“What’ll they do for us?” somebody shouted from another window.
“Won’t do nothin’,” one of the leaders answered. “Nothin’. Said we deserves every bit of it, an’ mo’ besides.”
After that, a few Negroes had tried to fight back against the rampaging mob. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Dark bodies hung from lamp posts, silhouetted against the roaring, leaping flames.
From behind Scipio, Bathsheba said, “Maybe we ought to run.”
He shook his head. “Where we run to?” he asked bluntly. “The buckra catch we, we hangs on de lamp posts, too. Dis buildin’ don’ burn, we don’ go nowhere.”
He sounded altogether sure of himself. He had that gift, even using the slurred dialect of a Negro from the swamps of the Congaree. Back in the days when he’d been Anne Colleton’s butler, she’d also made him learn to talk like an educated white man: like an educated white man with a poker up his ass, he thought. He’d seemed even more authoritative then. He hadn’t always been right. He knew that, as any man must. But he’d always sounded right. That also counted.
Raucous, baying laughter floated up from the street. Along with those never-ending shouts of, “Freedom!” somebody yelled, “Kill the niggers!” In an instant, as if the words crystallized what they’d come into the Terry to do, the rioters took up the cry: “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!”
Scipio turned to his wife. “You still wants to run?”
Biting her lip, she got out the word, “No.” She was a mulatto, her skin several shades lighter than his. She was light enough to go paler still; at the moment, she was almost pale enough to pass for white.
“Why they hate us like that, Pa?” Antoinette, their daughter, was nine: a good age for asking awkward questions.
In the Confederate States, few questions were more awkward than that one. And the brute fact was so much taken for granted, few people above the age of nine ever bothered asking why. Scipio answered, “Dey is white an’ we is black. Dey don’ need no mo’n dat.”
With the relentless logic of childhood, his son, Cassius, who was six, turned the response on its head: “If we is black an’ they is white, shouldn’t we ought to hate them, too?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. Bathsheba said, “Yes, but it don’t do us no good, sweetheart, on account of they’s stronger’n we is.”
That yes had led directly to the Red uprisings during the Great War. The rest of her sentence had led just as directly to their failure. What do we do? Scipio wondered. What can we do? He’d wondered that ever since he’d seen his first Freedom Party rally, a small thing at a park here in Augusta. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to worry about it. That hope, like so many others, lay shattered tonight.
“Kill the niggers!” The cry rang out again, louder and fiercer than ever. Screams said the rioters were turning words into deeds, too.
Gunfire rang out from the building across the street from Scipio’s: a black man emptying a pistol into the mob. Some of the screams that followed burst from white throats. Good! Savage exultation blazed through Scipio. See how you like it, you sons of bitches! Wasn’t keeping us cooped up in this poor, miserable place enough for you?
But the white men didn’t and wouldn’t think that way, of course. Cet animal est méchant. On l’attaque, il se defende. That was how Voltaire had put it, anyhow. This animal is treacherous. If it is attacked, it defends itself. Thanks to Miss Anne (though she’d done it for herself, not for him), Scipio knew Voltaire well. How many of the rioters did? How many had even heard of him?
A fusillade of fire, from pistols, rifles, and what sounded like a machine gun, tore into the building from which the Negro had shot. More than a few bullets slammed into the building in which Scipio and his family lived, too. Then some whites chucked a whiskey bottle full of gasoline with a burning cloth wick into the entryway of the building across the street. The bottle shattered. Fire splashed outward.
The white men whooped and hollered and slapped one another on the back with glee. “Burn, baby, burn!” one of them shouted. Soon they were all yelling it, along with, “Kill the niggers!”
“Xerxes, they gwine burn this here place next,” Bathsheba said urgently. “We gots to git out while we still kin.”
He wished he could tell her she was wrong. Instead, he nodded. “We gits de chillun. We gits de money. An’ we gits—out de back way to de alley, on account o’ we don’ las’ a minute if we goes out de front.”
