American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  If any Negro from Augusta hadn’t known it, the ralliers did their best to drive it home. They swarmed out of the park and into the Terry, shouting, “Freedom!” all the while. A few policemen came with the long, sinewy column, but more to observe it than to check it. Had the Freedom Party men turned on the police, they could have got rid of them in moments and then rampaged through the Terry altogether out of control.

  They could have, but they didn’t. Scipio didn’t even think they beat anybody up. They just marched and yelled and marched and yelled. In a way, that was a relief. In another way, it left Scipio all the more terrified, not least because of the discipline it showed. It was sending a message: this is what our people do when we tell them to do this. If we tell them to do something else . . . Scipio shivered at what the Freedom Party might do then. And would that handful of policemen try to stop them? Could they if they tried? Neither struck him as likely.

  He made a point of getting to Erasmus’ fish store and restaurant early the next morning. He still didn’t get there as early as his boss. “Mornin’, Xerxes,” Erasmus said when Scipio came through the door. “How you is?”

  “I been better,” Scipio answered. “Buckra march underneath my window yesterday. Don’t like that none, not even a li’l bit.”

  Erasmus nodded gloomily. “They go past my front door, too,” he said. “No, I don’t like that none, neither. They scared. When they scared, they do somethin’ stupid.”

  “Do somethin’ big an’ stupid,” Scipio agreed. “Burn down de Terry, maybe. De police, dey don’t stop ’em if dey tries.”

  “Reckon not,” Erasmus agreed. “Reckon the police do try—they ain’t all bad men. Reckon they try, but I don’t reckon they kin do much, neither.”

  “Where dat leave we?” Scipio answered his own question: “In trouble, dat where.”

  Erasmus looked at him. “You’s a black man in the CSA,” he said. “You think you ain’t been in trouble since the day you was born?”

  “I was borned in slavery days, same as you,” Scipio said. “I knows all about dat kind o’ trouble. But de Freedom Party, dey worse’n usual.”

  He waited to see whether Erasmus would try to argue with him. If his boss did, he intended to argue right back. But Erasmus slowly nodded. “Reckon you’s right. Didn’t used to think so. I reckoned them crazy buckra’d find somethin’ new to git all hot an’ bothered about. They been around for more’n ten years now, though. Don’t reckon they’s goin’ noplace.”

  “Wish they would—wish dey go far away an’ never come back no more,” Scipio said. “They gwine win plenty o’ new seats in the ‘lection come fall, too.”

  “God’s will,” Erasmus said. “We is a sinful lot, and the good Lord, He make us pay.”

  Before Scipio could think about it, he shook his head. “I don’t care none how sinful we is,” he said. “De Lord can’t hate we enough to give we what de Freedom Party want to give we.” Would he have had such thoughts before he got mixed up with the Red Negroes who’d led the uprising in 1915? He didn’t know for certain, but had his doubts.

  “The Lord do what He want to do, not what we wants Him to do,” Erasmus said. “Blessed be the name o’ the Lord.”

  “Lord help he what help hisself,” Scipio replied. “De Freedom Party git stronger, I reckon maybe niggers gots to help theyselves.” Was he really saying that? After watching from the inside the destruction of the Congaree Socialist Republic, could he really be saying that? He could. He was.

  “We rise up against the buckra again, we lose again. You knows it, too.” Erasmus sounded very sure.

  And Scipio did know it, too. Blacks in the CSA couldn’t hope to beat whites. He’d thought as much before the rising of 1915, and he’d proved right. On the other hand . . . “De Freedom Party git stronger, we lose if we don’t rise up, too.”

  Erasmus didn’t answer him. Maybe that meant there was no answer. He hoped it didn’t, but feared it did.

  Three days later, he got an answer of sorts. After finishing at Erasmus’, he went into the white part of Augusta to visit a couple of toy stores that had a better selection—and better prices—than any in the Terry. Coming home with something new and amusing—it didn’t have to be very big or very fancy—was a good way to delight his children. Having been childless for so long, Scipio found he took enormous delight in making them happy now that he had them.

