American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "Here I is, suh!" the Negro said, hurrying up at a trot. Sweat beaded his cheeks and the bald crown of his head.

  "Took you long enough," Stuart grumbled. "Fetch me a glass of some thing cold. While you're at it, bring one for the sergeant here, too."

  "Somethin' col'. Yes, suh." Pompey hurried off.

  Watching him go, Stuart shook his head. "I do wonder if we made a misake, letting our British friends persuade us to manumit the niggers after the Second Mexican War." He sighed. "I don't suppose we had much choice, but even so, we may well have been wrong. They're an inferior race, Sergeant. Now that they are free, we still can't trust them to take a man's place. So what has freedom got them? A little money in their pockets to spend foolishly, not a great deal more."

  Featherston had been a boy when the Confederacy amended the Constitution to require manumission. He remembered his father, an overseer, cussing about it fit to turn the air blue.

  Captain Stuart sighed again. He might have been thinking along with Featherston, for he said, "The amendment never would have passed if we hadn't admitted Chihuahua and Sonora after we bought them from Maximilian II. They didn't understand things so well down there-they still don't, come to that. But we wouldn't have our own transcontinental railroad without them, so it may have been for the best after all. Better than having to ship through the United States, that's certain."

  "Yes, sir," Featherston agreed. "The Yankees thought so, too, or they wouldn't have gone to war to keep us from having 'em."

  "And look what it got them," Stuart said. "Their capital bombarded, a blockade on both coasts, all the naval losses they could stand, their cities up on the Great Lakes shelled. Stupid is what they were-no other word for it."

  "Yes, sir," the sergeant repeated. Like any good Southerner, he took the stupidity of his benighted distant cousins north of the Potomac as an article of faith. "If Austria does go to war against Serbia — "

  It wasn't changing the subject, and Captain Stuart understood as much. He picked up where Featherston left off: "If that happens, France and Russia side with Serbia. You can't blame 'em; the Serbian government didn't do anything wrong, even if it was crazy Serbs who murdered the Austrian crown prince. But then what does Germany do? If Germany goes to war, and especially if England comes in, we're in the scrap, no doubt about it."

  "And so are they." Featherston looked across the river again. "And Washington goes up in smoke." His wave encompassed the heights. "Our battery of three-inchers here is a long way from the biggest guns we've got trained on 'em, either."

  "Not hardly," Stuart said with a vigorous nod. "You think Cowboy Teddy Roosevelt doesn't know it?" He spoke the U.S. president's name with vast contempt. "Haven't seen him south of Philadelphia since this mess blew up, nor anybody from their Congress, either."

  Featherston chuckled. "You don't see anybody much there when it gets hot." He wasn't talking about the weather. "The last thirty years, they find somewheres else to go when it looks like there's liable to be shooting between us and them."

  "They were skedaddlers when we broke loose from 'em, and they're still skedaddlers today." Stuart spoke with conviction. Then his arrogant expression softened slightly. "One thing they always did have, though, was a godawful lot of guns."

  Now he looked across the Potomac, not at the White House and Capitol so temptingly laid out before him but at the heights back of the low ground by the river on which Washington sat. In those heights were forts with guns manned by soldiers in uniforms not of butternut but of green so pale it was almost gray. The forts had been there to protect Washington since the War of Secession. They'd been earthworks then. Some, those with fieldpieces like the ones Captain Stuart commanded, still were. Those that held big guns, though, were concrete reinforced with steel, again like their Confederate opposite numbers.

  "I don't care what they have," Featherston declared. "It won't stop us from blowing that nest of damnyankees right off the map."

  "That's so." Captain Stuart's gaze swung from the United States back to his own side of the river and Arlington mansion, the Doric-columned ancestral estate of the Lee family. "That won't survive, either. They'd have wrecked it thirty years ago if their gunnery hadn't been so bad. They aren't as good as we are now"-again, he spoke of that as if it were an article of faith-"but they're better than they used to be, and they're plenty good enough for that."

  "'Fraid you're right, sir," Featherston agreed mournfully. "They hate Marse Robert and everything he stood for."

  "Which only proves what kind of people they are," Stuart said. He turned his head. "Here's Pompey, back at last. Took you long enough."

