The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  And even a blind man could see the election was a put-up job, too. Yes, the Whigs and the Radical Liberals had nominated candidates, but they had only a slightly better chance of winning than Scipio would have if he’d run against the incumbent president. The Freedom Party dominated the wireless web and the newspapers; the other candidates got only brief and unflattering mention. Despite the rain, Freedom Party stalwarts prowled outside polling places. Freedom Party officials would count most of the votes. Jake Featherston wouldn’t lose.

  With a snort, Scipio walked past another newsboy. As if elections applied to him or the likes of him anyway! He’d never had any choice in who ruled the Confederate States, and he never would. He wondered how many of the black men who’d earned the franchise fighting for the CSA in the Great War still had the nerve to try to use it. He also wondered how many of those who tried succeeded.

  Not many and even fewer, unless he missed his guess.

  As usual, he got to the Huntsman’s Lodge in good time. He shed the coat and galoshes with sighs of relief, and hung the umbrella on a peg so it dripped down onto the rug in a hallway. Then he went into the kitchen to remind himself of the day’s specials. At least this was Tuesday, not Monday. They wouldn’t be making specials out of whatever hadn’t moved over the weekend.

  “Evening, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said. “How are you?”

  “Tolerable, suh,” Scipio told the manager. “I’s tolerable. How you is?”

  “Not bad,” Dover answered. “Can we talk a little?”

  “Yes, suh. What you want?” Scipio did his best not to sound too alarmed. Whenever a boss said something like that, it usually meant trouble.

  Dover said, “You’re a hell of a good worker, Xerxes, don’t get me wrong. You read and write and cipher better than most white men I know. What I want to ask you is, do you have to talk the way you do?”

  “This heah onliest way I knows how to talk,” Scipio answered. That, of course, wasn’t true, as Bathsheba could have testified. If he hadn’t been able to sound like an educated white man, they and their children would have died in the riots after the Freedom Party took power.

  But if he talked that way without direst need, some white man or other who heard him would connect his voice with the Marshlands plantation and Anne Colleton—whereupon, very shortly, he would be dead.

  “Would you be willing to take lessons?” Jerry Dover asked, not knowing he could have given them instead.

  “Once upon a time, I try dat,” Scipio lied. “It don’t do no good. I still sounds like dis.”

  “I could make it worth your while,” Dover said. “Menander the headwaiter’s going to retire before too long—he’s been sickly for a while now, you know. You’d be the perfect fellow to take his place—if you didn’t talk like such a nigger. Everything else? I know you can do it. But you got to sound better.”

  Scipio wondered if he could fake the lessons and end up sounding a little better than he did now, but not a lot. He had his doubts. Dover wasn’t wrong: unless he sounded like a college-trained white (which the restaurant manager didn’t know he could do at all), he sounded like someone who’d come straight from the swamps by the Congaree. That wouldn’t do for a headwaiter. Compromise between the two dialects? He saw none. He also saw danger in sounding even a little like the way he had at Marshlands. He couldn’t afford to be recognized, not after he’d been a spokesman for the Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d been coerced into playing that role, but who would care? No one at all.

  And so, not without regret, he said, “Reckon I better stay where I is.”

  Dover exhaled angrily. “Dammit, where’s your get-up-and-go? And if you tell me it got up and went, I’ll kick your ass, so help me Hannah.”

  He might have meant it literally. Scipio shrugged. “Sorry, Mistuh Dover, suh. You is a good boss.” He meant that. “But you gots to see, I never want to be nobody’s boss a-tall.”

  “All right. All right, dammit. Why didn’t you say that sooner?” Jerry Dover remained disgusted, but he wasn’t furious any more—now he faced something he understood, or at any rate something he thought he did. “I’ve seen it before. You don’t want to play the white man over your own people, is that it?”

  “Yes, suh,” Scipio said gratefully. “Dat just it.” There was even some truth in what he said. He hadn’t wanted to open up his own café in the Terry for exactly that reason. He’d told other Negroes what to do for years in his role as butler at Marshlands, and hadn’t cared for it a bit. It was less important to him than his other reason for turning the manager down, but it was there.

