American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “No,” Anne replied. “What I’m telling you is, this time I expect you to win.”

  “And you want to come along for the ride,” Featherston said.

  “Of course I do,” Anne answered. “Sooner or later, we’re going to have some things to say to the United States. If you don’t think I want to be part of that, you don’t know me at all. And I can help. At your rallies, you’re still using tricks I figured out for you ten years ago, and you know it.”

  “You spent the last few years trying to teach the Whigs new tricks,” he said.

  “Yes, and they’re old dogs—they couldn’t learn them,” Anne answered. “They’ve been in power too long. They can’t learn anything any more. That’s why they’ve got to go.”

  “They’re dogs, all right, the sons of—” Featherston caught himself. “Well, I have plans for them, too. You’d best believe that. Way they’ve stomped on the people of the Confederate States . . . You’re dead right they’ve got to go, Miss Colleton. And I aim to get rid of ’em.”

  Anne wondered how he meant that. Literally? She knew he was ruthless. Was he that ruthless? Maybe. She wouldn’t have been astonished, but even the most ruthless man faced a formidable barrier of law. Anne nodded to herself. Here, that kind of barrier might not be bad at all.

  “You come back in, you’ll follow the Party line?” Jake Featherston asked.

  You’ll do as I say? was what he meant. Anne had never been one to do as anybody said. But if she said no, she’d have no place in the Freedom Party, not now, not ever. That was ever so clear. This is why you came to Richmond, she reminded herself. Do you want to go home empty-handed? Part of her said she did. She ignored it. Nodding to Featherston, she said, “Yes, I’ll do that.”

  He didn’t warn her—no, You’d better, or anything like that. “Good,” he said. “We’ve got a deal.” He didn’t ask for her soul, either. But why would he? She’d just handed it to him.

  XIII

  The alarm clock jangled, bouncing Jefferson Pinkard out of bed at what he reckoned an ungodly early hour. His shift at the Birmingham jail started an hour and a half earlier than he’d gone to the Sloss Works. He yawned, lurched into the bathroom of his downtown flat—one more thing he was getting used to after so long in company housing—brushed his teeth, lathered his face and slid a straight razor over his cheeks, and then went into the kitchen and made coffee and the inevitable bacon and eggs on the fancy, newfangled gas-burning stove in there.

  Thus fortified, he got out of his nightshirt and into the gray jailer’s uniform he’d worn since Caleb Briggs found out the Sloss Works had given him the boot. He planted his wide-brimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle and looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection happily nodded approval at him. “I’m hot stuff, no two ways about it,” he said, and that reflection did not presume to disagree.

  He put his nightstick on his belt and headed out the door. He’d toted longer, heavier bludgeons while breaking up Whig rallies with his Freedom Party pals, but he supposed he understood why jailers didn’t usually carry guns. If something went wrong, that would give prisoners deadly weapons, which was the last thing anybody wanted.

  People got out of his way when he walked down the street in that uniform. He liked that. He’d never had it happen before, except when he was in the company of a lot of his pals, all of them in white shirts and butternut pants, all of them ready—even eager—for trouble. Now he strode along by himself, but men and women still made way for him. He lit a cigarette and blew out a cheerful cloud of smoke.

  Birmingham City Jail was a squat red-brick building that looked like a fortress. As far as Jeff was concerned, it looked just the way it was supposed to. He tipped his hat to a policeman in an almost identical uniform coming out. “Mornin’, Howard,” he said. “Freedom!”

  “Mornin’, Jeff. Same to you,” the cop answered. A lot of policemen in Birmingham belonged to the Freedom Party. Pinkard had seen some of them at meetings. Since becoming a jailer, he’d found out that a good many who didn’t go to meetings or knock heads were members just the same. Some policemen felt they shouldn’t flaunt their politics. But that didn’t mean they had none.

