He walked home still suffused with that warm sense of virtue. If you didn’t vote, you had no one to blame but yourself for what happened to the country—unless, of course, you were black, or a woman. And one of these years, the way things looked, they’d probably let women have a go at the ballot box, no matter what he thought about it. He supposed the world wouldn’t end.
Emily came out onto the porch as he hurried up the walk toward the house. “Hi, darlin’!” he called. Then he saw the buff-colored envelope she was holding.
Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid raised a forefinger. “Another cup of coffee for me here, if you please,” the Confederate cavalry officer said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Nellie Semphroch said quickly, before her daughter Edna could. Edna glared at her. Half the reason Kincaid came into the coffeehouse the two women ran in occupied Washington, D.C., was to moon over Edna, his eyes as big and glassy as those of a calf with the bloat.
That was also all the reason Nellie tried to keep Edna as far away from Kincaid as she could. She’d caught them kissing once, and who could say where that would have led if she hadn’t put a stop to it in a hurry? She shook her head. She knew where it would have led. She’d been down that path herself, and didn’t intend to let Edna take it.
Edna filled a cup with the blend from the Dutch East Indies that Kincaid liked, set the cup on a saucer, and handed it to Nellie. “Here you are, Ma,” she said, her voice poisonously sweet. She knew better than to argue out loud with Nellie when the coffeehouse was full of customers, as it was this afternoon. That didn’t mean she wasn’t angry. Far from it.
Nellie Semphroch glared back at her, full of angry determination herself. Given a generation’s difference in their ages—a short generation’s difference—the two women looked very much alike. They shared light brown hair (though Nellie’s had some streaks of gray in it), oval faces, fine, fair skin, and eyes somewhere between blue and green. If Nellie’s expression was habitually worried, well, she’d earned that. In this day and age, if you were an adult and you didn’t have plenty to worry about, something was wrong with you.
She carried the steaming cup over to Lieutenant Kincaid. “Obliged, ma’am,” he said. He was polite, when he could easily have been anything but. And, when he dug in his pocket, he put a real silver quarter-dollar on the table, not the Confederate scrip that let Rebel officers live like lords in the conquered capital of the USA.
Outside in the middle distance, a sudden volley of rifle shots rang out. Nellie jumped. She’d been through worse when the Confederates shelled Washington and then fought their way into town, but she’d let herself relax since: that had been well over a year ago now.
“Nothin’ to worry about, ma’am,” Kincaid said after sipping at the coffee. “That’s just the firing squad getting rid of a nigger. Waste of bullets, you ask me. Ought to string the bastards up. That’d be the end of that.”
“Yes,” Nellie said. She didn’t really like talking with Kincaid. It encouraged him, and he didn’t need encouragement to come around. But Confederate soldiers and military police were the only law and order Washington had these days. The Negro rebellion that had tried to catch fire here hadn’t been against the CSA alone; a good part of the fury had been aimed at whites in general.
Kincaid said, “Those niggers were damn fools—beg your pardon, ma’am—to try givin’ us trouble here. Places where they’re still in arms against the CSA are places where there weren’t any soldiers to speak of. They take a deal of rooting out from places like that, on account of we can’t empty our lines against you Yankees to go back and get ’em. But here—we got plenty of soldiers here, coming and going and staying. Why, we got three regiments comin’ in tonight, back from whipping the Reds in Mississippi and heading up to the Maryland front. And it’s like that every day of the year. Sometimes I don’t think niggers is anything but a pack of fools.”
“Yes,” Nellie said again. Three regiments in from Mississippi, going up to Maryland. Hal Jacobs, who had a little bootmaking and shoe-repair business across the street, had ways of getting such tidbits to people in the USA who could do something useful with them.
“Bring me another sandwich here, ma’am?” a Confederate captain at a far table called. Nellie hurried over to serve him. Despite the rationing that made most of Washington a gray, joyless place, she never had trouble getting her hands on good food and good coffee. Of themselves, her eyes went across the street for a moment. She didn’t know exactly what connections Mr. Jacobs had, but they were good ones. And he liked having the coffeehouse full of Confederates talking at the top of their lungs—or even quietly, so long as they talked freely.
