The periscope kept wanting to fog up. Kimball invented ever more exotic curses and hurled them at its lenses and prisms. Down inside the steel tube with him, the sailors snickered at his extravagances. It was funny, too, but only to a point. If he couldn’t see where he was going, he wouldn’t get there.
He spotted Sandy Hook off to port and then, a little later, Coney Island to starboard. His lip curled. “Here we are, boys,” he said, “where all the damnyankees in New York City”-a symbol of depravity all over the Confederate States-“come to play.”
Nobody frolicked on the beaches today. The weather topside was chilly and gray and dreary. He swept the periscope around counterclockwise till he recognized Norton’s Point, the westernmost projection of Coney Island, which stuck out almost into the Narrows, the channel that led to New York’s harbors.
“There’s the lighthouse,” he said, confirming a landmark, “and there’s the fog bell next to it, for nights when a light doesn’t do any good. And-what the hell’s going on there?”
Cursing the blurry image, he stared intently into the periscope. His left hand folded into a fist and thumped softly against the side of his thigh. “What is it, sir?” Tom Brearley asked, recognizing the gesture of excitement.
“Must have had themselves a foggy night last night or somewhere not long ago,” Kimball answered. “Somebody’s aground on the mud flats by the lighthouse-sub, I think maybe. And they’ve got themselves one, two, three-Jesus, I see three, I really do-battleships sitting like broody hens around the cruiser that’s pulling her off. To hell with anything else. I’m going to get me one of those big bastards if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
“What are they doing there?” Brearley asked.
“Damned if I know,” Kimball answered. “But this is New York City, after all. They would have been in port, and some half-smart son of a bitch probably said, ‘Well, we’ve got ’em right close by. Let’s use ’em to make sure nobody gets frisky while we’re pulling our boat back into the water.’ It’s only a guess, mind you, but I’ll lay it’s a good one.”
“Bet you’re right, sir,” Brearley said.
Kimball didn’t care whether he was right or not. Why didn’t matter. What mattered, and there in front of him was the juiciest what this side of a fox sauntering into an unguarded henhouse. At his orders, the Bonefish pulled away from the fishing boats she’d been following and slid through the water toward the battleships.
They didn’t have a clue the boat was on the same planet, let alone closing toward eight hundred yards. They weren’t keeping anything like a proper antisubmersible watch, not here so close to home. All four of his forward tubes already had fish in them. He’d known from the beginning he would have to shoot fast and run.
“Five-degree spread,” he ordered. “I’m going to give two targets two fish apiece. I can’t get a clean shot at the third one. Are we ready, gentlemen?” He knew how keyed-up he was-he hadn’t called his crew a pack of bastards or anything of the sort. “Fire one! And two! And three! And four!”
Compressed air hissed as the fish leaped away. They ran straight and true. A bare instant before they reached their targets, one of the battleships began showing more smoke, as if trying to get away.
The explosions from at least two hits echoed inside the Bonefish. Whoops and cheers from the men drowned them out. “Right full rudder to course 130, Tom,” Kimball said exultantly. “Let’s get the hell out of here. If we don’t hit a mine, we’re all a pack of goddamn heroes-I think I nailed both those sons of bitches.”
And if we do hit a mine, it’s still a good trade for the C.S. Navy, he thought. But that had nothing to do with the price of beer. He’d done what he’d come to do; he’d done more than he’d thought he would be able to manage. Up till then, he hadn’t cared what would happen afterwards. Now, all at once, he very much wanted to live, so he could give the damnyankees’ balls another good kick somewhere further down the line.
If the hiring clerk at the cotton mill in Greenville, South Carolina, had been any more bored, he would have fallen out of his chair. “Name?” he asked, and yawned enormously.
“Jeroboam,” Scipio answered. After his meeting with Anne Colleton, he didn’t dare keep the false name he’d borne before, any more than he’d dared stay in Columbia.
“Jero-” That got the clerk’s attention: it made him unhappy. “You able to spell it for me, nigger?” Scipio did, without any trouble. The clerk drummed his fingers up and down on the desktop. “You read and write? Sounds like it.”
