In an odd way, Rodriguez thanked heaven for the Negroes who would fill the camp where he was to become a guard. If not for them, Mexicans would have been at the bottom of the hill, and everything would have flowed down onto them. As things were, most of the trouble went past them and came down on the mallates’ heads. That suited him fine.
The bus stopped once, in a dusty little town whose name—if it had a name—Rodriguez didn’t notice. The place had a Main Street with a filling station, a saloon that doubled as a diner, and a general store that doubled as a post office. It was even smaller than Baroyeca, the Sonoran town outside of which Rodriguez had a farm. It looked to be even poorer, too. Since Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been the two poorest states in the CSA, that said frightening things about this place on the road to nowhere.
Along with everybody else, Rodriguez lined up to use the toilet at the filling station. It was dark and nasty and smelly. The proprietor stared at the camp guards as if they’d fallen from another world.
Some of them bought cigarettes and pipe tobacco at the general store. Rodriguez went into the saloon with others. The bartender must have been used to three customers a day. Having a dozen all at once made his eyes bug out of his head. Somebody ordered a ham sandwich. In an instant, all the men in gray uniforms were clamoring for ham sandwiches. The barkeeper worked like a man possessed, slicing bread, slicing ham, slicing pickles, slapping on mustard and mayonnaise. The bus driver leaned on his horn.
“Screw him,” one of the camp guards said. “He ain’t gonna take off without all of us.” As if to contradict him, the driver blew another long blast.
None of the guards paid any attention. They stayed right there, waiting for their sandwiches and slapping down quarters as they got them. When Rodriguez’s turn came, the man in the boiled shirt and the black bow tie—as much a uniform as his own gray one—gave him a funny look. His dark skin and black hair said one thing, while the outfit he had on said another. Rodriguez just waited. The man handed him the sandwich.
“Gracias,” Rodriguez said as he paid him. He spoke more Spanish than English, but his English was more than good enough for thank you. He wanted to make the Texan twitch, and he did.
When they’d all got their food and their tobacco, they deigned to reboard the bus. The driver muttered to himself. He did no more than mutter, though. Considering how badly he was outnumbered, that was smart of him.
Rodriguez sank down into his seat with a grunt of relief. Not long after his farmhouse got electricity, he’d almost electrocuted himself. He hadn’t been the same since—otherwise, he might have gone to the front himself, and not into the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades.
Away went the bus, rattling west down the imperfectly paved highway. “Reckon I’m gonna pawn my fuckin’ kidneys when we finally get where we’re goin’,” one of the men in gray said.
“You been fuckin’ with your kidneys, Jack, there’s some shit your pappy never learned you,” another one replied. Goatish laughter erupted. The rattletrap bus filled with cigarette smoke.
Towards evening, the bus came into Snyder. It looked like all the other Texas towns through which Rodriguez had passed on the way west: bigger than some, smaller than others. Then the bus rolled on a few miles farther. Somebody sitting up near the front who could see out through the big windscreen said, “Son of a bitch!” It was an expression of awe, not anger.
Other soft oaths, and a few not so soft, followed. Rodriguez, who was sitting somewhere near the middle, tried to peer past the men in front of him to find out what they were getting excited about. He didn’t have much luck. They were all shifting and moving, too.
The bus stopped. This was where they were going, whatever this was. The driver answered that, saying, “Welcome to Camp Determination. Everybody off.”
With a tired wheeze, the bus’ front door opened. One by one, the new camp guards filed out. Some of them gathered in front of the luggage bin, waiting for the driver to unlock it so they could get out their duffels. Others, Rodriguez among them, took a look at Camp Determination first. He decided the fellow who said son of a bitch had known just what he was talking about.
“I was eighteen years old and in the Army in the last war before I saw a town that size,” said one of the gray-haired men in gray uniforms.
“Sí, me, too,” Rodriguez agreed. You could drop Baroyeca down in the middle of that camp, and it wouldn’t even make a splash.
