Ginny Gall

“She’s wanted for a killing,” Curtis said, smirking at the thought. He knew what their mother was known for over at the Emporium. And now she had come home with blood staining the hem of her purple satin party dress. It was Curtis’s auntie Belle Campion who, herself fresh from the jail, had informed the child of the Cappie Florence plight (Florence wasn’t even her real name, they said). “She done coldbraced that old jewman up Ducat street,” he said to the fourteen other child habitués of the city establishment.

“You mean murdered?” Winston Morgred said. He was a small albino child of six whose parents had been killed in the Homefield warehouse fire. Winston (called the Ghost) had skin that was a pasty white and his hair was orange. (“Like a negative of a africur,” the owner of the office supply store where his mother had swept up, said.)

“Murdered?” Curtis laughed. “I mean murdered. Left that old man lying in a pool of his own blood in the back of his own store. Knocked him down with a car jack the size of a locust log — that’s what my auntie said.”

“None of that’s true,” the twins cried, but they were shouted down by the excited children.

Delvin slid around to the side of the testimony crowd, slipped through, and before anybody could stop him caught Curtis with a punch in the mouth. The surprised boy fell back squealing. A fight broke out. All the boys including Delvin socked and swatted at each other like something out of the funnypapers, the sadpapers. Miss Pearl rushed from her office where she had been working out the youngsters’ documents, poor things, and swinging a big torn felt hat beat the hooligans into submission. It was time for supper.

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.