“This here’s blackmail,” Scipio said. “You ought to go to the police.”
Erasmus shook his head. “Ain’t no use. It’s like it was back the las’ time. Some o’ these fuckers, they is the police.”
Scipio had never heard the older man use an obscenity like that. “Got to be somebody kin he’p you.”
“If I was white . . .” But Erasmus shook his head. “Mebbe even that don’t do no good, not now. These Freedom Party buckra, it’s like they got everything goin’ their way, and nobody else got the nerve to stand up to ’em. They win the ‘lection, they’s top dogs for six years, an’ everybody reckon they gwine win.”
“I knows it. I’s scared, and dat de trut’,” Scipio said. “What kin a nigger do? Can’t do nothin’. Can’t even vote. Can’t run, neither—ain’t nowhere to run to. USA don’t want nothin’ to do wid we. An’ if we fights—”
“We loses,” Erasmus finished for him. “Dumb Reds done showed dat durin’ the war. Never shoulda riz up then, on account of they shoulda knowed they lose.”
I thought the same thing. I told Cassius the same thing. He wouldn’t listen to me. He was sure the revolution would carry everything before it. He was sure, and he was wrong, and now he’s dead. Scipio couldn’t say a word of that. He had a new name here. He had a new life here. Remembering things he’d done long ago, in another state and in another state of mind . . . What point to it? None he could see, especially since time-yellowed, creased wanted posters still proclaimed his other self fugitive from what South Carolina called justice.
Erasmus went on, “Sorry I got to let you go like this here. I know it ain’t right. Times is hard, an’ you gots young ‘uns. But I can’t help it, Xerxes. Can’t stay in business no more. You hook on somewheres else, mebbe.”
“Mebbe.” Scipio didn’t really believe it. How many places were hiring waiters? Even asking the question of himself made him want to laugh.
But it wasn’t funny. It was anything but funny, as a matter of fact. Bathsheba’s housekeeping work brought in some money, but not enough. He would have to find something to do, and find it fast.
I could be the best butler Augusta, Georgia’s, ever seen. If he’d passed muster for Anne Colleton, he could pass muster here. True, he had no references, but he was good enough to show what he could do even without them. And rich people always had money. People like that were always looking for good help. When he opened his mouth and showed he could talk like an educated white man . . .
He shook his head and shivered, as if coming down with the influenza. When I show that, I put a noose around my neck. He knew what a good servant he made. If he started playing the butler again, word would spread among the rich whites of Augusta. Old So-and-So’s got himself a crackerjack new nigger, best damn butler you ever saw. Word wouldn’t spread only in Augusta, either. St. Matthews, South Carolina, wasn’t that far away. Anne Colleton would hear before too long. And when she did, he was dead.
She’d gone back to helping the Freedom Party. He’d seen that in the newspapers. She wouldn’t have forgotten him. So far as he knew, she hadn’t tried very hard to find him after he’d escaped South Carolina for Georgia. But if he did anything to bring himself to her notice, he deserved to die for stupidity’s sake.
Erasmus reached into the cash box and took out two brown twenty-dollar banknotes. He thrust them at Scipio. “Here you is,” he said. “Wish it could be more, but I druther give it to you than to them Freedom Party trash.”
Pride told Scipio to refuse. He had no room in his life for pride. “Thank you kindly,” he said, and took the money. “God bless you.”
“He done bless me plenty,” Erasmus said. “Hope He watch out for you, too.”
Someone else had pressed money on Scipio when he lost a job waiting tables. He snapped his fingers. “Reckon I go see me Mistuh John Oglethorpe. Anybody in this here town got work, reckon he know ‘bout it.”
“Good idea.” Erasmus nodded. “Not all white folks is Freedom Party bastards.”
These days, Scipio ventured out of the Terry only with trepidation. He didn’t like the way white men looked at him when he walked along the streets outside the colored district. They looked at him the way they had to look at possums and squirrels and raccoons when they hunted for the pot.