  Inside the city jail, Jeff stuck his card in a time clock just like the one at the Sloss Works except for being painted gray rather than black. He stuck his head into the cramped little office where he had a battered desk. “Mornin’, Billy,” he said to his night-shift counterpart, who was writing a report at an equally beat-up desk. “What’s new for me?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot,” Billy Fraser answered. He was about Jeff’s age, and like him a veteran—precious few white men of their generation in the CSA hadn’t gone to the front. “A couple of niggers in for drunk and disorderly, and one burglar who was the easiest collar you’d ever want—dumb asshole fell out a second-story window making his getaway and broke his ankle. Yell he let out woke up the whole goddamn block. They were beating on him pretty good. He was probably glad when the cops pulled the citizens off him and hauled him away.”

  “Don’t reckon we have to worry about him bustin’ out for a while,” Pinkard said with a chuckle.

  “Hell, no,” Fraser said. “Like I told you, a quiet night.”

  Jeff nodded. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Don’t reckon so,” the other man answered. He threw the report in his Out basket and got to his feet. “Gonna head on home and catch me some shuteye. See you tomorrow. Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Pinkard echoed. “Get some rest. I don’t expect the bastards we’ve got locked up are going anywhere much.”

  “They better not,” Billy Fraser said. “That’d leave us some pretty tall explaining to do.” He grabbed his hat—the twin of Jeff’s—from the rack, stuck it on his head, and went out whistling “The Pennsylvania Rag,” a tune that had been popular during the early days of the Great War, back when the CSA had held a large part of Pennsylvania.

  The first thing Jefferson Pinkard did then was look at the report Fraser had written. It was meant for the warden, not for him, but he didn’t care about that. He’d discovered Billy sometimes wrote things down that he forgot to say, things Jeff needed to know. Nothing like that was in there today, but you never could tell. When you were dealing with prisoners, you couldn’t be too careful, either. If his experience in the Empire of Mexico had taught him anything, that was it.

  After Jeff put the report back where he’d got it, he ambled down to the kitchen and snagged himself a cup of coffee. He snagged a roll, too. One of the colored cooks clucked reproachfully at that, but he was grinning while he did it, a grin that showed several gold teeth. Jeff grinned back. He had no trouble with Negroes, as long as they remembered who the boss was.

  After he did that, he prowled through the whole jail, peering into every cell to see who was where. He couldn’t take the prisoners out of the cells and line them up for roll call, the way he had down in Mexico. He’d had all the room in the world down there: he’d built his prison camp on the loneliest stretch of ground he could find. Things were different in Birmingham, but he wanted to know as much about what was going on as he could.

  “I ain’t run away, jailer man,” said a Negro named Ajax, who was doing a year for beating up another man whom he’d caught using loaded dice. The victim was also black. Had he been white, Ajax would have faced a lot more time behind bars. “I’s still here. You don’t got to check on me every mornin’.”

  “Morning I don’t check on you is probably the morning you’ll try some damnfool thing or other,” Pinkard answered. “More I check, harder it is for me to get a nasty surprise.”

  Ajax reproachfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You ain’t no fun a-tall,” he said.

  “You wanted fun, you shoulda thought twice about pounding on that other nigger,” Jeff said.

  “That cheatin’ son of a bitch won ten dollars o’ my money with them goddamn dice,” Ajax exclaimed, nothing but indignation in his voice. “I see him when I gits o
ut o’ here, I kick his shiftless ass again, teach him not to try none o’ that shit no more.” If jail was supposed to rehabilitate, it wasn’t working with the aggrieved Ajax.

  But Jeff didn’t think jail was supposed to rehabilitate. Like the other jailers he was getting to know, he thought it was supposed to keep people who belonged there inside till it was time to let them out again. He didn’t worry his head about who belonged and who didn’t, either. Figuring that out wasn’t his job. As far as he was concerned, if somebody ended up in the Birmingham City Jail, he damn well belonged there.

  By the time his rounds ended, the trusties were going through the corridors serving breakfast to the other prisoners. Jeff didn’t like that, either. He thought using trusties begged for trouble, because they were so likely to be anything but. But the jail didn’t have the money to hire enough guards to do everything inside that needed doing, and so trusties took care of a lot of work. He scowled at them as he headed back to his office. How much contraband did they smuggle in? They knew. Nobody else did.