Maybe the building wouldn’t burn. Maybe the white men rampaging through the Terry would go on to some other crime instead. But if the roominghouse did catch fire, his family was doomed. Better to take their chances on the streets than to try to get out of a building ablaze.
Herding Antoinette and Cassius along in front of them, he and Bathsheba raced toward the stairway. A door flew open on the far side of the hall. “You crazy?” a woman in that flat said. “We safer in here than we is out there.”
“Ain’t so,” Scipio answered. “Dey likely fixin’ to burn dis place.” The woman’s eyes opened so wide, he could see white all around the iris. She slammed the door, but he didn’t think she’d stay in there long.
He and his family weren’t the only people going down the stairs as fast as they could. Some of the Negroes trying to escape the roominghouse dashed for the front entrance. Maybe they didn’t know about the back way. Maybe, in their blind panic, they forgot it. Or maybe they were just stupid. Blacks suffered from that disease no less than whites. Whatever the reason, they paid for their mistake. Gunshots echoed. Screams followed. So did hoarse bellows of triumph from the mob.
They’ve just shot down people who never did—never could do—them any harm, Scipio thought as he scuttled toward the back door. Why are they so proud of it? He’d seen blacks exulting over what they meted out to whites during the Red revolt. But that exultation had 250 years of reasons behind it. This? This made no sense at all to him.
Out the door. Down the rickety stairs. Pray no white men prowled the alley. The stinks of rotting garbage and smoke and fear filled Scipio’s nostrils. Away, away, away! “Where we run to, Pa?” Antoinette asked as he shoved her on ahead of him.
“Go where it darkest,” Scipio answered. “Whatever you does, don’ let no buckra see you.”
Easy to say. Hard to do. Most nights in the Terry were black as pitch, black as coal, blacker than the residents. The city fathers of Augusta weren’t about to waste money on street lighting for Negroes. But the fires burning here, there, everywhere didn’t just burn people they trapped. They also helped betray others by showing them as they tried to get away.
Down the alley, into another. Scipio stepped in something nasty. He didn’t know what it was, didn’t care to find out. As long as he and his family got away, nothing else mattered. Into a side street that would take them to the edge of town, take them out of the center of the storm.
The side street was dark—no fires close by. It looked deserted. But as Scipio and his kin ran up it, a sharp challenge came from up ahead: “Who are you? Answer right this second or you’re dead, whoever the hell you are.”
Scipio hadn’t used his white man’s voice since not long after the war ended. He’d sometimes wondered if it still worked. Now it burst from him as if it were his everyday speech: “Go on about your business. None of those damned niggers around here.”
Yes, it still held all the punch he’d ever been able to pack into it. “Thank you, sir,” said the white man who’d challenged him, and then, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Scipio echoed gravely. He dropped back into the dialect of the Congaree to whisper, “Come on!” to Bathsheba and the children. They said not a word. They just hurried up the street. No one shot at them.
Nor did anyone else challenge them before they reached a stand of pine woods on the outskirts of Augusta. Scipio didn’t know what he would do come morning. He would worry about that then. For now, he was alive, and likely to stay that way till the sun ca
me up.
“Do Jesus!” All his weariness and strain came out in the two words.
Then Bathsheba asked him the question he’d known she would: “Where you learn to talk dat way? Ain’t never heard you talk dat way before.”
“Reckoned I better,” Scipio said: an answer that was not an answer.
It didn’t distract his wife. He’d hoped it would, but hadn’t expected it to. Bathsheba said, “I never knew you could talk like that. You didn’t jus’ pull it out of the air, neither. Ain’t nobody could. You been able to talk dat way all along. You got to’ve been able to talk dat way all along. So where you learn?”
“Long time gone, when I was livin’ in South Carolina,” he said. That much was true. “Never did like to use it much. Nigger git in bad trouble, he talk like white folks.” That was also true.
