The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  November 5 dawned bright and clear, though the day plainly wouldn’t reach the eighties. “What are you going to do?” Rita asked at breakfast.

  “Vote.” Martin reached for the pepper shaker and spread pungent black flakes over his fried eggs.

  Rita made an irritated noise. “How?”

  “Oh, about like this.” He mimed picking up a stamp and making an X on a ballot with it.

  “Thank you so much.” Somehow, no sarcasm flayed like a spouse’s. His wife asked a question he couldn’t evade: “Who are you going to vote for?”

  “To tell you the truth, honey, I won’t know till I get inside the voting booth,” Chester answered.

  “If you don’t vote for Al Smith, you’ll end up sorry,” Rita said. “You were when you didn’t vote for Blackford eight years ago.”

  “I know I was. I think Coolidge might have been better than Hoover, but we’ll never know about that, will we?” He spread butter and grape jam on a piece of toast, then started to throw out the empty jam jar.

  “Don’t do that,” Rita said. “I’ll wash it out and use it for a glass. Jelly glasses are better for Carl—they don’t hold as much as real ones, and they’re thick, so they don’t break as easy if he drops them.”

  “All right,” Martin said with his mouth full. He put the jam jar back on the table. When he finished the toast, he gave Rita a quick, greasy kiss, stuck a cloth cap on his head, and hurried out the door. Rita took a deep breath, as if to call something after him, but she didn’t. She must have realized it wouldn’t change his mind.

  The polling place was in the auditorium of an elementary school three or four blocks from the apartment. Chester got there as it opened. As always, the child-sized chairs made him smile. Once upon a time, he’d fit into seats like those. No more, no more. He gave his name and address to the white-mustached man in charge of the list. The man matched it against the entry, then handed him a ballot. “Take any empty voting booth,” he droned. How many times had he said that, and in how many elections? How many more would he say it today?

  There it was, the big question, right at the top of the ballot. Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith? Chester ignored the Republicans’ candidate. Not many people outside of his native Indiana cared about the businessman they’d nominated, which meant they weren’t about to win with Willkie. Besides, how could a Wendell hope to prevail against the brute simplicity of Al and Bob? Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith?

  Chester stamped the X by Taft’s name, hoping he was doing the right thing. Had he voted for Smith, he would have had the same hope, and would have been just as unsure of himself. It’s done, anyhow, he thought, and went down the rest of the ballot in a hurry. Most of the candidates he voted for were Socialists. That salved his conscience, at least a little.

  He carried the finished ballot back to the table where he’d got it. Another old man took it, folded it, and thrust it through the slot in the ballot box. “Mr. Martin has voted,” he intoned, the words as formal and unchanging as any this side of the Mass.

  Having voted, Chester Martin hurried to the trolley stop. He rode across town to Westwood, not far from the Pacific and even closer to the southern campus of the University of California. Orange groves were going down, houses were going up, and union labor, as usual in Los Angeles, was being ignored.

  “Hey, Chester!” another organizer called as he came up. “You vote yet?”

  “Sure did, before I came here,” Martin answered. Westwood wasn’t bright and sunny. Fog lingered here, and probably wouldn’t burn off till midmorning. “How about you, Ralph?”

  “I’ll take care of it on the way home,” Ralph answered. “Who’d you vote for?” He winked and laughed uproariously. He was sure he already knew, which meant Chester didn’t have to tell him. Under the circumstances, that came as something of a relief.

  The strikers carried their picket signs around and around the construction site. They stayed on the sidewalk. Once, at a different site, a man had stumbled and gone onto what would be a lawn. The cops nabbed him for trespassing. Not here, not today.

  “Scabs!” the picketers shouted—along with other things, even less complimentary—when workers crossed the picket line and went into the construction site. They had to watch what they said, too. The police had been known to run strikers in for public obscenity. Still, endearments like “You stinking sack of manure!” got the message across.

  Most of the strikebreakers went in with their heads down. Watching them cross the picket line was one thing that made Chester glad he’d chosen this side. He had yet to see a scab who didn’t act as if his conscience bothered him. A man might go and decide he had to eat any way he could, but he seldom seemed happy about it.