Freedom Party posters and banners and emblems were everywhere. He saw several white men with little enamelwork Freedom Party pins—those reversed-color Confederate battle flags—on their lapels. More than anybody else, they glared at him as if he had no right to exist. He kept his eyes down on the sidewalk. Giving back look for look was the worst thing he could do. If one of those pin-wearing fellows decided he was an uppity nigger, he might not get back to the Terry alive.
When he walked into Oglethorpe’s restaurant, Aurelius was taking care of the breakfast crowd. Whites sat on one side of the room, Negroes on the other. They’d always done that. It wasn’t law, but it was unbreakable custom. Scipio perched at a small table. Aurelius nodded when he recognized him.
“Ain’t seen you in a long time,” he said. “What kin I git you?”
“Bacon and eggs over easy and grits and a cup o’ coffee,” Scipio answered. “I see Mistuh Oglethorpe when things slows down?”
“I tell him you’s here,” Aurelius said. “How come you ain’t at Erasmus’ place?”
“He shuttin’ down,” Scipio said, and the other man’s eyes widened in astonishment. In a voice not much above a whisper, Scipio explained, “They wants too much money for he to stay open.” He didn’t explain who they were. Aurelius would know.
“Hey, Aurelius!” a white man called. “I need some more coffee over here.”
“Comin’, Mr. Benson.” Aurelius hurried off to take care of the customer, and then another one, and then another one after that.
He didn’t get back to Scipio’s table till he set plate and coffee cup in front of him. “Thank you kindly,” Scipio said, and dug in. John Oglethorpe was in no way a fancy cook, but few of his kind could match him. The breakfast was easily as good as any Erasmus made: high praise indeed. Scipio hadn’t eaten grits in his days as Anne Colleton’s privileged servant; he’d thought of them as fieldhands’ food. He’d remade their acquaintance since, and found he liked them.
With Aurelius filling his cup every time it got low, he hung around in the restaurant till the rush thinned out. John Oglethorpe emerged from the kitchen then. His hair had gone gray and pulled back at the temples. He wore thick bifocals he hadn’t had before, and was thinner and more stooped than Scipio remembered.
“What’s this nonsense I hear about Erasmus goin’ out of business?” he demanded. “He can’t do that. He’s been cooking even longer than I have.”
“No mo’,” Scipio said. “Freedom Party fellas, they wants too much money from he.”
“Oh. Those people.” The white man’s voice went flat and hard. “I’ve always been a Whig, and so was my pappy, and so was his pappy—well, he was a Democrat before the War of Secession, but that doesn’t count. Some people, though—some people think yelling something loud enough makes it so.”
“Freedom!” Aurelius didn’t yell it, but the scorn in his voice ran deep.
Scipio blinked. The cook and the waiter had worked together for God only knew how many years. Even so . . . As far as Scipio could remember, this was the first time—outside the brief, chaotic madness of the Congaree Socialist Republic—he’d ever heard a Negro mock a Confederate political party where a white could hear.
“Yellin’ ain’t all them Freedom Party fellas does,” Scipio said. “Erasmus reckon somethin’ bad happen to he if he don’t pay, so he done quit.”
“That’s a shame and a disgrace,” Oglethorpe said. “That is nothing but a shame and a disgrace. This town needs hardworking folks like Erasmus a hell of a lot more than it needs blowhards like those Freedom Party yahoos.”
Did he know Gulliver’s Travels? Or was he using the word as a general term of contempt? Scipio didn’t see how h
e could ask. That might involve trying to explain how he knew Gulliver’s Travels. He kept trying to bury his past, but it lived on inside him.
All he said was, “Yes, suh.” And then he got down to the business that had brought him out of the Terry: “Mistuh Oglethorpe, I gots me a family to feed. I been workin’ fo’ Erasmus a good long time now. Ain’t like you an’ Aurelius, but a long time. You know somebody lookin’ for a waiter? I does janitor work, too, an’ I cooks some. Ain’t as good as you an’ Erasmus, but I ain’t bad, neither.”
Oglethorpe frowned. “I was afraid you were gonna ask me that. Why else would you come up here?” Scipio’s face heated. The restaurant owner only shrugged. “I don’t mind. If you know somebody, you better ask him. Only trouble is, I can’t think of anyone who’s short of help right now. What about you, Aurelius? You know the Terry a damn sight better than I do.”
