Ginny Gall

Pulled by the shirt, his favorite, pale green, worn for the occasion, that had torn all the way down one side, he was lifted and carried as one would carry a shot animal by the tail, and deposited in the street. An automobile blew a blast on its horn. He heard the shuffling of a mule and then its sneeze and a string of mucus blew over him, wetting his face.

Voices were speaking to him, but he could not tell who they were, which of the white folks addressed him.

He pulled himself to his feet as a car honked a long squealing blast. He staggered to the curb, shakily climbed the speckled granite rim and was swept back into the street. Above his head the leaves of a large beech tree shivered and rushed in the breeze. He got to his feet, and, startling himself and maybe the white people who still squeaked and blatted around him, he began to run.

“You better run, you little africanis!”

He didn’t quit running until he was on the Red Row side of the bridge. Dodging behind a big loquat bush, he stopped, bent over and began to draw back his breath. Those blaring, crumpled, pink-and-red-mottled faces. He’d seen angry colored faces among them too.

Cappie found him that afternoon sitting in his little yellow rocking chair with tears streaming down his face, still wearing the green cotton shirt. His sister had pinned the halves of the shirt together because he would not take it off. Coolmist told Cappie what had happened. She had heard it from Miss Maylene Watts, who was employed by the Minor family over on Covington street. Miss Maylene had been accompanying Mrs. Watts downtown to carry packages for her when she saw the boy tossed into the street. Mr. Jimmy Coolidge, who janitored for the Atwell Appliance store across the street from the Miss and Mrs. Style Shop, had filled her in on the details. According to the story Delvin had been thrashed in the street by Mr. Billy Hammock, the assistant manager of Cooper Drugs on Main street.

A hot gushing rage filled Cappie’s body, almost blinding her. She couldn’t hear what her daughter was saying. A stiff, bony purpose rose in her. She rushed out of the house and down Adams street. At the intersection she stepped on the meaty half of an apple lying in the dirt, slipped and fell to her knees. She pushed herself up and as she did so she saw the white underflesh of her knee and inside it a crescent-shaped slice of blood. A nausea filled her but she made herself start out again, limping onto the bridge.

Mr. Dominion Baskrell, a one-eyed negro barber just passing by, stopped her by grabbing her arm.

“Where you going now?” he said. “Git down. You aint goin to rile the white folks.”

“Get off me,” she cried, pulling her arm. Her voice that she thought should be loud was only a whisper. She felt a feathery faintness. Blood ran down her shin, a thin stream. “I got to go,” she said and started on, but before she got all the way across the bridge a suffocating tiredness came over her. Poor child. My poor child. She began to weep. The tears felt like cold water. Why aren’t they hot? she wondered.

Just beyond the bridge she stopped in a field where a market was held every Saturday. Some white boys were throwing a ragged ball around. A couple of them stopped to look at her. Shame crawled her. She was wearing her work clothes, a shiny, ruffled purple dress cut halfway up her thigh, and she carried her black patent leather pocketbook. The buildings of the city, up a slight incline from where she stood, seemed the ramparts of a fortress reared up before her. The heaviness in her body weighed her down. She couldn’t go forward. She began to walk, angling off to the other side of the street where a solitary house stood. She couldn’t tell quite where she was. She seemed to be sliding backwards down a slope. She bent and picked a purple thistle flower.

She still had this twirl of silky filament in her hand when she reached the bar at the Emporium.

Later that evening she appeared at the back door of Mr. Louis Miller’s clothing shop on Ducat street. She slipped inside the little boxlike back entry and yelled up the stairs for him to come down. She visited him on Wednesday nights after his store closed. He was an old flat-faced white man who had lived forty years in the town. Miller poked his head out of his door. He saw a drunken familiar woman with her hair all spriggy and spiraled around her head. He had always liked the darkest women; black as Africa, he thought of them as, but Cappie was blacker than that. She shouted that he had broke her child.