Ginny Gall (34 page)

He turned the pages of the small gray book, reading the story of his life. In no other place, he thought, did this story exist, not even in his own head. Only here, and in the other four notebooks left at Oliver’s. This is what keeps me from disappearing. In these few years riding trains he had watched and recorded the drifting men rucky times had cast onto the rails. This train was filled with shufflers, jobless characters following the latest rumor of work. After a while the dirt and soot wore in. Seemed like it did. Sleeptalkers, sleepwalkers, divers and chokers, barabys and Airedales.
A trainload of boys
, he wrote,
looking for work.
It’s a race. Tramps, not the same as hoboes. And the ones who rode for years without ever saying a word.
Sixty-two cars on this train
, he wrote.

Thirty or forty riders
.
Say thirty-seven.
Mostly white boys headed for (maybe) jobs in Memphis. Nine or ten colored boys. Many dressed in rags, or close to it. One has a yellow bandana tied around his head. A few boys carrying canvas sacks. A couple have suitcases. Soogans. Most of the colored boys aren
’
t carrying anything, maybe two or three have a few items tied up in handkerchiefs.

To the south clouds were filling up the hollow places in the pale sky, but they didn’t look like rain clouds, just frothy empties and leftovers from summer. The train was passing through grain fields; wheat, he thought. He stood and reached up to steady himself on the edge of the gondola catwalk. A white boy he didn’t at first see, boy with a high freckled forehead, just making his way along the narrow strip below the gondola rim, stepped on his hand.

“Hey,” Delvin said. “Watch those fingers, they’re precious to me.” He was feeling good, glad to be out in the wide world.

“If you want to keep em, chig, then get your ass off the train.”

The boy kicked at him, missed.

“You need to watch yo mouth as well as yo feet,” Delvin said.

He had been stuffing the notebook into his back pocket when the white boy stepped on him. He almost lost his grip—didn’t—but it was not worrisome, little aggravations happened on trains.

“I’ll watch you fly like a sack of shit off this train,” the boy said. He had fish-colored eyes and long pale eyelashes pretty as a girl’s.

A couple of africano boys on the other side of the gondola watched the exchange. Everyone proceeded on his way.

After a while Delvin made a course up the train to one of the two open boxcars and climbed in through the trap. Africano boys were in there talking. They saw Delvin and one waved him over. A burly boy with close-cropped hair said, “You the one that ofay kicked?”

“He didn’t exactly kick me,” Delvin said. “It was more of a step. Just missed being a stomp.”

“That white boy wants to fight about it,” another traveler said, a small, slender boy with not very recently conked hair, slicked back. He wore a long green shirt like some medieval woodsman. “
All
them white boys wants to fight. They gon come at us.”

“They sure like to mix it up,” another said, a blocky boy with a wide, friendly, scared face. “No questions about why or what for.”

“No why or what for in this world,” another said in a weary voice. He was tall and had narrow round shoulders.

“Long as they got the numbers,” another said.

They were all suddenly nervous.

A few pocket knives (if it came to that), a couple of round whittled sticks, a leather sap (the cracked leather showing the lead plumb underneath), and a bag of ball bearings in a canvas sack, these the weapons.

Down at the other end of the car a couple of unhappy, plain-looking white girls, one of them fat. The fat one interrupted chinning with her skinny buddy to hurl a couple insults at the negro end. A few white boys down there too, but they were just looking.

“Those men?” somebody asked, a dark-skinned boy unmemorable but for a small white scar cutting his left eyebrow in two. He was looking at the little group down the far end.

“They’s other ones coming,” said another boy—they were mostly, but for a couple, just leaving boy life for manhood, fresh travelers, hoboes, Chattanooga and upline angelicas trekked out of the hollows, headed west looking for work. They’d heard the mills in
Memphis were hiring. The mills or the box factory or the riverside warehouses or the meat-processing plant, somebody, someplace. One, a skinny boy with pale gold freckles on a tan face, was so scared already his hands shook; he kept slapping them against his jeans. He was on his way to meet his sister in Tulsa, he said. She needed him to escort her down to Dallas for their brother’s wedding.

