American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  He had no idea what Dover’s politics were. Talking politics with a white man could only be futile and dangerous. But whatever else Dover might have been, he was no fool. The other three colored waiters in the place showed no eagerness to leave. “All right,” the manager said. “Don’t worry about it. Stay as long as you need to. Sooner or later, those folks out there’ll be done, and then y’all can go on about your business.”

  But, staring out through the small panes of glass set into the door of the Huntsman’s Lodge at eye level, Scipio wondered if Jerry Dover knew what he was talking about. Block after well-organized block of men and women—mostly men—paraded past on Marbury Street. Some carried Confederate flags. Some carried Freedom Party flags. Some carried torches, to make the rest easier to see and the gathering as a whole more impressive.

  A lot of the men marched in step. Most of the ones who did wore the white shirts and butternut trousers of Freedom Party stalwarts. Some few of the disciplined marchers, though, were in what was almost but not quite Confederate uniform. They carried Tredegars whose bayonets gleamed bloody in the torchlight.

  “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” The endless chant came close to making Scipio long for the old cry of, Freedom! That had been a frustrated shout, the cry of men who didn’t fully understand what they wanted or how to go about getting it. This . . . This promised trouble right around the corner, and said just what kind of trouble it was, too.

  And the parade went on and on and on. Scipio wouldn’t have believed that Augusta held so many people, let alone that it held so many Freedom Party backers. Jake Featherston wasn’t in town. Neither was Willy Knight. These people had nothing special to lure them out of their houses. But they came. Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

  At last, after half an hour, the procession ended. Jerry Dover hadn’t gone outside, either. He had pushed Scipio and the other blacks out of the way a few times to look at things for himself. “Well, well, well,” he said when it was over and the raucous cries of Featherston! at last ebbed away. “I always wondered, but now I know. Those bastards really are crazy.”

  Scipio and the other waiters exchanged glances. Dover didn’t need to say that. What white man in the CSA needed to make Negroes like him? The question was so ridiculous, it might not even have occurred to Scipio without the goad of something as massive as the Freedom Party procession.

  The sheer scope of it got through to Dover, too. He spoke again: “Crazy or not, though, there’s a hell of a lot of ’em, ain’t there? Don’t see how they’re going to lose the election. Wish to God I did.” He made pushing motions at the waiters. “They’re gone. You can disappear, too.”

  Searchlights blazed from Allen Park, not far off to the west. With the door open, the rhythmic shouting of Jake Featherston’s name grew louder and more frightening. Scipio scuttled back toward the Terry, a black dust mote adrift on that dreadful sea of sound.

  Jefferson Pinkard came to the Freedom Party meeting in his jailer’s uniform. No time to go back to his apartment and put on the usual white shirt and butternut trousers, not if he wanted to be sure of having a place to sit down when he got to the old livery stable. Party meetings had never been so crowded. He saw faces he hadn’t seen for years, and he saw plenty of faces he’d never seen before—more at every meeting, it seemed.

  Now people want to hop on the train—when it looks like it’s just about to get to the station, he thought, eyeing with no small scorn the strangers who suddenly called themselves Freedom Party men. He’d been with the Party train every inch of the way, through ups and downs and derailments. Hell, he’d been at the Alabama State Fairgrounds out at the west end of town when Grady Calkins murdered President Hampton. He hadn’t given up even then, even when things looked blackest.

  He sent the Johnny-come-latelies another sour stare. Would they have stuck with Jake Featherston when the going got rough? Not likely, not most of them. They were here because they wanted to ride a winner’s coattails, not because they believed. You could use people like that, but could you ever really trust them? He had his doubts.

  Caleb Briggs strode briskly up onto the rostrum. He had a microphone up there these days, to help his gas-ruined voice fill the meeting hall despite the buzz from the big crowd. In the row behind Pinkard, a man who’d been in the party for a while explained to a couple of new fish who Briggs was. Jeff muttered something incredulous under his breath. Didn’t they know anything? Evidently not.

  Behind the dentist who headed up the Freedom Party in Birmingham stood Confederate and Party flags. He crisply saluted each of them in turn, then stepped up to that microphone and said, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” The roar from the crowd made Pinkard’s head spin. The new Party men were good for something, anyhow—they had big mouths.

