Chapter IV
Even months after getting over the Spanish influenza, Sam Carsten knew he wasn’t quite the man he had been. The disease had done its best to steamroller him into the grave. Something like a dozen sailors aboard the USS Remembrance had died. Many more, like him, remained weaker and slower than they were before they got sick.
He could still do his job, though, and do the hundreds of jobs any sailor had to do when he wasn’t at his battle station. And, as the Remembrance worked with the aeroplanes she carried, learning what they could and couldn’t do, he occasionally found time to marvel.
This was one of those times. He stood by the superstructure as the Remembrance steamed in the North Atlantic, watching while a Wright two-decker approached the stern. A sailor with semaphore paddles directed the aeroplane toward the deck. The pilot had to pay more attention to the director than to his own instincts and urges; if he didn’t, he’d end up in the drink.
“Come on,” Sam muttered. He’d been watching landings for a while now. Just the same, they made him sweat. If he couldn’t take them for granted, what were they like for the fliers? Pilots were the most nonchalant men on the face of the earth, but anyone who was nonchalant through one of these landings would end up dead. “Come on.”
On came the aeroplane. Smoke spurted as its wheels slammed the deck of the Remembrance. The hook on the bottom of the Wright machine’s fuselage missed the first steel cable stretched across the deck to arrest its progress, but caught on the second one. The two-decker jerked to a halt.
“Jesus.” Carsten turned to George Moerlein, who’d watched the landing a few feet away from him. “Every time they do that, I think the aeroplane is going to miss the deck—either that or it’ll tear in half when the hook grabs it.”
His bunkmate nodded. “I know what you mean. It looks impossible, even though we’ve been watching ’em for months.”
As the Wright’s prop slowed from a blur to a stop, the pilot climbed out of the aeroplane. Sailors with mops and buckets dashed over and started swabbing down the deck. With oil and gasoline spilling all the time, swabbing was a more serious business than on most ships.
Sam said, “The thing I really fear is one of ’em coming in low and smashing right into the stern. Hasn’t happened yet, thank God.”
“Yeah, that wouldn’t do anybody any good,” Moerlein agreed. “Could happen, too, especially if somebody’s coming in with his aeroplane shot to hell and gone—or if he just makes a mistake.”
“What I hope is, we never come into range of a battleship’s big guns,” Carsten said. “Taking a hit is bad enough any which way—I’ve done that—but taking a hit here, with all the gasoline we’re carrying…We’d go straight to the moon, or maybe five miles past it.”
“It’d be over in a hurry, anyhow,” his bunkmate answered. Before Sam could say he didn’t find that reassuring, George Moerlein went on, “But that’s one of the reasons we’re carrying all these aeroplanes: to keep battlewagons from getting into gunnery range in the first place.”
Carsten stamped the flight deck, which was timber lain over steel. “We can’t be the only Navy working on aeroplane carriers.”
“I’ve heard tell the Japs are,” Moerlein said. “Don’t know it for a fact, but I’ve heard it. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me, either, not even a little bit,” Sam said. “I was in the Battle of the Three Navies, out west of the Sandwich Islands. Those little yellow bastards are tougher than anybody ever gave ’em credit for.”
Moerlein looked sour. “And they just walked away from the war free and clear, too. The Rebs are paying, England and France are paying, Russia’s gone to hell in a handbasket, but Japan said, ‘Well, all right, if nobody else on our side’s left standing, we’re done, too,’ and we couldn’t do anything but say, ‘All right, Charlie—see you again some day.’”
“We will, too,” Carsten said. “I was just a kid when they took the Philippines away from Spain right after the turn of the century. And now we’ve taken the Sandwich Islands away from England—I was there for that, aboard the Dakota. So they’re looking our way, and we’re looking their way, and nobody’s sitting between us any more.”
“That’d be a fight, all right. All that ocean, aeroplanes whizzing around, us bombing them and trying to keep them from bombing us.” Moerlein got a faraway look in his eye.
So did Sam. “Hell, if both sides have aeroplane carriers, you could fight a battle without ever seeing the other fellow’s ships.”
“That would be pretty strange,” Moerlein said, “but I guess it could happen.”
“Sure it could,” Sam said. “And you’d want to sink the other bastard’s aeroplane carriers just as fast as you could, because if he didn’t have any aeroplanes left, he couldn’t stop your battleships from doing whatever they wanted to do.” He stamped on the flight deck again. “And if the aeroplane carrier is the ship you have to sink first, that makes the Remembrance the most important ship in the whole Navy right now.”
For a moment, he felt almost like a prophet in the middle of a vision of the future. He also felt pleased with himself for having had the sense to figure out that aeroplanes were the coming thing, and grateful to Commander Grady for having brought him to the Remembrance, no matter how ugly she was.
Then something else occurred to him. He hurried away. “Where’s the fire at?” George Moerlein called after him. He didn’t answer, but hurried down a hatch to go below.
He guessed Grady would be checking one sponson or another and, sure enough, found him in the third one into which he poked his head. The officer was testing the elevation screw on the gun there, and talking about it in a low voice with the gunner’s mate who commanded the crew for that sponson. Sam stood at attention and waited to be noticed.
Eventually, Commander Grady said, “You’ll want to make sure of the threads there, Reynolds. Good thing we’re not likely to be sailing into combat any time soon.” He turned to Sam. “What can I do for you, Carsten?”