True or not, it didn’t satisfy Bathsheba. “You got more ‘splainin’ to do than that. What other kind o’ strange stuff you gwine come out with all of a sudden?”
“I dunno,” he answered. Bathsheba put her hands on her hips. Scipio grimaced. Her curiosity promised to be harder to escape than the race riot still wracking the Terry.
New York City. The Lower East Side. Tall tenements blocking out the sun. Iron fire escapes red with rust. Poor, shabbily dressed people in the crowd, chattering to one another in a mixture of English and Yiddish and Russian and Polish and Romanian. Red Socialist posters on the walls and fences, some of them put up where Democratic posters had been torn down. A soapbox that wasn’t even a soapbox but a beer barrel.
Flora Blackford hadn’t felt so much at home for years.
She’d been a Socialist agitator in the Fourteenth Ward twenty years before, at the outbreak of the Great War. She’d argued against voting the money for the war. Her party had disagreed. She still wondered whether they’d made a mistake, whether international proletarian solidarity would have been better. She would never know now. What she did know was that the war had cost her brother-in-law his life, that her nephew had become a young man without ever seeing his father, that her brother David had only one leg.
And she knew she couldn’t talk about the war today, not to this crowd. She’d represented this district for years before marrying Hosea Blackford, before becoming first the vice president’s wife and then the First Lady. Now her husband was a private citizen again, trounced by the Democrats when Wall Street collapsed and dragged everything else down with it. Now she wanted her old seat back, and hoped she could take it from the reactionary who’d held it for the past four years.
She pointed out to the crowd, as she had from a different beer barrel twenty years before. “You voted for Democrats because you thought doing nothing was better than doing something. Do you still think so?”
“No!” they shouted, all except for a few heckling Democrats who yelled, “Yes!”
Hecklers Flora could take in stride. “Herbert Hoover has been president for almost two years now. He’s spent all that time sitting on his hands. Are we better off on account of it? Are the lines at the soup kitchens shorter? Are the Hoovervilles any smaller?” She refused to call the shantytowns where down-and-outers lived Blackfordburghs after her husband, though everybody else did. “Are there more jobs? Is there less misery? Tell me the truth, comrades!”
“No!” the crowd shouted again. This time, it drowned out the hecklers.
“That’s right,” Flora said. “No. You know the truth when you hear it. You’re not blind. You’re not stupid. You’ve got eyes to see and brains to think with. If you’re happy with what the Democrats are doing to the United States, vote for my opponent. If you’re not, vote for me. Thank you.”
“Hamburger! Hamburger! Hamburger!” They remembered her maiden name well enough to chant it. She took that as a good sign. She’d long since learned, though, that you couldn’t tell much from crowds. They came out because they wanted to hear you. They were already on your side. The rest of the voters might not be.
Herman Bruck held up a hand to help her descend from her little platform. “Good speech, Flora,” he said. Did he hang on to her hand a little too long? Back in the old days, he’d been sweet on her. He was married himself now, with children of his own. Of course, who could say for sure how much that meant?
“Thank you,” she answered.
“My pleasure.” He tipped his fedora. As always, he was perfectly turned out, today in a snappy double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with lapels sharp enough to cut yourself on them. “I think you’ll win in three weeks.”
“I hope so, that’s all,” Flora said. “We’ll find out about how people feel about Hoover—and about Congressman Lipshitz. If I win, I go back to Philadelphia. If I lose . . .” She shrugged. “If I lose, I have to find something else to do with the rest of my life.”
“Come back to Party headquarters,” Bruck urged. “A lot of the old-timers will be glad to see you, and you’re a legend to the people who’ve come in since you represented this district.”
“A legend? Gottenyu! I don’t want to be a legend,” Flora said in real alarm. “A legend is somebody who’s forgotten things she needs to know. I want people to think I can do good things for them now, not that I’m somebody who used to do good things for them once upon a time.”
“All right.” Herman Bruck made a placating gesture. “I should have put it better. I’m sorry. People still want to see you. Can you come?”
