Authors: Charlie Smith
He told Carmel about the fire (set by unknown white men) and a little about his life as an undertaker’s assistant, parts of a past he rarely talked about for his aging but still lively fear of Chat-town police.
“That’s quite an education,” Carmel said. He looked at the boy who was disheveled and needed a haircut, but who had the gleam of intelligence in his fine brown eyes. “You just touring around the country?”
“You might say that.”
“They kick you out of the funeral business?”
“No, ’twern’t that.”
“You don’t have to go into it. We all from time to time stick our foot into the dung heap.”
“I’m looking to further my education,” Delvin said. Said it and meant it—had said it before—even though he was tired out by all the instruction he’d received in the van. But he liked the smell of the place, liked the old man puttering about.
“Racewise you got a full education gathered right here in one location, my boy.”
Delvin on the spot decided to postpone his rod-riding travels. He spent the night in a hobo camp outside town and returned the next day and the next. On the third the professor invited him to hang around and gave him little chores to do. On the fifth day he proposed that Delvin join him on the road.
He saw that Delvin carried a little blue notebook and a couple of cedarwood pencil nubs and told him to take notes if he wanted to.
“In fact,” he said, “I recommend it.”
He spoke to him of the great power and destiny of the African peoples. The Wandering Negro, he called them.
“That’s us,” he said. “We are loose in the world, free to wander the earth poking our noses into whatever interests us. Many will complain and grieve about our plight, and it’s true it looks, especially in certain areas, as if the white man has the upper hand, yes.
But this is only appearances. In the kingdom of the spirit, we are so far ahead of these lily-livered folk that it is really our job to take care of
them
. Look at us. Stolen from our homes and sold into slavery, mistreated, raped and lynched, and still we find a way to love the work of the Lord, if you want to call it that, or the natural creations of the universe if you don’t. That church you are familiar with. It’s not just a house of worship—rebuilt, by the way—it’s a depot, a trolley stop, a way station and refreshment stand for those traveling this world of pain and struggle. In religion after religion you find at the heart of God a mystery. That same mystery is in everything, every rose—it’s in every dog or pig, every human being. In that mystery is the power of life. Not only the existence of life, but the purpose as well. The mystery is at the heart of life itself. A perplexity, a boggler. Everywhere you turn you find it. Who are we? Who is that lovely young woman over there? What did you mean by saying that? Who are you? A life of questions. Well, we don’t need so many questions really. Our job, son, through living, through love, through helping one another along in this wilderness, is to snug up with it. Simply that.”
He stared at Delvin with an expectant expression in his cool green eyes as if he had just explained everything.
Delvin looked him straight back. “With the
mystery
?” he said.
“Damn, you’re right,” Carmel cried, chuckling. “That
must
be what I mean.” He laughed, a croaky, slappy laugh. “Yes, son, with the mystery. We are the ones supposed to get up close and hug it till it squeaks.”
“You mean, colored folk?”
“I do indeed. We are the only ones got the heart for the job.”
He went on to explain that this wandering life—plus, he said, the willingness to bear burdens without complaint—was—“were,” he said—exactly the recipe for getting down to the heart of said mystery.
This last was spoken at a dinner they ate at Fanny’s Hot Shop over on Washington street in the quarter. Carmel informed Delvin that he was on the run from forces that were dedicated to the elimination of the negro race in general and him in particular.
“The materials I carry in my little traveling museum are a threat to the well-being of certain elements that will not be deterred until they have put out of existence the truths these materials contain. And I have to admit, it is true that in some quarters what I carry has the eliminatary aspects of a bomb. Built to blow the foolish, sanctimonious notions of these folks right out of the water. In a generous, in a kindly, way,” he added, his eyes twinkling.
As it turned out, Carmel had received this caravan of truths from a white man, his former employer, Dr. Haskell Sullivan, the famous ethnologist from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sullivan, with whom Professor Carmel had worked for many years as driver and helper of all kinds, and finally as partner,
“
in the ethnological enterprise you see before you” (they were back with the van, parked now in a field next to a little brushy river), had passed the outfit on to Carmel when he was taken with spasms and became too ill to continue.