“I’ve been thinking, sir,” Sam began.
A smile spread across Grady’s rabbity features. “Far be it from me to discourage such a habit. And what have you been thinking?”
“We’ve taken the Confederates’ battleships away from them, sir, and we’ve taken away their submersibles,” Carsten said. “What do the agreements we’ve made with them say about aeroplane carriers?”
“So far as I know, they don’t say anything,” Commander Grady said.
“Shouldn’t they, sir?” Sam asked in some alarm. “What if the Rebs built a whole raft of these ships and—”
Grady held up a hand. “I understand what you’re saying. If the Remembrance turns out to be as important as we think she is, then you’ll be right. If she doesn’t, though—” He shrugged. “There are a lot of people in Philadelphia who think we’re pouring money down a rathole.”
“They’re crazy,” Sam blurted.
“I think so, too, but how do you go about proving it?” Grady asked. “We need to have something to do to prove what we’re worth. In any case, I believe the answer to your question is no, as I said: if the Confederate States want to build aeroplane carriers, they are not forbidden to do so. When the agreements were framed, no one took this class of ship seriously.”
“That’s too bad,” Carsten said.
“I think so, too,” Grady repeated. “Nothing I can do about it, though. Nothing you can do about it, either.”
Carsten looked southwest, in the direction of the Confederacy. “Wonder how long it’ll be before the Rebels have one of these babies.” Then he looked east. “Wonder how long it’ll be before England and France do, too.”
“It’ll take the Rebs a while, and the frogs, too, I expect,” Commander Grady said. “We’re sitting on the CSA, and Kaiser Bill is sitting on France. England…I don’t know about England. They didn’t have the war brought home to them, not the way the Confederates and the French did. Yeah, they got hungry, and the Royal Navy finally ended up fighting out of its weight, but they weren’t whipped—you know what I mean?”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said.
Grady went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “And from Australia through India and Africa, they’re still cocks o’ the walk. If they decide they want to get even and they find some friends…” His laugh was anything but mirthful. “Sounds like the way we won this last war, doesn’t it, Carsten? We decided we were going to get even, and we cozied up to the German Empire. I hope to God it doesn’t work for them ten years down the line, or twenty, or thirty.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. “I guess we just have to do our best to keep ahead of them, that’s all.” He sighed. “I wonder where all this ends, or if it ever ends.”
“Only way I can see it ending is if we ever figure out how to blow a whole country clean off the map,” Grady said. He slapped Sam on the back. “I don’t figure that’ll happen any time soon, if it ever does. We’ll have work to do for as long as we want it, the two of us.”
“That’d be good, sir,” Carsten said equably. “That’s the big reason I wanted to transfer to the Remembrance. As soon as they bombed us off Argentina, I knew aeroplanes were going to stay important for a long, long time.”
“You’re a sharp bird, Carsten,” Grady said. “I was glad to see you get that promotion at the end of ’16. You’re too sharp to have stayed an able seaman for as long as you did. If you were as pushy as you’re sharp, you’d be an officer by now.”
“An officer? Me?” Carsten started to laugh, but Commander Grady wasn’t the first person who’d told him he thought like one. He shrugged. “I like things the way they are pretty well. I’ve got enough trouble telling myself what to do, let alone giving other people orders.”
Grady chuckled. “There’s more to being an officer than giving orders, though I don’t suppose it looks that way to the ratings on the receiving end. I think you’ve got what it takes, if you want to apply yourself.”
“Really, sir?” Sam asked, and Commander Grady nodded. Sam had never aspired to anything more than chief petty officer, not even in his wildest dreams. Now he did. He’d known a few mustangs, officers who’d come up through the ranks. Doing that wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t easy, either. How much did he want it? Did he want it at all? “Have to think about that.”
Jake Featherston rubbed brilliantine into his hair, then combed a part that might have been scribed with a ruler. He looked at himself in the tiny mirror above the sink in his room. He wasn’t handsome, but he didn’t figure he would ever be handsome. He’d do.
He put on a clean shirt and a pair of pants that had been pressed in the not too impossibly distant past. Again, he didn’t look as if he were about to speak before the Confederate Congress, but he didn’t want to speak before the Confederate Congress, except to tell all the fat cats in there where to go. He grinned. He was going to tell some fat cats where to go today, too, but they weren’t so fat as they wanted to be, nor so fat as they thought they were.
He donned a cloth workingman’s cap, put his pistol on his belt, and left the room. Fewer people bothered wearing weapons on the streets in Richmond than had been true in the first desperate weeks after the Great War ended, but he was a long way from the only man sporting a pistol or carrying a Tredegar. Nobody could be sure what would happen next, and a good many people didn’t care to find out the hard way.
Featherston hurried down Seventh toward the James River. The back room in the saloon where the Freedom Party had met wasn’t big enough these days, but a rented hall a couple of doors down still sufficed for their needs. After meetings, the Party veterans would repair to the saloon and drink and talk about the good old days when everyone had always stood shoulder to shoulder with everyone else.
Sometimes Jake was part of those gatherings, sometimes he wasn’t. After tonight, either he would be or he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Party any more. He saw no middle way—but then, he’d never been a man who looked for the middle way in anything he did.