  One of the scabs here, a big man on whom the picketers had showered a lot of abuse, finally got fed up and shouted back: “Wait till the Pinkertons get into town, you bastards! They’ll kick your asses but good!”

  Not one but two foremen ran up to the strikebreaker. They both started cussing him up one side and down the other. The cops didn’t jug them for the language they used, any more than they’d arrested the scab.

  Chester didn’t stop marching or yelling. But he sure as hell did prick up his ears. If the bosses were bringing in Pinkerton men, they were going to try breaking the union. The more notice he had about that, the better he could fight back, because the Pinkertons, notorious union-busters, fought dirty, really dirty. If he’d been one of those foremen, he would have cussed out that scab, too, for tipping the other side’s hand.

  At lunch, Ralph came up to him and said, “Pinkertons, is it? Well, there’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”

  “You bet there will,” Chester said. “We can lick ’em, though. They’re bastards, sure as hell, but we can lick ’em. And if we do, what have the bosses got left to throw at us? Soldiers? Whose side would they be on?”

  “Pinkertons.” Ralph made a disgusted face. “I fought those fuckers years ago, in Pittsburgh. Never thought I’d see their ugly mugs again.”

  Martin nodded. “Same with me in Toledo. They’re goons, all right. You think we’re going to back down, though? I sure as hell don’t. I’ve got brass knucks, and I can always get a .45 if it looks like I need one.”

  The other union man looked worried. “You gotta be careful with that, though. You pull it, the cops have the perfect excuse to blow you to kingdom come.”

  “I know. I know. Like I said, I did this before,” Chester said. “But I know something else, too—if they get us on the run, we’re in trouble. I don’t aim to let that happen.”

  Cincinnatus Driver refused to buy a paper as he steered his truck toward the railroad yard. He was too disgusted to want to hear anything more about Al Smith’s reelection than he had the night before on the wireless. He’d stayed up till the West Coast returns came in, and poured down three cups of coffee to try to make up for not enough sleep. Taft, behind in the race, had needed to sweep the Coast to win enough electoral votes to overtake the president. He’d won in California, but lost Oregon and Washington—and the election.

  They’re gonna hold the plebiscite, Cincinnatus thought dolefully. They’re gonna hold it, and the Confederate States are gonna win. That meant he had to get his mother and father out of Kentucky before it left the USA and returned to the CSA. He knew what being a Negro in the Confederate States was like—and it was bound to be even worse now, under Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, than it had been before the Great War.

  He wished his mother were in better shape than she was. He could have sent his father and her train fare, and they would have ended up in Des Moines not long afterwards. As things were, with her sinking ever deeper into her second childhood, he knew he would have to go down to Covington to help his father bring her out. Elizabeth wouldn’t like it—he didn’t like it himself—but he saw no way around it.

  He pulled into the railroad yard at a quarter to seven, yawning despite all the coffee. When he jumped out of his trunk and hurried ov
er to see what cargoes he could pick up, first one railroad dick and then another waved to him. He was accepted here. He belonged. He never remembered belonging in Covington—certainly not in any part of it where he bumped up against white men. The first conductor whose train he approached greeted him with, “Hey, Cincinnatus. How you doing?”

  “Not bad, Jack,” he answered. He never would have called a white man in Covington by his first name. “What you got?”

  But Jack felt like gabbing. “Four more years of Smith,” he said. “I’m happy. My son got conscripted not long ago, and I don’t want him getting shot at. I saw too goddamn much of that myself twenty-five years ago.”

  That gave Cincinnatus a new slant on things. He’d been shot at during the Great War, too, if only as a truck driver behind the lines. But he didn’t have to worry about Achilles getting conscripted. The USA didn’t conscript Negroes, any more than the CSA did. If war came, Achilles would be as safe as anybody. Even so, Cincinnatus said, “You won’t find anybody colored who wants to go back to livin’ in the Confederate States.”

