When the Rhythm Aces finished their number, the announcer said, “You know folks will hear this program in the CSA as well as the USA. What do you have to say to the people of the country you chose to leave?”
“Ain’t got nothin’ much to say to the white folks there,” Satchmo answered, sounding like a gravelly bullfrog. “White folks down there don’t listen to the niggers anyways. If you is colored an’ you is in the Confederate States, I gots one thing to tell you—git out if you can. You stays dere, you gwine end up dead. I hates to say it, but it’s de Lawd’s truth.”
His English was almost as foreign to Flora’s ear as his music. White Confederates had their own accent, or group of accents; she was used to those. People from the USA, though, seldom got to hear how uneducated Confederate Negroes spoke.
“How did you get out of the CSA?” the announcer asked.
Flora already knew that story; she’d met Satchmo after he and his fellow musicians came to Philadelphia. Knowing what he was going to say helped her follow his account: “We was up in Ohio, playin’ fo’ de sojers dere. We done decided we better run, on account of we never gits no better chance. So we steals a command car—you know, one o’ dem wid a machine gun on it.” His accent got even thicker as excitement filled his voice. “We drives till we comes to de front. It’s de nighttime, so de Confederate pickets, dey reckons we’s ossifers—”
“Till we commences to shootin’ an’ drives on by,” one of the other Rhythm Aces broke in. They all laughed at the memory.
“Good for you. Good for you,” the announcer said. Flora didn’t like his fulsome tones; she thought he was laying it on with a trowel. The idea wasn’t to patronize the Negroes. It was to show the world they were human beings, too, human beings abused by their white Confederate masters. She couldn’t think of a better word than that, even though the Confederates had formally manumitted their slaves in the 1880s. Neither side’s propaganda was subtle these days. The announcer asked, “What will you play for us next?”
As usual, Satchmo spoke for the band: “This here is a song dat show we is glad to be where we’s at.”
They broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was not the National Anthem as Francis Scott Key had written it. It was not the National Anthem as Flora had ever imagined it, either. They did things with and to the rhythm for which she had no names. But what they did worked. It made the staid old tune seem new and fresh to her again. Most of the time, she listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with half an ear, if that. She knew it too well to pay much attention to it. Not here, not now. She had to listen closely, because she couldn’t be sure just what was coming next. She didn’t think even the Rhythm Aces knew before the notes flowed from their instruments.
After the last proud wail of Satchmo’s trumpet, even the bland announcer seemed moved when he murmured, “Thank you very much.”
“You is mighty welcome, suh,” Satchmo said. “You is mighty welcome, an’ we is mighty glad to be in ‘de land o’ de free an’ de home o’ de brave.’ If we was still in de CSA, maybe they fixin’ to kill us.”
The announcer still didn’t seem to know what to make of that. Getting people in the USA to believe that whites in the CSA were systematically killing blacks wasn’t easy. Getting people in the USA to care even if they did believe was harder yet. People in this country wanted as little to do with blacks as they could, and wanted as few blacks here as possible.
Flora wondered if Satchmo and his fellow musicians had bumped up against that yet. They weren’t valued for themselves; they were valued because their escape gave the Confederates a black eye.
“What will you do now that you’re in our great country?” the wireless man asked at last.
“Play music.” By the way Satchmo said it, he could conceive of no other life. “Wherever folks wants us to play music, we do dat.”
How many people would want them to play music as alien to the U.S. tradition as that National Anthem had been? Flora couldn’t know. One way or another, Satchmo and his band would find out. They wouldn’t starve; the government wouldn’t let them. And they wouldn’t have to worry about pogroms and worse. People might not like them, but their lives weren’t in danger anymore.
After farewells and commercials, the news did come on. It wasn’t good. The big U.S. push in Virginia remained bogged down. U.S. counterattacks in Ohio hadn’t come to much. The fight to grind down the Mormon uprising remained stalled in Provo. If the United States could have thrown their full might at Utah, the revolt would have been crushed in short order. The Mormons, of course, had the sense not to rebel when the USA could do that. Flora hoped Yossel stayed safe.