Barbed wire surrounded an enormous square of Texas prairie. Machine guns poked their snouts out of guard towers outside the wire perimeter. Barracks halls built of bright yellow pine as yet unbleached by the sun and unstained by the rain and rusty nails rose in the middle distance. There were a lot of them, but the vast acreage inside the barbed wire had room for at least as many more.
Somebody else pointed in a different direction. “Holy Jesus!” the man said. “Will you look at all them trucks?”
There they sat, on an asphalted lot separated from the barracks by more barbed wire. Along with the rest of the guards, Hipolito Rodriguez had become very familiar with those trucks. They looked like ordinary Army machines, except that the rear compartment was enclosed in an iron box—an airtight iron box. Pipe the exhaust in there and people who got into the trucks didn’t come out again . . . not alive, anyhow.
“They’re gonna get rid of a hell of a lot o’ niggers in this place,” the man next to Rodriguez said. “Hell of a lot.”
“You want to shut your mouth about that, Roy,” somebody else told him. “We don’t talk about that shit. If we do it amongst ourselves, we’re liable to do it where the coons can hear us, and then we’ll have trouble.” He’d learned his lessons well; the Freedom Party guards who’d trained them at the much smaller camp near Fort Worth had rammed that home again and again. “Far as the niggers know, when they get on those trucks, they’re always going somewhere else.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Roy said impatiently. “Far as I know, they’re all goin’ to hell, and it damn well serves ’em right.”
“Come on, come on.” The bus driver sounded even more impatient than Roy did. “Y’all get your gear and get moving. I got to get moving myself, get the hell outa here and back towards where I live.”
Rodriguez found the gray canvas bag with his last name and first initial stenciled on it in black paint. He slung it over his shoulder and joined the column of guards thumping toward what looked like the main gate, at least on this side of the square. Extra guard towers watched over it. Anyone who tried attacking it without a barrel would get chopped to hamburger.
The camp was already manned. A couple of the men at the gate lowered the muzzles of their submachine guns toward the ground. “New fish,” one of them remarked.
“Don’t look so new to me.” His pal had the heartlessness of a man with all his hair and all his teeth.
“Sonny boy, I learned to mind my own business before you were a hard-on in your old man’s dungarees,” said a man from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade.
“I believe you, Pops,” the guard answered. “Some people need as big a head start as they can get.” He didn’t smile when he said it.
Guards on duty and new arrivals glared at one another. Before anybody could get around to demanding papers and showing them—and before anybody could get around to tossing out more insults like grenades—a man with a deep voice spoke from inside the gate: “What’s going on here? Are these the new guards they’ve been promising us? About goddamn time, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
As soon as the men at the gate heard that voice, they became all business. As soon as Hipolito Rodriguez heard it, he had to look around to remind himself that he wasn’t in a trench somewhere even farther west in Texas, with damnyankee machine-gun bullets cracking by overhead and damnyankee shells screaming in.
Out through the gate came Jefferson Pinkard. He was older now, but so was Rodriguez. He had a good-sized belly and two or three chins and harsh lines on his face that hadn’t been there
in 1917. Back when Rodriguez was training, he’d heard that a man named Pinkard was high in the camp hierarchy. He’d wondered if it was the man he’d known. He didn’t wonder anymore.
He took half a step out of line to draw Pinkard’s eye to him, then said, “How are you, Señor Jeff?”
Pinkard eyed him for a moment without recognition. Then the big man’s jaw dropped. “Hip Rodriguez, or I’m a son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, and thundered forward to fold Rodriguez into a bear hug. The two of them pounded each other on the back and cursed each other with the affection a lot of men can show no other way.
“Teacher’s pet,” said one of the guards who’d ridden on the bus with Rodriguez. But he made sure he sounded as if he was joking. If one of his comrades turned out to be a war buddy of the camp commandant’s, he didn’t want to seem to resent that, not if he knew which side his bread was buttered on.
