Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  Once she got the travel permit, Gabi wanted to immediately arrange an official visit to the Northwest Republic, joyfully conscious that she would be the first American official ever to do so, and a Womyn of Color at that. Blackwell called in Sheriff Ben Lomax to the ERA office for backup. When he heard what Gabi wanted to do, he pulled his .45 Peacemaker out of the holster and handed it to her. “Tell you what, ma’am, let’s save everybody a lot of time. Take this. Cock the hammer back, then stick the barrel in your mouth, right up against your top palate, and pull the trigger. Yeah, it will make a mess for us to clean up, but this way at least we’ll have a body to ship back to your family in Vermont or wherever. The Northmen will simply leave you out in some canyon for the buzzards.”

  “Sheriff, I appreciate your concern, but I really think it’s misplaced,” Gabi told him. “I know that the people in the Northwest racist entity have some very retrograde attitudes toward people of color, but how are we ever to change that if we never even sit down to discuss our differences? I’m not naïve. I don’t expect to be welcomed with open arms, and I expect hostility. This Lieutenant Campbell may well refuse to meet me…”

  “I told you, he already did,” said Lomax. “In no uncertain terms.” He had not thought it politic to repeat Bobby’s Doctor Doolittle remark verbatim.

  “Then if he won’t come to me, I will have to go to him,” explained Gabi patiently. “Yes, he may refuse to see me even when I go right up and knock on his door. I’m prepared for that. I know he has to follow his superiors’ orders and his government’s official policies, just like I do. I’m not asking him to sign a treaty or negotiate any kind of agreement, even an unofficial one. But that may come one day if people of good will on both sides of this terrible and artificial border can at least start treating one another like human beings. Is this Campbell fellow really so unrealistic? After all, he’s willing to meet with you to resolve mutual problems, as you recently proved. Is he really so bigoted or restricted by his upbringing that he won’t even meet with me at all or exchange a civil word?”

  “Jesus Christ!” whispered Lomax, staring at her in amazement. “You really don’t know, do you?” He looked at Blackwell. “How is this possible?” Blackwell just shrugged. Lomax turned back to Gabi.

  “Let me spell this out for you, ma’am. I live here. You do not. I know these men from a lifetime of living beside them. You do not. This Northwest Civil Guard officer met with me, reluctantly, because I am white. It is not something either of us want to make a habit of. Campbell will not meet with you, not under any circumstances, nor will any of them ever address a word to you, civil or otherwise, because you are not white. You are black, and in their eyes you are an animal. They will not treat you like a human being, not ever. What part about they will shoot you dead is it that you do not understand? If you set foot across that road into their country, you will not stand a chance with those men, nor will anyone who goes with you. If you must commit suicide in this bizarre manner, please don’t take anybody else with you. Your FBI agents are almost as badly hated as you are Over There, I’m sure your English mercenary friend has better sense, and nobody local here will go with you, not even crazy bitter-ender coots like Elwood Tolliver.”

  Gabi sat there stupefied at his outburst. Never before in her life had a white person ever spoken to her like this. The rules in America were clear: black and brown people alone could speak of race. Whites were allowed only to maintain a respectful silence, and then agree. Lomax had some hope he might finally have gotten through to her, and he decided to quit while he was ahead. He stood up and addressed Brandon Blackwell. “When she’s gone, who takes over the ERA mission?” he asked. “You?”

  “Not senior enough,” said Blackwell. “They’ll have to send somebody else out from Burlington.”

  “If you can’t talk her out of it, go ahead and make the call,” said Lomax. “This town still needs all that money and all those jobs. I think between myself and the other local community leaders we can convince the Northmen this wasn’t anything we had a hand in. Just some crazy black lady trying to prove some kind of point nobody will ever understand.” Lomax considered saying “nigger” but decided against it; the hatespeech laws were still on the books even if they were never enforced any longer, so no sense in completely wrong-footing himself. He turned and stalked out the door.

  “Well, Gabi?” said Blackwell. “Should I make the call?”