“What kind of spasms?” Delvin asked.
“Hard to say. Gut mainly. He’d also lost a bit in the head department. I had to put him in a home over in Jackson. I left him on the front steps of the Berrins Home for the Aged with a note pinned to his coat.”
This was six days into their association. Delvin sat in sweet-smelling roadside grass on a rice mat provided by Carmel. By then Carmel had told him to call him Professor. They were drinking sugar cane juice from white china mugs.
“It was five years ago this September,” the professor said, “that I said goodbye to that fine white man on the steps of the charity home. When I am in the area I stop by and check on him. He is still alive, but only in body. His mind has become part of the great mystery.”
This mystery the professor spoke of hung like a misty picture in Delvin’s mind. His life was filled with mystery. Everywhere he looked he was baffled and diverted.
In days to come the professor gave Delvin books to read: novels, poetry, polemics, race stories, histories, uplift books and books de
signed to probe the ways of men on the earth. Many of these books were written by black authors, and not just the big-timers like Du Bois and Washington and Sojourner Truth. There were slim softbacks printed on flimsy paper written by men sweating away, so Carmel said, in Manhattan and Brooklyn tenements, and books written by africano men living over in Europe, and men in Chicago, and even Memphis. Why, in Memphis, he said, there was a small publishing house that specialized in literature written by negro men—and women—for the negro race only. He owned some of these books. They tended to be long arguments concerning the superiority of the negro race, most of them, as well as a few that counseled brotherhood and love. In one Carmel showed him, the author Seneca Wilson—a nom de plume, Carmel said—wrote of the vacancy in white men’s faces and the “digested fullness” in black faces (“This goes right along with what I’ve pointed out to you in the photographs,” Carmel said, smiling). The faces were empty, Wilson said, because white people, by way of their long defense of their “rightness,” their right to consider themselves the top dogs in life, had lost touch with faithfulness. This showed in the wrenched-up greed in their faces (“When the disease of corruption has reached the bone, there’s nothing left but greed and self-importance,” he said), whereas the negro man, who lived in a disheveled and turmoil-filled state, one he was constantly having to call for help with and constantly getting knocked around by, had thereby come on a much deeper understanding of the great mysteries of being. As you could plainly see in the face of every negro person you met.
It wore Delvin out to read all this.
Other books proclaimed the day when the negro man would rise up and by force of simple righteousness take his rightful place at the head of the table. It scared Delvin to read these and gave him a guilty thrill. He had not thought particularly of these matters. The world belonged to the white man. Delvin and his kind were merely scumbling through it. They were stranded in a country whose language was not theirs and whose customs were foreign to them. They did their best under these circumstances. Nothing he knew of had
corrupted the spirit of negro folk, not in any significant way. Even the lynchings. Sojourner Truth said it was most important to show love and concern for those around us, colored or white. This was the only way to show our love of God, she said. Love meant freedom from oppression. Somehow it soothed him to read this. But many of the negro writers appeared to be girding up for a fight.
He spoke of this to Carmel who listened with his small cropped head down. They were parked behind the Bethlehem Baptist church in the african quarter in New Hope, Mississippi.
“If it’s their country, then where is our country?” Carmel asked.
“I thought you saw our greatness as being people not tied to any place.”
“It
is
our greatness,” Carmel said, stretching his short legs out in front of him. He sat on the van’s back step; Delvin sat on the tufty grass in front of him. The summer-dry leaves of a sycamore above their heads creaked in a faint breeze.
“And though we are become a wandering people,” Carmel said, “we nevertheless come from somewhere.”
“Yeah—Africa.”
The professor held up his hand. The butterscotch palm was crossed by a wild hatch of lines.
“Wait. I know a couple of those books say we arrived here in big ships swung down from the heavens—from outer space somewhere parked on the backside of Jupiter—but truth is we come from the great empires of Africa.”