  Dover said, “If you want to know what I think, I think you’re a damn fool. Somebody’s got to do it. Why not you instead of somebody else? Especially why not you if you feel that way? Wouldn’t you make a better boss than some other buck who did it just to show what a slave driver he could be?”

  He was shrewd. He was very shrewd, in fact, to use that last argument and to contrast Scipio, who remembered slave drivers, with one. If not wanting to boss other blacks had been the only thing troubling Scipio, the restaurant manager might have persuaded him. As it was, he shrugged again and said, “Mebbe”—disagreeing too openly with a white man wasn’t smart, either.

  His boss knew what that mebbe meant. Dover waved him away. “Go on. Go to work, then. I’d fire some people for telling me no, but you’re too good to lose. If you don’t want the extra money, I won’t pay you.”

  With a sigh of relief, Scipio went into the dining room. Tonight, he felt much better about dealing with customers than with his own boss. The Huntsman’s Lodge was not the sort of place that kept a wireless set blaring away while people ate, but he got his share of the news anyway. Sure enough, Jake Featherston was easily winning a second term. All the whites in the restaurant seemed happy about it. Every so often, somebody at one table or another would call out, “Freedom!” and glasses would go high in salute. No one asked Scipio’s opinion. He didn’t offer it, and wouldn’t have if asked. He did pocket some larger tips than usual, as often happened when people were happy.

  The rain had stopped by the time he headed for home: a little past twelve. He’d gone about half a block from the restaurant when a rattling, wheezing Birmingham pulled up to the curb alongside of him. A young black man got out. He and Scipio eyed each other for a moment. Scipio’s heart thudded in his chest. All too often, Negroes stole from other Negroes, not least because whites cared little about that kind of crime.

  But then the youngster grinned disarmingly. “You ain’t never seen me, grandpa. You know what I’m sayin’? You ain’t never seen this here motorcar, neither.”

  Was he fooling around with someone else’s woman? That was the first thing that occurred to Scipio: no, the second, for that grandpa rankled. Still, if the required price was no higher, he could meet it. “Ain’t never seen who?” he said, peering around as if someone invisible had spoken.

  He got another grin for that. “In the groove, grandpa.”

  “Somebody talkin’ to me?” Again, Scipio pretended not to see the man right in front of him. Then he started back down the street toward the Terry. Behind him, the young Negro laughed. He walked warily even so, ready to run in case the other fellow came after him. But nothing happened. The man who’d parked the Birmingham might have forgotten all about him.

  By the time he woke up the next morning, he’d just about forgotten the young man. Bathsheba, who had to go to her cleaning job much earlier than he needed to leave for the Huntsman’s Lodge, was heading out the door when an explosion tore through the morning air.

  “Do Jesus!” Scipio exclaimed. The windows rattled and shook. He thought they might break, but they didn’t.

  “What was that?” Antoinette asked.

  “That was somethin’ blowin’ up,” Scipio said heavily. “Mebbe it was an accident. But mebbe it was a bomb, too.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, who’d want to blow things up?” Bathsheba burst out. “Ain’t we seen enough sufferin’?�
�� Out she went, shaking her head.

  When Scipio headed for work later that day, he had to take a detour to get to the Huntsman’s Lodge. He got a glimpse of the street where the bomb had gone off. The building closest to where it went off had fallen down. Windows or pieces of façade were missing from several others. It wasn’t till he looked down the street from above the Huntsman’s Lodge that he realized just where the explosion had taken place. You ain’t never seen me, that grinning young Negro had said. You ain’t never seen this here motorcar, neither. Nobody would ever see it again. Scipio was sure of that. How much dynamite had it held?

  Enough. More than enough. Even here, a good long block from where the bomb had gone off, there were bloodstains under Scipio’s shoes. How many dead? How many hurt? Plenty. He could see that. “Do Jesus!” he said again.