  He found a doll for Antoinette, one that closed its eyes when it lay down. It was, of course, white, with golden hair and blue eyes. He’d never seen a doll with dark features like his own. He’d scarcely imagined there might be such a thing. Whites dominated the Confederate States in ways neither they nor the Negro minority quite understood.

  No matter what this doll looked like, Scipio knew his little girl would enjoy it. He set money on the counter before asking the clerk for it. To that extent, he did understand how things worked in the CSA. But the clerk, once he had the price, was polite enough, saying, “Here you are. Have a good evening.”

  “Thank you, suh,” Scipio answered. He started for the door, and had just set his hand on the knob when he heard a scuffle outside, and then a man’s shout of pain.

  From behind him, the clerk said, “Maybe you don’t want to go out there right now. Freedom Party hasn’t always been nice to colored folks they catch out in the evening.”

  Hasn’t always been nice to seemed to translate into is beating the stuffing out of. Scipio’s first emotion was raw fear. His next was shame that he couldn’t help the luckless Negro the goons had found. He felt gratitude toward the clerk, gratitude mixed with resentment. “Ought to call the cops,” he said: as close as he dared come to letting that resentment show.

  “I’ve done it before,” the man answered. “They don’t usually come for a call like that. I’m sorry, but they don’t.”

  Erasmus had insisted the Augusta police weren’t all bad men. Maybe he was right. Scipio found it harder to believe now. He did nod to the clerk. “Thank you fo’ tryin’, suh,” he said. Not all whites were bad. He was reasonably sure of that.

  A little while after the sounds of violence ended, Scipio left the toy store and hurried back to the Terry. He got home safe. His daughter did love the doll. Everything should have been fine. And it would have been, if only he could have forgotten what had happened in the white part of town. As things were, he got very little sleep that night.

  When the train pulled into Abilene, Texas, Jake Featherston knew he was in a different world from the one he’d left. The plains seemed to go on forever. Dust was in the air. This wasn’t the narrow, confined landscape of Virginia. No wonder Texans had a reputation for thinking big.

  But Texas itself wasn’t so big as it had been. Not far west of Abilene, Texas abruptly stopped. What the damnyankees called the state of Houston began. That was why Jake had come all the way out here: to make a speech as close to what he still called occupied territory as he could.

  The train stopped. His bodyguards got up, ready to precede him out onto the platform. Looking out there, one of them said, “It’s all right. Willy Knight’s there waitin’ for us.”

  “Hell it’s all right, Pete,” another guard said. “What if that Knight bastard’s the one who wants to try and get rid o’ the boss?”

  Pete, an innocent soul, looked shocked. Jake wasn’t. Willy Knight’s Redemption League might have swallowed up the Freedom Party instead of the other way round. It hadn’t, though, and Knight couldn’t be happy that he wasn’t the biggest fish in the pond, the way he’d dreamt of being. Still . . . “If he wants to put me six feet under, reckon he can do it,” Featherston said. “This is his part of the country; he can hire more guns than I can bring along. But if you stick your head in the lion’s mouth and get away with it, after that the lion knows who’s number one. That’s what we’re gonna do here.”

  When Jake stepped out onto the platform, the band struck up a sprightly version of “Dixie.” People cheered. Jake took off his hat and waved it. Willy K
night stepped forward to shake his hand. As the two Freedom Party leaders met, photographers took pictures. The flashes made Featherston’s eyes water.

  “Welcome to Texas, Jake—what’s left of it,” Knight said, a broad smile on his handsome face.

  “Thank you kindly, my friend.” Featherston lied through his teeth. “We’ll see what we can do about getting back what the USA stole from us.”

  “How are you going to do that?” a reporter shouted. “The Yankees won’t pay any attention to us.”

  “They don’t have to pay any attention to the CSA, not as long as the Whigs hold on to Richmond,” Jake answered. “The Whigs say we lost the war, and so we’re stuck—stuck forever. And we are, too, long as we think that way. But even the Yankees knew better. After we whipped ’em, they set up Remembrance Day so they wouldn’t forget what happened. The Whigs want to forget—they want to pretend all their mistakes never happened at all. And they want the country to forget. Me, I don’t intend to.”