When Pinkard let Rodriguez go, he said, “So you’re here to help us deal with the damn niggers, are you? Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Rodriguez echoed automatically. He was used to saying it in English now instead of going, ¡Libertad! the way he had down in Baroyeca. “Sí, Señor Jeff. That is why I have come.”
“Good,” Camp Determination’s commandant told him. “We’re gonna have us a hell of a lot of work to do, and we’re just about ready to do it.”
****
Since coming to Augusta near the end of the Great War, Scipio hadn’t gone far from his adopted home. For one thing, he hadn’t cared to go anywhere else; he’d made his life there, and hadn’t wanted to wander off. And, for another, travel restrictions on Negroes had started tightening up again even before the Freedom Party came to power. They’d got much worse since.
Just how much worse, he discovered in detail when he went to the train station to buy a ticket for Savannah. The line for whites was much longer than the one for blacks, but it moved much, much faster. Whites just bought tickets and went off to the platforms to board their trains. Blacks . . .
“Let me see your passbook, Uncle,” said the clerk behind the barred window. Scipio dutifully slid it over to him. The man made sure the picture matched Scipio’s face. “Xerxes,” he muttered, botching the alias the way most people did when they saw it in print. “What’s the purpose of your visit to Savannah, Uncle?”
“See my family there, suh,” Scipio said. He had no family in Savannah, but it was the safest reason to give.
The clerk grunted. “You got permission from your employer to be away from work?”
“Yes, suh.” Scipio produced a letter from Jerry Dover on Huntsman’s Lodge stationery authorizing him to be absent for one week.
Another grunt from the clerk. He jerked a thumb to the left. “Go on over there for search and baggage inspection.”
Scipio went “over there”: to a storeroom now adapted to another purpose. A railroad worker—a weathered fellow who couldn’t have been far from his own age—patted him down with almost obscene thoroughness. Two more white men of similar vintage pawed through his carpetbag.
“How come you do all dis?” Scipio asked the man who was groping him.
“So nobody sneaks a bomb on the train,” the white man answered matter-of-factly. “It’s happened a couple-three times. We’ve had to tighten up.” He turned to the men checking Scipio’s valise. “How’s it look?”
“He’s clean,” one of them said. “Bunch of junk, but it ain’t gonna go boom.”
Stung by that appraisal of his stuff, Scipio said, “Ask you one mo’ thing, suh?”
“Yeah?” The white man who’d searched him spoke with barely contained impatience. Why are you bothering me, nigger? lay at the bottom of it. But Scipio had sounded properly deferential, so the fellow let him go on.
“What you do when a lady come in here?”
“Oh.” The man laughed and gestured as if grasping a woman’s breasts from behind. Scipio nodded; that was what he’d meant. The frisker said, “We got a couple of gals who take care of that. Don’t you worry your head about it, Uncle. Just get on down to Platform Eight.”
“Thank you, suh.” Scipio picked up the carpetbag and headed for the platforms. The Confederate authorities—or maybe it was just the railroad employees—were shrewd. If they had white men groping black women, they would stir up trouble they didn’t need. They already stirred up a whole great storm of troubles; at best, life for Negroes in the CSA was one long affront. But it often wasn’t the sort of affront that made people flash into fury. Back in the days of slavery—the days into which Scipio had been born—white men did as they pleased with black women . . . and with black men who presumed to object. Resentment still simmered, ready to boil. The railroads didn’t turn up the heat under it.
The corridors were designed so that nobody could give Scipio anything while he was on the way from the inspection station to the platform. Some of the barriers were of new, unweathered wood. We’ve had to tighten up lately, the railroad man said. They seemed to have done a good job.
Several whites were already waiting on the platform. A couple of them sent Scipio suspicious glances. Do you have a bomb? Did you sneak it past the inspectors? Will you blow us up? For his part, he might have asked them, If you send colored folks into camps, why don’t they come out again?
He didn’t say anything, any more than they did. The questions hung in the air just the same. Despair pressed down heavily on Scipio. How were you supposed to make a country out of a place where two groups hated and feared each other, and where anybody could tell to which group anyone else belonged just by looking? The Confederate States of America had been working on that question for eighty years now, and hadn’t found an answer yet.
