“Listen, people, anybody see a paper the past couple days or listen to news on the wireless?” Jerry Dover asked.
None of the waiters and assistant cooks and dishwashers and janitors said anything. Scipio might have bought a Constitutionalist if rain hadn’t kept newsboys off the street. He wasn’t sure how many of the other Negroes in the crew could read. Wireless? Sets were cheap these days, but nobody here got rich at his job.
“No?” Dover shrugged. “All right. I suppose you heard about the colored fellow who took a shot at President Featherston at the Olympics.” Again, nobody said anything. Too bad he missed, was what Scipio was thinking. His boss went on, “There’s an order from the president that colored folks—all colored folks—have got to pay a fine to the government on account of that. And there’s an order that anybody who’s got colored folks working for him has to take twenty dollars out of their pay and send it to Richmond to make sure that fine gets paid. So that’s what’ll happen. I’m sorry, but I can’t do a thing about it.”
“Twenty dollars?” The pained echo rose from the throats of all the men there. Twenty dollars was a lot of money—a week’s wages for the ones who made the most, two weeks’ for the rest. Scipio cursed softly under his breath. A twenty-dollar hole in his budget wouldn’t be easy to fill. Somebody asked, “How is we supposed to git by without that money?”
Jerry Dover spread his hands. “I can’t answer that. All I can tell you is, I don’t dare try to duck this, not with what they’ll do to me if I get caught.”
From a lot of men, that would have been a polite lie. Scipio believed the manager of the Hunstman’s Lodge; Dover treated the black men who worked for him like human beings. “Mistuh Dover, suh!” he called.
“What is it, Xerxes?”
“Kin you dock we a dollar, two dollars, a week, so it don’t hurt so bad?”
“Yeah!” Several other men spoke up. Others nodded. One of the assistant cooks said, “I buys everything on the installment plan. I should oughta pay this here fine the same way.”
But Dover shook his head. “I would if I could, but I can’t. The order says it’s got to come out of your next pay. It’s supposed to hurt. That’s why they’re doing it. I’m sorry, Xerxes. It was a good idea.”
Dully, Scipio nodded. It’s supposed to hurt. He’d known that from the minute the Freedom Party won in 1933. No, he’d known it from the moment he first heard Jake Featherston speak in a park here in Augusta, back when the Party was young and small. He asked, “Mistuh Dover, suh, what keep de gummint from takin’ away anudder twenty dollar from we whenever dey please?”
Jerry Dover looked startled. He was, within his limits, a decent man. Plainly, that hadn’t occurred to him. It hadn’t occurred to some of Scipio’s fellow workers, either, not by their horrified exclamations. And Dover proved his honesty, for he answered, “I’ll be damned if I know.”
The Huntsman’s Lodge was a glum place that night. Some of the men who came to dine there wore Freedom Party pins on their lapels. Somehow or other, waiters contrived to spill hot or greasy food on several of them, or on their wives or girlfriends. The whites were furious. The Negroes were apologetic. So was Jerry Dover. “I’m sure it was an accident, sir,” he said repeatedly. “We have a very fine staff here, but they are human.”
Freedom Party men don’t want to believe that, Scipio thought. He’d taken his tiny revenge on a man with one of those enamel pins on his tuxedo jacket. Cleaning the jacket wouldn’t come cheap, but it wouldn’t come to twenty dollars, either.
By contrast, two or three waiters found themselves with unusually large tips. The men who gave them might have been silently saying they didn’t approve of collective fines. You could always tell when a man got an unexpected tip. He would straighten and smile in delighted surprise before he could catch himself. Scipio kept hoping he would find a sympathetic customer like that. He kept hoping, and he kept being disappointed.
When he left the Lodge at half past twelve, the rain was still coming down. He didn’t mind. Fewer troublemakers, white or black, were on the streets in weather like this. So he thought, anyhow. And, indeed, no one troubled him. But he was going up the front steps of his apartment building when he heard gunfire from the white part of town. It wasn’t just a pistol shot; it was a regular fusillade from several Tredegars. Back during the brief and bloody history of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he’d come to know the sound of military rifles much better than he ever wanted to. Some things you didn’t forget, no matter how much you wished you could.