  “He’s talking bullshit! The kind of virulent knee-jerk racism he’s describing hasn’t existed in this country for two hundred years!” she protested feebly.

  “Over The Road is not this country any more, Gabi, and the kind of white men who live there haven’t existed for two hundred years, either,” Blackwell told her. “Extinct Tasmanian tigers aren’t the only species the Northwest Republic has brought back from the dead.”

  * * *

  Everyone thought they had talked Gabrielle Martine down from the ledge, but they were wrong. The more Gabi brooded over it all, the angrier and more stubborn and sullen she became. How dare they? Brandon, Lomax, the Northwest racists, they were all white, so how dare they tell her what to do? That wasn’t supposed to happen. Did they not realize that she had come a long way, baby, that she was Moving On Up? The very idea that there was any place on earth reserved for white people and white people alone, someplace where she was not allowed to show her black face, began to obsess her even more than was usual with the “African-American managerial class,” one of the many euphemisms used for several generations to describe the small handful of negroes who through some genetic quirk and generous dollops of affirmative action and preferential treatment, were of sufficient intelligence to be trainable to function on a nearly-white level.

  Her whole attitude was a complete anachronism that had nothing to do with anything in the real world as it had existed for the past forty years, but it was by no means uncommon. Like many of her kind, and indeed like most of the American ruling élite, Gabi Martine was like a fly stuck in amber. In the Twilight Zone through which most of the shell-shocked American governing class staggered, the Northwest American Republic did not exist.

  It could not exist. It was unthinkable, and whatever kind of tortuous doublethink that was required to work around the fact that the NAR did exist was embraced and practiced without hesitation. America consisted of fifty states, from sea to shining sea. It was all one, yet diverse (e pluribus unum). The President of the United States was the Leader of the Free World and the most powerful leader on the planet, even the one who had been stabbed through the eye with a pencil in the Oval Office just before he was about to destroy the continent in a fit of insanity. America’s cities were not festering slums jammed tight with primitive savages about to explode if their EBT cards missed a payment. Oh, no, no, no, not at all. America’s Designated Urban Zones were grand and glorious showcases of multicultural diversity which proved once and for all that all men and women were equal, for sure, for sure. There was no white country in the Pacific Northwest, ripped by force from the benevolent hands of the federal government by undefeated and indomitable armed force and courage. Oh, no, no, no, whatever gave anyone that idea? Such a thing would be an abomination, a paradox, a cosmic contradiction that would tear apart the very fabric of space and time and cause bloody rain and plagues of frogs. It could not be, so it was not.

  Although seldom articulated, this was the thinking that had guided and dominated American policy for the past forty years, a manic refusal to accept the reality of what had happened at Longview. It permeated every aspect of American upper class society, where Gabrielle Martine had been raised as a dark child of privilege, she and her kind being required to maintain the all-important fiction of racial equality which was the central premise of all liberalism. She absorbed and internalized the comforting delusion that Longview, the Seven Weeks War, the Northwest space program and planetary colonies, the Northwest cancer cures, the return of the Tasmanian tiger, the imminent implosion of the old America when
the non-white cities overflowed their razor wire perimeters and could no longer be contained—none of it was really happening. This was the glorious age when Hillary Clinton received her first presidential nomination from the Democratic convention, to the thunderous cheers and the mindless chanting and dancing of an endless macarena. Time had stopped on that night.

  It therefore followed that no white racist would ever dare to actually do anything to Gabrielle Martine because her skin was black and she was in the wrong place. That sort of thing simply didn’t happen any more. The idea was absurd. White folks knew better these days, in the United States anyway, and as to these people in the Northwest, they weren’t real. Something one saw on television as stereotype villains. They were some kind of cartoon characters.