“You had a ham and cheese there?” she asked. The captain nodded. She hurried back of the counter to fix it for him.
Nicholas H. Kincaid was not without resource. He gulped down the coffee Nellie had given him and asked for another refill while she was still making the sandwich. That meant Edna had to take care of him. Not only did she bring him the coffee, she sat down at the table with him and started an animated conversation. The person to whom she was really telling something was Nellie, and the message was simple: I’ll do whatever I please.
Seething inside, Nellie sliced bread, ham, and cheese with mechanical competence. She wished she could haul off and give her daughter a good clout in the ear, but Edna was past twenty, so how much good could it do? Why don’t young folks listen to people who know better? she mourned silently, forgetting how little she’d listened to anyone at the same age.
She took the sandwich over to the captain, accepted his scrip with an inward sigh, and was about to head back behind the counter when the door opened and a new customer came in. Unlike most of her clientele, he was neither a Confederate soldier nor one of the plump, clever businessmen who hadn’t let a change of rulers in Washington keep them from turning a profit. He was about fifty, maybe a few years past, with a black overcoat that had seen better times, a derby about which the same could be said, and a couple of days’ stubble on his chin and cheeks. He picked a table near the doorway, and sat with his back against the wall.
When Nellie came over to him, he breathed whiskey fumes up into her face. She ignored them. “I thought I told you never to show your face in here again,” she said in a furious whisper.
“Oh, Little Nell, you don’t have to be that way,” he answered. His voice, unlike his appearance, was far from seedy: he sounded ready for anything. His eyes traveled the length of her, up and down. “You’re still one fine-looking woman, you know that?” he said, as if he’d seen right through the respectable gray wool dress she wore.
Her face heated. Bill Reach knew what she looked like under that dress, sure enough, or he knew what she had looked like under her clothes, back when she’d been younger than Edna was now. She hadn’t seen him since, or wanted to, till he’d shown up at the coffeehouse one day a few months before. Then she’d managed to frighten him off, and hoped he was gone for good. Now—
“If you don’t get out of here right now,” she said, “I’m going to let these officers here know you’re bothering a lady. Confederates are gentlemen. They don’t like that.” Except when they’re trying to get you into bed themselves.
Reach laughed, showing bad teeth. It looked like a good-natured laugh—unless you were on the receiving end of it. “I don’t think you’ll do that.”
“Oh? And why don’t you?” She might be betraying Rebel information to Hal Jacobs, but that didn’t mean she’d be shy about using Confederate officers to protect herself from Bill Reach and whatever he wanted.
But then he said, “Why? Oh, I don’t know. A little bird told me—a little homing pigeon, you might say.”
For a couple of seconds, that meant nothing to Nellie. Then it did, and froze her with apprehension. One of Mr. Jacobs’ friends was a fancier of homing pigeons. He used them to get information out of Washington and into the hands of U.S. authorities. If Bill Reach knew about that—“What do you want?” Nelli
e had to force the words out through stiff lips.
Now the smile was more like a leer. “For now, a cup of coffee and a chicken-salad sandwich,” he answered. “Anything else I have in mind, you couldn’t bring me to the table.”
Men, Nellie thought, a one-word condemnation of half the human race. All they want is that. Well, he’s not going to get it. “I’ll bring you your food and the coffee,” she said, and then, to show him—to try to show him—she wasn’t intimidated, she added, “That will be a dollar fifteen.”
Silver jingled in his pocket. He set a dollar and a quarter on the table—real money, no scrip. He’d looked seedy the last time she’d seen him, too, but he hadn’t had any trouble paying her high prices then, either. She scooped up the coins and started back toward the counter.
She almost ran into Edna. “I’m sorry, Ma,” her daughter said, continuing in a low voice, “I wondered if you were having trouble with that guy.”