“Yes, suh,” Scipio answered. He’d decided he didn’t need to lie about that. It wasn’t against the law, and wasn’t even that uncommon.
“Cipher, too?” the clerk asked. He yawned again, and scratched his cheek, just below the edge of the patch covering his left eye socket, a patch that explained why a white man in his twenties wasn’t at the front.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again, and cautiously added, “Some, I do.”
But the clerk just nodded and wrote something down on the form he was completing. For a moment, he almost approached briskness: “You got a passbook you can show me, Jeroboam?”
“No, suh,” Scipio said resignedly.
“Too bad,” the clerk said. “That’s gonna cost you.” Scipio had been sure it was going to cost him; now he wanted to find out just how much. He had more money now than when he’d come to Columbia; he figured he could get by till this petty crook was through shaking him down. But, to his amazement, the clerk went on, “These last couple weeks, we’ve been paying twenty-dollar hiring bonuses to bucks with their papers all in order, on account of they stay with us longer and we want to keep ’em in the plant.”
“Ain’t got no papers,” Scipio repeated, doing his best to hide how surprised he was. “Been a busy time, dese pas’ couple years.”
“Nigger, you don’t know the half of it,” the clerk said. Considering what all Scipio had been through, the clerk didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he scratched by the eye patch again, so he knew some things Scipio didn’t, too. He asked, “How old are you?”
“I’se fo’ty-fo’-I think,” Scipio answered.
“All right.” The clerk wrote that down, too. “Even if you took your black ass down to the recruiting station, they wouldn’t stick you in butternut, so we ain’t real likely to lose you anyhow, ain’t that right?”
“I reckon not,” Scipio said. All of a sudden, things made more sense. “You losin’ a lot o’ de hands to de war, suh?”
“Too damn many,” the clerk said. “Always knew niggers was crazy. You got to be crazy if you want the chance of gettin’ shot and next to no money while you’re doin’ it.” He scratched by the patch yet again. “I been through all that, and I purely don’t see the point to it.”
“Me neither, suh,” Scipio said. But he did, though he wouldn’t say so to a white man. The clerk had gone to war along with his peers, masters of what they surveyed. If Negroes put on butternut, they hoped to gain some measure of the equality the clerk took for granted.
“Well, that’s as may be,” the one-eyed white man said. “Pay is two dollars an’ fifty cents a day. You start tomorrow mornin’, half past seven. You make sure you’re here on time.”
“Yes, suh. I do dat, suh.” Scipio had expected warnings far more dire. That this one was so mild told him how badly the mill needed workers. So did their attitude toward his papers, or lack of same. The clerk called him nigger in every other sentence, but the clerk had undoubtedly called every black he saw a nigger from the day he learned how to talk. He did it more to identify than to demean.
Scipio went looking for a room at a boardinghouse, and found one not far from the cotton mill. The manager of the building, a skinny, wizened Negro who called himself Aurelius, said, “We’s right glad to have you, Jeroboam, and that’s a fac’. Lots o’ folks is leavin’ here fo’ to join the Army. Up from the Congaree country, is you?”
“Dat right,” Scipio said. Aurelius’ acce
nt was different from his, closer to the way the white folks of Greenville spoke than to the Low Country dialect Scipio had learned on the Marshlands plantation.
Aurelius scratched his head. His hair had more gray in it than Scipio’s. “You know somethin’, Jeroboam?” he said. “If I thought they’d let me tote a rifle, I’d join the Army my own self. Reckon I wouldn’t mind votin’ an’ all them other things the white folks is givin’ to niggers who goes to war for ’em.”
“Maybe,” was all Scipio said. Having fought against the Confederate government, having the blood of a Confederate officer on his hands, he didn’t think he wanted to put on butternut himself, even had he been young enough for recruiters to want him.