  So on the afternoon of September the fifth, brimming with self-confidence and three lunchtime martinis, tired of her FBI bodyguards’ constant argument and refusal to accompany her on a sight-seeing tour of the NAR Border District, Gabi Martine hopped in her long and luxurious government-issue Lexus Model Twelve and rolled westward down Second Avenue, out of Boulder. She crossed under the Interstate Fifteen underpass where she noted the special trailer by the side of the road without realizing what it was. Since there was no formal border post, nor even a sign or a line painted on the asphalt, it took her a moment or two to realize that she was now in the racist entity itself. The GPS in her vehicle was not programmed to direct her to Basin, since such programming would have required an admission that Basin and the Northwest American Republic existed. But Gabi had a copy of an old map donated by the Jefferson County commissioners hanging on the wall of the office in the hotel, and she had memorized the route, so she barreled down what was still known as Old Depot Hill Road heading for her appointment with destiny. Imagine, the McCurtain finally breached by an African-American Womyn! She could see the opening credits of the movie that would be made about her rolling in her head as she drove.

  It had never occurred to Agent Mona James that her ostensible boss would actually be so stupid as to simply get in a car and drive across the border on her own—what black person possibly could be so brainless?—but as a precaution Mona had tapped into the GPS trackers on all four staff vehicles and programmed them to send her an alarm on her phone if one of them crossed the interstate. She had just finished an afternoon quickie with Colonel Hart when her phone bleeped. She reached over, grabbed the phone from the nightstand, and swore. “Fuck! That crazy woman has crossed into the Exclusion Zone!”

  “Gone walkabout, has she?” said Hart, sitting up and pulling on his underwear. “Well, that’s going to be a sticky wicket. I suppose they really will kill her? Yes, of course they will. What do you plan to do about it?”

  “I don’t know what the hell I can do about it!” she snarled, leaping up and pulling on her clothes. “I can’t go after her, because I’m almost as dark as she is. None of the locals will. You and Hornbuckle could try.”

  “Hornbuckle is an FBI agent, who is also therefore on these barbarians’ shoot-on-sight list, white or not. I am an officer in the United States Army, or rather one of its subcontracting components. None of us, including you, is supposed to even be this close to the border. If any of us is killed or captured on their side of the Road, then there will be a barney almost as big as Madam Gabrielle getting it will cause. You’re sure Burlington really wants to set up this industrial and economic zone here?”

  “Yes, again, to the best of my knowledge,” said Mona.

  “Obviously somebody back there in maple syrup country doesn’t want that to happen,” said Hart crisply, buttoning his tunic and settling his beret jauntily on his head. “Hence the fact that this delegation has been led by a black nanny with cobblers for brains, whom the people who sent her had to know would do something exactly like this and get herself done in, thus causing enough hanna-hanna to scuttle the project. Who would want that?”

  “The ONR itself was never happy with the idea,” said Mona. “The current director, Goldblum, is a Jew and he gets apoplectic at anything even remotely suggesting normalization of relations. The ONR as a whole was enraged when they got demoted down from full cabinet status at the time of the move to Burlington, and they’ve been trying to get back up there ever since.”

  “I suspect that was because the American government was finally forced to admit that the Northwest isn’t going to be recovered, and one doesn’t need a full cabinet ministry to go through the empty motions and keep up appearances,” commented Hart dryly. “At any rate, I think we can assume Gabi has gone the way of all dusky flesh west of here, or she’s about to. What are you going to do? Go back to Burlington? I need at least a few more days here.”

  “Speaking of going through the motions, we need to at least look like we’re doing so,” replied Mona. She looked in the mirror to pin on her earrings, then flipped open her phone. “Hello, may I speak with Sheriff Lomax, please? Agent Mona James. I need to speak to him right away. We have a problem.”

  Ten minutes later, while Mona, Hart, and Brandon Blackwell were in Lomax’s office listening to the sheriff rant and curse, Gabi roared by a Northwest pickup truck going the other way coming out of Basin. In the truck were Basin town manager Leland Hauser and his wife. “That was an American car we just passed,” said Hauser.

  “How do you know?” asked Mrs. Hauser.

  “It had license plates on it. We gave those up forty years ago,” replied Hauser. “I could have sworn there was a female nigger driving it.”

  “Yeah, right,” said his wife. “If you won’t get corrective surgery, Lee, will you at least wear your glasses? Looks like you need ’em.”