  He was halfway through a circuit of the jail before lunch when one of the corridor guards waved to him and called, “Hold on there. Warden wants to see you in his office right away.”

  “Does he?” Jeff said uselessly. The guard nodded, as if to affirm he hadn’t been kidding. “What the hell does he think I did?” Pinkard muttered. The guard didn’t hear that. A prisoner did, and leered at Jeff. As far as the former steelworker knew, the boss wanted to see you only when you were in trouble. Still cursing under his breath, he walked to the warden’s office.

  Ewell McDonald had all to himself more space than Jeff and the other assistant jailers put together. He was a beefy man in his early sixties, with his silver hair greased down and with a bushy gray mustache he’d probably worn since it was dark and stylish back in the 1890s. He heaved himself out of his swivel chair and stuck out a well-manicured hand for Jeff to shake. “Sit down, Pinkard, sit down,” he boomed, sounding more like a politician on the stump than anything else. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

  “Uh, thank you kindly, sir,” Jeff replied, wondering when and how and why McDonald was going to lower the boom on him. “What can I do for you?” Might as well make it short and sweet, he thought.

  Instead of answering right away, McDonald reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Pinkard’s eyes widened slightly, or more than slightly. Alabama was a dry state, though there were ways around that. He knew as much. He didn’t expect the warden of the Birmingham City Jail to know it, or at least to show he knew it to a man he was going to bawl out. But Ewell McDonald yanked out the cork, swigged, and then passed the bottle across the wide expanse of his desk to Jeff. “Here you go, Pinkard,” he said. “Have a snort.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Pinkard said again. He knew he sounded bewildered, but couldn’t help it. After he drank, he whistled appreciatively. That was real whiskey, not something cooked up in a hurry over an illegal still. He hadn’t drunk anything so tasty in quite a while. He passed the bottle back, more worried than ever. McDonald wouldn’t waste that kind of whiskey on him if he were in only a little trouble.

  But the warden beamed at him. “You know, Pinkard, when I hired you, I reckoned I was stuck with you on account of Freedom Party business,” he said. “Happens sometimes; nothing you can do but make the best of it. But I’ll be goddamned if you ain’t pulled your weight and then some. You weren’t lyin’ ‘bout that prison-camp business down in Mexico, were you?”

  “Lying, sir?” Pinkard shook his head. “Hell, no. I did all that stuff.”

  “I guess maybe you did,” McDonald said. “I wouldn’t have bet on it when I took you on, I’ll tell you that. But you’ve worked out fine. Hell, son, you’re doing better than some of the fellows who’ve been here ten years.” He grabbed the whiskey bottle and tilted it back for another knock.

  “Thank you very much, sir,” Jeff said, more than a little dazedly. He’d thought the same thing himself, but he’d never dreamt the warden would come out and say so. “Thank you very much. I’ve learned a hell of a lot here, too. Down in Mexico, I was making it up as I went along. You-all really know what you’re doing.”

  “Some of the time, maybe,” McDonald said. “But I like the way you prowl the cells. I like that a lot. Nothing’s going to happen unless you know about it first, is it?”

  “Well, I hope not,” Pinkard answered. “You can never be sure, but I hope not.”

  “Long as you know you can never be sure, you won’t do too bad.” The warden pushed the bottle across the desk again. “Go ahead. You’ve earned it.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” As Ewell McDonald had, Jeff took a long pull at the bottle. Smooth fire ran down his throat. “Ahh! That’s mighty fine,” he said, and then laughed. “Prisoners’ll smell it on my breath and say I’ve been drinking on the job.”

  McDonald laughed, too. “They don’t like it, you tell ’em they can take it up with the warden.” He corked the whiskey bottle and stuck it back in his drawer. “However you did it, I’m glad you found your way here. You’re goddamn good at this business, you hear what I’m telling you?”

  “Thanks,” Jeff said once more. Yes, he did feel dazed, and not just on account of unaccustomed morning slugs of whiskey. How long had he been at the Sloss Works without ever hearing anybody tell him anything like that? Too long, he thought as he got to his feet. Much too damn long.