Other fronts were sideshows. Confederate-sponsored Indian uprisings in Sequoyah kept the occupied territory in an uproar. That wouldn’t have mattered much if Sequoyah didn’t have more oil than you could shake a stick at. As things were, the United States had trouble using what they could get, and sabotage ensured that they didn’t get much.
Sequoyah was one more piece of trouble left over from the Great War and the harsh peace that followed. If the peace had been milder, maybe someone like Jake Featherston never would have arisen in the Confederate States. The smoldering resentments and hatreds that fueled the Freedom Party’s growth wouldn’t have existed. On the other hand, if the peace had been more draconian—more on the order of what the United States had visited on Canada—any sign of trouble would have been ruthlessly suppressed before it could turn dangerous.
Which would have been better? Flora didn’t know. All she knew for sure, all anyone in the battered USA knew for sure, was that what they’d tried hadn’t worked. That was particularly bitter to her because so much of what they’d tried had been under Socialist administrations, including her own late husband’s.
The Democrats had ruled the USA almost continuously between the disaster of the War of Secession and the bigger disaster of the Great War. Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t seen the Great War as a disaster; he’d seen it as a vindication, a revenge toward which the country had worked for two generations. Maybe he’d even been right. But the voters thought otherwise. They’d elected Socialists ever since, except for one four-year stretch.
And what had that got them? The economic collapse while Hosea Blackford was in the White House, and the rebirth of Confederate military power while Al Smith was. If only he hadn’t agreed to the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah . . . But he had, and he’d won reelection on the strength of it, and none of Jake Featherston’s solemn promises turned out to be worth the paper it was written on.
We aren’t immune from mistakes, either, Flora thought, and laughed bitterly. There were times when the Socialists seemed to go out of their way—a long way out of their way—to prove that.
The telephone rang, dropping a bomb on her train of thought. Not sorry to see it go, she picked up the handset and said, “Yes? What is it, Bertha?”
“Mr. Roosevelt is on the line, Congresswoman,” her secretary answered.
“Is he?” Flora could hear the pleasure in her voice. “Put him through, of course.”
“Hello, Flora! How are you today?” the Assistant Secretary of War said. Franklin Roosevelt always sounded jaunty, even though poliomyelitis left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was only a distant cousin to Theodore, and had always been a solid Socialist.
“I’m fine, Franklin. How are you? What can I do for you today?” Flora said.
“I’m about as well as can be expected,” he replied. “I’d be better if the war were better, but I expect that’s true of the whole country. Reason I called is, I wondered whether you’d listened to Satchmo and his pals on the wireless just now.”
“I certainly did,” Flora told him. “I don’t think I ever heard the National Anthem sound like that before.”
Roosevelt had a big, booming laugh, a laugh that invited everyone who heard it to share the joke. “Neither did I, by God!” he said. “But it didn’t sound bad, you know—just different.”
/> Had he been a Democrat like his late cousin, the two words would have meant the same thing to him. Flora said, “I liked the way he and the Rhythm Aces talked between numbers. They’ll make some people think—here and in the CSA.”
“That’s the idea,” Roosevelt said. “We made sure this broadcast went out over a big web. Featherston’s boys could try till they were blue in the face, but they couldn’t jam all our stations. People on the other side of the border will have got the message.”
“Good. Excellent, in fact,” Flora said. “Featherston says he tells the truth. His people—white and black—need to know better.” She knew white Confederates wouldn’t pay much attention to anything Negroes said. But plenty of blacks in the Confederate States had wireless sets, too.
“They sure do.” Franklin Roosevelt paused. It seemed very casual. Then he went on, “President La Follette wanted me to pass on to you that, as far as he’s concerned, the bargain you had with Al Smith still holds. He’ll meet his end of it. He wants me to check and see that you will, too.”
“If he does, I will.” Flora hoped she hid her bemusement. Two presidents, now, had agreed to speak out against Confederate atrocities on Negroes if she didn’t speak out on a strange budget item she’d found. Stranger still, she didn’t even know what the item was for.