“I got to get on,” he said, and Delvin could tell he wanted to slip away. But he didn’t; he was afraid to, Delvin could see this too. Out the door he could see a river, lengths of shining water running between sycamore trees turning yellow.

“Can’t help from it,” he said slowly, referring to the fight; letting the words out carefully, as if they were precious, like special stones held back in a pouch or wrapped in cloth and stowed in a bindle. A whole speech. Like something from Shakespeare. His body buzzed with excitement. He was not particularly angry. But he wanted to experience—here, now—the exercise of his power, wanted to move harshly against something solid and strong. These white boys. They were hardly real to him. They came and went, and it was always the same with them, they knew only one way, had only one side.

“Knock these dicty jeffs on they diasticusses,” the tall boy said, and the others laughed.

The car smelled of cedar shavings. It was beginning to fill up. Two, three, more white boys swung in off the roof and others crawled through the trap at the far end. Tattered boys in denim and patched khaki, farm boys, city boys with shop grease under their fingernails. They too had weapons. Sticks and short lengths of cane pole, what looked like a corner off a metal bed.

The girls started yelling, calling the africano boys names. Nothing they hadn’t heard before.

The air in the car was cool, but Delvin felt a heat on him. He trembled and the heat seemed suddenly to fly out of him and he was cold. I must be coming down with something, he thought, and then thought, yeah, scaredy-catness. The edges of his body felt numb. His palms were sweating, his heart galloped. He had no weapon but his pocketknife and he really didn’t want to set down his soogan and
the little cotton sack Mrs. Parker had filled for him; he didn’t want to draw that. He thought of Celia walking across a grassy lawn to her classes. The buildings, she said, were made of stone that changed colors according to the light. He pictured a rainbow, but the ones she named were hardly colors at all: charcoal, gray, brown like a mule’s back. Maybe Mr. Rome would find her one day. He pictured the little man reared-back reciting the wordy love message he had prepared, and choked a laugh.

One of the boys looked at him. “You pretty bugged-up,” he said.

The white boys moved away from the back wall. A dozen, fourteen, fifteen, a clenched little army. Road toughs, scared boys just looking for work, boys on the run from bad daddies, drunk mothers, no mothers, something sad in their eyes, something wild, something hateful. For a sec he wanted to stick out his hand.

Hopeless, Delvin thought, useless. But then he didn’t mind.

An ache in his shoulders, a sorrowfulness like a headache. He wrapped his right hand in his bandana.

The old time—the dream time—slipping away,
he thought—it was something the professor said. As if we were supposed to hold onto it.

One of the white boys flung a rotten cucumber. It hit a burly stutterer colored man in the shoulder, Coover Broadfoot. Delvin knew him from the Chat-town streets, from games of clip poker in a house around the corner from New Bethel church, from the Emporium, from his auntie’s funeral, from Coover’s teariness, from the set of his head like a little soot-headed lamb’s.

Then somebody yelled and, their eyes slitted and wild, the white boys rushed among them, flailing and whipping their sticks.

The africano boys bunched up and all at once sprang at them, fought back hard and cunningly, striking the white boys across their faces, kicking at their knees.

Delvin caught a glancing blow against his upper arm but he didn’t feel it.

A big africano man, somebody he’d never seen before, picked up a medium-sized white boy with blond hair thick as a pelt and threw
him against the side of the car. The boy landed on hands and feet, crumpled into a heap, slowly gathered himself, crawled a few steps and ran up against another africano boy, somebody called Rollie, a ruthless man missing his front teeth, who kicked him in the side. The white boy rolled like a stumplog rolling down a hill.

Delvin punched somebody, cracked somebody across the eyes with the side of his wrapped fist. Somebody whapped him in the back of the head and somebody else caught him with what felt like a firebrand across his lower back. It was a tall boy hitting him with a section of bamboo cane. He staggered away, knocked against another white boy who punched him to his knees. How did he get in this? He saw a blue-colored band of light weaving in among the roiling shapes. He was suddenly off to the side.

All the while the white women shrieked hatefully, their voices, especially the voice of the big woman with the piano legs standing foursquare grasping in her thick chalky hands a piece of broomstick, brandishing it—condemning, excusing nothing. She saw him and shook the stick at him and seemed about to come for him.