“Tomorrow,” she answered. “Tell everyone I’m sorry, but I don’t think I ought to go over there today. Heaven knows when I’d get home, and I want to go back to the flat and see how Hosea is doing. This cold doesn’t seem to want to go away.” She hoped she didn’t show how worried she was. The difference in their ages hadn’t seemed to matter when she married him, but now, while she remained in vigorous middle age, he was heading toward his seventy-fourth birthday. Illnesses he would have shrugged off even a few years before hung on and on. One of these days . . . Flora resolutely refused to think about that.
Bruck nodded. “Sure. Everybody will understand that. Give him our best, then, and we hope we’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll drive you back to your block of flats.”
She eyed him. Would he cause trouble in the auto? No. He had better sense than that. “Thanks,” she said again. He hurried off to get the motorcar from a side street. The De Soto bespoke prosperity but not riches.
New York City traffic was even crazier than Flora remembered: more motorcars and trucks on the street, more drivers seeming not to care whether they lived or died. This in spite of the subways, she thought, and shuddered. Earlier in the year, she and Hosea and Joshua had been living in Dakota. New York City had five or six times as many people as the big state, and by all appearances had fifty or sixty times as many automobiles.
She let out a sigh of relief at escaping the De Soto. The doorman tipped his cap when she went into the block of flats. The building where she’d lived with her parents and brothers and sisters hadn’t boasted a doorman. It hadn’t boasted an elevator operator—or an elevator—either. Not having to walk up four flights of stairs whenever she went to the flat was pleasant.
Hosea Blackford greeted her with a sneeze. His nose was red. His face, always bony, had lost more flesh. His white hair lay thin and dry across his skull. This wasn’t death’s door—little by little, he was getting well—but the way he looked still alarmed her. After another sneeze, he peered at her over the tops of his reading glasses and brandished the New York Times like a weapon. “Another round of riots down in the Confederate States,” he said. “If that’s not reactionary madness on the march down there, I’ve never seen nor heard of it.”
“Has anyone protested yet?” Flora asked.
Her husband shook his head. “Not a word. The Confederates are saying it’s an internal matter, and our State Department is taking the same line.”
She sighed. “We’d sing a different song if the Freedom Party were going after white men and not Negroes. The injustice, the hypocrisy, are so obvious—but no
body seems to care.”
“A lot of whites in the Confederate States despise Negroes and come right out and say so,” Hosea Blackford said. “A lot of whites in the United States despise Negroes, too. They keep their mouths shut about it, and so they seem tolerant when you look at them alongside the Confederates. They seem tolerant—but they aren’t.”
“I know. I saw that when we were both still in Congress,” Flora said. “It’s not just Democrats, either. Too many Socialists wouldn’t cross the street to do anything for a black man. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if we can do anything about it.”
Hosea nodded. “Even Lincoln said the War of Secession was about trying to preserve the Union, not about the Negro or about slavery. He couldn’t have made anybody march behind his banner if he’d said the other—and even as things were, he failed.” He coughed again. “I wish I would have asked him about that when I met him on the train. I wish we would have talked about all kinds of things we never got to touch.”
“I know,” Flora said. That chance meeting had changed his life. He talked about it often, and ever more so as he got older.
Now he laughed a bitter laugh. “We’re two peas in a pod, Lincoln and I: the two biggest failures as president of the United States.”
“Don’t talk like that!” Flora said.
“Why not? It’s the truth. I’m not a blind man, Flora, and I hope I’m not a fool,” Hosea Blackford said, words that might have come right from her speech. “I had my chance. I didn’t deliver. The voters chose Coolidge instead—and then got Hoover when Cal dropped dead. I don’t know what we did to deserve that. God must have a nasty sense of humor.”
Flora didn’t think of God as having a sense of humor at all. She also didn’t care to be sidetracked. “We can’t just turn our backs on the Negroes in the CSA,” she said.
The Victorious Opposition Page 6