“I just said—”
“Wait. We are the descendants of mighty rulers.” He went on to explain how the stepped-on negro folk of the US of A were the natural children of great chiefs who had ruled vast African empires. “Just imagine how much fortitude and imagination it took to rule a continent as fierce and wild as Africa. That’s not one of those puny so-called civilized countries of Europe. No sir.”
He went on to explain how this fact was not so much the important consideration as the fact that Africa was the cradle of life, home of the original Garden of Eden and other great gardens and general
stomping places, the most ancient of lands on the earth and thereby the place not only black people but all people must one day return to. “Except this time when the white people show up,” he said, “they will find the colored folks in charge. They will have to ask us about how the proceedings are supposed to go.”
“And what will we tell them?” Delvin said.
“Why, we will tell them to pick up a hoe and get to chopping that cotton.” He laughed. “Go forth,” he said, waving his hand, “that’s what we will tell them—and get yourselves a little first-class suffering.”
Delvin couldn’t help but laugh, it all sounded so comical. But he also couldn’t help being excited by what he heard and what he read in the slim floppy books. He’d agreed by then to come along more or less permanently with Carmel and work as his helper. After a week on the road he was driving the van and doing the cleaning work on the exhibits. The prof had not only photographs but a small collection of artifacts that included woven baskets, quilts, pipes, drums, fired bowls, woodcarvings, a few painted pictures (of well-dressed, healthy negro folk giving speeches, preaching or gathered together by a river talking among themselves), two Union army uniforms, a few bushee sticks for warding off evil at night and goofer bags and other conjur potions in little blue bottles and a collection of ty-ty seed and claystone necklaces.
“I intend to rustle up more of these curios,” he said, “when I get more room.”
“Are you looking for a home for all this?”
“I am and I am not,” the professor said. “I want to transfer this knowledge into as many minds as possible and in these dreary days it is best to bring the knowledge to the people instead of the other way around. But one day . . . one day,” he said, smiling his wide, thin-lipped smile. He began to laugh as if everything he was saying and everything he was doing was a pleasant joke he was playing on the world.
They drove from town to town, parked in the africano sections and opened for business. A nickel per, able to accommodate ten people at a time, the money added up. They ate at colored restaurants
or stood in line behind white restaurants at the window for colored folks or supped in people’s homes when invited (which happened not as often as the prof would have liked) and slept on the floor of the van or out beside it under a canvas awning. They were usually not bothered by the police and the local white population because the professor generally stopped off at the station first thing to offer a contribution to the police general welfare fund. He was well known and genially mocked in most towns and usually left alone. Since he stayed in the africano areas only he did not interfere with the dreams and illusions of white folks and trouble if it came was usually uncoordinated and of the variety that included fruit or hand-sized vegetables thrown at the big black van. Once a bucket of limewash was thrown from a passing vehicle, but the bucket missed and splashed across the front steps of the Pisgah AME church in New Constance, a town that over both east and west entrances had white-painted filigreed rose-climbing arches welcoming all good christian folk.
Delvin met stern-mouthed gents and audibly sighing women and little boys carrying big bandanas in their back pockets and fishermen who propped their cane poles on the side of the van and left their shoes outside and harmonica players and anonymous connivers and scoundrels and a tubercular essayist visiting from Boston, who mocked them both, and a retired sideshow Wildman of Borneo and various cute girls and several wanted men and loquacious clerks and bosomy, chuckling women; and he met some of his own kind—as he saw them—boomers and breezers of the great continental railroads, hoboes and angelinas like him (formerly) who flapped dust from their shirttails, laughing and telling stories about wild rides on the gunnels. He met buckheads and jeffs and caledonias pretending to be upright women and drunks and wine drinkers and some on dope ingested by way of syrups and elixirs, and he met bright-skinned dancing women and conjurers—all of whom, travelers and squinchers both, so the professor said, were on their way to Bee-luther-hatchee.