  "I's right sorry, Marse Jeb," said the Negro; he carried on a tray two sweati ng glasses in which ice cubes tinkled invitingly. "Fs right sorry, yes I is. Here-I was makin' this here nice fresh lemonade fo' you and Marse Jake, is what took me so long. July in Virginia ain't no fun for nobody. Here you go, suh."

  Featherston took his glass of lemonade, which was indeed both cold and good. As he drank, though, he narrowly studied Pompey. He didn't think Stuart's servant was one bit sorry. When a Negro apologized too much, when he threw "Marse" around as if he were still a slave, odds were he was shamming and, behind his servile mask, either laughing at or hating the white men he thought he was deceiving. Thanks to what Jake's father had taught him, he knew nigger tricks.

  What could you do about that kind of shamming, though? The depressing answer was, not much. If you insisted-rightly, Featherston was convinced- blacks show whites due deference, how could you punish them for showing more deference than was due? You couldn't, not unless they were openly insolent, which Pompey hadn't been.

  In fact, his show of exaggerated servility had taken in his master. "Get on back to the tent now, Pompey," Stuart said, setting the empty glass on the Negro's tray. He smacked his lips. "That was mighty tasty, I will tell you."

  "Glad you like it, suh," Pompey said. "How's yours, Marse Jake?"

  "Fine," Featherston said shortly. He pressed the cold glass to his cheek, sighed with pleasure, and then put the glass beside the one Stuart had set on the tray. With a low bow, Pompey took them away.

  "He's all right, even if I do have to get down on him," Stuart said, watching the Negro's retreat. "You just have to know how to handle niggers, is all."

  "Yes, sir," Featherston said once more, this time with the toneless voice noncommissioned officers used to agree with their superiors when in fact they weren't agreeing at all. Stuart didn't notice that, any more than he'd noticed Pompey laying the dumb-black act on with a trowel. He was a pretty fair officer, no doubt about it, but he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

  Of course, when you got right down to it, who was?

  Cincinnatus stepped on the brake as he pulled the Duryea truck up behind the warehouse near the Covington docks. He muttered a curse when a policeman-worse, by the peacock feather in his cap a Kentucky state trooper- happened to walk past the alleyway and spy him.

  The trooper cursed, too, and loudly: he didn't have to hide what he thought. He yanked his hogleg out of its holster and approached the Negro at a swag-bellied trot. Pointing the revolver at Cincinnatus' face, he growled, "You better show me a pass, or you is one dead nigger."

  "Got it right here, boss." Cincinnatus showed more respect than he felt. He pulled the precious paper out of his passbook and handed it to the state trooper.

  The man's lips moved as he read: "Cincinnatus works for Kennedy Shipping and has my leave to drive the Kennedy Shipping truck in pursuit of his normal business needs. Thomas Kennedy, proprietor." He glowered at Cincinnatus. "I don't much hold with niggers drivin', any more'n I do with women." Then, grudgingly: "But it ain't against the law-if you're really Tom Kennedy's nigger. What do you say if I call him on the tellyphone, hey?"

  "Go ahead, boss," Cincinnatus said. He was on safe ground there.

  The trooper stuck the pistol back in its holster. "Ahh, the hell with it," he said. "But I tell you somethin', an' you be
tter listen good." He pointed north toward the Ohio River. "Just across there it's the You-nited States, right?" He waited for Cincinnatus to nod before going on, "Any day now, all hell's gonna break loose between us and them. Some people, they see niggers like you down here by the docks or anywhere near, they ain't gonna ask to see your pass. They gonna figger you're a spy an' shoot first, then stop an' ask questions."

  "I got you, boss," Cincinnatus assured him. The trooper nodded and went on his way. When his back was turned, Cincinnatus allowed himself the luxury of a long, silent sigh of relief. That hadn't turned out so bad as it might have, not anywhere near. He was resigned to playing the servant to every white man he saw; if you didn't want to end up swinging from a lamppost, you did what you had to do to get by. And the state trooper had even given him what the man meant as good advice. That didn't happen every day.

  As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, the fellow was crazy, but that was another matter. Keep all the black folks away from the Covington docks?

  "Good luck, Mr. Trooper, sir," Cincinnatus said with a scornful laugh. Every longshoreman and roustabout on the docks was colored. White men dirty their hands with such work? Cincinnatus laughed again.