  Briggs’ smile showed white teeth. “Good to see y’all here,” he rasped, “old friends and new.” A few of the longtime Freedom Party men, Jeff among them, laughed softly. Caleb knew what was what, same as anybody else who’d seen the light a while ago. Smiling still, Briggs went on, “A month to go, boys, and then we get to the Promised Land. We’ve been in the wilderness a long time now, but we’re almost there.”

  Pinkard whooped. “Freedom!” he shouted, as if he were a Negro responding to a preacher’s sermon. He wasn’t the only one, either. Far from it.

  But when Briggs held up a hand, silence fell, just like that. By God, the Freedom Party had discipline. “The one thing we’ve got to do now,” he said, and paused to draw more air into his ravaged lungs, “is make sure we don’t stumble and fall. We’ve come too far for that. This time, we win.”

  More shouts of, “Freedom!” rang out. So did a chorus of, “Featherston!” Pinkard tried to imagine waking up the morning after Election Day and finding out Jake Featherston had lost again. He didn’t think the Party could survive it. He wasn’t sure he could.

  “We’ve got to make sure we win,” Briggs went on. “We’ve been doing plenty, but we’ve got to do more. Just for instance, Hugo Black is coming to town Saturday.”

  A low murmur ran through the crowd. The Whig vice-presidential candidate was good on the stump—not so good as Featherston or Willy Knight, not as far as Pinkard was concerned, but still a formidable speaker.

  Caleb Briggs grinned a sly, conspiratorial grin. “I’m sure we’ll give him a nice, warm Birmingham welcome when he pays us a call.” He waited for the grins and sniggers to stop, then held up a hand. “It may not be so easy. The Whigs aren’t ashamed to steal our tricks. They’ll have their own tough boys at Black’s rally, you can bet on that.”

  “We’ll lick ’em!” Jeff roared, before anybody else could. Somebody behind him clapped him on the back.

  “We’d better lick ’em,” Briggs said. “We need to make damn sure we do. I want a show of hands for volunteers.”

  Every man in the place raised his hand. Some men held up both hands at once to look more prominent. Pinkard thought about doing that, but didn’t. One hand was plenty. He didn’t need to show off.

  Up on the platform, Caleb Briggs grinned. “I knew I could count on you. Be here Saturday at half past twelve. Black’s speaking at two. He reckons he is, anyways.”

  Half past twelve was a good time to gather. The men who still worked Saturday mornings would have time to put in their half days. A lot of businesses had cut back to five days a week. Men who worked for them wouldn’t have any problems showing up, either. And, of course, the men who were out of work could come whenever the Party needed them, as long as they could scrape up trolley fare.

  Jeff was scheduled to work all day that Saturday. He traded shifts with another jailer, a man who despised politics of all sorts almost as much as he despised prisoners of all sorts. He got to Freedom Party headquarters fifteen minutes early. His shirt was so white, it gleamed like polished marble. His pants were the exact color of the uniform he’d worn during the war. He’d put on a pair of steel-toed shoes he hadn’t worn since leaving the Sloss Wor
ks. They weren’t a required part of a stalwart’s outfit, but they let him kick like a mule.

  Across the street from the headquarters, a couple of Whigs were arguing with a gray-clad policeman. “They’re preparing for a riot in there!” one of them said loudly. “You’ve got to do something to stop them.”

  The cop shrugged broad shoulders. “I can’t arrest anybody till he commits a crime,” he said. “It’s still a free country, you know.” As the Whigs started to expostulate, he smiled and sank his barb: “Freedom!”

  They jerked as if stung. The loud one cried, “Why, you miserable, stinking—”

  “Shut up, buddy, or I’ll run you in.” The policeman set a hand on his nightstick.

  “I thought you couldn’t arrest anyone till he committed a crime.”

  “Disturbing the peace is a crime.”

  “What do you think the Freedom Party’s going to do?” the Whig demanded.

  “That’s a political demonstration. That’s different.”

