The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  One afternoon when the black gum and maple trees were beginning to change color, he got back to the widow Bissett’s house to find Henry Pleasants sitting on the front porch waiting for him. Grinning, he charged up the steps to shake his friend’s hand. “How did you manage to get the time off to come up and see me?” he asked.

  “I have all the time I need,” Pleasants answered. When Caudell looked puzzled, he amplified: “The railroad let me go.”

  “They did what?” Caudell said indignantly. “Why would they go and do a damnfool thing like that? Where are they going to find anyone half as good as you?”

  “That I don’t know. They don’t either, I’m sure. They let me go anyhow,” Pleasants said.” As for why…shall we go for a walk?” His eyes slid to the house. Caudell heard Barbara Bissett moving around in the parlor. He caught Pleasants’s drift, nodded, and started down the street. Pleasants came with him. A backwards glance showed Caudell the widow disappointedly standing by a front window.

  “Tell me,” Caudell said after they’d got out of earshot. He kept his voice low.

  So did Pleasants. “It was the way I treated the Negroes, they said.”

  “What?” Caudell gaped. Memories of Josephine’s terrified face—and of her sweet, ripe body—surged through him. “You were too rough on them?” He could not imagine Pleasants, whose disposition lived up to his name, producing that kind of fear in anyone.

  “Too rough?” His friend stared, too, then started to laugh, rather bitterly. “No, no, no. The railroad let me go because I treated them too much like men.”

  “Is that what happened?” Caudell said. He’d heard of other Northerners dismissed from positions for just the same reason.

  “That’s what happened, by God.” Pleasants searched for a way to explain himself: “Nate, you’re a teacher. You must know the difference between people who are stupid and people who are only ignorant.”

  “Of course I do.” Before he went on, Caudell looked around. They’d walked south from the widow Bissett’s house. A couple of minutes were plenty to get them to the edge of town. No one was around to overhear. “Too many of the people in this county are ignorant. Plenty in my company couldn’t write their names, or read them if they were written out. But I don’t reckon there are more stupid people here than anywhere else. I taught more than one man his letters while we were in the army,” And Mollie Bean, too, he added to himself. “They learned fine, when I gave them the chance they hadn’t had before.”

  “I’ve had the same experience, with the Cornishmen and Irish and Germans who work the Pennsylvania mines. They don’t know much, but they’re not idiots or children—show them what they need to do, explain why, and they’ll go on from there. You don’t need to stand over them with a whip. The ones who won’t work, you turn loose.”

  “You can’t turn niggers loose,” Caudell pointed out.

  “That’s true, but I didn’t want to stand over them with a whip, either. I was afraid I’d have to: you people have kept them pig-ignorant, much worse than the white men who used to work for me up North. But I decided I’d do the same as I did there—I broke the gangs in half, setting ‘em against each other, and I gave half a dollar to each man on the crew that put down the most ties or hauled the most gravel for the roadbed each day. I gave them work quotas they had to meet, or else neither half got paid. I wanted ‘em to have a reason to work besides my say-so, if you see what I mean. And after I gave’ em that reason, I just stood back and let’ em go to it.”

  “How did all that work? I know some white men who’d swing a hammer for half a dollar a day.” In summer, Caudell thought, he might have been one of those men himself.

  “Don’t forget they only got the money if they did the most work. That went the same as it would in the mines—they got the idea real quick. And inside of a week, somebody in one half-gang figured out a faster way to get the gravel from the freight car to the roadway. The day after that, both half-gangs were doing it the new way. Be damned if I know whether niggers are as smart as white folks, Nate, but they aren’t as stupid as people down here think, and that’s a fact.”

  “If you got the work out of them, how could the railroad people complain?” Caudell asked.

  “I guess the trouble is, if you treat a Negro like a man, he’s going to act like a man. My gangs started bragging and strutting in front of other laborers, and getting in fights with them, and even talking back to whites who showed they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

  “Uh-oh,” Caudell said.