  Then, all at once, he sobered. Maybe the state trooper wasn't so crazy after all. If war came, no riverboats would come down the Ohio from the United States or up it from the Mississippi and the heart of the Confederacy. Both sides had guns up and down the river trained at each other. Without that trade, what would the dockworkers do? For that matter, what would Cincinnatus do?

  He looked toward the Ohio himself. One thing he wouldn't do, he figured, was try to run off to the United States, no matter how the trooper worried about that. In the Confederacy, there were more Negroes around than whites wanted (except when dirty work needed doing), so the whites gave them a hard time. In the United States, which had only a relative handful of Negroes, the whites didn't want any more-so they gave them a hard rime.

  "Shit, even them big-nosed Jews got it better up there than we-uns do," Cincinnatus muttered. Somebody could doubt whether you were a Jew. Wasn't any doubting about whether he was black.

  Wasn't any doubt he'd spent too long daydreaming in the truck, either. A big-bellied white man in overalls and a slouch hat came out of the warehouse office and shouted, "That you out there, Cincinnatus, or did Tom Kennedy get hisself a real for-true dummy for a driver this time?"

  "Sorry, Mr. Goebel," Cincinnatus said as he descended. For once, he more or less meant it. He knew he had been sitting when he should have been working.

  "Sorry, he says." Goebel mournfully shook his head. He pointed to a hand truck. "Come on, get those typewriters loaded. Last things I got in this warehouse." He sighed. "Liable to be the last Yankee goods we see for a long time. I ain't old enough to remember the War of Secession, but the Second Mexican War, that was just a little feller. This one here, it's liable to be bad."

  Cincinnatus didn't remember the Second Mexican War, he was within a year either way of twenty-five. But the newspapers had been screaming war for the past week, troops in butternut had been moving through the streets, politicians were ranting on crates on every corner… "Don't sound good," Cincinnatus allowed.

  "If I was you, I'd get out of town," Goebel said. "My cousin Morton, he called me from Lexington yesterday and said, Clem, he said, Clem, you shake your fanny down here where them cannons can't reach, and I reckon I'm gonna take him up on it, yes I do."

  White folks take so much for granted, Cincinnatus thought as he stacked crated typewriters on the dolly and wheeled it out toward the Duryea. If Clem Goebel wanted to get out of Covington, he just upped and went. If Cincinnatus wanted to get out of town and take his wife with him, he had to get written permission from the local commissioner of colored affairs, get his passbook stamped, wait till acknowledgment came back from the state capital-which could and usually did take weeks-then actually move, reregister with his new commissioner, and get the passbook stamped again. Any white man could demand to see that book at any time. If it was out of order- well, you didn't want to think what could happen then. Jail, a fine he couldn't afford to pay, anything a judge-bound to be a mean judge-wanted.

  The typewriters were heavy. The stout crates in which they came just added to the weight. Cincinnatus wasn't sure he'd be able to fit them all into the bed of the truck, but he managed. By the time he was done, the rear sagged lower on its springs. Sweat soaked through the collarless, unbleached cotton shirt he wore.

  Clem Goebel had stood around without lifting a finger to help: he took it for granted that that sort of labor was nigger work. But he wasn't the worst white man around, either. When Cincinnatus was done, he said, "Here, wait a second," and disappeared into his little office. He came back with a bottle of Dr Pepper, dripping water from the bucket that kept it, if not cold, cooler than the air.

  "Thank you, sir. That's right kind," Cincinnatus said when Goebel popped off the cap with a church key and handed him the bottle. He tilted back his head and gulped down the sweet, spicy soda water till bubbles went up his nose. When the bottle was empty, he handed it back to Goebel.

  "Go on, keep it," the warehouseman said. Cincinnatus stowed it in the truck after thanking him again. For once, he felt only half a hypocrite: he'd gladly pocket the penny deposit. He cranked the engine to start it, got the truck in gear, and headed south down Greenup Street toward Kennedy's storerooms.

  A policeman in gray uniform and one of the tall British-style hats that always reminded Cincinnatus of fireplugs held up a hand to stop him at the corner of Fourth and Greenup: a squadron of cavalry, big, well-mounted white men with carbines on their shoulders, revolvers on their hips, and sabers mounted on their saddles, was riding west along Fourth. Probably going to camp in Devon Park, Cincinnatus thought.

