sulfur and citronella. He stood in the shade on the eastern side of the infirmary shaking the outdoor smell into his shirt. But he can still smell the pesthouse on his body.
His step is trivial and untrustworthy, the step of a sick man. He wants to lie down in the dust. He stops walking and Milo offers another drink from the tin cup he carries, an act of love since he too thinks the malaria is contagious. The blood sluices in Delvin’s veins; he can feel it washing back and forth, a heatedness picking up speed. The top of his back feels as if a hot board is pressing against it. He staggers; it takes both of them to catch him up. Steadies, he pauses and takes the cup. The sip of water brings with it a yearning for mountain air, for water that tastes of granite, of iron. Often these delicacies of his past revisited. At first he thought they might be helpful in sustaining his drive to escape but they aren’t. He tries to avoid them, but sometimes, as now, they come unbidden.
Up ahead, on the wooden bench encircling the big water oak, Bulky Dunning sits weaving a length of grass rope. Bulky never weaves lengths longer than two or three feet. Any longer and the guards will confiscate it. Some of these lengths he is able to secrete in various cubbyholes around the prison. He plans to go over the wire using one of the joined-together ropes. Delvin knows all about this. Bulky offered to take him with him and Delvin is glad to see that during his period of incapacitation he hasn’t run off. They met at Delvin’s second day at Uniball, when Bulky asked if he was familiar with the negro writer Zora Hurston. No, he said, he wasn’t. “How do you spell that,” he asked. Bulky carefully spelled the name. “Never met anybody named Zora,” Delvin said. “Oh,” Bulky, a bright-eyed little man with a thin mustache, said, “I know several. Down in Florida where I come from they’re all over.” The remark made Delvin laugh. Bulky went on to describe her work, light-footed stories that caught the flavor of negritude without its being stained with white folks’ life. “Some kind of dream?” Delvin had asked. “Better,” Bulky had answered. “‘I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal.’ That’s her.” Delvin had let out a low whistle. “Well, no wonder I never heard of that woman.” “Yeah,” Bulky said. “Spoken by somebody who’s found a way out of the general disrespectfulness.” Delvin laughed again. The words had pricked him; he experienced a sulky, sullen shame that evaporated as quickly as it came. “I want to read one of her books.” But Bulky didn’t have one and he couldn’t remember any of the titles.
He looks up now from plaiting his eternal rope. He stretches the rope through his fingers and flicks the tail of it, smiling calmly at Delvin he gets up and enters the barracks. He wanted that first day, or the day after, to slide into Delvin’s bed, but Delvin shooed him out. “I’m spoke for,” he whispered, which was what he said from the beginning though it hadn’t always worked; he hadn’t always wanted it to; Sandy Suber up at Uniball he loved like he’d never loved a man before, but Sandy died of diphtheria, moaning and blind and crying for his sister. Crouching beside his bed in the dark, Bulky said he didn’t really mind and appeared not to. They talked occasionally when their paths crossed out in the fields and sometimes after supper Bulky would sit with Delvin on the steps behind the kitchen and talk about his boyhood in Florida. He had swum in the Gulf of Mexico, the first colored person Delvin had met who’d done that, and he’d raked oysters and fished for speckled trout with his uncle who owned a boat. These stories charged Delvin up. He wanted to dive into that big blue water even though he hardly knew how to swim. Delvin knows where Bulky keeps his rope. It is coiled in a little rack under the floor of one of the old deserted barracks where it juts over a latrine. The fit is tight and smelly. The officers never poke up there and the prisoners they send feeling around come back saying there wont nothing but black widow spiders. Bulky won’t speak about what is or isn’t under the floor.