  “That’s right.” Willy Knight nodded vigorously. “That’s just exactly right. Here in Texas, we live with that every day when we look west and see what the United States did to us.”

  The reporters scribbled. Jake sent Knight a sour look. The Texan wanted to be part of the story, too. If you wanted to horn in on this, why’d you invite me out here to the middle of nowhere? Featherston thought. But he knew the answer, knew it all too well. Because you still want to be top dog, that’s why, you son of a bitch. Most ways, having ambitious men in the Party was wonderful. They worked hard, for their own good as well as its. But having them here meant Jake could never stop watching his back.

  “I’m making my main speech at a park west of town, isn’t that right?” he asked Knight, though he also knew that answer. “Almost within spitting range of what they call Houston. Spitting’s not half what they deserve, either.”

  “Sure isn’t,” Knight said. “If the people in occupied Texas ever got the chance to vote, they’d come back to the Confederate States in a red-hot minute.”

  “Same with Kentucky,” Featherston agreed. “Same with Sequoyah.” He had mixed feelings about Sequoyah—it was, after all, full of redskins, and he had little more use for them than he had for niggers. (The USA had even less use for Indians; Sequoyah remained occupied territory, while Houston and Kentucky were full-fledged U.S. states.) But Sequoyah was also full of oil and gas, and cars and trucks and aeroplanes meant the Confederate States needed all the oil and gas they could lay their hands on. If the redskins came along, too, then they did, that was all. At least they’d been loyal during the war, unlike the blacks in the Confederacy.

  “Take you to the hotel first, if that suits you,” Knight said. “Give you a chance to freshen up, maybe rest a little bit, before you go out and give your speech. You aren’t set to start till six, you know.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jake nodded as they left the platform together. “That way, it’s eight o’clock back on the East Coast—a good time for folks on the wireless web to listen in.” He laughed. “Who would’ve reckoned a few years back that we’d have to worry about such things? Times are changing—if we don’t change with ’em, we’re in trouble.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with the Whigs,” Knight said. “They’re a bunch of damn dinosaurs, is what they are.”

  Dinosaurs had been much in the news lately. A team of Japanese scientists in Mongolia had come back with not only spectacular skeletons but also some of the first dinosaur eggs ever seen. They’d sent some of their specimens to the Museum of Natural History in Richmond, where they’d drawn record crowds. Jake liked the phrase, too; it captured exactly what he felt about the Whigs.

  He slapped Willy Knight on the back. “They sure are,” he said. “You took the words right out of my mouth, matter of fact—I’m aiming to call ’em that very thing tonight.” And so he was, even if he hadn’t been a moment before.

  “Good,” Knight said, not suspecting Featherston was stealing his figure of speech.

  Driving through Abilene was depressing. The town had flourished in the years just before the Great War and, like so much of the Confederacy, languished since. Timber buildings looked sun-blasted; brick ones looked old before their time. As he did all over the CSA, Jake saw men sleeping on park benches and in bushes, and others prowling the streets looking for food or work.

  The hotel seemed as gloomy as the rest of the place. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the lobby, stirring the air without cooling it much. The carpet was shabby. The walls needed painting. The clerk behind the registration desk seemed pathetically glad to have anybody come in. “Welcome to Abilene, sir,” he said as he gave Jake his key.

  “Thanks,” Jake replied, in lieu of what he really thought. “Freedom!”

  “Uh, freedom,” the clerk said, but not as if he were a Party man.

  Since Featherston was due to speak at six, he and Willy Knight ate an early supper: enormous slabs of steak, a Texas specialty. Texas wasn’t dry; they could drink beer without breaking the law. Knight swallowed a big piece of rare meat and then said, “God damn you, Jake. I thought you were buzzard bait, but you turned out to be right all along. Our time is coming.”

  “I always said so.” Featherston cocked his head to one side. “You reckoned we were going down the drain, and you’d pick up the pieces.”