A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the meeting hall: men in caps and straw hats crowding around the doorway, jostling to get in. They parted like the Red Sea to let Jake by. “Tell the truth tonight, Featherston!” somebody called. “Tell everybody the whole truth.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Jake answered. “I don’t know how to do anything else. You wait and see.”
Several people clapped their hands. But somebody said, “You don’t want to be Party chairman. You want to be king, is what you want.”
Whirling to turn on the man, Jake snapped, “That’s a goddamn lie, Bill Turley, and you know it goddamn well. What I want is for the Freedom Party to go somewhere. If it wants to go my way, fine. If it doesn’t, it’ll go however it goes and I’ll go somewhere else. No hard feelings.”
No matter what he’d said a moment before, that was a thumping lie. Hard feelings were what made Jake Featherston what he was. If the Freedom Party rejected him tonight, he would never forget and never forgive. He never forgot and never forgave any slight. And this rejection, if it came, would be far worse than a mere slight.
Inside, people buzzed and pointed as he walked up the aisle toward the long table on the raised stage at the front of the hall. Anthony Dresser already sat up there, along with several other Party officials: Ernie London, the treasurer, who was almost wide enough to need two chairs; Ferdinand Koenig, the secretary, a headbreaker despite his fancy first name; and Bert McWilliams, the vice chairman, a man who could be inconspicuous in almost any company.
Dresser, London, and McWilliams all wore business suits of varying ages and degrees of shininess. Koenig, like Jake, was in his shirtsleeves. As Jake sat down at the table, he looked out over the audience. It was a shirtsleeves crowd; he saw only a handful of jackets and cravats and vests. He smiled, but only to himself. Dresser and his chums no doubt thought they looked impressive. The crowd out there, though, would think they were stuffed shirts.
“And they are,” Jake muttered to himself. “God damn me to hell and gone, but they are.”
Anthony Dresser rapped a gavel on the tabletop. “This meeting of the Freedom Party will now come to order,” he said, and turned to Ferdinand Koenig. “The secretary will read the minutes of last week’s meeting and bring us up to date on correspondence.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Koenig said in a rumbling baritone. Jake Featherston listened with half an ear as he droned through the minutes, which were approved without amendments. “As for correspondence, we’ve had a good many letters from North and South Carolina and from Georgia concerning joining the Party and forming local chapters, this as a result of Mr. Featherston’s speaking tour. We’ve also had inquiries from Mississippi and Alabama and even one from Texas, these based on newspaper stories about the speaking tour.” He displayed a fat sheaf of envelopes.
Dresser gave him a sour look. “Kindly keep yourself to the facts, Mr. Koenig. Save the editorials for the papers.” He nodded to Ernie London. “Before we proceed to new business, the treasurer will report on the finances of the Party.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman.” London’s voice was surprisingly high and thin to be emerging from such a massive man. “As far as money goes, we are not in the worst situation. Our present balance is $8,541.27, which is an increase of $791.22 over last week. I would like that better if it were in dollars from before 1914: then we would have ourselves a very nice little piece of change. But even now, it is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”
“Question!” Jake Featherston said sharply. “Where did all that new money come from?”
Dresser brought the gavel down sharply. “That doesn’t matter now. Only thing that matters is how much money we’ve got.” He banged the gavel again. “And now, if nobody else has got anything to say, we’ll get on with the new business. We—”
“Mr. Chairman, I reckon Jake’s got himself a point,” Ferdinand Koenig said, “especially on account of the new business you’ve got in mind.”
Bang! “No, sir,” Dresser said, angry now. “I said it doesn’t matter, and my ruling stands, by Jesus.”
“Mr. Chairman, I appeal that ruling to a vote from the floor,” Jake said. He hated parliamentary procedure, but he’d started learning it anyhow, even if he did think it was only a way to cheat by the numbers.
“Second,” Koenig said.
“Never mind,” Dresser said in a low, furious voice. He wasn’t ready for a floor vote, then. Jake wasn’t nearly sure he was ready for a floor vote, either. When one came, he wanted it to be for all the marbles. Dresser said, “Go ahead, Ernie. Tell ’em what they want to know, so we can get on with things.”
Reluctantly, London said, “Some came from dues, some came from contributions from people who heard Featherston’s speaking tour.”
“How much came from each?” Jake demanded.
Fat as he was, Ernie London looked as if he wished he were invisible. “I don’t have the figures showing the split right here with me,” he said at last.
“Hell of a treasurer you are,” Featherston jeered. “All right, let me ask you an easy one: did I bring in more or less than half the week’s take? You tell me you don’t recollect, I’ll call you a liar to your face. Everybody knows bookkeepers like playing with numbers. They don’t forget ’em.”
Most unwillingly, London said, “It was more than half.”
“Thank you, Ernie.” Jake beamed at him, then nodded to Anthony Dresser. “Go on ahead, Tony. It’s your show for now.” He put a small but unmistakable stress on the last two words.
“All right, then.” Dresser looked around the room, no doubt gauging his support. Featherston was doing the same. He didn’t know how this would come out. He knew how it would come out if there were any justice in the world, but that had been in short supply for a while now. If there were any justice in the world, wouldn’t the CSA have won the war? Maybe the same sorts of thoughts were going through Anthony Dresser’s mind as he banged the gavel down once more and announced, “New business.”