  Into the old livery stable Pinkard went. When he came out again, a stout bludgeon in his hand, the Whigs were still yelling at the cop. They withdrew—hell, they ran for their lives—as soon as the Freedom Party started coming out. Jeers chased them down the street.

  The day Grady Calkins killed Wade Hampton V, Tredegar-carrying state militiamen had held the stalwarts away from the president of the CSA. Nobody had called out the militia this time—so Caleb Briggs insisted. Back in the early 1920s, people had thought they could suppress the Freedom Party. The governor of Alabama wouldn’t dare try it now. The legislature might not impeach him, convict him, and throw him out on his ear if he did. On the other hand, it might.

  Down the street toward the park marched the Freedom Party stalwarts, several hundred strong. People on the sidewalk either cheered or had the sense to keep their mouths shut. People in autos drove away in a hurry. The ones who didn’t got their windscreens and windows smashed. Pinkard supposed, if the Whigs had been ruthless enough, they could have sent cars smashing through the ranks of Freedom Party men. Featherston’s followers would have done it to the Whigs in a minute if they thought it would help. The Whigs didn’t try it.

  Jeff was up in the fifth or sixth row of marchers. The leaders let out whoops when they turned the last corner and saw Ingram Park, near city hall, dead ahead. Shouts followed the whoops a heartbeat later, as the Whig stalwarts charged them. The Whigs aimed to fight in the narrow confines of the street and not let the Freedom Party men into the park at all.

  That probably means we have got more men than they do, Jeff thought. Then the first Whig swung a club at him, and he stopped thinking. He blocked the blow and aimed one of his own at the Whig’s head. They stood there smashing at each other for a few seconds. Then someone tripped the Whig. Jeff hit him in the face with his bludgeon, kicked him in the ribs with those steel-toed shoes, and strode forward, looking for a new foe.

  He and another man in white shirt and butternut trousers teamed up on a Whig. They both stomped the fellow once he was down. Shouting “Freedom!” they pressed forward, shoulder to shoulder. “Freedom!” Jeff yelled again. “Featherston and freedom!”

  “Longstreet!” the Whigs yelled back. “Longstreet and liberty!” Samuel Longstreet, a grandson of the famous James, was a Senator from Virginia. He wasn’t bad on the stump, either. “Longstreet and Black!” a rash Whig shouted.

  That gave the Freedom Party men an opening. “Longstreet the nigger-lover!” they yelled, and pushed forward harder than ever.

  Pinkard’s left arm ached where a club had got home. Another one had laid his forehead open above his left eyebrow. He kept shaking his head like a restive horse, trying to keep the blood out of his eyes. Step by bitter step, the Freedom Party men forced the Whigs back toward the end of the street. If they broke out into the crowd, they’d win the day, rampaging through the crowd and wrecking Hugo Black’s rally.

  A pistol barked. Jeff saw the muzzle flash rather than hearing the report; that was lost in the din of battle. The Freedom Party man next to him grunted and clutched his belly and folded up like a concertina.

  As soon as the first shot was fired, pistols came out on both sides. Freedom Party men and Whigs blazed away at one another from point-blank range. The Whigs had fired first—Pinkard thought they had, anyhow—but the Freedom Party men had more firepower and more determination, or maybe just more combat experience. They kept going forward, smashing down or shooting the last few Whigs who stood against them.

  “Freedom!” Pinkard bawled as he ran across the grass toward the people who’d thought they were going to hear the Whig vice-presidential candidate speak. “Freedom!” his fellow stalwarts howled at his side and behind him. This had to be what a breakthrough felt like, what the damnyankees had known when they smashed the Confederate lines in Tennessee and Virginia during the war.

  He whooped with delight when more Freedom Party men burst out from another street and charged the assembled Whigs. Then the stalwarts were in among the crowd, some clubbing, some kicking, some shooting. A few of the men in the crowd tried to fight back. Most of the tough ones, though, had tried to hold the Freedom Party men out and were already down.

  From the podium, Hugo Black cried out, “This is madness!”

  He was right, not that it did him any good. Madness it was, madness engulfing his party, madness engulfing his country. After the third bullet cracked past him, after the Birmingham police did nothing to slow down the Freedom Party stalwarts, he leaped down and made his escape.

