Читаем Ginny Gall полностью

Everybody senses the sadness and despair fuming around her like a cloud of bottleflies as she passes by but nobody calls it that.

Every human being, so the story goes, has to find something to believe in, to base his ridiculous hopes on, and she has found this.

Delvin does not account particularly well for himself. Already bearer of an extended sentence (escape fiend), he has lapses during which he forgets the order of things and thinks this is the second trial and then for a sec thinks he is sitting in the cab of the van, debating with the professor the true facts of the slave revolt in Haiti, and then suddenly he is snatched up by a rage that according to the Capital City Observer seems to fill him like a gust of hot wind fills a sail and he lets loose with a gusher of vituperation aimed at the state judicial system and the state itself (“impoverished, derelict agency of numbskullery and perversion”), including every soul in said state, though those accusing him of these crimes, so the paper points out, are all natives of other states, including not only the accused’s home state of Tennessee but such northern states as Ohio and New York. Gammon has allowed him to be put up for cross-examination and he does no better, really, at the hands of the state prosecutor. He does get across to the jury that he believes himself to be falsely accused, but that is pretty much the limit of it.

By this time the state is becoming embarrassed by the whole confabulation. The first two trials were hot topics in the national media. The state, which already considers itself put upon and misused as all get-out, is now presented in an even more unfavorable light. The nativeborn, who think of themselves — white folk, that is — as among the most accommodating and generous human beings on earth, are scalded by the adverse publicity. Dolts, bigots, murderers, incesters, juicers, addled row runners, slew-footed cretins and nutcases, nightcrawlers, dusters, general miscreants and shovel-faced fools, showoffs, clods, shitheads — utter assholes — are some of the terms used against them.

But if they have never grown used to such, they are prepared. Ever since things first began to go badly with the cheap labor business, the locals learned to fling back what was flung at them. They are beginning in this instance to grow tired of the acidic innuendoes and outright slanders. This crazy nigra and all those other crazy nigras have caused them more trouble really than they are worth, or than standing them straight up by way of a profound lesson in how to behave is. Men lying in their beds under window fans sucking in the scents of yellow jasmine, fertilizer, spun cotton and Bull Durham tobacco smoke feel in their deepest recesses the faint but insistent pressure of a misused people rising. The powers of custom and church-sponsored reason are all that hold back a tide of despair that otherwise would swamp these men and drive them to wild futile acts. But they — like everybody — have to find a way to go on without befouling themselves, or at least without making it look as if they did.

Out beyond the tiny zone of actuality, the meaty core of fact from which they receive their instructions to do what is necessary to stay alive on earth (no matter what), pressed and marbled with the sweet fat of love for those children whose lives are being cut down at the root by falseness, beyond this supersaturated mix of divisible realities, they experience, as always, the need to hold to a position that is imperishable. Only such a position will allow them to take a break and start to get some fun out of life. That’s what, goddammit, this routine with these grassy coons is about, they say.

“Everybody down here thinks he is right,” Gammon says, pulling on his cigar. “He is too scared not to think it.