  “Uh-oh is right,” Pleasants agreed. “You ask me, that’s a stupid thing for a Negro to try in this country, no matter how right he is—maybe especially if he’s right. But somebody who feels like a man doesn’t take kindly to orders from a fool. The whole thing was partly my fault, too. My crews were used to telling me when they thought they had good ideas, or if they thought I had a bad one. I’d listen. Why not? Sometimes they were right. Down here, though, if you’re black, you’re wrong.”

  “You talk like an abolitionist,” Caudell said.

  Pleasants shrugged. “If niggers really are a lot less than whites—if they’re stupid by nature, I mean—I might see some justice in slavery. If they’re backwards just because they’re ignorant, why not enslave ignorant white men, too?”

  Caudell pondered that. In his mind, he saw Georgie Ballentine again; and black men in blue uniforms standing up under the fire of AK-47s; and Josephine, lovely flesh to be sold and abused because it came in a dark wrapping. Was that justice? Before the war, he’d taken it for granted. He’d taken a lot of things for granted before the war. He wondered what would have happened had the North won and forced the South to free its slaves. How would they live? Where would they work? “You couldn’t just go and turn them loose all at once,” he said.

  “Mmm—maybe not,” Pleasants said, though he didn’t sound convinced. Then he laughed. “I suppose you’d lynch anybody who tried, after you’re just through fighting a war to keep them slaves.”

  “The war wasn’t about slaves,” Caudell said. “At least, it wasn’t about slaves till Lincoln made it that way. He lost the war, and he’s not U.S. President anymore, either. And the niggers the Yankees freed while they were holding our land are just going to complicate our lives for the next twenty years.”

  “Not if Nathan Bedford Forrest has his way,” Pleasants said. When Caudell looked a question at him, he went on, “By the papers, Forrest would just as soon kill the Negroes he catches as make slaves out of them again.”

  “He’s a hard man, by all accounts,” Caudell admitted. “Some folks like to take that line.” As vividly as if it had happened the day before, he heard the bark of an AK-47, saw a grinning Billie Beddingfield standing over the corpses of two Negro soldiers who had tried to surrender at Bealeton.

  Pleasants watched the line between his eyes deepen, the corners of his mouth turn down. “You don’t have the stomach for massacre yourself, do you?”

  “I guess not.” Caudell felt that in some obscure way he betrayed the Confederacy by admitting his doubts to this man from the North, who happened to be his friend. To keep from having to do it again, he changed the subject: “What will you do now? Head back to Pennsylvania?”

  “That’s the first thing I thought of, I tell you frankly. Then I had a better idea.” Pleasants smiled foxily. “You know the old saying, ‘Living well is the best revenge’? The railroad paid me good money, and I never did get around to buying that house down in Wilmington, so I have a tidy sum in a bank there. I was thinking of moving up here to Nash County, buying myself a farm, and working it with free labor, white and black both. How does that strike you?”

  “Your new neighbors may not like it—”

  “Along with the farm, I’ll buy a rifle,” Pleasants said, looking very much like a man who had commanded a Union regiment.

  “—but if anybody can make a go of it, I expect you’re the fellow,” Caudell finished. He meant it. If ever he’d
met an all-around competent man, Henry Pleasants was the one. “Come to think about it, folks hereabouts will likely give you more leeway than they would somebody who was born in North Carolina. They’ll reckon you’re a damnfool crazy Yankee who doesn’t know any better.”

  “I love you too, Nate.” Pleasants snorted in suppressed mirth. “Maybe I am a damnfool crazy Yankee. If I had any sense, I would go back to the United States, you know? But letting a bunch of rich peckerheads in embroidered waistcoats run me out of here just sticks in my craw. So I figure I’ll stay around and show ‘em.”

  “You’re stubborn enough to make a Southern man, that’s certain.” Caudell cocked his head to one side.” You aim to buy a farm up here, you say? Why not down around Wilmington? The land is better there. You could raise rice or indigo, make more than you would here at tobacco and corn.”

  “The delta land is richer, but it costs more, too. And besides—” Pleasants paused to clap Caudell on the back. “I thought I’d sooner live close by a friend.”

