spare me the time, I will explain. Thank you. You see, I met Delia during a fairly low point in my life. I won't go into that. Delia was very nice to me, very pleasant. So I found myself now and then walking down that street at that hour, and sometimes I saw her and we spoke. I swear I had no intentions at all, honorable or otherwise. It was just pleasant to see her face.' He laughed. 'She
would always say, 'Good afternoon, Reverend.' I was not at that time accustomed to being treated like a respectable man. I must say I enjoyed it. It got so that I would walk along her street with no thought of seeing her, just because there was a kind of comfort in being reminded of her. And then one evening I did meet her, and we spoke a little, and she asked me in for tea. She shared rooms with another woman who taught at the colored school. It was pleasant. We had our tea together, the three of us. I told her then I was not a minister. So she knew that. I believe she invited me in in the first place because she was under that impression, but I was honest with her. About that. It didn't seem to matter too much.
'I don't know just how it happened—I stopped by to lend her a book I had bought in order to lend it to her—as if from 222
my library—I even dog-eared a few pages—and she invited me to come for Thanksgiving dinner. She knew I wasn't on excellent terms with my family, and she said she couldn't have
me spending the holiday by myself. I said I was uncomfortable with strangers, and she promised me it would be all right. Still, I had a couple of drinks before I came and I was later than I had intended. I thought I would walk in on a gathering of some kind, but she was there all by herself, looking terribly unhappy.
'I apologized as well as I could and offered to go away, but she said, 'You just sit down!' So we sat there eating, neither one of us saying anything. I told her the dinner was delicious and she said, 'It probably was once.' Then she said, 'Two hours late, liquor on your breath—' speaking to me as if I were, well, what I was, and it came over me that I had no business there, I was no one she could respect, and the grief I felt was amazing to me. I stood up to thank her and excuse myself, and then I left.
'But when I had walked a few blocks I realized she was following along behind me. She came up beside me and she said,
'I just wanted to tell you not to feel so bad.'
'And I said, 'Now I will have to walk you back to your door.' 'And she laughed and said,
'Of course you will.'
'So I did. And then the other woman came home, Lorraine, the one who shared her rooms. There was a dinner at their church, but Delia had made some excuse about not feeling well and having to stay home. I should have been long gone by then, but there we were, eating our pumpkin pie. What could have been more compromising?'
He laughed. 'It was all so respectable. But word got to Tennessee somehow and her sister came to visit, with the clear intention
of scaring me off. I'd come in the evenings with a book of poetry and we'd read to each other, while her sister sat there 223
glaring at me. It was ridiculous. It was wonderful. But when the school year ended, her brothers came and took her back to Tennessee. She left a note for me with Lorraine, saying goodbye.
I knew her father couldn't be hard to find, since he was a minister, so I went there, to Memphis, and I found his church, a very large African Methodist Episcopal church, and the next morning being Sunday, I went to hear him preach. Knowing Delia would be there, of course. And I hoped to speak to him. I thought it might recommend me to him, if I could manage
to seem forthright and manly, you know. I got my shoes shined and my hair trimmed.
'The church was full and I sat near the back, but I was the only white man there, and people noticed me. Delia's sister was in the choir, so of course she saw me. And I could tell her father suspected who I was, by the way he watched me. He preached about those who come among you in sheep's clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves. He also spoke about whited tombs, which inwardly are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Looking at me the whole time, of course. 'But I still made myself speak to him at the door. I said, T only want to assure you that my friendship with your daughter has been entirely honorable.' And he said, 'If you were an honorable man, you would leave her alone.'
'I said, 'Yes, I will do that. I came here to assure you of that.' Which was a lie, of course. I did intend to stop seeing her, but it was an intention I had formed in his church that very morning. I thought that Delia's standing with her family might be helped if I impressed him as a plausibly decent man, and my only chance of doing that was by going away. And I could see what a very good life she had. I'm not sure what my intentions had been in going there. Certainly I never thought I would leave without saying even one word to her. But I did. I left for St. Louis that same evening. I'm not sure he was im224
pressed by my gallantry, but I do know it impressed Delia. Then the fall came, and I happened to be walking down her street, as I happened to do every week or so, and there she was. I tipped my hat and she burst into tears. And from thai moment we have considered ourselves man and wife.
'Word got back to Tennessee and she was more or less disowned, and then she got pregnant and the school dismissed
her. I was selling shoes at the time—there's very little money in it, but you don't get arrested for it, either. So her mother came a few weeks before the baby was due and found us in a state of something like destitution, living in a residential hotel in an unpleasant part of town. It was humiliating. But of course we couldn't find respectable accommodations, and the hotel clerk where we got a room charged me a good deal extra for turning a blind eye, or words to that effect. He had a phrase for the law we were breaking—-'pernicious cohabitation? 'lascivious cohabitation'? Lewd. For some reason I always forget that word. You can't imagine how many ways they make things difficult.
'Then her father came and her brothers, and the five of us had an earnest talk about Delia's well-being, which began with her father saying, 'You should be very glad that I am a Christian man.' He is an imposing figure. And he persuaded me that
I should tell Delia to go home where she could be cared for. I did that, and she went away with them. Ah, the desolation!
The relief! I was so scared by the thought of that baby. I knew in my miserable heart that something would go wrong and I would be to blame for it. I tried to hide my relief from her, but
she could see it, and she was hurt by it, I knew she was. I told her I would come to Memphis as soon as I had saved up the money. It took me weeks, because I had some debts and the fellows
