Her father nodded at what Blackford had said. “These Freedom Party mamzrim remind me of the Black Hundreds in Russia, except they go after Negroes instead of Jews.”
“Not enough Jews in the Confederate States for them to go after,” Isaac said. “If there were more, they would.”
“That’s probably true,” Flora said, and Blackford nodded. Flora’s laugh sounded a little shaky. “Funny to think of anybody going after anyone instead of Jews.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Isaac said. “People do it here, too, even though there are more Jews than Negroes in the USA. It makes life easier for us than it would be otherwise.”
Hosea Blackford looked around the crowded apartment. Flora knew what was in his mind: with so many people in so small a space, Jews still didn’t have it easy. She hadn’t been able to see how crowded the flat was, how crowded the whole Lower East Side was, till she moved away. Before, they’d been like water to a fish. Only going to Philadelphia had given her a standard for comparison.
But that standard for comparison didn’t mean her brother was wrong. Easier and easy weren’t the same thing. She said, “Wherever we end up, no matter how hard things are for us, we manage to get by.”
“That spirit is what made this country what it is today, no matter who has it,” Hosea Blackford said. He stopped with a bite of tongue halfway to his mouth and an astonished look on his face. “Will you listen to me. Will you listen to me? If you didn’t know better, wouldn’t you swear that was Teddy Roosevelt talking?”
“He’s set his mark on the country for a long time to come,” David said. He rapped his own artificial leg, which sounded of wood and metal. “He’s set his mark on me for the rest of my life. Having the Socialists running the country has turned out better for the country and better for us”—he grinned at Flora and at Hosea Blackford—“than I thought it would. I admit it. But I still think TR deserved a third term in 1920.”
Flora knew her brother’s opinion. She had never understood it, and still didn’t. But she refused to let him get her goat. “Now we’ll see how many terms President Sinclair deserves,” she said, which seemed to satisfy everyone. As her husband had, she heard what she’d said with some surprise. Will you listen to me? Will you listen to me? If you didn’t know better, wouldn’t you swear that was a politician talking?
Someone had plastered two-word posters—VOTE FREEDOM!—on every telegraph pole and blank wall in the Terry. As Scipio walked from his roominghouse to Erasmus’ fish store and restaurant, he wondered if all the Freedom Party men had gone round the bend. Only a handful of Negroes in Augusta, Georgia, were eligible to vote. Even if they’d all been eligible, the Freedom Party wouldn’t have picked up more than a handful of their votes.
When Scipio came up to the fish store, Erasmus was scrubbing a Freedom Party poster off his door. “Mornin’, Xerxes,” he said. “I don’t need me no extra work so early in the mornin’.”
“Crazy damnfool buckra,” Scipio said. “Ain’t nobody here got no use for no Freedom Party.”
“Freedom Party?” Erasmus exclaimed. “That whose poster this here is?” He was a clever man, and sharp with figures, but could hardly read or write. At Scipio’s nod, he scrubbed and scraped harder than ever. “Mus’ be tryin’ to make us afraid of ’em.”
“Mebbe so,” Scipio said; that hadn’t occurred to him. “I was feared o’ they befo’, but I ain’t now. They shoots theyselves when they shoots de president.”
Erasmus didn’t answer for a moment; he was busy getting rid of the last bits of the offending poster. “There—that’s better.” He kicked shreds of wadded-up paper across the sidewalk and into the gutter, then glanced over at Scipio. “Them bastards ain’t even collectin’ ‘taxes’ no more. You reckon they’s goin’ anywheres now?”
“Pray to Jesus they ain’t,” Scipio answered with all his heart. He still didn’t believe prayer helped, but the phrase came automatically to his lips.
“Amen,” Erasmus said. Then he reached into a pocket of his dungarees and pulled out a one-dollar banknote. “And I reckon this here hammers some nails in the coffin lid, too. Give ’em one big thing less to bellyache about.”
“Yeah.” Again, Scipio spoke enthusiastically. The Freedom Party hadn’t been alone in bellyaching about the inflation that had squeezed the CSA since the end of the Great War. He’d done plenty of that himself. “Been a year now, near enough, an’ the money still worth what it say. Almost done got to where I starts to trust it.”