  “Thank you, Henry.” They walked along in companionable silence for several steps. Caudell tried to remember if he’d ever had a finer compliment. He couldn’t think of one. A few stars poked through the clouds that drifted by overhead. The evening, he realized, was getting chilly. It had a habit of doing that in fall, even if one tended to forget about such things during the seemingly endless days of summer. Which reminded him—”Do you have a place to stay in town?”

  “Yes, I’ve hired a room over the Liberty Bell tavern, thanks—the same as we did in Rocky Mount, that first day we met.”

  “Ah.” The neutral noise covered a certain amount of relief. Caudell would gladly have shared his room with his friend, but he was far from sure Barbara Bissett would have been glad about having an unexpected guest. And while Pleasants would have to endure her gimlet gaze for only one day, he himself might never hear the end of her complaints.

  Pleasants said, “Do you remember what else we did in Rocky Mount that day?”

  “Pieces of it, anyhow,” Caudell said, smiling reminiscently.

  “Shall we go and do it again?”

  “Don’t know if I want to get that drunk. I have to teach tomorrow, and I’d sort of like to be able to know who I am and what I’m doing. But I wouldn’t say no to a drink or three.” Caudell and Pleasants both turned around in the road. The not-so-bright lights of the not-so-big city lay ahead. They hurried toward them.

  Raeford Liles was putting boxes of cloves and peppercorns on a shelf in a back corner of his general store when Nate Caudell came in. Behind the counter, a gray-haired Negro made change for a woman buying a thimble. She put money and thimble into her handbag, nodded to Caudell as she headed for the door.

  “Morning, Mrs. Moye,” he told her. She nodded again. The bell jingled to signal her departure. Caudell said, “I didn’t know you’d finally bought yourself a nigger, Mr. Liles.”

  “Who, Israel there?” Liles turned around, shook his head. “Didn’t buy him, Nate—ain’t you seen niggers too high for the likes of me? He’s a free nigger, new in town just a couple days and lookin’ for work, so I done hired him. He’s right sharp, Israel is. Israel, this here’s Nate Caudell, the schoolteacher. “

  “I’s pleased to make your ‘quaintance, suh,” Israel said.

  “Where’d you come from, Israel?” Caudell asked.

  “Las’ few years, suh, I been livin’ ovah in New Berne, an’ in the Hayti—the colored folks’ town—across the Trent from it.”

  “Have you?” Caudell eyed the black man with new curiosity. New Berne had been in Federal hands from early 1862 to the end of the war, and served as a mecca for escaped slaves from all over North Carolina. Colored regiments recruited there had raided the northeastern part of the state, and more blacks in the area labored to support the Union war effort. Some of them had left with the withdrawing Yankees, but not all. Caudell wondered if Israel’s freedom papers were genuine—and if Raeford Liles had bothered asking to see them.

  The Negro reached under the counter. “If you Nate Caudell, suh, you gots a letter here.”

  He gave Caudell an envelope which, sure enough, was addressed to him. He recognized Mollie Bean’s handwriting. For a moment, that was all he noticed. Then he blurted, “You can read!”

  “Yes, suh, so I can,” Israel admitted. He sounded anxious; teaching blacks their letters was against the law in North Carolina. Defensively, he went on, “The Yankees, they had schools there, an’ they learned lots of us to read. Now they showed me, don’ reckon I can jus’ go an’ forget it again.”

  “I hired him on account of he reads,” Raeford Liles said. “You’re one who’s always been talkin’ about changin’ times, Nate, an’ I reckon maybe you’re right, at least partways—like Israel said, he ain’t gonna forget what he learned. The damnyankees messed with niggers for years at New Berne, an’ at Beaufort an’ Carolina City an’ Washington an’ Plymouth, too. There’s probably thousands and thousands o’ niggers in the state with their letters now, goddamn it. Shootin’ ‘em’d be purely a waste; might as well get the most use we can out of ‘em.”