III
WHEN SCIPIO was Anne Colleton’s butler, back in the days before and at the start of the Great War, he’d got an education less formal but more thorough than he would have had at most colleges. He knew the name for a group of people forced to live in a walled-off part of a town. They formed a ghetto.
The Terry had been Augusta, Georgia’s colored district for God only knew how long. Blacks lived there and nowhere else. Whites didn’t live there, no matter what. But it hadn’t been a ghetto. Negroes had worked all over Augusta, waiting tables, cleaning houses, cutting hair, and doing all sorts of backbreaking, low-paying jobs that were beneath whites’ dignity.
But the Terry was a ghetto now. Barbed wire surrounded it. Armed guards—police and Freedom Party stalwarts—patrolled the perimeter. The only people who got out were the ones who showed their passbooks at the gates and were approved. Reentering was controlled just as rigidly.
Even before the barbed wire went up, the authorities swept out—emptied—one big chunk of the Terry. Word was that the people removed had been resettled somewhere else. Scipio didn’t know of anybody who’d heard from any of them, though. His guess was that they’d gone to a camp. Negroes went into camps. He didn’t know of anybody who’d come out of one, either.
All he could do was live his life one day at a time, try to get through, try to get by. Every afternoon, he put on the tuxedo he wore to his job at the Huntsman’s Lodge and headed for the nearest gate.
He’d been waiting tables there for a long time. The cops and the stalwarts knew him. They’d known him long enough that most of them had even stopped teasing him about the penguin suit he wore—and for a white man, or even a black, to abandon that particular joke required a forbearance not far from the superhuman. Better still, they’d even known him long enough to let him back into the Terry when he got off work after the usual curfew hour for Negroes.
That he worked at the Huntsman’s Lodge in particular undoubtedly helped him and his fellow waiters and cooks and busboys acquire their immunity from the curfew. The place was the finest and fanciest restaurant in Augusta. It was where the town’s most important whites gathered—and of course they had to be well served. Of course.
As usual, Scipio arrived for his shift about twenty minutes early. Showing up early and showing up all the time no matter what were two of a restaurant worker’s chief virtues. Reliability counted for more than anything else he could think of.
He ducked into the staff entrance—customers had a much fancier one—and hung his ratty overcoat on a hook. He didn’t think he’d need it much longer. Spring came early to Augusta, and summer followed hard on its heels. In the subtropical heat and humidity of a Georgia summer, his wing collar and tailcoat became a torture and a torment.
“Hello, Xerxes.” That was Jerry Dover, the manager at the Huntsman’s Lodge. The sharp-faced white man made a pretty good boss.
“Good day to you, suh.” Scipio responded to his alias more readily than he would have to his own name. As Scipio, he was still a wanted man in South Carolina. He hadn’t thought the Red uprising during the Great War had a prayer of success, which hadn’t kept him from becoming a prominent and visible part of the short-lived Congaree Socialist Republic. As far as he knew, the others who could say that were long dead; his son Cassius was named for one of them.
He expected Jerry Dover to go on his way after the greeting. The manager ran himself ragged making sure the Huntsman’s Lodge stayed the best place in town. However much Dover’s bosses paid him, it wasn’t enough.
Instead, though, Dover said, “Grab yourself some grub and then come see me in my office. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”
“I do dat, suh. What you need?”
“It’ll keep till then.” Jerry Dover did hurry off after that. Scipio scratched his head. Something was on Dover’s mind. The manager hadn’t seemed anxious or upset, so it probably wasn’t anything too dreadful.
You couldn’t get rich waiting tables. (If you were a Negro in the CSA, you were most unlikely to get rich any which way, but you sure wouldn’t by waiting tables.) The job had its perquisites, though. The meals the cooks fixed for themselves and the rest of the help weren’t so fancy as the ones they made for the paying customers, but they weren’t bad, and they were free. Scipio ate fried chicken and string beans and buttery mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, and washed them down with coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.
Thus fortified, he went to Jerry Dover’s office, tapped on the open door, and said, “What kin I do fo’ you, suh?”