“Wasn’t all bad.” Erasmus chuckled. “Still recollect the look on the white-folks banker’s face when I paid off what I owed. Thought he was gonna piss his pants. Money was still worth a little somethin’ then, so they couldn’t pretend it weren’t, like they done later. An’now I got my house free an’clear. Wish more niggers woulda did the same.”
Scipio shared that wish. Most of the Negroes in Augusta hadn’t been alert enough to the opportunity that had briefly glittered for them. “Reckon mos’ of the buckra don’ think of it till too late, neither,” he said.
“You right about that,” Erasmus answered. “Some folks is jus’ stupid, an’ it don’t matter none whether they’s black or white.” Before Scipio could say anything about that, his boss went on, “We done spent enough time chinnin’. Got work to do, an’ it don’t never go away.”
Once inside the fish store and restaurant, Scipio fell to with a will. Erasmus had told a couple of important secrets there. Fools weren’t the only ones who came in all colors. So did people who worked hard. One way or another, they got ahead. The ones with black skins didn’t get so far ahead and didn’t get ahead so fast, but they did better than their brethren who were content to take it easy.
After the lunch crowd thinned out, Scipio said, “You let me go downtown for a little bit, boss? Bathsheba want some fancy buttons for a shirtwaist she makin’, an’ she can’t find they nowhere in the Terry. Don’t reckon no buckra too proud to take my money.”
Erasmus waved him away. “Yeah, go on, go on. Be back quick, though, you hear?” Scipio nodded and left. He could take advantage of his boss’ good nature every once in a while because he did work hard—and because he didn’t try taking advantage very often.
Fewer Negroes were on the streets of downtown Augusta nowadays than had been there right after the war, when Scipio first came to town. The factory jobs that had brought blacks into town from the fields were gone now, gone or back in white hands. Two cops in the space of a couple of blocks demanded to see Scipio’s passbook. He passed both inspections.
“Don’t want no trouble from nobody, boy, you hear?” the second policeman said, handing the book back to him.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio answered. He might have pointed out that the policeman wasn’t stopping any whites to see if they meant trouble. He might have, but he didn’t. Had he, it would have meant trouble for him. The cop wouldn’t have needed to belong to the Freedom Party to come down hard on an uppity nigger.
The Freedom Party itself wasn’t lying down and playing dead. Posters shouting VOTE FREEDOM! covered walls and poles and fences here, as they did over in the Terry. Here, though, they competed with others touting the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. The more of those Scipio saw, the happier he was.
He also grew happier when he saw exactly the kind of buttons Bathsheba wanted on a white cardboard card in the front window of a store that called itself Susanna’s Notions. When he went inside, the salesgirl—or possibly it was Susanna herself—ignored him till he asked about the buttons. Even then, she made no move to get them, but snapped, “Show me your money.”
He displayed a dollar banknote. That got her moving from behind the counter. She took the buttons back there, rang up twenty cents on the cash register, and gave him a quarter, a tiny silver half-dime, and a roll of pennies. By the look on her face, he suspected it would prove two or three cents short of the full fifty it should have held. A black man risked his life if he presumed to complain about anything a white woman did. The
charges she could level in return…Reckoning his own life worth more than two or three cents, he nodded brusquely and left Susanna’s Notions. He wouldn’t be back. The woman might have profited from this sale, but she’d never get another one from him.
No sooner had he got out onto the sidewalk than he heard a cacophony of motorcar horns and a cry that still made his blood run cold: “Freedom!” Down the street, blocking traffic, came a column of Freedom Party marchers in white shirts and butternut trousers, men in the front ranks carrying flags, as arrogant as if it were 1921 all over again.
Scipio wanted to duck back into Susanna’s Notions once more; he felt as if every Freedom Party ruffian were shouting right at him, and glaring right at him, too. But the woman in there had been as unfriendly in her own way as were the ruffians. He stayed where he was, doing his best to blend into the brickwork like a chameleon on a green leaf.