“Mr. Chairman!” Bert McWilliams’ voice was more memorable than his face, but not much. When Dresser recognized him, he went on, “Mr. Chairman, I move that we remove Jake Featherston from his position as head of propaganda for the Freedom Party.”
“Second!” Ernie London said at once. Jake had expected London to bring the motion and McWilliams to second it; otherwise, he was unsurprised.
“It has been moved and seconded to remove Jake Featherston as head of propaganda,” Anthony Dresser said. “I’ll lead off the discussion.” He rapped loudly with the gavel several times. “And we will have order and quiet from the members, unless they have been recognized to speak. Order!” Bang! Bang!
When something not too far from order had been restored, Dresser resumed: “I don’t deny Jake has done some good things for the Party—don’t get me wrong. But he’s done us a good deal of harm, too, and it’s not the kind of harm that’s easily fixed. He’s taken all the great things we stand for and boiled them down to hang the generals and hang the niggers. Not that they don’t need hanging, mind you, but there are so many other things to get the country going again that need doing, too, and he never talks about a one of them. People get the wrong idea about us, you see.”
London and McWilliams followed with similar speeches. Out in the hard, uncomfortable seats that filled the hall, the Freedom Party members were silent, listening, judging.
Confidence surged through Featherston. Even here, when they should be doing everything to crush him, his opponents beat around the bush and tried to see all sides of the question. He would never make that mistake. “Mr. Chairman!” he said. “Can I speak for myself, or are you just going to railroad me altogether?”
Warily, Dresser said, “Go ahead, Jake. Have your say. Then we vote.”
“Right,” Featherston said tightly. He looked out at the crowd. “Now is the time to fish or cut bait,” he said. “The reason I’m head of propaganda is that I’m the only man up here people can listen to without falling asleep.” That got him a laugh. Anthony Dresser, sputtering angrily, tried to gavel it down and failed. “I’m the one who brings in the money—Ernie said so himself. And I’ll tell you why—I keep it simple. That’s what propaganda is all about. I make people want to support us. I don’t say one thing Monday and another thing Tuesday and something else on Wednesday. Like I say, I keep it simple.”
He took a deep breath. “I shake things up. I make the people in high places sweat. That’s the other thing propaganda is for, folks—to show people your way is better. So. Here it is: you can go on with me and see how much we can shake loose together, or you can throw me out and spend your time pounding each other on the back, on account of it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any more new members.” He rounded on Anthony Dresser. In tones of contemptuous certainty, he said, “Mr. Chairman, I call the question.”
Dresser stared, the scales suddenly fallen from his eyes. “You don’t want to be head of propaganda,” he stammered. “You—You want to head the Party.”
Jake grinned, hiding his own unease where Dresser let his show. “I call the question,” he repeated.
Licking his lips, Dresser said, “In favor of removing Jake Featherston?” Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the men in the hall raised their hands. In a voice like ashes, Dresser said, “Opposed?” The rest of the hands flew high. So did a great shout of triumph. “The motion is not carried,” Dresser choked out.
“Mr. Chairman!” Ferdinand Koenig said, and Dresser was rash enough to recognize the Party secretary. Koenig went on, “Mr. Chairman, I move that you step down and we make Jake Featherston chairman of the Freedom Party.”
Another great shout rose. In it were two dozen cries of, “Second!”—maybe more. Featherston and Koenig grinned at each other as Anthony Dresser presided over voting himself out of office. In that glorious moment, Jake felt the world turned only because his hands worked its axis. He had his chance now. He didn’t know what he would make of it, not yet, but it was there.
Stephen Douglas Martin looked at his son. “I wish you wouldn’t do this,” he said, worry in his voice.
“I know,” Chester Martin answered. “You’ve got to understand, though—you have a place. The way the bosses are acting these days, I’ll never have one, not unless I take it for myself.”
His father pointed to the bulge of the pistol behind his belt. “You won’t get it with that.”
“I won’t get it any other way,” Martin said stubbornly. “I don’t aim to shoot first—I’m not that stupid—but I’m not stupid enough to stand around and watch my friends on the picket lines get shot down like dogs, either. If there’s no trouble, fine. But if those goons start banging away at me, I’m not going to run like a rabbit, not any more.”
His father shook his head, a troubled gesture. “You’ve been listening to the Socialists again. If I never see another red flag, it’ll be too soon.”
“You don’t get it, Pa,” Chester said, impatient with the ignorance of the older generation. “If it weren’t for the Socialists, nobody’d make any kind of decent money—the bosses would have it all.” Unending labor strife since he’d come home from the war had eroded his lifelong faith in the Democratic Party.
“You’re going to end up on a blacklist,” his father said gloomily. “Then you won’t have any work at all, no matter how the strikes turn out.”
“I won’t have any steel work, maybe,” Chester said with a shrug. “One way or another, though, I’ll get along. There’s plenty of things I can do if I have to. One of ’em or another is bound to work out. I’m a white man; I pull my weight.”
“Aahhh.” Stephen Douglas Martin made a disgusted noise. “You’re in it for the glory. I remember the red flags flying back in the ’90s, too, and the battles, and the blood in the streets. It was all foolishness, if you ask me.”
“Glory?” Chester Martin laughed bitterly. He unbuttoned his left cuff and rolled the sleeve high to show the scar a Confederate bullet had left on his upper arm. “There’s no such thing as glory, near as I can tell. If the machine guns didn’t kill it, the artillery did. Teddy Roosevelt promised us a square deal, but I don’t see him delivering. If I have to go out into the streets to get it, I’ll do that—and to hell with glory.”