  By the way Jack blinked, he’d no more thought about that than Cincinnatus had worried about conscription. The white man said, “I don’t suppose there’s enough colored folks to change the vote, though.”

  Cincinnatus grimaced. That was painfully true. Not wanting to dwell on the likely fate of Kentucky (and Houston, and perhaps Sequoyah, but Kentucky mattered most to him), he asked again, “What you got here?”

  “Furniture,” Jack said, and Cincinnatus’ eyes lit up. He and Jack haggled for a while, but not too long. He loaded the truck as full as he could, then roared off for the shops taking delivery. If he got rid of everything in a hurry, he thought he could be back for another equally profitable load by lunchtime.

  He was, too. Plenty of things held back a colored man: fewer in the USA than in the CSA, but still plenty. Adding laziness on top of everything else would only have made matters worse. Cincinnatus was a lot of different things. Whatever he was, though, he’d never been afraid of hard work.

  His back ached when he pulled up to the apartment building that night, but the money in the pocket of his overalls made the ache seem worthwhile. He opened the mailbox in the lobby, crumpled up the advertising circulars, and winced when he saw a letter with a Covington postmark and the sprawling handwriting of his father’s neighbor. News from Covington was unlikely to be good. Because he wished he didn’t have to find out what the letter said, he carried it upstairs without opening it.

  When he walked in, Amanda was doing homework. He smiled at her. Gonna have me two high-school graduates soon, he thought proudly. That ain’t bad for a Kentucky nigger who never went to school at all.

  From the kitchen came the crackle and the mouth-watering smell of frying chicken. Cincinnatus went in to say hello to Elizabeth, who was turning pieces with long-handled tongs. After a quick kiss, she asked, “What you got there?”

  “Letter from Covington.”

  “Oh.” She understood his hesitation, but asked the next question anyhow: “What’s it say?”

  “Don’t know yet. Ain’t opened it,” he said. The look his wife sent him was sympathetic and impatient at the same time. He tore off the end of the envelope, took out the letter, unfolded it, and read. By the time he got to the end, his face was as long as the train from which he’d taken off furniture.

  “What is it?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I got to git down there. Got to do it quick,” Cincinnatus said heavily. “Neighbor says my mama, she start wanderin’ off every chance she get. Pa turn his back on her half a minute, she out the door an’ lookin’ for the house where she growed up. Can’t have that. She liable to git lost for good, or git run over on account of she go out in the street and don’t look where she goin’.” Stress and the thought of Covington made his accent thicken.

  Elizabeth sighed. Then hot fat spattered, and she yipped and jerked back her hand. She said, “I reckon maybe you do, but, Lord, I wish you didn’t.”

  “So do I, on account of Ma and on account of I don’t want to go back to Kentucky, neither,” Cincinnatus said. “But it ain’t always what you want to do. Sometimes it’s what you got to do.” He waited. Elizabeth sighed again, then reluctantly nodded.

  He bought a round-trip train ticket, knowing he would have to get one-way fares for his parents in Covington. He sent the neighbor down there a wire to let him know when he’d be getting into town. Then he stuffed a few days’ clothes and sundries into a beat-up suitcase and went to the railroad station to catch the eastbound train.

  It pulled into Covington at eleven that night. The neighbor, Menander Pershing, stood on the platform with his father. Cincinnatus’ father looked older and smaller and wearier than Cincinnatus had dreamt he would. After embracing him, Cincinnatus looked nervously across the brightly lit platform.

  “Ain’t none o’ them Kentucky State Police this time,” Seneca Driver said. He’d been born a slave, and still talked like it. After so long hearing the accents of the white Midwest, Cincinnatus found his father’s way of speaking strange and ignorant-sounding, even though he’d sounded like that himself when he was a boy. His father hadn’t even had a surname (and neither had he) till they’d all taken the same one after Kentucky returned to the USA in the Great War.

  Cincinnatus couldn’t help looking around some more. As far as he could tell, nobody was paying any attention to him. Little by little, he began to relax. “Freedom Party don’t give you no trouble?” he asked.

  “Don’t want trouble from nobody,” his father said. “I minds my business, an’ I don’t git none.”