“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The shout was as loud and, in Scipio’s ears, as hateful as it had been during the presidential campaign two years before.
But more white men shouted back from the sidewalks and from their automobiles: “Murderers!” “Shut up, you bastards!” “Get out of the road before I run you over!” “Liars!” “Sons of bitches!” Scipio had never heard shouts like that during Jake Featherston’s run for the Confederate presidency.
And, as if from nowhere, a phalanx of policemen, some with pistols, some carrying rifles, came off a side street to block the marchers’ path. “Disperse or face the consequences,” one of them growled. Nobody had ever spoken like that to a Freedom Party column during the 1921 campaign, either.
“We have the right to—” one of the men in white and butternut began.
“You haven’t got the right to block traffic, and if you don’t get the hell out of the way, you can see how you like the city jail,” the cop said. He and his men looked ready—more than ready—to arrest any Freedom Party stalwart who started to give them a hard time, and to shoot him if he kept it up.
The Freedom Party men saw that, too. By ones and twos, they began melting out of the column and heading back to whatever they’d been doing before they started marching. A couple of the men up front kept arguing with the police. They didn’t seem to notice they had fewer and fewer followers. Then one of them looked around. He did a double take that would have drawn applause on the vaudeville stage. The argument stopped. So did the march.
Scipio’s feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to the Terry. When he told Erasmus what he’d seen, his boss said, “’Bout time them bastards gits what’s coming to ’em. Way past time, anybody wants to know. But better late than never, like they say.”
“Didn’t never reckon I live to see the day when the police clamps down on the buckra marchin’ ’long the street,” Scipio said.
“You never lose your shirt bettin’ on white folks to hate niggers,” Erasmus said. “You bet on white folks to be stupid all the time, you one broke nigger. They knows they needs us—the smart ones knows, anyways. An’ the Freedom Party done come close enough to winnin’ to scare the smart ones. Don’t reckon they gets free rein no more.”
“Here’s hopin’ you is right,” Scipio said. “Do Jesus, here’s hopin’ you is right.”
When he got home, Bathsheba examined the buttons with a critical eye, then nodded. “Them’s right nice,” she said.
“You’s right nice,” Scipio said, which made his wife smile. He went on, “I gots somethin’ else right nice to tell you,” and again described the ignominious end to the Freedom Party march.
That made Bathsheba jump out of her chair and kiss him. “Them white-and-butternut fellers used to scare me to death,” she said. “Tell the truth, them white-and-butternut fellers still scare me. But maybe, if you is right, maybe one fine day even us niggers can spit in their eye.”
“Mebbe so,” Scipio said dreamily. He’d already spit in the white man’s eye as a not altogether willing member of the ruling council of the Congaree Socialist Republic. This would be different. Echoing Erasmus, he said, “Even some o’ the buckra like to see we spit in the Freedom Party’s eye.”
“I got somethin’ else we can do about the Freedom Party,” Bathsheba said. Scipio raised a questioning eyebrow. His wife condescended to explain: “Forget there ever was such a thing as that there party.”
Now Scipio kissed her. “Amen!” he said. “Best thing is they disappears like a stretch o’ bad weather. After the bad weather gone, you comes out in the sunshine an’ you forgets about the rain. We done have more rain than we needs. Mebbe now, though, the sun come out to stay.” And, in the hope the good weather would last, he kissed Bathsheba again.
Tom Colleton dumped afternoon papers from Charleston and Columbia down on the kitchen table in front of Anne, who was eating a slice of bread spread with orange marmalade and drinking coffee fortified with brandy. Headlines on all the newspapers proclaimed thumping Whig victories in the election the day before.
“Got to give you credit, Sis,” Tom said. “Looks like you got out of the Freedom Party just in time.”
“If you think the bottom is going to fall out of a stock, you sell it right then,” Anne answered. “You don’t wait for it to go any lower, not unless you want to lose even more.”
Her brother had been content to look at the headlines. She studied the stories line by line, knowing headline writers often turned news in the direction their editors said they should. That hadn’t happened here; the Whigs would own a larger majority in both the House and Senate of the Thirty-second Confederate Congress than they had in the Thirty-first.