“Aahhh,” his father repeated. “Well, go on, then, since that’s what you’re bound and determined to do. I only hope you come back in one piece, that’s all. You’re playing for keeps out there.”
Chester nodded. The thought did not bother him, or not unduly. He’d been playing for keeps since his first comrade got hung up on Confederate barbed wire and shot just inside the Virginia line back in August 1914. He said, “What was the war about, if it wasn’t about having a better life after it was over? I don’t see that, not for me I don’t, not without this fight. I’m still here in the old room I had before I went into the Army, for heaven’s sake.”
“I buried one son, Chester, when the scarlet fever took your brother Hank,” his father said heavily. “It tore my heart in two, and what it did to your mother…. If I had to do it twice, I don’t know how I’d get by afterwards.”
Chester Martin slapped his father on the back. “It’ll be all right. I know what I’m doing, and I know why I’m doing it.” That wasn’t the bravado he might have shown in the days before conscription pulled him into the Army. Instead, it was a man’s sober assessment of risk and need.
His father said nothing more. His father plainly saw there was nothing more to say. With a last nod, Chester left the flat, went down to the corner, and waited for the trolley that would take him into the heart of Toledo and into the heart of the struggle against the steelmill owners.
The strikers, by now, had their own headquarters, a rented hall a couple of blocks away from the long row of steelworks whose stacks belched clouds of black, sulfurous smoke into the sky. The hall had its own forward guards and then a stronger force of defenders in red armbands closer to it. Most of the strike’s leaders had served in the Great War. They understood the need to defend a position in depth.
An unusual number of trash cans and kegs and benches lined the street by the hall. If the Toledo police tried to raid the place, the strikers could throw up barricades in a hurry. They’d already done that more than once, when their struggle with the owners heated up. For now, though, motorcars whizzed past the hall.
For now, too, blue-uniformed police made their way past the strikers’ guards. The men in blue strolled along as if they were in full control of the neighborhood. Only a few of them strolled along at any one time, though. A tacit understanding between the leaders of the strike and city hall let the police keep that illusion of control, provided they did not try to turn it into reality. The agreement was not only tacit but also fragile; when things heated up on the picket lines, the cops drew near at their peril.
“What do you say, Chester?” Albert Bauer called when Martin walked into the hall. The stocky steelworker made a fist. “Here’s to the revolution—the one you said we didn’t need.”
“Ahh, shut up, Al,” Martin answered with a sour grin. “Or if you don’t want to shut up, tell me you were never wrong in your whole life.”
“Can’t do it,” Bauer admitted. “But I’ll tell you this: I don’t think I was ever wrong on anything this important.”
“Teach me to be like you, then,” Martin said, jeering a little.
“You’re learning.” Bauer was imperturbable. “You started out mystified by the capitalists, same as so many do, but you’re learning. Before too long, you’ll see them like they really are—nothing but exploiters who need to be swept onto the ash heap of history so the proletariat can advance.”
“I don’t know anything about the ash heap of history,” Martin said. “I hope some of them get swept away in the elections. They’re only a couple of months off. That would send the country the right kind of message.”
“So it would,” Bauer said. “So it would. That means we have to send the country the right kind of message between now and election day.”
“You mean you don’t want me to go out and start taking potshots at the ugly blue bastards who’ve been taking potshots at us?” Martin said.
“Something like that, yeah.” Bauer’s eyes went to the pistol concealed—but not well enough—in the waistband of Martin’s trousers. “We aren’t out to start any trouble now. If the police start it, we’ll give them as much as they want, but the papers have to be able to say they went after us first.”
“All right.” That made sense to Martin. He headed over to the neat rows of picket signs. Choosing one that read A SQUARE DEAL MEANS A SQUARE MEAL, he shouldered it as if it were a Springfield and headed out toward the line the striking steelworkers had thrown up around the nearest plant.
By then, the scabs who kept the plant running had already gone in. Martin was sure they’d gone in under a hail of curses. Perhaps they hadn’t gone in under a hail of rocks and bottles today. That was the sort of thing that touched off battles with the police, and everything seemed quiet for the time being, as it had on the Roanoke front when both sides were gearing up to have a go at each other.
Martin marched along the sidewalk. Toledo police and company guards kept a close eye on the strikers. The police looked hot and bored. Martin was hot and bored, too. Sweat ran off him in rivers; the day was muggy, without a hint of a breeze. He kept a wary eye on the company guards. They looked hot, too, but they also looked like Great Danes quivering on the end of leashes, ever so eager to bite anything that came near.
“Scab-lovers!” the strikers taunted them. “Whores!” “Goons!” “Stinking sons of bitches!”
“Your mothers were whores!” the guards shouted back. “Your fathers were niggers, just like the ones who rose up in the CSA!”
“Shut up!” the cops shouted, over and over. “Shut the hell up, all of you!” They didn’t want to have to do anything but stand there. Brawling on a day like this was more trouble than it was worth. Chester Martin knew a little sympathy for them, but only a little. He cursed the company guards along with everybody else on the picket line.
Socialist Party workers brought the picketers cheese sandwiches to eat while they marched. In the middle of the afternoon, a picketer and a cop keeled over from the heat within a few minutes of each other. No company guards keeled over. They had all the food and cold water they wanted.
