The salt of the earth, she thought with mingled admiration and scorn. Joseph and his wife, obviously, would never do anything scandalous, but they'd never do anything interesting, either.
Life should be interesting, she thought. If it's not, what point to living it? She felt like Eleanor of Aquitaine, free beyond the common limits of the world in which she lived. Royal birth had given Eleanor that freedom. Modern times were simpler: money did the job for Anne Colleton. The useless swamp along the Conga-ree aside, most of the land between St. Matthews and Columbia was Colleton cotton country.
She tapped a finger against the gleaming mahogany banister. Brains hadn't hurt Eleanor of Aquitaine, and they didn't hurt her, either. She'd doubled profits from the land in the five years since her father died, and they hadn't been low before. After a couple of protests more for form's sake than because they really wanted the job, her brothers had let her run the plantation as suited her. Why not? She let them have allowance enough to get into all the mischief they liked, and they liked quite a lot.
She'd grown used to patronizing Tom and Jacob in her mind. What they were getting into these days was worse than mischief. The casualty lists in the newspapers were hideously long, and the battles not going so well as everyone had been sure they would. Too many damnyankees, she thought bitterly.
And who would remember the Marshlands Exhibition of Modern Art now, except as the show that was going on when war raced around the .world? She knew to the penny what the show had cost to set up and publicize. She'd made that back—she couldn't remember the last investment where she'd failed to turn a profit— and the artists had sold a good many works, but much of the fame that should have come to both the Marshlands mansion and to herself was gone forever now, lost in the cannon's roar. One more reason to hate the United States.
But, even if not quite so notorious as she'd hoped (in this modern age, what difference between notoriety and fame?), she was still free, and still reveling in that freedom. As she sometimes had before, she wondered how best to enjoy it.
Work for the vote for women? That thought had crossed her mind before, too. As she had when it last did, she shook her head. For one thing, advocates of suffrage were earnest to the point of boredom, and she did not want to be bored: life was too short for that. The cause, while worthy, reeked of bourgeois respectability. And, for another, South Carolina had only recently come to grant the vote to all white men, and its districts were so arranged that half of those white men or more might as well not have had it. Making headway against such resolute conservatism struck her as a long, slow job.
What then? She didn't know. She had time to find something. She was only twenty-eight, with the whole world stretched out before her.
That thought had hardly passed her mind when some sort of commotion broke out at the front of the mansion. She hurried forward to see what was going on. Looking out the window, she spied a new automobile near the mansion: a dusty Manassas, probably hired in St. Matthews. But getting out of it was ...
She threw open the door and hurried forward, stopping to curtsy as her grandmother might have done before the War of Secession. "Mr. President!" she exclaimed. "I had no idea you would honor me with a visit here." Part of that was, Why didn't you telegraph ahead, dammit? But another part, a gloating part, said, Now people will remember this exhibition, by God!
Woodrow Wilson tipped his hat to her. "This is entirely impromptu, Miss Colleton. I'm due in Charleston tomorrow to christen a new submersible as she goes off the shipway there. When I remembered your showing was on the way down from Richmond, or at least not too far out of the way, I decided to stop and see the paintings that have the world so intrigued." His smile soured. "Frankly, this is more congenial to me than blessing another instrument of war."
"You are very welcome," Anne told him.
"I am glad to hear you say it," Wilson replied. "Your support for the Whig Party has been generous, and I certainly hope it may continue."
"I don't think you need to worry on that score," Anne said with a slow, thoughtful nod. She wondered just how impromptu the president's visit really was. Maybe Wilson himself didn't know. Politicians, in her experience, inevitably and inextricably mixed politics with every other facet of their lives—and her support for the Whigs had always been anything but ungenerous. She went on, "Please come in, Your Excellency. Don't stand there in the sun. If you had a heatstroke, they'd probably shoot me for treason."
Wilson smiled back. From everything she'd heard, he'd never been averse to smiling at a pretty woman. Anne knew her own good looks were about as useful to her as her money. Fanning himself with his straw hat, Wilson said, "I'm delighted to accept that invitation. Your climate here makes Richmond feel temperate by comparison, something many people would reckon impossible."
