Ginny Gall

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.”