His room was bigger and cleaner and cost less than the one in Columbia. Being just a mill town rather than the state capital, Greenville didn’t have to put on airs. The work Scipio got was marginally easier than what he’d been doing before. Instead of hauling crates of shell casings from one place to another, he loaded bolts of coarse butternut-dyed cloth onto pallets so someone else could haul them off to the cutting rooms.
Two days after he got the job, the young Negro who had been hauling those pallets quit. Another young black took his place. This one lasted a week. A third Negro held the position two days. All three of them resigned to put on that butternut cloth once it had been made into uniforms.
Scipio saw his first black man in Confederate uniform a little more than a week after he came to Greenville. Three big, tough-looking Negroes in butternut came down Park Avenue side by side. They swaggered along as if they owned the sidewalk. Blacks of all ages and both sexes stared at them as if they’d fallen from the moon. Scipio was one of those who stared. He wondered if any of the brand-new soldiers had worn the red armband of the Congaree Socialist Republic the winter before.
As the uniformed Negroes strode along the avenue, sighs rose up from every woman around. If the men in butternut were out for a good time, their problem would be picking and choosing, not finding.
That much, though, Scipio could have guessed beforehand. He found watching whites far more interesting. They stared at the Negroes in uniform, too. Their attitude was more nearly astonishment and uncertainty than delight. Their legislators had passed the bill authorizing Negro soldiers. Now that they were confronted with the reality, they didn’t know what to make of it.
A white captain, perhaps home on leave, came out of a shop on Park Avenue. The three Negroes snapped to attention and gave him salutes so precise, they might have been machined. The captain stopped and looked the black men over. Damnfool buckra, Scipio thought. If a white officer doesn’t treat them like soldiers, who will?
But the captain, though half a beat late, did return the salutes. Then he did something better, something smarter: he nodded to the three Negroes before he went on his way. They nodded back; one of them saluted again. The captain gravely returned that salute, too. He hadn’t acknowledged them as his equals, but they weren’t his equals in the Army. He had acknowledged them as belonging to the same team he did. In the Confederacy, that was epochal in and of itself.
A sigh ran through blacks and whites alike. Everyone recognized what had happened. Not everyone, Scipio saw, was happy with it. That didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was that none of the whites on Park Avenue raised a fuss. The three Negro soldiers found a saloon and went into it one after another.
More and more blacks in butternut began appearing as time went by. A couple of weeks after Scipio saw his first colored recruits, he was going home from the mill when a white corporal stopped a black man in Confederate uniform. The white man had his right arm in a sling. In a voice more curious than anything else, he asked, “Nigger, why the hell you want to take the chance of getting a present like this one here?” He wiggled the fingers sticking out of his cast.
The Negro came to attention before he spoke. “Co’p’ral, suh,” he said, “my big brother, he was in one o’ they labor battalions, an’ a damnyankee shell done kilt him. He didn’t have no gun. He couldn’t do nothin’ about it. Them damnyankees ain’t gwine shoot at me without I shoots back.”
“All right. That’s an answer, by Jesus,” the corporal said. “Kill a couple o’ them bastards for your brother, then kill a couple for your own self.”
“That’s what I aims to do,” the Negro said.
Scipio was very thoughtful all the way back to his boardinghouse. After the CSA pounded the Congaree Socialist Republic into the ground, he’d been convinced everything Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Marxist revolutionaries had tried to achieve had died with the Republic. He wasn’t so sure, not any more. Maybe Negroes were getting a taste of greater freedom after all, even if not in the way the Reds had aimed to give it to them. And maybe, just maybe, the struggles of the Congaree Socialist Republic hadn’t been in vain.
When the field hands lined up in the morning, two more men were missing. “Where did Hephaestion and Orestes disappear to?” Anne Colleton asked. “Are they off somewhere getting drunk?” Instead of sounding furious, she hoped that was what the two stalwart hands were doing.
But the field foreman, a grizzled buck named Maximus, shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Dey is on de way to St. Matthews-dey leave befo’ de fust light o’ dawn.” Maximus had an unconsciously poetic way of speaking. “Dey say dey gwine be sojers.”