Servants—all save Scipio, who remained gravely impassive— gaped as the president of the Confederate States came into the Marshlands mansion, Anne Colleton on his arm. He let her guide him through the exhibition. He also let her shield him from people who might have pestered him. This time, she smiled inside, where it didn't show. Wilson knew who was important and who wasn't— and she was.
After gravely studying several of the paintings, the president turned to her and said, 'This is why we fight, you know. To me, it is even more important than ties of blood and sentiment. Nothing so ... so progressive as these works could possibly come into being in the United States or the German Empire. We truly are preserving civilization."
"Not just preserving it," Anne said. "Helping it grow."
"Of course." He accepted the correction with good grace, accepted it and took it as his own. But then the creases in his long, thin face got deeper. 'The price, though, the price is dreadfully high. You have a brother in the service, don't you?"
'Two brothers," she answered proudly. The worry she couldn't help feeling she kept to herself.
"I hope, I pray, they will come through safely," Wilson said. "I do the same for every man in the Army and Navy. Too often—far too often already—my prayers have gone unanswered."
Before Anne could decide how to answer that, Scipio came back with his silver tray. "Would you like a glass of champagne, Your Excellency?" she asked the president.
"Thank you," Wilson said, and took one. So did Anne. He lifted his crystal flute to her. "To civilization, to victory, and to the safe return of your brothers."
"I'll gladly drink to that," Anne said, and did. She turned to Scipio. "You may go."
"Yes, madam." He bowed and went on his way, back straight, wide shoulders braced almost as if he were on parade.
"A fine-looking fellow," Wilson remarked. "Well-mannered, too."
"Yes, I'm lucky to have him here." Anne watched Scipio go. He
did make an impressive servant, no two ways about it.
* * *
As butler, Scipio was of course a house servant, with quarters within Marshlands for himself. But, not least because he'd been chief cook before becoming butler, he kept up a closer relation with the outside Negroes than most servants of similar station would have done. He knew how much the larder depended on their ingenuity and goodwill: if they said hunting and fishing weren't going well, how could he prove they were lying? But the outside food bill would go up, and he'd catch the devil for that from the mistress.
Lightning bugs flashed on and off as he made his way out to the rows of Negro cottages behind Marshlands. He had every right to make the trip, but glanced back over his shoulder anyhow. It wasn't the mistress he thought was staring at him: it was Marshlands itself. The three-story Georgian mansion had been sitting here for more than a hundred years, and seemed to have a life of its own, an awareness of what went on inside and around it. The mistress would have called that superstitious nonsense. Scipio didn't care what she called it. He knew what he knew.
Perhaps, today, he also still felt the presence of Woodrow Wilson, though the president had gone back to St. Matthews to reboard his train and continue on down
to Charleston. His mistress associated with any number of prominent people—which meant he did, too, not that they paid him much attention. He was, after all, only a Negro.
A groom coming out of the barn stared at him through deepening twilight. "Evenin'," he said, nodding. "Almos' didn't rec'nize you—gettin' dark earlier nowadays."
"I is still me," Scipio answered. Wherever white folks could hear him, he talked like an educated white man. That was what the mistress wanted, and what she wanted, she got. Among his own people, he spoke as he had since the day he first began forming words. He hadn't made a mistake switching back and forth between his two dialects in more than ten years.
Candles and kerosene lamps lighted the Negro cottages. Marshlands had had electric lights for a long time now. The mistress had plenty of money for paintings, but for wires for the help? Scipio shook his head. If he held his breath waiting, he'd be blue under his black.
Some of the little brick cottages were already dark. If you worked in the fields sunup to sundown, you needed all the rest you could get sundown to sunup. But you needed a little time to live, too. From out of open windows and doors flung wide against the muggy heat came snatches of song, cries of joy or dismay as dice went one way or the other, and the racket of children. More children made more racket outside, running after one another and pretending to be soldiers. None of them ever admitted he'd been killed. Scipio shook his head again. Too bad the real war didn't work out that way.