“It’s all right,” Nellie said. It wasn’t all right, or even close to all right, but she didn’t want Edna getting a look at the skeletons in her closet. Edna was hard enough to manage as things were. One of the things that helped keep her in line was the tone of moral superiority Nellie took. If she couldn’t take that tone any more, she didn’t know what she’d do.
And then, from behind her, Bill Reach said, “Sure is a pretty daughter you have there, Nell.”
“Thank you,” Nellie said tonelessly. Edna looked bemused, but Nellie hoped that was because Reach’s appearance failed to match the other customers’. At least he hadn’t called her Little Nell in front of Edna. The most unwanted pet name brought the days when he’d known her back to all too vivid life.
“I’d be proud if she was my daughter,” Reach said.
That was too much to be borne. “Well, she isn’t,” Nellie answered, almost certain she was right.
The cold north wind whipped down across the Ohio River and through the Covington, Kentucky, wharves. Cincinnatus felt it in his ears and on his cheeks and in his hands. He wasn’t wearing heavy clothes—overalls and a collarless cotton shirt under them—but he was sweating rather than shivering in spite of the nasty weather. Longshoreman’s work was never easy. Longshoreman’s work when Lieutenant Kennan was bossing your crew was ten times worse.
Kennan swaggered up and down the wharf as if the green-gray uniform he wore turned him into the Lord Jehovah. “Come on, you goddamn lazy niggers!” he shouted. “Got to move, by God you do. Get your black asses humping. You there!” The shout wasn’t directed at Cincinnatus. “You don’t do like you’re told, you don’t work here. Jesus Christ, them Rebs were fools for ever setting you dumb coons free. You don’t deserve it.”
Another laborer, an older Negro named Herodotus, said to Cincinnatus, “I’d like to pinch that little bastard’s head right off, I would.”
“You got a long line in front of you,” Cincinnatus answered, both of them speaking too quietly for the U.S. lieutenant to hear. Herodotus chuckled under his breath. Cincinnatus went on, “Hell of it is, he’d get more work if he didn’t treat us like we was out in the cotton fields in slavery days.” Those days had ended a few years before he was born, but he had plenty of stories to give him a notion of what they’d been like.
“Probably the only way he knows to deal wid us,” Herodotus said.
Cincinnatus sighed, picked up his end of a crate, and nodded. “Ain’t that many black folks up in the USA,” he said. “They mostly didn’t want us before the War of Secession, an’ they kep’ us out afterwards, on account of we was from a different country then. Me, I keep wonderin’ if Kennan ever set eyes on anybody who wasn’t white ’fore he got this job.”
Herodotus just shrugged. He did the work Kennan set him, he groused about it when it was too hard or when he was feeling ornery, and that was that. He didn’t think any harder than he had to, he couldn’t read or write, and he’d never shown any great desire to learn. Saying he was content as a beast of burden overstated the case, but not by too much.
Cincinnatus, now, Cincinnatus had ambition. An ambitious Negro in the CSA was asking for a broken heart, but he’d done everything he could to make life better for himself and his wife, Elizabeth. When the USA seized Covington, he’d hoped things would get better; U.S. law didn’t come down on Negroes nearly so hard as Confederate law did. But he’d discovered Lieutenant Kennan was far from the only white man from the USA who had no more use for blacks than did the harshest Confederate.
Along with Herodotus, he hauled the crate from the barge to a waiting truck. He could have driven that truck, freeing a U.S. soldier to fight; he’d been a driver before the war started. But the Yankees wouldn’t let him get behind the wheel of a truck, for no better reason he could see than that he had a black skin. That struck him as stupid and wasteful, but how was he supposed to convince the occupying authorities? The plain answer was, he couldn’t.
And so he did what he had to do to get along. He and Elizabeth had a son now. Better yet, Achilles was sleeping through the night most of the time, so Cincinnatus didn’t stagger into work feeling three-quarters dead most mornings. He thanked Jesus for that, because what he did was plenty to wear him out all by itself, without any help from a squalling infant.
He and Herodotus finally loaded the day’s last crate of ammunition into the last truck and lined up for the paymaster. Along with the usual dollar, they both got the fifty-cent hard-work bonus. The gray-haired sergeant who paid them said, “You boys is taming that Kennan half a dollar at a time, ain’t you?”
