Ginny Gall (4 page)

The children were marched into a small room lit by kerosene lamps. A long table wrapped in tin sheeting with squared-away corners. The regulars, the long-termers, led the way to a back window of the same kitchen that served the white children in the larger, electrically lit hall on the other side. Into a tin bowl was scooped grits, stew beans with gravy and a chunk of cornbread hard as a schoolbook.

Back at the table they ate with spoons attached by thin lengths of chain to an iron firedog screwed into the tabletop. It was the oldest child’s job to sort out the chains and pass the spoons to the children. They were supposed to sit quietly, but this quiet was almost impossible to maintain.

During the week Miss Pearl read to them at meals from the Bible. This was Delvin’s first experience with the famous old legends and tales. As time passed he found himself enthralled with the stories, especially the ones concerning wars and killing. The story of Joshua, who stopped the sun and knocked down the walls of Jericho with a bugle shout, was his favorite. He daydreamed of great victories won by obscure means such as horns and freakish powers. He was impressed with the Lord. The French lords were familiar to him from his home study. The lord the old Israelites called upon seemed mighty capable though he liked mostly to hang back in the shadows. This appealed to Delvin, who liked to lay low himself.

He mentioned to Miss Pearl that when he grew up he wanted to go after the Lord’s job.

“That job’s not for us human beings,” she told him, with no smile in her hard black eyes. “All we can do is follow him.”

“I’d like to get up close to him.”

Misunderstanding, she was pleased with the little boy.

At night the children trooped into a long high-ceilinged room behind the dining room. Two wide low platforms ran the length of the room on either side. Canvas mattresses filled with hay were laid widthwise on these platforms, one side for the boys, the other for the girls. A ragged green curtain ran down the middle partway, giving a little privacy. Delvin and his brothers and sister arrived on the day the mattresses had just been stuffed with fresh timothy hay, a hygienic procedure that took place every month or so if the guardians thought of it and if there was any hay available (donated). The timothy was newly cured and smelled spicy and welcoming. At home he slept on a cotton tick on the floor of the second bedroom when his mother wouldn’t let him into her bed.

He missed the house, missed its smells of rich perfume and
cornmeal and grease and silver polish—missed the streets of Red Row that smelled of dreaminess and stewed collards and deep green shade and mica and ashes and kerosene and a hundred kinds of panbread—but mostly he missed his mother. At supper, listening to the little orange-haired boy, Winston, he had experienced the sinking, falling sensation in his chest. His whole body tingled and what was usually compact and strong inside him began to dissolve. He drank water and ate the hard bread in an attempt to replace it. If his mother had been there he would have thrown himself into her arms and made her hold him tight. Every day at home, sometime during the day, maybe more than once, she would grab him up and squeeze so tight he couldn’t take a breath. In her arms there was no need to breathe.

He got out of his bed and ducked under the curtain and got into his sister Coolmist’s bed. Coolmist was crying and at first seeing her little brother made her ashamed of her tears. But she couldn’t stop and she liked anyway to have little Delvin to snuggle in with her. They clasped each other in their arms. Down the row the twins were hugging each other. Miss Pearl as she walked the rows saw this and left the lamp burning longer than usual. Whimpering and moaning and sobbing, even yells, shrill cries and yips, were a common feature of foundling home nights.

The room smelled like a field in the country. Delvin was on his back on his own pallet. He heard a small chirping sound—a cricket—and stayed still, listening. The cricket was nearby. He raised himself and waited in the half-lit dark. The cricket chirped at the edge of his mattress. It was caught inside, in the fresh timothy hay stuffing, near the top that was closed with two big Bakelite buttons. Delvin couldn’t undo the buttons but he could still reach his hand inside. He lay quietly waiting for the cricket. When it chirped again he had its location. He slipped his hand under the canvas and caught the insect. It was a shiny black handsome creature with a swashbuckling set of feelers.

“Hidy, bug.”

He wished he had something to keep the cricket in, but there was nothing, not even in the little bundle of clothes he had been allowed to bring with him from the house (“What the hell you wearing?” one policeman said). He held the cricket loosely in his hand. His face scrunched with worry. “I’m sorry I caught you.”

Despite himself he was getting sleepy.

“All right,” he said.

He put the cricket in the pocket of the frilly dress shirt he had taken off to get into the coarse nightshirt the home made all the children wear. He lay down but almost immediately raised up to check on the cricket. It was already gone, sailed off into the dark. Delvin felt a pang in his heart.

“Oh me,” he said and lay back. “Mama,” he said into the dark, his lips barely moving, “where are you?”

On his back, looking up into the dark that was dimly lit by high long narrow windows, he felt the tears start, brim, spill and trail down his cheeks. He didn’t think to wipe them away. I wonder how tall I am, he thought. Wonder how tall Mama is. And then he was asleep.

Cappie did not reappear, and after the pumping of informants and interviews of the girls over at the Emporium and a few neighborhood householders and the personal searches and tracking expeditions into the woods and bulletins issued to surrounding states, the police department decided they probably wouldn’t find her. Delvin, if anybody had looked for him, spent the next year and a half living the orphan’s life, first in the local foundlings home and then out in the Homeless African House in Tullawa where he spent mornings at school and afternoons working in the apple orchards pining springlings. Despite his willingness to prove he could he was informed that he did not know how to read and was forced to learn all over following the confusing Boatwright method taught at the time in Tennessee schools. He chafed but went along and relearned or overlearned
first his ABCs and then the puny words and pitiful sentences printed under the pictures of white children in the books passed out each afternoon by Moneen Butler, a cinnamon-colored girl originally from the high mountains in east Tennessee.

He fell in love with Moneen and was smartly rebuffed and ministered his heartbreak by zipping through the little brown biographies of famous americans he got from the school library. He discovered books, real books, as rideable transports into habitable territory. He tried to enter the town library but was turned away. He tried to enroll in the regular colored primary school, walking two miles along Fallin street under the long line of oaks and sycamore trees and past the garages and metal shops and appliance stores, but he was turned away there too; he had no parent or guardian except the state, which paid him little mind, other than being the ready agent of preventing little homeless darkies from getting too fresh. Nobody at either school recognized him as the son of the infamous murderer Cappie Florence, though her crime and flight were an oft-told tale in the negro and white communities.

On the day he showed up at the public school dusty and barefoot carrying in his pocket a case dollar folded small as a quarter, a bill he’d lifted from a drawer in the back office of the Muster General Goods store, and was turned away hurt in his heart, instead of returning to the orphanage he crossed town and walked along Overlook street, the north boundary of Red Row. There, beyond its edge, white enterprise dribbled along past the meatpacking plant and the old deserted fertilizer plant on Supline road to the dusty red-earthed pebbly field used for traveling circuses and revivals. This day the field was occupied by the Clyde Beatty circus. Delvin paid ten cents of his dollar to sit in the africano section, a bank of seats high up under the eaves and far from the band. He was just beginning to enjoy the performance, especially the midgets on unicycles, when the clown parade began. As they began their sniggery stroll, waving and juking and shooting at each other with flower pistols, he grew agitated. He was far away from the sawdust rings, but not too far to see, underneath the clowns’ ribald paint, the faces of watchful, unamused
white men. This sight frightened him in a way that made him sick to his stomach. He jumped up and fled the swooping gray tent.

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.