Shift-changing time neared. Chester Martin tensed. The picketers’ shouts, which had grown perfunctory, turned loud and fierce and angry once more as the scabs, escorted by guards and police both, left the steelworks.
“Back away!” a policeman yelled at the strikers. Martin had heard that shout so often, he was sick to death of it. The cop shouted again anyhow: “Back away, you men, or you’ll be sorry!”
Sometimes the striking steelworkers would back away. Sometimes they would surge forward and attack the scabs regardless of the cops and goons protecting them. Martin had been in several pitched battles—that was what the newspapers called them, anyway. To a man who’d known real combat, they didn’t rate the name. Either the reporters had managed to sit out the war on the sidelines or they cared more about selling papers than telling the truth. Maybe both those things were true at once. It wouldn’t have surprised Martin a bit.
Today, nothing untoward happened. The strikers jeered and cursed the scabs and called, “Join us!” More than a few former scabs had quit their jobs and started on the picket lines. No one threw a stone or a horse turd this afternoon, though. No one started shooting, either, although Martin was sure he was a long way from the only striker carrying a pistol.
Having been through more gunfire than he’d ever wanted to imagine, he was anything but sorry not to land in it again. He trudged back to the strikers’ hall, turned in his sign, and dug a nickel out of his pocket for trolley fare. His father and mother would be glad to see him home in one piece. He wondered about his sister. From some of the stories Sue told, her boss exploited her, too.
As he stood on the streetcorner, he shook his head in slow wonder. “The bosses are too stupid to know it,” he murmured, “but they’re turning a whole bunch of good Democrats into revolutionaries.”
Scipio had hoped he would never hear of the Freedom Party again after that one rally in May Park. He hadn’t thought such a hope too unreasonable: he’d never heard of it till that rally. With any luck, the so-called party would turn out to be one angry white man going from town to town on the train. The times were ripe for such cranks.
But, as summer slowly gave way to fall, the Freedom Party opened an office in Augusta. The office was nowhere near the Terry; even had more than a handful of Negroes been eligible to vote, the Freedom Party would not have gone looking for their support. Scipio found out about the office in a one-paragraph story on an inside page of the Augusta Constitutionalist.
He showed the story to his boss, a grizzled Negro named Erasmus who ran a fish market that doubled as a fried-fish café. Erasmus, he’d seen, was a shrewd businessman, but read only slowly and haltingly, mumbling the words under his breath. When at last he finished, he looked over the tops of his half-glasses at Scipio. “Ain’t such a bad thing, Xerxes, I don’t reckon,” he said.
“The buckra in this here party hates we,” Scipio protested. After close to a year in Augusta, he’d grown as used to his alias as he was to his right name. “They gets anywheres, ain’t gwine do we no good.”
Erasmus peered at him over those silly little spectacles again. “Most o’ the white folks hates us,” he answered matter-of-factly. “These ones here, at least they’s honest about it. Reckon I’d sooner know who can’t stand me than have folks tell me lies.”
That made a certain amount of sense—but only, Scipio thought, a certain amount. “The buckra wants to be on top, sure enough,” he said. “But these here Freedom Party buckra, they wants to be on top on account o’ they wants we in de grave, six feets under de ground.”
His boss shook his head. “White folks ain’t that stupid. We dead an’ buried, who gwine do their for work them? You answer me dat, an then I’ll worry ’bout this here Freedom Party.”
“Huh,” Scipio said. He thought for a little while, then laughed a bit sheepishly. “Mebbe you’s right. Cain’t you jus’ see de po’ buckra out in de cotton fields, wid de overseer yellin’ an’ cursin’ at they to move they lazy white backsides?”
“Lawd have mercy, I wish to Jesus I could see me that,” Erasmus said. “I pay money to see that. But it ain’t gwine happen. White folks ain’t about to get their soft hands all blistered an’ dirty, an’ we’s safe enough because o’ that.” A Negro in overalls came in and sat down at one of the half dozen rickety little tables in front of the counter where fish lay on ice. Erasmus pointed. “Never mind this stupid stuff we can’t do nothin’ about anyways. Get yourself over there an’ see what Pythagoras wants to eat.”
“Fried catfish an’cornbread,” the customer said as Scipio came up to him. “Lemonade on the side.”
“I gets it for you,” Scipio answered. He turned to see whether Erasmus had heard the order or he’d have to relay it. His boss had already plucked a catfish from the ice; an empty spot showed where it had been. A moment later, hot lard sizzled as the fish, after a quick dip into egg batter, went into the frying pan.
Scipio poured lemonade and cut a chunk from the pan of moist, yellow cornbread Erasmus had baked that morning. He took the lemonade over to Pythagoras. By the time he got back, Erasmus had slapped the fried catfish onto the plate with the cornbread. He also dipped up a ladleful of greens from a cast-iron pot on the back of the stove and plopped them down alongside the fish.
“He don’t ask for no greens,” Scipio said quietly.
“Once he sees ’em, he decide he wants ’em,” Erasmus said. “He been comin’ in here better’n ten years. You reckon I don’t know what he wants?”
Without another word, Scipio took the plate over to Pythagoras. He had spent years learning to anticipate Anne Colleton’s needs and to minister to them even before she knew she had them. If Erasmus had done the same with his regular customers, how could Scipio argue with him?