“Maybe,” Herodotus said. Cincinnatus just shrugged. The paymaster wasn’t a bad fellow, but he didn’t feel easy about trusting any white man, even one who criticized a comrade.
Herodotus spent a nickel of his bonus on trolley fare and headed for home in a hurry. Cincinnatus had always saved money, even before he had a child, so he walked through Covington on his way to the colored district that lay alongside the Licking River.
Walking through Covington was walking through a minefield of resentments. The Stars and Stripes floated over the city hall and all the police stations. Troops in green-gray uniforms were not just visible; they were conspicuous. The Yankees had the town, and they aimed to keep it.
Some local whites did business with them, too. With Cincinnati right across the Ohio, Covington had been doing business with the USA for as long as Kentucky had been in Confederate hands. But more than once, Cincinnatus saw whites cross the street when U.S. soldiers came by, for no better reason he could find than that they didn’t want to walk where the men they called damnyankees had set their feet.
Cincinnatus didn’t worry about that. He walked past Joe Conroy’s general store. The white storekeeper saw him, but pretended he didn’t. Nor was there any advertising notice taped to the lower left-hand corner of Conroy’s window. That meant neither Conroy nor Tom Kennedy, who had been Cincinnatus’ boss before the war and was now a fugitive from the Yankees, wanted to talk with him tonight.
“And that’s a damn good thing,” he muttered under his breath, “on account of I don’t want to talk with them, neither.” If he hadn’t hidden Tom Kennedy when a U.S. patrol was after him, he never would have been drawn into the Confederate underground that still functioned in Covington and, he supposed, in other Yankee-occupied parts of the CSA as well.
He shook his head. If the U.S. soldiers had just treated Negroes like ordinary human beings, they would have won them over in short order. It hadn’t happened; it didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that it should happen. And so he found himself, though far from in love with the government that had been driven out of these parts, no less unhappy with the regime replacing it. As if life wasn’t hard enough, he thought.
After a while, the big white clapboard houses and wide lawns of the white part of town gave way to smaller, dingier homes packed tightly together, the mark of a Negro district in any town in the Confederate States of America. The paving on a lot of the streets here was bad. The paving on the
rest of the streets did not exist at all.
Boys in battered kneepants kicked a football up and down one dirt street. One of them threw it ahead to another, who caught it and ran a long way before he was dragged down. “Yankee rules!” the two of them shouted gleefully. As football had been played in the Confederacy, forward passes were illegal. North of the Ohio, things had been different. This wasn’t the first such pass Cincinnatus had seen thrown. The U.S. game was catching on here.
He walked past a whitewashed picket fence. Like fresh blood, red paint had been daubed here and there on the whitewash. A couple of houses farther on, he came to another fence similarly defaced. On the side of a shack that nobody lived in, somebody had painted REVOLUTION in big, crimson letters, and a crude sketch of a broken chain beside the word.
“Ain’t nobody happy,” Cincinnatus muttered. Whites in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them apart from the Confederacy most of them held dear. Blacks in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them from joining the uprising against the Confederacy most of them despised.
He turned a corner. He was only a couple of blocks from home now. Being an up-and-coming man, he lived on a street that was paved and that boasted real concrete sidewalks. That meant horses and mules drawing wagons and buggies didn’t step on the wreaths there, and meant that the blood on the sidewalk, though it had gone brown rather than crimson and looked gray, almost black, in the deepening twilight, had not been washed away by rain.
He kicked at the sidewalk with his shabby shoes. Yankee soldiers didn’t hesitate to shoot down Negroes aflame with the beauty of the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Maybe the revolution would succeed down in the Confederacy, with so many armed whites having to stay in place and fight the USA. It would not work here, not now, not yet.
A kerosene lamp burned in the front window of his house. The savory smell of chicken stew wafted out toward him. All at once, he could feel how tired—and how cold—he was. As he hurried up the walk toward the front door, it opened. His mother came out.
Walk in Hell Page 8