“I ought to, boss, don’t you reckon?” But Aurelius’ smile didn’t stick on his face. “No, I don’t know nobody, neither. Wish to heaven I did.”
“Damn.” Scipio spoke quietly, but with great feeling.
“May not be so bad,” Oglethorpe said. “This isn’t like some businesses—slots do open up now and again. You pound the pavement—you’ll find something. You can use my name, too. Don’t reckon you’ll need to, though. You tell people you worked for Erasmus all these years, they’ll know you’re the straight goods.”
“Hope so. Do Jesus, I hope so.” Scipio drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Hope somethin’ come up pretty damn quick. Don’t wanna end up in no Mitcheltown.”
As soon as he said the word, he wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel that fear. He did. But the shantytowns named after the Confederate president were a judgment on the Whigs. Calling them by that name—even thinking of them by that name—only helped the Freedom Party. Trouble was, everyone in the Confederate States called them Mitcheltowns, just as they were Blackfordburghs in the United States. Whoever chanced to be in power when the disaster struck got the blame.
“Good luck, Xerxes,” John Oglethorpe said. “Wish to God I could do something more for you.”
“Thank you kindly, suh,” Scipio answered. “I thanks you very kindly. An’ I wishes you could, too.”
As Hipolito Rodriguez had seen when he went up north to fight in Texas, spring could be a wonderful time of year, a time when the land renewed itself after the chill and gloom of winter. It wasn’t like that in Sonora. Here, it was the time when the rains petered out. The weather got warmer, yes, but it had never really turned cold. He’d seen snow in the trenches of Texas. The memory still appalled him.
He eyed the streams coming down from the mountains. If they dried up, his crops would dry up with them. They seemed all right. He worried anyhow. He’d never known a farmer who didn’t worry. Even the white men beside whom he’d fought had worried about what was happening to their farms while they went to war.
He’d plowed. He’d planted his corn and beans and squashes. Now he and the rest of his family watched them grow—and weeded to make sure they would grow. Work on a farm was never done. Even so, he sent his children into Baroyeca for schooling as often as they could go. He wanted them to have a chance at a life that wasn’t work, work, work every minute of every day. He didn’t know how much of a chance they would have, but any chance was better than none.
Teachers taught in English, of course. Rodriguez worried about that only every now and again—would the children forget their heritage? More often, he thought it good that they learn as much of the dominant language of the CSA as they could.
Magdalena knew very little English. With his wife, Rodriguez stuck to Spanish. Because of that, his sons and daughters—especially his sons—thought he understood less English than he really did. They started using it among themselves to say things they didn’t want him to follow.
“Silly old fool,” Miguel called him one day, smiling as if it were a compliment.
Rodriguez boxed his son’s ears. He smiled, too, though he doubted whether Miguel appreciated it. “Silly young fool,” he said, also in English.
After that, his children were a lot more careful when they had something to say either to him or about him. He went on about his business, more amused than otherwise. Life taught all sorts of lessons, and only some of them came from school.
No matter how tired he was at the end of a day, he tried to go into Baroyeca one evening a week for the Freedom Party meeting. Magdalena had given up complaining about that when she saw he came back neither drunk nor smelling of a puta’s cheap perfume.
As far as Rodriguez was concerned, the scent of victory in the air was headier than liquor, sweeter than the dubious charms of Baroyeca’s handful of women of easy virtue. (With the closing of the silver mines, a lot of the whores had moved to other towns, towns where they hoped to do better for themselves. The business collapse had had all sorts of unexpected, unfortunate consequences.)
Robert Quinn did his best to fan that scent all over the countryside. Baroyeca still had no electricity. Quinn couldn’t call people together to listen to Jake Featherston’s weekly speeches on the wireless. He did the next best thing: he got the text of the speeches by telegram and translated them into Spanish himself. Even though it wasn’t his native tongue, he spoke well, and plainly believed every word he said.