Here and there, a mother or a father taught children to read, mostly from books and magazines and newspapers the white folks had thrown away. Scipio, who'd been in his teens when manumission came, remembered the days when teaching a Negro to read had been against the law. He'd managed to pick up the knowledge anyway, as had a good many of his friends—too many things were being printed to keep them all out of Negroes' hands. Black literacy was legal now, but South Carolina still had no school for Negroes.
Scipio walked past Jonah's cottage, and was surprised to find no light burning in there. Jonah and his woman Letitia were always ones for singing and playing and dancing and carrying on. When he got to Cassius' cabin, though, the door was open and light streamed out into the night.
"Is you in there?" he called: good manners, by the standards of the field hands. The mistress' standards were something else again. Scipio moved between two sets of etiquette as readily as he did between dialects. If he ever thought about how he did what he did, he probably wouldn't be able to do it any more.
"No, ain't nobody to home here," Cassius answered. That drew raucous laughter from whoever else wasn't in there with him.
Snorting, Scipio went inside. If you took Cassius seriously, you were in trouble. He'd pull your leg till it came off in his hands, then walk off and leave you to hop home without it. But he was also the best hunter on the plantation, and that had been so for a long time. If you wanted something special for the larder, as Scipio did tonight, he was the man to talk to, even if you had to take your chances on everything else.
Now Cassius threw a hand up before his eyes. "Lord, Kip, you gwine blind we, the light shinin' off them brass buttons that way." Again, his crew of rascals and easy women laughed with him. The only thing that surprised Scipio about the inside of the cottage was that he didn't see any quart whiskey bottles on the mantel or sitting atop one of the rickety tables—or clamped in somebody's fist.
Cassius and the rest of the male field hands wore unbleached cotton shirts and trousers with no shape to them, nothing like Scipio's fancy suit of clothes—though better suited to this breathless heat. A couple of them had bright bandannas on their heads or wrapped around their necks to give themselves a spot of color. The women, by contrast, were in eye-searing calicoes and plaids and paisleys, with no shade of red too hot, no green too vibrant.
"You done been talking wid de president," Cassius said. "You don' reckon you too good to talk wid de likes of we now?"
"I talks wid de president," Scipio agreed with a weary sigh. "De president, he don't talk wid me. You hear what I say?"
Cassius nodded. That was how things worked for blacks in a white man's world. "So—what kin I do fo' you this day, Kip?" he asked. "You come here, you always want somethin'." It could have been an accusation, but it came out like a good-natured joke, which relieved Scipio, for it happened to be true.
In spite of that invitation, coming straight out with what you wanted was rude. "Where Jonah?" Scipio asked. "I see he cabin dark, an' he usually carry on damn near much as you do."
"Jonah?" Cassius shook his head. "He ain't here no more, not he. He leff this afternoon. Gone fo' good, I reckon."
"He leff? What you mean, Cass, he leff? That nigger pick cotton here since he big enough to do it, an' Letty, too."
"Not no mo'," Cassius said. "He say he light out fo' Columbia, he work in one o' them factories makin' shells and things."
Scipio stared. "They don' let no niggers work in they factories. Those is jobs fo' white folks, nobody else."
"Whole powerful lot o' white folks is gone to be sojers," Cassius pointed out. "But they still got to have they shells to shoot, o' the damnyankees kick they butts. Nigger kin do the job, nigger gonna get the job. They don' pay he like he was white folks, so the factory bosses, they happy, an' Jonah, he happy, too, 'cause they do pay more'n he make here. An' Letty, she gwine try an' fin' work at one of they tex-tile plants takin' care o' the cotton after it picked 'stead o'befo'."
"Mought do that my own self," said one of Cassius' friends, a big man called Island for no reason Scipio had ever been able to learn. "Mo' money fo' less work sound right good."
"Mo' money, yeah," Cassius said. "Less work?" He snorted. "When you ever know white folks give mo' money 'cep' fo' mo' work, an' heaps o' times not then, neither."