  In the summertime, heat and humidity could make Augusta close to unbearable, especially for Negroes in the crowded quarters of the Terry. When Scipio got the chance, he liked to bring his family up to Allen Park and relax in the fresh air under the shade of the trees that grew thickly there. He and Bathsheba and the children would lie on the grass on a Sunday afternoon and watch people with more energy—and, he was convinced, less sense—play volleyball or throw around a football.

  Allen Park was in the white part of town, but close enough to the Terry that Negroes often used it. Scipio would gladly have gone to a park inside the Terry, but nobody’d bothered leaving any open space for a park there. He wasn’t surprised. How could he have been, when he’d lived in the Confederate States all his life? Whites got whatever they needed and whatever they wanted. If anything happened to be left over after that, Negroes got it. If nothing happened to be left over, well, too bad.

  That was how whites saw things, anyhow. And then they’d been shocked when blacks rose up against them in Red revolt during the Great War. Scipio had thought that a damnfool idea, because he’d been all too sure the revolts would fail—as they had. Nothing made the whites fight hard like seeing their privileges threatened. But fearing failure didn’t mean Scipio hadn’t understood the impulse to hit back as hard as his own people could.

  One lazy July Sunday, after finishing a picnic lunch, Bathsheba pointed to a sheet of paper stuck to the trunk of an oak not far away. “What’s that say, Xerxes?” she asked.

  Scipio took his alias for granted. He also took being asked such questions for granted: Bathsheba couldn’t read or write. “I goes and looks,” he answered, climbing to his feet. Full of fried chicken and yams, he ambled slowly over to the tree, read the paper, and came back to sit down on the grass again.

  “Well?” his wife asked.

  “Well?” Antoinette echoed. She was six now, which astounded Scipio every time he thought about it. And Cassius—named, though Scipio had never said so, for the Red rebel in the swamps of the Congaree River—was already three, which astonished him even more.

  But he shook his head. “Ain’t so well,” he said; the thick patois of the Congaree made him sound more ignorant than Bathsheba, whose accent was milder. “Big Freedom Party rally here two weeks from now.”

  The corners of Bathsheba’s wide, generous mouth turned down. “You’re right,” she said. “That ain’t so good. That ain’t no good at all. Thought them people was all over and done with, but now they’re back.”

  “Now they’s back,” Scipio echoed so
mberly. “Times is hard. De buckra, dey’s scared. When dey’s scared, dey starts yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ ”

  “If they want it so bad, how come they don’t want to let us have none?” Bathsheba asked.

  “Dey does dat, who dey gots to t’ink day’s better’n?” Scipio didn’t hide his bitterness.

  “Ought to tear that sheet o’ paper down,” Bathsheba said.

  “Do Jesus, no!” Scipio exclaimed. “Anybody see me do dat, my life ain’t worth a penny. An’ dey’s bound to be plenty more o’ they papers. Don’t put up no notice like dat in jus’ de one place. Tearin’ it down don’t do no good.”

  She didn’t argue with him, but she didn’t look as if she agreed with him, either. When they walked back to their flat, Scipio saw more Freedom Party notices. He wondered how he’d missed them coming up to Allen Park. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see them, and so had turned his eye aside.

  He’d expected to pay no attention to the rally. What else was a Negro supposed to do with anything pertaining to Confederate politics, especially with a part of Confederate politics of which he disapproved? But this rally, very much in the frightening Freedom Party style of ten years before, refused to let Augusta’s Negroes ignore it. For one thing, it was enormous. Scipio didn’t know exactly how many white men thronged to it, but he could hear great roars of, “Freedom!” coming from the park again and again, though it was blocks away from his family’s apartment building.

  “Why they yellin’ like that, Pa?” Antoinette asked.

  Scipio wished he knew what he was supposed to tell her. “On account o’ dey don’t like what de gummint doin’,” he answered at last.

  She could have left it there. Scipio wished she would have left it there. Instead, with a child’s persistence, she asked the inevitable child’s question: “Why?”

  “They’re some o’ the buckra what have it in for black folks,” Bathsheba said when Scipio hesitated. That satisfied their daughter. No Negro, no matter how young, could help knowing plenty of whites in the Confederate States had it in for blacks.