Somebody pulled him to his feet and he jammed himself back into the fray. At its densest it was a big pulsing congery of boys, a wild patch. He banged on somebody’s back. Somebody slugged him on the side of the head and he saw red bursts, flares. He was shoved against the wall that gave and bounced him back. The boards smelled of sweat and faintly of piss. He edged away and crouched, sprang up and hit a skinny white boy straight in the nose. The boy reeled backwards into another white boy who hit him and knocked him down. Delvin laughed.

The africano boys pushed the white boys steadily back until all but a few were huddled at the front of the car weakly brandishing their sticks and splintered cane poles. One africano boy whom no one knew, gripping his piece of broomstick like a baseball bat, kept hitting a stocky brutish-looking white boy who all the time kept shouting at him like he wasn’t being hit at all. The strikes made hollow sounds against his shoulders. Finally the africano boy threw down the stick and tried with his fists but the white boy knocked him
on his ass with one blow. Two africano boys piled into the white boy and forced him back into the pack. Everybody was shouting, nobody coming around to the other’s point of view, nobody offering anything but slurs and insults, nobody in his heart giving in, or maybe only a few.

And then as suddenly as it had begun the fighting stopped. Everybody just quit. They could hear the train,
clanka clanka clanka
. It was as if some greater force had called out halt, or nothing had, or some strange interval timing, clockwork none realized he was party to but nonetheless faithfully followed, had crunched down to the last second of martial time and let them go.

They stood, or knelt, or sat on their aching butts scrunched against the wall, panting. None really cared to look directly into the faces of his opponents. Most’d had enough and didn’t stare. Eye contact slid and dissolved and some were crying and some were gasping in and out of a hatred and a sullen despicable remorse and others were dazed and some were silently praying and others were whispering to the blank places in their souls about what had happened and what had not.

Delvin drew breaths from way down in his body. Each one hurt a little and made him remotely dizzy but he knew he was okay. He had fought with strength and will to some degree. This surprised him slightly.

No one said much. A single epithet from one of the girls—“coon fucktards!” she yelled—but somebody, a white boy, made a harsh noise, just a cry, that shut her up, and that was it. The panting mixed with the clack of the train wheels.

Suddenly the smell of corn. Delvin looked out the door. They were passing a huge field of yellowing corn. Corn as far as he could see. The season rich with the sharp silky smell of it, rich already with the early yellows and reds. The tall sumac in the road ditches going red, the shaggy flowers like spires of imperial acknowledgment, the yellow goldenrod in big bunches thickly flowering so he wanted for a second to throw himself out onto it, soft bed of gold, and the smell of corn like a natural dust, ancient and soothing.

At Klaudio, just up the line, somebody jumped off the train—Cornell Butler, the papers said later—and ran to the police. Assault by negroes on white boys. And on two white girls. Rape? Yeah, yeah—something like that. You don’t even have to say it. A breeze picked lightly through the narrow leaves of a butternut tree just outside the sheriff’s office, as if looking for one special leaf.

The first accuser Butler was sweating and shaking, and he had the look about him of somebody who had suffered a great tragedy.

He looked heartbroke,
the chief testified later.
Just plain heartbroke
.

It took one call to the stationmaster at Kollersburg. Then another to the Cumbly county sheriff. In a matter of minutes men in cars and pickups were on the road, racing to catch the train. A line of cars filled with outraged, murderous, bloody-minded, vengeful—and all the other dark indemnities—men. It wasn’t only the excitement. The men hurt in their hearts.
Beat the boys and raped the women for christ’s sake.

Carrying guns and tobacco sticks and ax handles picked up at Burns’ Hardware on Harris street, they rushed toward Kollersburg. Some had experience with this sort of thing, a few were klansmen, others just attendees of lynchings and other routs and ambuscades, most were money-stretched citizens, hurled by this atrocity into sudden stumbling pellmell motion.

A breeze played in the tops of the long grove of red cedars just beyond the town limits they passed going as fast as they could, jangling and seething. Torn-looking bottom-heavy clouds were banked in the west. Art Luger ran over a something he later swore was a six-foot-long rattlesnake. Some men felt anguished with pain for the poor girls and for those ambushed boys, others felt only a satisfying urgency. Hard times had stiffened their souls.