“Come on in,” Dover told him. “Close that thing, will you?”
“Yes, suh.” As Scipio did, he began—oh, not to worry, but to wonder. What didn’t Jerry Dover want anybody else hearing? The restaurant business had few secrets—fewer, most of the time, than the people who believed they were keeping them imagined.
Jerry Dover pointed to the battered chair in front of his battered desk. “Sit down, sit down,” he said impatiently. “You don’t need to stand there looking down at my bald spot. I’ve got something I want you to take care of for me.”
“I do dat,” Scipio said, assuming it was something that had to do with the restaurant. “Ask you one mo’ time—what you need?”
“Something a little special,” Dover answered. Scipio still didn’t worry. Later, he realized he should have started right then. But he just sat there politely and waited. His mama had raised him to be polite, going on seventy years ago now, and Anne Colleton’s relentless training reinforced those early lessons. Dover went on, “I need you to take something to somebody down in Savannah for me.”
“Savannah, suh?” Automatic deference tempered even the horror Scipio felt. “Do Jesus, suh! How I gonna git to Savannah, things like they is now? I is lucky I kin git outa de Terry.”
“I’ll get you authorized to leave town. Don’t you fret about that,” Jerry Dover said, which only made Scipio more alarmed than ever.
“What is this thing?” he demanded. “You can’t go your ownself? You can’t put it in de mail, let de postman bring it?”
“No and no,” the manager answered. “If I go out of town, people will notice. Right now, I can’t afford to have anybody notice me leaving town. And the mail’s not as safe as it used to be. A lot of people are mighty snoopy these days.” He doubtless meant people who worked for the Freedom Party. He doubtless meant that, but he didn’t say it.
“You reckon nobody care about some raggedy-ass nigger?” Scipio said. Quite calmly, Jerry Dover nodded. His very coolness infuriated the black man. “Suh, this here ass o’ mine may be raggedy, but it be the onliest one I got.”
“Then you’l
l be careful of it, won’t you . . . Scipio?”
There it was. He’d feared it was coming. Anne Colleton had known who he was, had known what his right name was. She’d eaten at the Huntsman’s Lodge—was it really less than a year earlier?—and recognized him. Naturally, she’d wanted him arrested, brought back to South Carolina, and shot. Jerry Dover had forestalled her. He’d shown her that a colored waiter named Xerxes had worked at the Lodge before the Great War. It was, of course, a different Xerxes, but she couldn’t prove that. Anne Colleton had always been a woman who got her own way. She couldn’t have liked being thwarted here.
Maybe she would have done something about it had she lived. Thanks to the U.S. raid on Charleston, she hadn’t. Scipio was free of her forever. But . . . She’d told Jerry Dover his right name. It was a gun in Dover’s hands no less than it had been in hers.
Dover opened a desk drawer and reached inside. What did he have in there? A pistol? Probably. What had Scipio’s face shown? What he was really thinking? A Negro in the CSA could do nothing more dangerous. Dover said, “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“I know what you talkin’ ’bout, yes, suh,” Scipio said. Then he let the accent he’d used only once or twice since the downfall of the Congaree Socialist Republic, the educated white man’s accent Anne Colleton had made him learn, come out: “I know exactly what you are talking about, and I wish to heaven that I didn’t.”
Jerry Dover’s eyes widened. “You are a sandbagging son of a bitch. How many times did you tell me you could only talk like a swamp nigger?”
“As many times as I needed to, to keep myself safe,” Scipio answered. Bitterly, he added, “But I see there is no safety anywhere. Now—suppose you eliminate the nonsense. What must I deliver, and to whom, and why?”
Accent was almost as important in the CSA as color. Scipio remained black. He couldn’t do anything about that. But his skin said he was one thing. Now, suddenly, his voice said he was something else. His voice proclaimed that he was not just a white man, but someone to be reckoned with: a lawyer, a judge, a Senator. Jerry Dover shook his head, trying to drive out the illusion. Plainly, he wasn’t having an easy time of it.
Drive to the East Page 8