  Only shards of glass jagged as knives remained in the windows of the Huntsman’s Lodge. The door had a jagged hole in it. As Scipio started to go in, a policeman barked, “Let me see your passbook, boy.” He handed it over. The policeman matched the photograph and his face, then gave it back. “You work here?”

  “Yes, suh,” Scipio said. “I’s a waiter. You kin go ask Mistuh Dover, suh.”

  “Never mind,” the gray-uniformed cop said impatiently. “You see anything funny when you went home last night? Anything at all that wasn’t regular?”

  Scipio looked at him. He wore a Freedom Party pin next to his badge. “No, suh,” the black man answered. “I didn’t seen nothin’. I didn’t see nobody. Jus’ go home an’ mind my business.”

  The policeman snarled in frustration. “Somebody must have, dammit. We catch the son of a bitch who did this, he’ll be begging to die before we’re through.”

  “Yes, suh,” Scipio repeated in studiously neutral tones. “Kin I go to work, suh?” The cop didn’t say no. Scipio walked into the Huntsman’s Lodge without another word.

  With their third Socialist president in office, with a Socialist working majority in both houses of Congress, the United States should have been a country where labor had the advantage on capital. They should have been. As Chester Martin had bitterly discovered, they weren’t—and nowhere was that truer than in Los Angeles.

  When construction workers picketed a site, goons often came out in force to break up their picket lines. The cops backed the goons. So did the newspapers. As far as the Los Angeles Times was concerned, strikers were Red revolutionaries who deserved hanging—shooting was too good for them.

  Chester remembered the days of the steel-mill strikes in Toledo. Next to this, those had been good times. That, to him, was a genuinely frightening thought. But it was also true. Back in Toledo, he’d had a feeling of solidarity with his fellow strikers, a feeling that their hour was come round at last. They’d been doing something epoch-making: winning strikes that had always been lost before, paving the way for Socialist victories at the polls that had never been seen before.

  What was another strike nowadays? Just another strike. Some were won; more were lost. Nobody except the immediate parties—and the Times—got very excited about most of them, and even the immediate parties didn’t always bother. The strikes put Chester in mind of some of the later battles on the Roanoke River front during the Great War. They would tear up the landscape and cause a lot of damage and pain to both sides, but things wouldn’t change much no matter who won. Either way, the next fight on the same ground would loom around the corner.

  When he said as much to Rita one morning before heading out to the latest picket line, she frowned. “That wasn’t what you told me when you first led the construction workers out on strike,” she said. “Then you thought you were doing something worth doing, something important.”

  “I know.” He tried to recapture the feeling of outrage, the feeling of urgency, he’d had then. It wasn’t easy. It was, after more than a year, next to impossible. “Too much has happened since, and not much of it good. Have we got enough money for groceries this week?”

  His wife nodded. “And for the rent when the first rolls around. You’re making as much as an agitator as you ever did building houses.”

  “Swell,” he said. “When I build a house, though, I’ve got something to show for it, something I can see, something people can live in. Same when I was making steel. Once I was done, it was there. It was real. I don’t even know that I’m doing any good by agitating. Plenty of people aren’t making as much money now as they were before we started striking.”

  “They will, though. They’ll make a lot more if you get your just demands.” A solid Socialist—more solid than Chester—Rita assumed the demands were just. He’d been sure of that at the beginning of the strikes. He wasn’t sure of anything any more.

  He shook his head. He was sure of one thing: he had to get out the door to get to the picket line by the time the construction crew got to the site. Some of the workers were leery of crossing picket lines, and the ones who were were usually the real builders, the men who knew what they were doing. Half the time, the scabs the contractors hired to take strikers’ places couldn’t tell a chisel from a brace-and-bit. Chester wouldn’t have wanted to live in a house put up by such half-trained workers.