And, sure enough, Pythagoras waved to Erasmus and ate the greens with every sign of enjoyment. He ordered a slab of peach pie for dessert. Only after he’d polished that off did he turn a wary eye on Scipio and ask, “What’s all that come to?”
“Thirty-fi’ dollars,” Scipio answered, and waited for the sky to fall.
Pythagoras only shrugged, sighed, and pulled a fat wad of banknotes from a hip pocket. He peeled off two twenties and set them on the table. “Don’ fret yourself none about no change,” he said as he stood up. “Foe the war, I don’t reckon I never had thirty-five dollars, not all at the same time. Money come easy now, but Lord! it sure do go easy, too.” He lifted his cloth cap in salute to Erasmus, then went back out onto the street.
“Do Jesus!” Scipio said. “He sure enough right about dat.” Erasmus was paying him $500 a week after his latest raise, and feeding him dinner every day besides. Despite what would have looked like spectacular wealth in 1914, Scipio remained just one more poor Negro in the Terry.
Erasmus said, “It ain’t all bad. Couple weeks ago, I done took me a thousand dollars down to the bank so I could pay off the note on my house. Should have seen them white bankers fuss an’ flop—jus’ like a catfish on a hook, they was.” His reminiscent grin showed a couple of missing front teeth. “Wasn’t nothin’ they could do about it, though. Money’s money, ain’t that right?” He laughed.
So did Scipio. “Money’s money,” he agreed, and laughed again. These days, the Confederate dollar would scarcely buy what a penny had bought before the war. For anyone in debt, cheap money was a godsend. For those who weren’t, it was a disaster, or at best a challenge to make last week’s salary pay for this week’s groceries.
The eatery got more sit-down trade as afternoon darkened into evening. More women, though, threw down brown banknotes for fish they carried away wrapped in newspaper to fry for their husbands and brothers and children. Scipio watched Erasmus throw the story about the Freedom Party around a fat catfish that a fat woman with a bandanna on her head took off under her arm like a loaf of bread.
He wasn’t sorry to see the story go. He wished somebody—God, perhaps—would use the Freedom Party itself to wrap fish. Whatever else you said about the skinny man who spoke for the party, he’d been terribly earnest. He’d believed every word of what he was saying. If that didn’t make him all the more frightening, Scipio didn’t know what would.
At last, Erasmus said, “Might as well go on home, Xerxes. Don’t reckon we’s gwine get much more trade tonight. I see you in the mornin’.”
“All right.” Scipio left the little market and café and headed back to his roominghouse. He kept an eye open as he hurried along. The street lights in the Terry were few and far between; the white men who ran Augusta didn’t waste a lot of money on the colored part of town. If anybody was thinking of equalizing the wealth in an altogether un-Marxist way, Scipio wanted to see him before being seen.
No one troubled him on the way to the roominghouse. No one troubled him when he got there, either. “Evenin’, Xerxes,” the landlady said when he walked up the stairs and into the front hall. “Not so hot like it has been, is it?”
“No, ma’am,” Scipio said. He’d been paying the rent regularly for some time now. He was working steady hours, too, which made him a good bet to be able to go on paying the rent. Under those circumstances, no wonder the landlady sounded friendly.
He went on up to his neat little third-floor room, got out of his white shirt and black pants, and threw on a cheap, flimsy cotton robe over his drawers. Then, barefoot, he padded down to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Being butler at Marshlands had left him as fastidious about his person as he was about his surroundings, which meant he bathed more often than most of the people who shared the roominghouse with him.
But when he tried the bathroom door, it was locked. A startled splash came from within, and a woman’s voice: “Who’s there?”
Scipio’s ears heated. Had he been white, he would have blushed. “It’s Xerxes, Miss Bathsheba, from up the hall,” he said. “I’s right sorry to ’sturb you.”
“Don’t fret yourself none,” she said. “I’m just about done.” More splashes: he judged she was getting out of the cramped tin tub. He smiled a little, letting his imagination peek through the closed door.
In a couple of minutes, that door opened. Out came Bathsheba, a pleasant-looking woman in her early thirties. Scipio thought she had a little white blood in her, though not enough to be called a mulatto. She wore a robe with a gaudy print, of the same cheap cotton cloth as his. She didn’t hold it closed as well as she might have. At Marshlands, Scipio had mastered the art of looking without seeming to. He got himself a discreet eyeful now.
“See you later, Xerxes,” Bathsheba said, and headed up the hall past him. He turned his head to watch her go. She looked back at him over her shoulder. Her eyes sparkled.
“Well, well,” Scipio murmured. He hurried into the bathroom, ran the tub half full, and bathed as fast as he could. He would have bathed in a hurry anyhow; sitting down in a tub of cold water was a long way from a sensual delight. Now, though, he had an extra incentive, or hoped he did.
He went back to his room almost at a trot, and put on a fresh shirt and a pair of trousers. Have to take the laundry out soon, he thought. He started out the door again, then checked himself. When he did leave, he was carrying a flat pint bottle of whiskey. He didn’t do a lot of drinking, but there were times…He knocked on the door to Bathsheba’s room.
“That you, Xerxes?” she asked. When he admitted it, she opened the door, then shut it after him. She was still wearing that robe, and still not bothering to hold it closed very well. She pointed at the whiskey bottle. “What you got there?” Her voice was arch; she knew perfectly well what he had—and why, too.