“What was that?” Bathsheba asked worriedly when he went inside.
“Dunno,” he answered. That was technically true, but he had his suspicions—his fears.
So did his wife. “You reckon some niggers doin’ somethin’ stupid?” She sounded frightened, too. And she didn’t know about the fine the government was levying.
“Wouldn’t be surprised. We all be sorry if they is. That one nigger, he shoot at the president. . . .” He told her of the fine.
“Twenty dollars!” Bathsheba’s anguish was painful to hear. She knew how much that was, how badly it would hurt their finances.
“Ain’t nothin’ I kin do about it,” Scipio said. More gunfire burst out in the white part of Augusta: Tredegars again, and then the smaller answering pops of pistols. Black attackers and roused whites fighting back with whatever weapons they had handy, Scipio judged.
A moment later, a hard hammering made him shiver, even though it wasn’t close. Somebody had a machine gun. He’d seen what such reaping machines of death could do. By the way the rifle fire suddenly slacked off, the machine gun didn’t belong to the raiders.
Bathsheba’s face was a mask of pain. She had to be thinking the same thing. “Them poor boys,” she whispered. “Them poor boys gettin’ all shot up.”
Scipio nodded heavily. But his pain wasn’t just for the raiders who’d bitten off more than they could chew. Bitter as wormwood, Revelations said. He understood that now, where he never had before. “Them damn fools give de buckra de excuse to come down on we even harder’n ever.”
“How they come down on us harder’n they already doin’?” his wife asked.
“Suppose Georgia fine de niggers in de state? Suppose Augusta fine de niggers in de city? Richmond do it. Dey reckons dey kin do it, too, mebbe,” Scipio said. Bathsheba flinched as if he’d hit her, then reluctantly nodded. With the Freedom Party in the saddle, anything was possible, anything at all. That was a big part of what made it so frightening.
Another Inauguration Day. Nellie Jacobs wondered how many she’d seen. She hadn’t gone to all of them. Work, indifference, and war had kept her away at one time or another. This year, though, February first fell on a fine, bright Monday. The temperature got up close to fifty. It might almost have been spring. She decided to close the coffeehouse and go hear what Al Smith had to say.
She took Clara with her: the high school closed for the day. That her younger daughter, her accidental daughter, should be in high school still struck her as amazing, to say nothing of unnatural. Hadn’t Clara been born just a few weeks ago? That was how it seemed to Nellie. But Clara was taller than she was. She’d grown up while Nellie wasn’t looking.
She’d grown snippy while Nellie wasn’t looking, too. “Do we have to go with Edna and Merle and Armstrong?” she said.
The last name was the problem. Clara and Armstrong Grimes had never got along, not since she was a toddler and he was a baby. She didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and she wasn’t shy about letting the world know as much, either.
“He’s my only grandson, and Edna’s my daughter just as much as you are, Miss Smarty-Britches, and Merle Grimes is a good man—and I don’t say that about many men,” Nellie answered. “So you’ll come along and act polite, or you’ll find out you’re not too big for me to warm your backside.”
One of these days, that kind of argument wouldn’t work. She’d have a fight on her hands if she tried it. She remembered
that from dealing—trying to deal—with Edna. She got by with it today, though. Clara might be snippy, but she wasn’t ready to fight back hard yet.
Merle Grimes wore his Purple Heart. Edna had on her Order of Remembrance, Second Class. Nellie wished she’d worn her medal. She’d earned it, where Edna hadn’t come close to deserving hers.
They got pretty good bleacher seats on the Mall in front of the Washington Monument. Nellie remembered when it had been blasted down to a stump. Now it stood tall again. All it needed were hieroglyphics carved on the sides to make it seem perfectly Egyptian.