  Pinkard’s club broke when he hit a rich-looking man in the head. The Whig’s skull broke, too; Jeff could feel it. He waded on through the fray with fists and heavy shoes. “Freedom!” he yelled exultantly. “Featherston and freedom!”

  Whig headquarters in Charleston a week before the election reminded Clarence Potter of Army of Northern Virginia headquarters a week before the Confederate States had asked the United States for an armistice. He was among the walking wounded: two fingers of his left hand were splinted, he sported a shiner and wore a new pair of glasses he couldn’t afford, and he was all over bruises. And, all things considered, he was one of the lucky ones.

  Braxton Donovan had a bandage wrapped around his head. He’d needed an X ray to make sure he didn’t have a fractured skull. His nod held a graveyard quality. “Almost over now,” he said.

  “Everything’s almost over now,” Potter said gloomily. “We showed those bastards we could fight, too, by God.”

  The lawyer nodded, then grimaced and reached into his jacket pocket for a vial of pills. He washed down two of them with a sip from his drink. “Wonderful stuff, codeine,” he remarked. “It’s especially good with whiskey. Doesn’t quite make the headache go away, but it sure makes you stop caring. Yeah, we showed the yahoos we could fight, too. Fat lot of good it’s done us. How many dead?”

  “A couple of dozen here in Charleston.” Even before Potter went into intelligence, he’d always had figures at his fingertips. “Over a hundred in the state. All over the country? Who knows? More than a thousand, or I miss my guess. Close to fifty men killed in that one shootout in Birmingham all by itself. Hugo Black is lucky to be alive, if you want to call it luck.”

  “Ha. Funny.” Donovan drained the whiskey. He scowled. “I hope those pills hurry up. My head feels like it wants to fall off. If that bastard had hit me just a little harder, you’d be counting one more dead man here.”

  “I know.” Potter held up his left hand. “I got these broken keeping another one of those stinking stalwarts from caving in my skull. We have made them pay, though. Even if they do win, they know they’ve been in a brawl.”

  “If they win, it doesn’t matter,” Braxton Donovan said. “Do you know what I wish?”

  “Hell, yes, I know what you wish. You wish the same thing I do,” Potter said. “You wish the Radical Liberals would drop out of the race and throw whatever weight they’ve got left behind Longstreet and Black. And you know what?”

 
“What?”

  For once, Potter let a full, rich drawl come into his voice as he answered, “It ain’t a-gonna happen, that’s what.”

  “It should, by God,” Donovan said. “The Rad Libs have just as much to lose if Jake Featherston wins as we do.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but Hull and Long don’t know that,” Clarence Potter said. “All they know is, we’ve been kicking their tails every six years as long as there’ve been Confederate States of America. If we were in hell—”

  “What do you mean, ‘if’?” Donovan said. “With Jake Featherston president . . .”

  “If we were in hell and screaming for water, they’d throw us a big jar of gasoline to drink.” Potter was damned if he’d let the lawyer step on a good line.

  “What are we going to do?” Braxton Donovan said. “What can we do? Only thing left is to go down swinging.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, we battle ’em all the way up till next Tuesday,” Potter replied. “The more Congressmen and legislators we elect, the more trouble Featherston and his goons will have getting their laws through. And the bastard can’t run again in 1939, so this too shall pass.”

  “Like a kidney stone,” Donovan said morosely. By the way he set one hand on the small of his back for a moment, he spoke from experience. But then he managed a smile and gently touched his bandaged head. “Codeine is starting to work.”

  “Good,” Potter said. People were setting down drinks and taking seats on the folding chairs at the front of the hall. “Looks like the meeting’s going to come to order. Let’s see how exciting it is, shall we?”

  It was about as bad as he’d expected. The speakers insisted on staying optimistic long after the time for optimism had passed. When Potter heard, “Sam Longstreet will make a great president of the Confederate States!” for the fourth time, he stopped listening. He didn’t think Longstreet was a bad man at all—on the contrary. But as long as the Whigs kept running sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who’d won the War of Secession, they gave Jake Featherston an easy target.