“Did they?” Anne bit down on the inside of her lower lip. She had helped get the bill allowing Negro soldiers passed, and now she was paying the price for it. In front of the hands, she had to keep up a bold facade. “Well, we’ll make do one way or another. Let’s get to work.”
Out to the fields and to their garden plots trooped the Negroes. The young men among them had found a loophole in the silent agreement they’d made with her after the Congaree Socialist Republic collapsed. If they joined the Confederate Army, they didn’t need her to shield them from authority-and they didn’t need to do as she said.
Grimly, Anne headed back toward her cabin. She had letters to write, bills to pay. How she was supposed to put in a proper crop of cotton next year if all her hands departed was beyond her. Her shoulders stiffened. She’d managed a crop of sorts after the Red uprising. If she’d worked one miracle, she figured she could work another. She’d have to, so she would do it.
Julia was already busy in the cabin, feather duster in one hand, baby in the crook of her other elbow. She couldn’t join the Army. Anne appraised her as coldbloodedly as if she’d been a mule. She wouldn’t be much good out in the fields, either.
“Mornin’, ma’am,” Julia said, unaware of the scrutiny or ignoring it. “It gwine be Christmastime any day now.”
“So it will,” Anne said. She’d driven into Columbia a few days before, and sent Tom half a dozen pairs of leather-and-wool gloves. She’d also bought a crate of the usual trinkets for the workers on the plantation. She couldn’t make herself believe they deserved anything but the back of her hand, but couldn’t afford any more trouble with them. She had troubles enough. A little bribery never hurt anything, and a congressman, for instance, would have been far more expensive.
“De tree sho’ smell fine,” Julia said. “Jus’ a little feller dis yeah, not like in de old days.”
In the old days, Anne had had the halls of Marshlands in which to set a tree that was a tree. Here in the low-roofed cottage, this sapling would have to do. She was making the best show she could with tinsel and a cheap glass star on top.
Julia cleaned at a glacial pace. Anne had learned hurrying her was useless. She would just look hurt and stare down at her baby. She’d been slow before she had the baby. She was slower now. Anne waited impatiently. Maybe she let the impatience show. Julia dropped and shattered the chamber pot, then spent what felt like half an hour sweeping up shards of china. Anne was ready to kick her by the time she finally left the cottage.
At last, the mistress of Marshlands, such as there was of Marshlands these days, got down to her own work without anyone
peering over her shoulder. She was gladder by the day that she’d been in fine financial shape before the war started. She wouldn’t be in fine shape by the time it was done. If she survived, though, she knew she’d be able to get her own back once peace finally returned.
She picked up the telephone mouthpiece to call a broker down in Charleston. The line was dead. She said something pungently unladylike. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, not any more. It was either write another letter or drive into St. Matthews to send a telegram. She wrote the letter. More and more these days, she felt nothing at Marshlands got done unless she stayed here to see it get done.
To add to her foul mood, the postman was late. When he finally did show, up, he rode toward her with a bigger armed escort than usual. “You want to watch yourself, ma’am,” he said. “They say them Red niggers is feelin’ fractious.”
“They say all sorts of things,” Anne answered coldly. She took the envelopes and periodicals the fellow gave her and handed him the letters she’d written. He stuck those in his saddlebag and rode off.
Once he was gone, she regretted snapping at him. The guards accompanying him argued that people in St. Matthews were taking seriously the threat from Cassius’ diehards.
She checked her pistol. It lay under her pillow, where it was supposed to be. Wondering if Julia or one of the other Negroes had pulled its teeth, she checked that, too. No: it was fully loaded. That eased her mind somewhat, arguing as it did that the Marshlands Negroes didn’t expect an imminent visit from their friends and comrades skulking in the swamps of the Congaree.
“Comrades.” The word tasted bad in her mouth. Now that the Reds had degraded it, it wasn’t a word decent people in the Confederate States could use comfortably any more. No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than she laughed at herself. Before the war, she’d had nothing but contempt for the stodgy, boring folk who counted for the Confederacy’s decent people. Now she reckoned herself one of them.
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