Nellie endured the parade of soldiers and workers and bands. They weren’t what she’d come to see or hear, though they entranced both Clara and Edna, and Merle tapped the tip of his cane up and down between his feet in time to the music. Armstrong also seemed bored with parades and bands, but Armstrong made a habit of seeming bored with everything, so Nellie wasn’t sure what that meant.
She leaned forward when the big black limousine carrying Hoover and Smith and La Follette pulled up to the platform on which the new president and vice president would take the oath of office. She hadn’t voted for Smith, but she wanted to hear what he had to say for himself.
Chief Justice Cicero Pittman probably hadn’t voted for Al Smith, either. He was a Hoover appointee, replacing at last the fierce and venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a veteran of the War of Secession: he’d outlasted even George Custer in public life. Pittman was round and benign-looking, unlike the hawk-faced, piratically mustached Holmes.
Charlie La Follette took the vice-presidential oath first. No outgoing vice president congratulated him, for Hoover, having been elected as vice president himself, had no replacement when propelled to the presidency on Calvin Coolidge’s death. Hoover did rise to shake Al Smith’s hand. The atmosphere on the platform was what diplomats called correct: people who despised one another did their best to behave as if they didn’t.
After Chief Justice Pittman administered the oath of office to President Smith, the jurist sat down. Smith stayed behind the forest of microphones that would send his words to the crowd and take them across the country by wireless. His unruly shock of black hair tried to deny that he was in his early sixties, but his jowls affirmed it.
“Workers and people of the United States, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing me here today.” Al Smith’s voice was raspy and full of New York City. “I have a lot of work to do, and I am going to do it. It is the people’s work, and none is more important.” Applause washed over him. He seemed to grow a couple of inches taller when it did. Nellie had seen that before with other politicians; Teddy Roosevelt and Upton Sinclair had both been the same way.
“Some folks said that because I am a Catholic, that was the kiss of death for my chances.” As was his way, Smith met the issue head-on. Scorn in his voice, he continued, “They used to say the same thing about any Socialist’s chances. What I say is, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.”
Nellie joined the startled laughter. Up on the platform, Al Smith grinned. They didn’t call him the Happy Warrior for nothing. “And what I say is, you’ve heard a lot of baloney about what I’ll do and what I won’t, especially about our newest states.” President—no, former President—Hoover squirmed in his seat. Smith went on, “Let’s look at the record. The record shows we won the war and we took Houston and Kentucky away from our Confederate neighbors at gunpoint. We didn’t ask the people who were living there what they thought. We just went ahead and grabbed with both hands. Now we’re paying the piper on account of that.”
Merle Grimes started tapping his cane again—this time, Nellie judged, in anger. She needed a moment to realize Smith hadn’t said a word about Sequoyah. But it was full of Indians, so what difference did that make?
“We have to find some way to straighten things out there,” Smith said. “I don’t know yet what that will be, but I intend to work with President Featherston to learn. If I need to, I will go to Richmond to seek it out.”
For a moment, that didn’t get applause. It got nothing but astonished silence. No president of the United States had ever said anything like it, not in all the years since the Confederate States rammed secession down the USA’s throat. The cheers it did get after that long, amazed beat were all the more fervent because of the preceding surprise.
Nellie didn’t join in them. She had her own ideas about Confederates, and cozying up to them wasn’t one of those ideas. From then on, she stopped listening. Armstrong said to Edna, “Granny’s falling asleep,” but that wasn’t true. She just wasn’t interested any more. She almost told him so—she almost told the obnoxious brat where to go and how to get there—but it didn’t seem worth the effort.
Next thing she remembered, loud clapping made her jump, so maybe her grandson hadn’t been as wrong as she’d thought. Smith was done. Armstrong’s still obnoxious, though, she thought, looking around furtively to make sure no one had paid too much attention to her lapse. Her voice was louder and cheerier than it had to be when she said, “Well, let’s go back to my place.”
“All right, Ma.” Edna, by contrast, sounded oddly gentle.
“Are you all right, Ma?” Clara asked.
“I’m fine,” Nellie declared. Then she stood up too quickly, and felt dizzy for a moment. Oh, for God’s sake, she thought, mortified. They’re all going to think I’m nothing but a little old lady.