Those speeches gave Hipolito Rodriguez a window on a wider world, a world beyond Baroyeca. After one of them, he said, “Señor Quinn, you are a traveled man. Is it true what Señor Featherston says, that these politicians in Richmond are nothing but criminals?”
“If Jake Featherston says it, you can take it to the bank,” Quinn answered—he would sometimes translate English idioms literally into Spanish. Considering the sad state of banking in the CSA these days, this one lost something in the translation. Even so, Rodriguez understood it. Quinn went on, “How can you trust the Party if you don’t trust what Jake Featherston says? You can’t. It’s as simple as that. You do trust the Party, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Rodriguez answered quickly; he knew a dangerous question when he heard one. That didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth, though. “Without the Party, what would we be?”
“Bad off, that’s what,” Quinn replied. “But as long as we follow what Jake says, we’ll be fine. He’s the leader. He knows what’s what. All we have to do is back him up. That’s our job. Comprende?”
“Sí, señor,” Rodriguez said as the other men at the meeting nodded.
“Bueno.” Quinn grinned. “If Jake was wrong, he couldn’t have come as far as he has, now could he? He couldn’t see what all was wrong with los Estados Confederados, either, eh? We’ve got a lot of work to do to win this election, and we’ll have even more to do after we win it.”
Carlos Ruiz asked a question that had also been in Rodriguez’s mind: “After Señor Featherston wins the election, what will the Confederate States be like?”
“That’s easy, Carlos,” Robert Quinn answered. “That’s real easy, to tell you the truth. Once Jake Featherston gets to be president, we will fix everything that’s wrong with the Confederate States of America. Everything, by God. And once we fix everything that’s wrong inside the country, then we start thinking about getting even with los Estados Unidos, too. How does that sound?”
“I like it,” Ruiz said simply. Rodriguez nodded. So did the rest of the local men at the Freedom Party headquarters. How could anyone not like such a program? The United States were a long way off, yes, but they deserved vengeance. The room was full of veterans. They’d all fought the USA during the war.
Someone behind Rodriguez said, “I don’t want to go back into the Army, but I will if I have to.” That drew more nods. To his own surprise, Rodriguez found himself contributing one. He’d had all the war he wanted, and then some. But if it was a matter of turning the tables on the USA, he knew he would redon the color the Confederates called butternut.
“You are all good, patriotic men. I knew you w
ere,” Quinn said in his deliberate Spanish. “But I have a question for you. I know your patrón is not such a big man as he was in your grandfather’s day. How many of you, though, have a patrón who tries to keep you from voting for the Freedom Party?”
Two or three men raised their hands. Carlos Ruiz was one of them. He said, “Don Joaquin says the Freedom Party is nothing but a pack of bandidos, and must be stopped.”
“Does he? Well, well, well.” Robert Quinn grinned again, a grin that was all sharp teeth. “We have a saying in English: who will bell the cat? Does Don Joaquin think he can put the bell on the Partido de la Libertad?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Señor Quinn,” Ruiz answered. “He thinks he can tell people how to vote. Of that I am certain.”
“And you do not think he ought to?” Quinn asked. Ruiz shook his head. The local Freedom Party leader said, “Perhaps he should change his mind.”
“Don Joaquin is a stubborn man,” Ruiz warned. Quinn showed his teeth again, but didn’t say a word, not then.
As the meeting was breaking up, he asked Ruiz and Rodriguez and three or four other men to stay behind. “It would be a shame if anything happened to Don Joaquin’s barn,” he remarked. “It would be an even bigger shame if anything happened to his house.”
“He has guards,” Carlos said. “They carry pistols.”
Quinn opened a closet. Inside were neatly stacked Tredegar rifles. “Do you think the guards would listen to reason?” he asked. “If they decide not to listen to reason, do you think you could persuade them?”
The locals looked at one another. No, a patrón wasn’t what his grandfather had been. Still, the idea of attacking his grounds, of attacking his buildings, hadn’t crossed their minds up till now. “If we do this,” Hipolito Rodriguez said slowly, “we have to win, and Señor Featherston has to win in November. If either of those things fails, we are dead men. You understand this, I hope.”
American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Page 64