  It was right at four o’clock in the afternoon when Gabrielle Martine pulled up in front of the Civil Guard station on Basin’s one major street, appropriately enough called Main Street. She got out of the car and looked up at the flagpole on top of the old fire station, flying the Northwest Tricolor and the green and white Civil Guard flag beneath it. She was thrilled with a sense of history, history of her own making.

  There was no one on the street; Basin was a tiny place, and it was a work day. Across the street and down a ways George Bassett, the bartender at the Four Deuces, opened the front doors of his establishment and hooked them back, leaving the traditional bat-wing doors swinging freely. He walked out with a push-broom to give the boardwalk a brush-down, then looked up and saw what appeared to be a tall black woman wearing an American-style business suit and skirt, standing in high heels in front of the Guard station. The suit was almost as unusual as the woman’s skin color. Northwest women in this part of Montana wore the same long skirts and calico blouses and practical hats, bonnets, and boots as their great-great-grandmothers had worn, although the material was better and lighter. When they were riding or working they wore the same jeans and plaid shirts as men; the Ministry of Culture had long recognized that sartorial and fashion manipulation had limits. Bassett had only seen a woman in high heels on a few prior occasions; they weren’t really infra dig for the mountains of Montana. He stared for a moment, then pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed 999. “Civil Guard, Sergeant Boardman speaking,” came the desk sergeant’s voice.

  “Hey, Joe. This is George. I’m out in front of the Deuces opening up. You got a nigger outside your station.”

  “Huh?” replied Sergeant Boardman.

  “There’s a big car with American plates parked outside your station, and there’s a she-boon dressed like some kind of department-store dummy from Jew York at your door,” said George. “Now she’s coming inside.”

  Sergeant Joseph Boardman looked up and saw an elegant black woman striding confidently up to the duty desk. “Good afternoon, Sergeant,” she said, flashing him a smile from huge white teeth. “Is Lieutenant Campbell in? I’d like to see him if he has a moment.”

  Boardman put down the phone and began to laugh, and then laugh uproariously. He wasn’t sure who would be pulling a stunt like this or what it was in aid of. Presumably someone in t
he Guard pulling the leg of the new station boss. Maybe that Colonel from Missoula who was the Lieutenant’s father, or some of his buddies with a sense of humor. Whoever it was, it was a great makeup job. Probably an actress from one of the movie or TV outfits; they could make up a white person so you’d swear he or she was black as the ace of spades, and the camera would make you believe it. “Sure, I’ll call him!” the desk sergeant said, gasping with laughter. He picked up the phone and called up to Bobby’s office. “Hey, Lieutenant, there’s someone down here to see you!”

  “Who?” asked Bobby upstairs.

  Boardman could no longer resist. He started ooking and eeking and making monkey noises into the telephone, jumping up and down in his seat screaming like a chimpanzee. Gabi stared at him, not quite quick enough on the uptake to realize that the sergeant was describing her. Upstairs, Bobby stared at the phone in his hand with the monkey yells coming from it. “Boardman, are you drunk?” he snapped. He put down the phone and hurried downstairs.

  When he entered the lobby he took one look at Gabi Martine, who was still staring at the sergeant-turned chimp, and he understood what had happened. “GOD DAMN!” he roared. He leaped forward and as Gabi was turning toward him, before she could say a word, he grabbed her by her lacquered hair, pulled her off her feet, and slammed her face into the wall twice, hard, breaking several of her teeth and leaving smears of blood and mascara on the wall. He dragged her screaming and terrified down a small corridor, opened a maintenance closet, and threw her inside very hard. She went down with a crash of mop buckets and shelves. Bobby slammed the door and leaned over into the stairwell. “Sweeney!”

  The corporal stuck his head over the balustrade. “Sir?”

  “Go to my desk, top right hand drawer, get my gun and bring it down here!” Sweeney’s face disappeared.

  Sergeant Boardman appeared at his side. “Sir, that—that was an actual nigger? For real?”