Merle Grimes steadied her with a strong hand on her elbow. “Don’t worry, Mother Jacobs,” he said. “We’ll get you home just fine.”
“Thank you, Merle,” Nellie said. “You’re a good son-in-law.” Merle smiled. Armstrong made a face. Merle was good and strict with him, and didn’t put up with any guff, the way Edna sometimes did.
When they went back to the coffeehouse above which Nellie had lived for so many years, Edna and Clara both crowded into the kitchen with her as she took a big frying chicken out of the icebox. “Why don’t you let us give you a hand, Ma?” Clara said. Edna nodded.
“You can stick me in a rest home the day I don’t know how to cut up a chicken and put it in hot fat,” Nellie said tartly. Her daughters looked at each other and both started to laugh. With identical shrugs, they retreated.
And then, with almost the first cut she made, Nellie got her own hand on the web between thumb and forefinger. She said something she hadn’t said since her days as a working girl. Armstrong was sitting closest to her. His head came up in astonishment. She glared at him, defying him to make something of it or even to believe he’d heard what he thought he had. He looked away in a hurry.
Satisfied, Nellie went back to work. She didn’t even bother washing her hands, not that it would have done much good when she was still messing with chicken pieces. Once the chicken was dredged in cornmeal and sizzling in the fat, she did rinse off. The wound hadn’t bled much. She forgot about it.
Everyone said the chicken was the best she’d ever made. She thought so, too. It turned out crisp and juicy and not a bit greasy. Clara and Edna insisted that they wash the dishes. Triumphantly full, Nellie let them.
When she woke up a couple of days later with a sore hand, she had trouble even remembering what she’d done to it. Only when she looked down and saw how red and angry the cut looked did she nod to herself and think, Oh, that’s right—the chicken. Then she went on about her business, favoring the hand as much as she could.
Clara noticed when she came home from school. “You ought to take that to a doctor, Ma,” she said. “It doesn’t look so good.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Nellie said. “It’ll get better. Besides, who can afford doctors?”
But the hand didn’t get better, and the next day she started feeling weak and hot and run-down. Real alarm in her voice, Clara said, “I’m going to get the doctor over here right now.” Nellie started to tell her not to bother, but then didn’t. She didn’t feel up to it—and besides, Clara was already out the door.
The doctor look
ed Nellie over, listened to her heart, took her pulse, and took her temperature. “What is it?” Nellie asked, though she was too miserable to care much about the answer.
“It’s 104.4, Mrs. Jacobs,” he said reluctantly. “You have blood poisoning, I’m afraid. It could be . . . serious. Do you understand me?”
When Nellie nodded, the room spun. Even so, she said, “Of course I do.” After a moment, she added, “And the coffee, and the raspberries . . .” Even she had no idea what that meant. She tried to laugh, but didn’t seem to have the strength.
“What do we do?” Clara asked from a million miles away.
“Keep her comfortable. Aspirin, to fight the fever. Soup, water, juice—whatever she can keep down,” the doctor answered, his voice even more distant. “If she beats the infection, she’ll be fine.” He didn’t say what would happen if she didn’t. Clara didn’t ask. Neither did Nellie. She knew. Her body knew, even if the fever clouded her mind.
She remembered very little of the next few days—and less and less as the time went on. In that same dim way, that way beneath consciousness, she knew she was fading, but she’d already faded so far that she had trouble caring. Above her, people seemed to appear and disappear as she drifted in and out of the real world: Clara, Edna, Merle, Armstrong. She would blink, and one would turn to another. It might have been magic.
Once, though, when she saw Edna, she knew there was something she had to say. After a struggle, she found it: “Bill Reach.” Forcing out the name took all the strength she had.
“What is it, Ma?” Tears glinted off Edna’s cheeks.
“Bill Reach,” Nellie repeated, and Edna nodded, so she’d understood. Fighting for every word, Nellie went on, “Killed him. Stuck him. Fuck him.”
The Victorious Opposition Page 27