Island thought about that, then nodded. But he said, "Hard to think o' anything bein' mo' work'n growin' cotton."
Scipio, who knew how lucky he was to have escaped the fields, also nodded. Plenty of field hands would think the same way; he was sure of that. Jonah and Letitia wouldn't be the only ones to head off the plantation for the factory. He was sure of that, too. And how would the mistress like it? Not much, he figured. Could she do anything about it? He wasn't sure about that. She was a power, but not the only one in the state, not by a long shot.
Marshlands, though, wasn't the state. Here, for those who remained here, her word was still law. Scipio said, "Mistress want a couple gobblers for she dinner party tomorrow night. Kin you get 'em, Cass?"
"Reckon I kin," the hunter answered. His eyes, cool and confident, flicked to the shotgun above the mantel. "Yeah, reckon I kin."
Scipio's eyes also went to the gun and the mantel. On the length of pine wood sat a pamphlet or little book, upside down and open. "What this?" Scipio asked, and reached for it, expecting to find a religious tract. And sure enough, the bright blue paper cover said,
DR. GILRAY'S COLLECTION OF CHRISTIAN HYMNS, PRINTED IN RICHMOND, CSA, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1912.
Idly, he picked it up, wondering what hymn Cassius, who'd never struck him as pious, was learning. At that same moment, Island slammed the door to the cottage shut. Scipio hardly noticed. He was staring down at the page to which the pamphlet had been opened. The printing was as bad and smudgy as he'd expected. The words were anything but what he'd expected: Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the ...
He noticed how quiet it had grown inside the cottage. He looked up from the page and saw Cassius and Island and the rest of the people who'd been in there with him, and how they were all staring at him. He didn't like what he saw in their eyes. Those intent looks frightened him even more than the book he held in his hands, and that wasn't easy.
"Do Jesus!" he said softly. "The mistress find out you got this, she not gwine whip you. She gwine hang you. Ain't gonna bother with no law, ain't gonna bother wi
th no cou't. Niggers what spread revolutionary propaganda"—he brought out those two words in his educated voice, as he'd never imagined saying them in the dialect he'd been born speaking—"they gots to die."
"We knows," Cassius said, just as softly. "So they kills we fast 'stead of slow. So what? White folks, they in this big war. They ain't got time to pay no attention to we, we who is doin' they work fo' they. One fine day, they ain't 'spectin' it nohow, the revolution come. It a whole new world then."
"Come the revolution," one of the women—Cherry, her name was—said with a longing croon in her voice, the way a lot of women sounded in the clapboard Baptist church of a Sunday morning, praying for Jesus' second coming. "Come the revolution, this here gwine be a different country, it sho' will."
Something glittered in Island's hand—a knife. Scipio watched it with horrified fascination. He gathered himself to fight, knowing how bad his chances were. Island glanced over at Cassius. "We got to shut he up. He a house nigger, tell everything he know to the mistress."
Somehow—perhaps by magic—Cassius had produced a knife, too. Almost meditatively, he said, "Kip here, he have the chance to do me wrong plenty times. He never do it oncet, not even. He even take the blame hisself when huntin' go bad. Maybe he keep a secret here, too. Kip, what you think o' that book you holdin'?"
"I think niggers rise up against white folks, we get licked," Scipio answered truthfully. "I think I wish I wasn't so curious." How long had Karl Marx been here at Marshlands? The mistress didn't have the first notion Red revolution was simmering under her nose. Scipio hadn't the first notion, either. What was that white poet's line? Ignorance is bliss, that was it. That white folks had known what he was talking about.
Cassius said, "Mos' times, sho', we get licked. Ain't so many guns away from the border, now. Ain't so many white folks to tote 'em, neither. We rise up, they gonna use they army 'gainst we? Damnyankees tromp they into the mud, they try that." He wasn't arguing; he'd already made up his mind, and might have been a preacher talking about the Gospel. His gaze sharpened. "Now, tell me true, Kip—you gwine say about this to the mistress?"
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