  People-white people-cheered and waved as the cavalry went by. Some of them waved Maltese-cross battle flags like the one that flapped at the head of the squadron, others Stars and Bars like the sixteen-star banner above the post office across the street from Cincinnatus. The cavalrymen smiled at the pretty girls they saw; a couple of them doffed their plumed hats, which looked much like the one the Kentucky state trooper had worn but were decorated with the yellow cord marking the mounted service.

  After the last horse had clopped past, the Covington policeman, reveling in his small authority, graciously allowed north-south traffic to flow once more. Cincinnatus stepped on the gas, hoping his boss wouldn't cuss him for dawdling.

  He'd just pulled up in front of Tom Kennedy's establishment when a buzzing in the air made him look up. "God almighty, it's one o' them aeroplanes!" he said, craning his neck to follow it as it flew up toward the Ohio.

  "What are you doing lollygagging around like that, goddamn it?" Kennedy shouted at him. But when he pointed up into the sky, his boss stared with him till the aeroplane was out of sight. The head of the shipping company whistled. "I ain't seen but one o' those before in all my born days-that barnstorming feller who came through town a couple years ago. Doesn't hardly seem natural, does it?"

  "No, sir," said Cincinnatus, whose acquaintance with flying machines was similarly limited. "That wasn't no barnstormin' aeroplane, though-did y'all see the flag painted on the side of it?"

  "Didn't even spy it," Kennedy confessed. "I was too busy just gawpin', and that's a fact." He was a big, heavyset fellow of about fifty, with a walrus mustache and ruddy, tender Irish skin that went into agonies of prickly heat every summer, especially where he shaved. Now he turned a speculative eye toward Cincinnatus. He was a long way from stupid, and noticed others who weren't. "You don't miss much, do you, boy?"

  "Try not to, sir," Cincinnatus answered. "Never can tell when somethin' you see, it might come in handy."

  "That's a fact," Kennedy said. "You're pretty damn sharp for a nigger, that's another fact. You aren't shiftless, you know what I mean? You act like you want to push yourself up, get things better for your wife, the way a white man would. Don't see that every d
ay."

  Cincinnatus just shrugged. Everything Kennedy said about him was true; he wished he hadn't made his ambition so obvious to his boss. It gave Kennedy one more handle by which to yank him, as if being born white weren't enough all by itself. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with ambitions that would probably end up breaking his heart. Sure, he wanted to push himself up. But how far could you push when white folks held the lid on, right above your head? The wonder wasn't that so many Negroes gave up. The wonder was that a few kept trying.

  Seeing he wasn't going to get anything more than that shrug, Kennedy said, "You pick up the whole load of typewriters all right?"

  "Sure did, sir. They was the last things left in Goebel's warehouse, though. He ain't gonna be left much longer his own self-says he's headin' down to Lexington with his cousin. This war scare got everybody jumpy."

  "Can't say as I blame Clem, neither," Kennedy said. "I may get out of town myself, matter of fact. Haven't made up my mind about that. Wait till it starts, I figure, and then see what the damnyankees do. But you, you got nowhere to run to, huh?"

  "No, not hardly." Cincinnatus didn't like thinking about that. Kennedy had more in the way of brains than Clem Goebel. If he didn't think Covington was a safe place to stay, it probably wasn't. He understood Cincinnatus was stuck here, too. Sighing, the laborer said, "Let me unload them typing machines for you, boss."

  That kept him busy till dinnertime. He lived down by the Licking River, south of Kennedy's place, close enough to walk back and forth at the noon hour if he gulped down his corn bread or salt pork and greens or whatever Elizabeth had left for him before she went off to clean white folks' houses.

  A shape in the river-a cheese box on a raft was what it looked like- caught his eye. He whistled on the same note Tom Kennedy had used when he saw the aeroplane. By treaty, the United States and the Confederate States kept gunboats off the waters of the rivers they shared and the waters of tributaries within three miles of those jointly held rivers. If that gunboat-the Yankees called the type monitors, after their first one, but Southerners didn't and wouldn't-wasn't breaking the treaty, it sure was bending it.