  Israel waited to hear how Caudell would answer. More than a few North Carolinians, Caudell thought, would cheerfully have shot thousands of black men. But as Henry Pleasants had said, he couldn’t stomach a massacre. “I think you’ve done well, Mr. Liles,” he said. “No matter how much we wish they could, things aren’t going back to just like they were before the war. Wars tear things up; that’s what they’re all about. One way or another, though, I expect we’ll get along.”

  “You got pretty good sense, Nate,” Liles said.

  “Yes, suh,” Israel agreed softly. “Tha’s all I try to do, is git along.”

  Caudell shrugged. “If I’m so all-fired smart, why aren’t I rich?” He took the letter and walked out into the street. Once out there, he used his free hand to jam his hat as far down over his ears as he could. The trees that lined Washington and Alston were bare-branched now; snow had fallen once or twice. This Saturday afternoon was clear enough, but Caudell’s breath puffed out in a smoky cloud.

  He opened the envelope as he walked back to the widow Bissett’s house. “Dear Nate,” he read, “the big thing hear in Rivington to day is skandul. A nigger went name of Josefeen wich belonged to one of the Rivington men called Peet Hardy has gon and hung her self. I seen her oncet or twice in town and its a shaym on a count of she was a bout the purttiest gal black or wite I ever seen. But I reckon I aynt serprized on a count of I went to Peet Hardys hous oncet and I aynt never going back a gain not for all the gold in the woreld he is that crool. The Rivington men is hard on there niggers weve noed that sins we was in the army to gether but even the rest of them has bad things to say a bout Feet Hardy. Non of the girls wil go to him no more Im not the onely one. I no you dont like me to tawk a bout wat I am and wat I do but Nate to day I cant help it I feel so bad for that Josefeen. If you are my true frend I no you will understand. Yor true trend al ways, M. Bean, 47NC.”

  Caudell stared down Alston Street without really seeing it. Instead, with frightening vividness, he saw Josephine’s dress fall from her shoulders, saw her dark charms exposed for buyers to admire, saw the frustrated lust on the Alabama man’s face when Piet Hardie—a schoolmaster even in his own thoughts, he spelled the Rivington man’s name correctly in his mind—outbid him. He also saw her face peering through the jasmine by Stony Creek, heard the terror in her voice, heard the nigger hounds baying on her trail. He wondered what Hardie had done to her, to make her first try to flee and then take her own life. Mollie would know, he thought, and then shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. Some knowledge, he decided, he could live without.

  He read the letter again, then slowly and deliberately tore it into tiny pieces. He hurled them down to the dirt of the street. The chilly wind whirled them away, as if it were snowing again after all.

  * XIII *

  Robert E. Lee glanced over at a map of Kentucky, then
noted a last couple of corrections to an order changing the size of the garrisons in the new Confederate fortifications along the Ohio River. With a satisfied nod, he fixed his signature to the bottom of the paper. Then he got up, stretched, and set his hat on his head. The sky was beginning to go more purple than blue—enough for one day. In peacetime, he could think that and keep his conscience clear.

  The lobby of Mechanic’s Hall was all but deserted when he went downstairs. Even John Beauchamp Jones’s proud brass nameplate presided over a bare desk and an empty chair. A sentry came to attention as Lee walked past him into the gathering twilight.

  Another man in Confederate gray was coming down the steps of the building across the street from the War Department, the building that was the Richmond headquarters of America Will Break. Lee’s mouth tightened, ever so slightly; he wished soldiers would stay away from the Rivington men, especially since the war was more than a year and a half over. He had contemplated a general order to that effect, but set the notion aside as being unjust and without foundation in fact: the Rivington men troubled him, but on balance had done his country far more good than harm.

  As he and the other man approached each other, he noticed the fellow’s tunic buttons were grouped in three groups of three. His frown deepened. What was a general doing, consorting with the Rivington men? He peered through the gathering darkness, but did not recognize the officer.

  The other man appeared to have no such doubts about him, but then his face was arguably the most widely known in the Confederacy. The man saluted, then held out a hand and said, “General Lee, sir, I’m delighted to meet you at last. I am Nathan Bedford Forrest.”