And the Freedom Party had lost enough seats to make Anne’s lips skin back from her teeth in a savage smile. They hadn’t lost quite so many as she’d hoped, but they’d been hurt. Nine Congressmen…how did Jake Featherston propose doing anything with nine Congressmen? He couldn’t possibly do anything but bellow and paw the air. People weren’t so inclined to pay attention to bellowing and pawing the air as they had been before Grady Calkins killed Wade Hampton V.
“Yes, I think he is finished,” Anne murmured.
“By God, I hope so,” Tom said. “Do you know what he reminded me of?” He waited for Anne to shake her head before continuing, “A wizard, that’s what. One of the wicked ones straight out of a fairy tale, I mean. When he started talking, you had to listen: that was part of the spell. He’s still talking, but the spell is broken now, so it doesn’t matter.”
Anne stared at her brother in astonishment, then got up and set the palm of her hand on his forehead. His oath should have left the smell of lightning in the air. “Oh, hush,” Anne said absently. “I was wondering if you had a fever—fancies like that aren’t like you. But you don’t, and it was a very good figure indeed, even if you won’t come up with another one like it any time soon.”
“Thanks a heap, Sis.” Tom’s grin made him look for a moment like the irresponsible young man who’d gone gaily off to war in 1914 rather than the quenched and tempered veteran who’d returned. “He wasn’t a wizard, of course, only a man too damn good at making everyone else angry when he was.”
“He was angry all the time. He still is. He always will be, I think,” Anne said. She’d just spoken of Featherston as finished. Even so, hearing Tom use the past tense in talking about him brought a small jolt with it.
Her brother said, “He sure had you going for a while.”
Past tense again, and another jolt with it. But Anne could hardly disagree. “Yes, I reckon he did,” she said, her accent less refined than usual. “Looking back on it, maybe he was a wizard. For a while there, I would have done anything he wanted.”
Had President Hampton not been assassinated, Anne knew she would have gone on doing whatever Featherston wanted, too. She was honest enough to admit it to herself, if to no one else, not even her brother. Perhaps especially not to Tom, who’d always shown more resistance to Featherston’s spell than she had.
Would I have gone to bed with him, if he’d w
anted that? Anne wondered. Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded to herself. I think I would have. She hadn’t been in control of things, not with Jake she hadn’t. With every other man she’d ever known—even Roger Kimball after their first encounter—yes. With Featherston? No, and again she was honest enough to admit it to herself.
But he hadn’t wanted her. So far as she knew, he hadn’t wanted any woman. She didn’t think that made him a sodomite. It was more as if he poured all his energy into rage, and had none left for desire.
All that flashed through her mind in a couple of heartbeats: before her brother said, “If I don’t see him or hear him again, I won’t be sorry.”
“As long as the money stays good, you probably won’t,” Anne said, and Tom nodded. She went on, “And as long as the niggers know their place and stick to it.”
Tom nodded again. “Featherston’s closest to sound on the niggers, no doubt about that. It’s still worth a white man’s life, sometimes, to get any decent work out of field hands. They’d sooner loll around and sleep in the sun and collect white men’s wages for doing it.”
“It won’t ever be the way it was before the war,” Anne said sadly, speaking in part for Marshlands, in part for the entire Confederacy. The desire to make things again as they had been before the war had won the Freedom Party votes by the thousands, and had helped win her backing, too. But the war was almost six and a half years over, and life did go on, even if in a different way.
“I want another chance at the United States one day,” Tom said. “Featherston was sound about that, too, but he wanted it too soon.”
“Yes,” Anne said, “but we will have another chance at the United States sooner or later, no matter who’s in charge of the CSA. And we’ll have a good chance at them, too, as long as the Socialists hold the White House.”
“They don’t,” her brother remarked with no small pride. “We wrecked it during the fight for Washington.”
“It’s almost rebuilt,” Anne said. “I saw that in one of the papers the other day. We’ll have a harder time knocking it down again, too, with the Yankees holding northern Virginia.”
Blood and Iron Page 71
