Ginny Gall

And she did, Delvin would think, marveling. He liked to walk off by himself along the grassy ravine that separated Red Row from white town. The ravine or gully was deep and craggy with outcroppings of gray mica-flecked granite. At the bottom flowed a constant stream that ran thin and rusty in dry times and heavy, clumsy and milky with mountain runoff, after a rain. The ravine ran up through neighborhood and woods until it folded itself back into the mountains where among the sassafras and laurel slicks Delvin liked to lie down and dream about his life. His mother read to him from a book of French kings — another customer gift — and he saw himself not as one of them exactly but as one of their company, a gallant lieutenant of kings, the one sent out into the wilderness to find a place for people to settle, some sweet land that had grapevines and wild strawberries and blueberry bushes growing in clumps and sweet apple trees you could pick little striped apples from and carry around in your pockets to munch on. In the dusk of a summer afternoon he would walk down the center of the street carrying a stalk of sugar cane or a bottle of buttermilk given to him by Mr. J W for his mama and he would caper as if the street was a rope he was balancing on — he was always teaching himself how to stay upright, keep from falling — and he didn’t want to tell his mother that the good things he brought her were gifts from somebody else.

All around him was a world intricate and rich with smells and sounds that fascinated him. He loved the look and feel of the rusty dust kicked up out in the street whenever an automobile passed and he loved the smell of the mules parked with their wagons in front of Bynum’s and he loved to sit on the wooden bench out in the yard in front of the Azalea Bethany church on Slocum street to listen to hymns being sung and he loved the smell of baking in Miss Consolia Dikens’s outdoor oven that was big as a little cabin and stoked with wood from a pile that smelled of apples and he loved the swaying of the bulrush cane down in the gully and he loved the other kind of cane, sugar cane, that was stacked like broom handles in the big wooden barrel outside Heberson’s and liked to buy a stalk for a penny and strip the snakegreen hide off with his teeth and gnaw off a chunk and chew the sweet iron-tasting juice into his mouth. He loved the sound of the little girls’ voices as they passed on their way to school and even liked the way they mocked him as he sat in his tiny yellow rocking chair on the little front porch. Four years old and rocking up a storm and telling his little two-year-old neighbor about how French kings lived in the hills up the gully and kept great castles and palaces stocked with fresh fish and sweet potato pudding and big jars of strawberry soda.

“What’s the difference between a castle and a palace?” his older brother Whistler asked, laughing at him.

He was teaching himself to read from the funnypapers he got from stacks at the back of Heberson’s store, getting old J W first to read them to him then again while he moved his fingers through the words. After that he could read the panels himself.

“He’s got em learnt by heart,” J W said to Cappie, who was sitting beside Delvin on the plank back steps of the store eating canned oysters out of a little white china dish, giving every fourth one to Delvin who didn’t care for them and surreptitiously put each one in his pocket. She was fascinated by what her chappie could do, even if he was reciting. Reciting was even better than reading. Any fool could read — she could read and wasn’t a fool, but many others were — but how many got the natural head power to keep all those words in order inside his brain?

“He’s a wonderanemous child,” she said licking the small plump body of an oyster before forking it into her mouth.

Not that time, but three times later, reading the adventures of the Katzenjammer Kids, he told his mother what was true — that he really was reading. He went more slowly and his mother at first didn’t like it — she liked better the zippy way he had when he memorized the words — but he explained to her that now he could take a piece of paper with writing on it and didn’t have to have somebody read it to him first before he could tell her what was there. “It’s like I can tell the secrets now,” he told her. She lay in her bed late at night after she came in from the Emporium thinking about this. She had long believed that life was a secret thing, built on secrets, most of which she had no idea how to learn. That boy’s building him a key, she thought. He’s going to establish hisself.

Just beyond the crossing of Bynam and Adams streets was the oakwood bridge that led to the world of the white folks. Huge and ponderous, all powerful, it squatted over there.