  The sun hadn’t risen. December days in Los Angeles were longer than they were in Toledo, but sunrise still came late. And, by Los Angeles standards, it was cold: it had dropped down into the forties. Chester Martin found the idea that that could be chilly laughable. He wore a denim jacket over a cotton shirt and a pair of dungarees. He might have put on the same outfit in April in Toledo. In December, he would have frozen to death with it. But his real cold-weather gear had sat at the back of the closet for years. He’d finally given most of his winter-weight coats and heavy wool mufflers to the Salvation Army. He didn’t think he would ever need to wear that kind of outfit again.

  He had to watch where he was going as he made his way down to the trolley stop. One thing where Toledo beat Los Angeles hollow was street lights. They were few and far between here. Whole neighborhoods—his, for instance—did without them altogether. Long winter nights made that especially noticeable.

  Street lights or not, the southbound trolley came on time. Chester tossed his nickel in the fare box and bought a couple of transfers, too. He rode down toward the suburbs, where most of the building was going on right now. Dawn came as he rattled along. It was a leaden dawn, the sky full of gray clouds. He wondered if it would rain. That would shut things down better than any picket line. Probably not, though. Even by Los Angeles standards, 1939 had been a dry year.

  Torrance, where he got off, reminded him of Gardena, the little town to the north of it where he’d started building houses after coming to California. Groves of figs and walnuts and oranges and lemons and alligator pears still flourished. Truck gardens, many of them run by farmers from Japan, shipped strawberries and lettuce and carrots and other produce to half the country, thanks to refrigerated freight cars. And, here and there, clusters of houses with clapboard sides mostly painted white sprouted among the greenery.

  At the site where the picket line went up, the houses were still sawdust-smelling wooden skeletons. Strike headquarters was a big tent on a vacant lot two blocks away. Four or five burly men guarded the tent day and night. Contractors had tried to get the police to remove it, but the man who owned the lot was a good Socialist, and wouldn’t swear out a trespassing complaint.

  One of the guards tipped his battered fedora to Chester. “Mornin’,” he said. “Pot of coffee’s going inside, you want a cup.”

  “Good deal,” Chester said. “Any trouble?”

  All the guards shook their heads. “Not a bit,” answered the one who’d spoken before. “Bastards don’t bother anybody they figure he’ll fight back.” This time, all of his friends nodded.

  That wasn’t true. The class enemies and their lackeys weren’t cowards. They defended their interests no less earnestly than proletarians. Things would have been easier if they hadn’t. Chester said nothing about that. Why
hurt the guards’ morale?

  He just ducked into the tent. Sure enough, a coffeepot perked above the blue flame on some canned heat. Several not very clean cups sat on a card table nearby. He’d drunk from far worse during the war. There was a sugar bowl, but no cream. Sugar would do. He poured himself a cup, quickly drained it, and took a picket sign. It said, SHAME! and UNFAIR TO WORKERS!, so it could be used in almost any strike. The handle was a good, solid piece of wood. Tear off the sign, and it turned into a formidable bludgeon.

  Shouldering the sign, Martin went back outside. Another picket was walking across the lot toward the tent. “Morning, John,” Chester called.

  “Morning,” John answered. “Chilly today.”

  “You say so.” Chester smiled. No, he didn’t think he’d ever get used to Los Angeles notions about weather.

  He had a good picket line in place around the houses under construction before many workers started showing up. Some turned away, as if glad for an excuse not to go to work. Others squared their shoulders and crossed the line. The pickets showered them with abuse. They had to watch what they said; some of the scabs could have been plainclothes cops. General curses and insults were all right. Threats like, We know where you live, or, Wait till you get off work, could land a man in jail on an assault charge. Lawyers were expensive. Using them drained a strike fund in a hurry.

  Around and around and around. In a field across the street, crows and Brewer’s blackbirds with golden eyes pecked for worms and bugs and seeds. Hammers started banging at the construction site. The pickets cursed. “Scabs!” they shouted. Around and around and around.

  Halfway through the morning, a white-haired, sun-browned man in a windbreaker fell into step with Chester. The man was missing most of two fingers from his right hand. “What the hell you want, Mordechai?” Martin asked.