The Freedom Party thought it had. It said, If only one group is left, the problem goes away. The trouble was, the problem went away for only one group if you tried that solution. For the other, it got worse. No one in the Party seemed to lose any sleep over that.
More whites came onto the platform. So did a few more Negroes. The blacks all grouped themselves with Scipio, well away from the whites. Had they done anything else, they would have fallen into a category: uppity niggers. Nobody in his right mind wanted to fall into that category these days.
A little blond boy pointed up the tracks. “Here comes the train!” He squeaked with excitement.
It rumbled into the station. Departing passengers got off, got their luggage, and left the platform by a route different from the one Scipio had used to get there. He and the other Negroes automatically headed for the last two cars in the train. They wouldn’t sit with whites, either: they knew better. And if the cars in which they sat were shabbier than the ones whites got to use, that was unlikely to be a surprise.
Rattles and jolts announced the train’s departure. It rolled south and east, the tracks paralleling the Savannah River. When Scipio looked across the river, he saw South Carolina. He shook his head. Even after all these years, he wasn’t safe in the state where he’d been born. Then he shook his head again. He wasn’t safe in Georgia, either.
Cotton country and pine woods filled the landscape between Augusta and Savannah. Scipio saw several plantation houses falling into ruin. Marshlands had done the same thing. Raising cotton on plantations wasn’t nearly so practical when the colored workforce was liable to rise up against you.
People got on and off at the stops between the two cities. Scipio wouldn’t have bet that God Himself knew the names of hamlets like McBean Depot, Sardis, and Hershman.
And, when the train was coming out of the pine woods surrounding Savannah, it rolled through a suburb called Yamacraw that seemed to be the more southerly town’s Terry. Negroes did what they could to get by in a country that wanted their labor but otherwise wished they didn’t exist. Drugstores in white neighborhoods sold aspirins and merthiolate and calamine lotion—respectable products that actually worked. Scipio saw a sign in Yamacraw advertising Vang-Vang Oil, Lucky Mojoe Drops of Love, and Mojoe Incense. He grimaced, ashamed of his own folk.
Here were the ignorant preying on the even more ignorant.
As soon as he got on the east side of Broad Street
, things changed. The houses, most of them of brick, looked as if they sprang from the eighteenth century. Live oaks with beards of moss hanging from their branches grew on expansive lawns. That moss declared that Savannah, its climate moderated by the Atlantic only fifteen miles away, was a land that hardly knew what winter was.
“Savannah!” the conductor barked, hurrying through the colored cars as the train pulled into the station. “This here’s Savannah!” He didn’t quite come out and snap, Now get the hell off my train, you lousy coons! He didn’t, no, but he might as well have.
Scipio grabbed his carpetbag and descended. As at Augusta, the exit to the station kept him from having anything to do with boarding passengers. He gave the system grudging respect. That it should be necessary was a judgment on the Confederate States, but it did what it was designed to do.
Once he got out of the station, he stopped and looked at the sun, orienting himself. Forsyth Park was east and south of him. He walked towards it, wondering if a policeman would demand to see his papers. Sure enough, he hadn’t gone more than a block before it happened. He displayed his passbook, his train ticket, and the letter from Jerry Dover authorizing him to be away from the Huntsman’s Lodge. The cop looked them over, frowned, and then grudgingly nodded and gave them back. “You keep your nose clean, you hear?” he said.
“Yes, suh. I do dat, suh,” Scipio said. His Congaree River accent had marked him as a stranger in Augusta. It did so doubly here; from what little he’d heard of it, Savannah Negroes used a dialect almost incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t grown up speaking it.
Forsyth Park was laid out like a formal French garden, with a rosette of paths going through it. With spring in the air, squirrels frisked through the trees. Pigeons plodded the paths, hoping for handouts. Flowering dogwood, wisteria, and azaleas brightened the greenery.
Drive to the East Page 11