  The mixed metaphor didn’t faze the former head of the Redemption League. “Damn right I did. This party was drying up and blowing away four years ago.” He cut off another chunk of steak. By the way he did it, he would sooner have stuck the knife into Featherston. “Amos Mizell and I, we were ready to get on another horse. The Party did jussst well enough”—he stretched the word into a long hiss—“to keep us on board. But now—”

  Jake finished for him: “Now we’re back in business.”

  “We are.” Knight nodded. “Hell with me if we’re not. I’d take my hat off to you if I was wearing it. All through everything, you said this was going to happen one of these days. You said so, and you were right.”

  “You bet I was,” Featherston said, adding, You stinking bastard, to himself. “Come November, we’re going to pick up a hell of a lot more seats in the House. We’ll pick up some in the Senate, too, from states where we got control of the legislature two years ago. And two years from now . . . Two years from now, by God . . .” Even in the dimly lit steakhouse, a feral glow shone in his eyes.

  “Yeah.” That same glow lit Willy Knight’s face. He and Jake nodded to each other. Both men had been hungry, hungry in the spirit, for a long, long time, and at last they thought they could see satisfaction on the horizon.

  Softly, Jake said, “If things go our way two years from now, I’m going to pay back every blue-blooded bastard and every nigger who ever did me wrong. And I’m going to put this poor, sorry country back on its feet again.”

  “Yeah,” Knight said again. As with Featherston, he sounded more as if he looked forward to revenge than to rebuilding. He added, “We’ve got the United States to pay back, too.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Jake said. “Don’t you worry about that, Willy. I haven’t forgotten at all. That’s why I came out here—to help everybody remember.”

  When he got to the park, it was filling up fast. Bare bulbs bathed the platform from which he would speak, though the sun hadn’t set yet. As he walked up onto the platform and over to the microphone that would send his words across the CSA, a frightening, almost savage, roar went up from the crowd. He hoped the microphone would pick it up. He wanted people to get all hot and bothered when they heard him or thought about him.

  “Hello, friends,” he said at six on the dot. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth. The truth is, the United States are afraid of us. You look across what they call the border, you look into what they call Houston, and you’ll know it’s the truth. If they let people over there vote which country they wanted to belong to, they know what would happen. You know what would happen, too. Texas would be itself ag
ain. And so the Yankees don’t let ’em vote.”

  Cheers in Abilene had that savage edge, too. Here not far from the border, people feared the United States, whether the United States feared them or not.

  Jake went on, “The USA won’t let people in Kentucky vote on that, either, or people in Sequoyah. They know where the people would go, and they don’t aim to let ’em. Why? They’re scared, that’s why!”

  He pointed east, a gesture full of contempt. “And do the Whigs way over there in Richmond, the Whigs who’ve been running this country ever since the War of Secession, do they do anything about it? Do they push the USA to let the folks in Houston—Houston!—and Kentucky and Sequoyah vote about who they want to belong to? Do they? Do they? Noooo!” He made the word a howl of rage. “They’re nothing but a pack of dinosaurs, is what they are. And you know what you’ve got to do with dinosaurs, don’t you? Send ’em to the museum!”

  A vast roar went up. Featherston looked back at Willy Knight, standing there behind him. They grinned at each other. Knight was happy about his own cleverness, even though he thought Featherston had had the idea on his own, too. Jake was happy about how well the line had gone over. He knew he’d stolen it, knew and didn’t care. The point was, it did what he wanted. And nobody else in the whole wide world knew, or cared, where he’d got it.

  Little by little, Party men turned the roar into a chant: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The crowd followed along. The chant went on till Jake’s head rang with it.

  He raised his hands. Quiet slowly returned. Into it, he said, “Come November, you get your chance to send some more Whigs to the museum. I know you’ll take care of it, friends. Folks who think they’re smart used to say the Freedom Party was dead. We’ll show ’em who’s dead, see if we don’t, and who needs burying, too. We’re not dead, by God. We’re just getting started!” Another roar went up, one that told him he’d found a brand-new slogan.