  “Ain’t too bad,” Menander Pershing added. He was about Cincinnatus’ age, lean, with a few threads of gray in his close-cropped hair. He fixed autos for a living, and wore a mechanic’s greasy overalls. “They reckon they win come January, so they bein’ quiet till then.” He jerked a thumb toward the exit. “Come on. I got my motorcar out in the lot.”

  U.S. soldiers were searching some passengers’ bags as they left the station. The men in green-gray waved Seneca and his companions through without bothering. It might have been the first time in his life when being colored made things easier for him. The soldiers didn’t think Negroes would back the Freedom Party no matter what. They were likely to be right, too.

  Menander Pershing’s auto was an elderly Oldsmobile, but its motor purred when he started it. Getting in, Cincinnatus asked, “How’s Ma?”

  “Well, she sleepin’ now. That’s how I come away,” his father answered. “You see in the mornin’, that’s all.” He wouldn’t say anything more.

  Even by moonlight, the house where Cincinnatus’ parents lived was smaller and shabbier than he remembered. He lay down on the rickety sofa in the front room and got what sleep he could.

  In the morning, heartbreak began. His father had to introduce him to his mother; she didn’t recognize him on her own. After she came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand, she looked at him and said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Cincinnatus, Ma,” he said quietly, and felt the sting of tears.

  As long as they stayed in the room together, she seemed to know who he was. When she left to go to the outhouse, though, she came back and looked at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life. As far as she knew, she hadn’t. Fighting the stab at his heart, he introduced himself again.

  “She like that,” Cincinnatus’ father said sadly. “She still know me all the time. She better, after all these years. But she don’t know nobody else, not so it stick.”

  Cincinnatus pounded a fist into his thigh. “Damn!”

  “Don’t you talk like that, young man! I switch you if you cuss in the house!” For two sentences, his mother sounded just the way she had when he was thirteen. Hearing that damn might have flipped a switch in her head. Old things seemed more familiar to her than new ones. But then her eyes went vague again. She forgot her own annoyance. Seeing her forget might have been harder to bear than
anything.

  Or so Cincinnatus thought, till he too went out back to use the outhouse—a fixture he hadn’t had to worry about for many years—and returned to find his father rushing out to get him. “She run off!” Seneca cried. “I go back in the kitchen for a minute, and she run off!”

  “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. “We got to find her.” He and his father hurried out to the front yard. Cincinnatus looked left and right. No sign of her. “You go this way,” he told his father. “I’ll go that way. She ain’t gone real far.”

  Off he went, quick as he could. When he got to a corner, he hesitated. Up or down? Either way might prove a dreadful mistake—and he had the chance for another one at every corner he came to. Swearing under his breath, he dog-trotted along the street. Each time he came to a corner, his curses got louder.

  But luck was with him. He rounded one last corner and there she was, on the far side of the street, strolling along as if she knew just where she was going. “Ma!” Cincinnatus yelled. “Ma!” She paid no attention to him. Maybe she didn’t hear. Maybe she’d forgotten a grown man could call her his mother.

  Cincinnatus ran out into the street after her—and his luck abruptly changed. He remembered a squeal of brakes, a shout, and an impact . . . and then, nothing.

  When he woke, he wanted that nothing back. One leg was on fire. Someone was taking a sledgehammer to his head. He opened his eyes a crack. Everything was white. For a moment, he thought it was heaven. Then, blearily, he realized it had to be a hospital.

  He made a noise. A nurse appeared, as if by magic. He tried to talk. At last, after some effort, he succeeded: “Wha’ happen?”

  “Fractured tibia and fibula,” she said briskly. “Fractured skull, too. When they brought you in a week ago, they didn’t think you’d make it. You must have a hard head. You had to be nuts, running out there like that. The guy in the auto never had a chance to stop. And how are you going to pay your bills?”

  That was the least of his worries. His wits didn’t want to work. The injury? Drugs? Whatever it was, he tried to fight it. “Ma?” he asked. The nurse only shrugged. “Got to get out of here,” he said.