“Wonder if you wants to take a nip with me,” Scipio said.
By way of reply, Bathsheba got a couple of mismatched glasses and sat down at one end of a ratty sofa. When Scipio sat down, too, close beside her, he contrived—or maybe she did—to brush his leg against hers. She didn’t pull away. He poured a healthy shot of whiskey into each glass.
They drank and talked, neither one of them in a hurry. After a while, Scipio slipped his arm around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder. He set down his glass, turned toward her, and tilted her face up for a kiss. Then his free hand slid inside her robe. He rapidly discovered she was naked under it.
Bathsheba laughed at what must have been his startled expression. “I was hopin’ you might stop by,” she said.
“Sweet thing, I ain’t stopped,” Scipio said. “I ain’t hardly even started.” He lowered his mouth to a dark-nippled breast. She pressed her hand to the back of his head, urging him on. His breath caught in his throat. He needed no urging.
These days, the Lower East Side in New York City felt strange to Flora Hamburger. That it felt strange was strange itself. She’d lived her whole life there, till she’d gone off to Philadelphia to take her seat in Congress at the start of 1917. Now, as October 1918 yielded to November, she was home again, campaigning for a second term.
But, though she’d visited the Lower East Side several times since, this long campaign swing forcibly brought home to her how much she’d been away. Everything seemed shabby and cramped and packed tighter with people than a tin of sardines was stuffed with little fish. Things surely hadn’t changed much in less than two years. But she’d taken them for granted before. She didn’t any more.
Her posters—red and black, with VOTE SOCIALIST! VOTE HAMBURGER! in both English and Yiddish—were almost everywhere in the Fourteenth Ward, and especially in the Centre Market, across the street from the Socialist Party headquarters. Her district was solidly Socialist; the Democratic candidate, an amiable nonentity named Marcus Krauskopf, had for all practical purposes thrown in the sponge. The Democrats hadn’t been able to win two years before even with an appointed incumbent. Now that Flora held the advantage of incumbency, they looked to be saving their efforts for places where they had a chance to do better.
Flora was not the sort who took anything for granted. She stood on a keg of nails and addressed the people who crowded into the Centre Market, even if many of them were after pickled tomatoes or needles or smoked whitefish, not speeches. “What have we got from our great victory? Dead men, maimed men, men who can’t get work because the capitalists care more for their profits than for letting people earn a proper living. That was the war the Democrats gave you. This is the peace the Democrats are giving you. Is it what you want?”
Some people in the market shouted, “No!” About as many, though, went on about their business. Most of them—most who were citizens, at any rate—would vote when the time came. They’d known too much oppression to throw away the chance to have a say in government the United States offered them.
“If you want to help the capitalists, you’ll vote for the Democrats,” Flora went on. “If you want to help yourselves, you’ll vote for me. I hope you vote for me.”
Her breath smoked as she talked. The day was raw, with ragged gray clouds scudding across the sky. People sneezed and coughed as they went from one market stall to the next. The Spanish influenza wasn’t nearly so bad as it had been the winter before, but it hadn’t gone away, either.
When Flora stepped down from the keg of nails, Herman Bruck reached out a hand to help steady her. Bruck was dapper in an overcoat of the very latest cut: not because he was rich, but because he came from a family of master tailors. “Fine speech,” he said. “Very fine speech.”
He didn’t want to let go of her hand. Her being away hadn’t made him any less interested in her. It had made her much less interested in him, not that she’d ever been very interested. Next to Hosea Blackford, he was a barely housebroken puppy. Freeing herself, Flora said, “Let’s go back to the offices. I want to make sure we’ll have all the poll-watchers we’ll need out on the fifth.” She was confident the Socialists would, but it gave her an excuse to move, and to keep Bruck moving.
The Party offices were above a butcher’s shop. Max Fleischmann, the butcher, came out of his doorway and spoke in Yiddish: “I’ll vote for you, Miss Hamburger.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fleischmann,” Flora answered, genuinely touched—the butcher was, or had been, a staunch Democrat. His vote meant a lot to her.
In a slightly different way, it also meant a lot to Herman Bruck. As he went upstairs with Flora, he said, “If people like Fleischmann are voting for you, you’ll win in a walk.”
“We’ll know Tuesday night,” Flora said. Inside the office, people greeted her like the old friend she was. A term in Congress slipped away, and for a little while she was just the agitator she had been before Congressman Myron Zuckerman’s tragic accidental death made her run to fill his shoes and bring the seat back to the Socialist Party.
Everyone cheered when Bruck reported what Max Fleischmann had said. Maria Tresca remarked, “If we keep on like this, in 1920 the Democrats won’t bother to run anybody at all in this district, any more than the Republicans do now.” The secretary was a lone Italian in an office full of Jews, but probably the most ardent Socialist there—and, by now, not the least fluent in Yiddish, either.
“Maybe in 1920—alevai in 1920…the White House,” Herman Bruck said softly. Silence fell while people thought about that. When Teddy Roosevelt rode the crest of the wave after winning the Great War, such dreams from a Socialist would have been only dreams, and pipe dreams at that. Now, with the cost of the war clearer, with the strife that followed—maybe the dream could turn real.
Flora did check the roster of poll-watchers, and suggested some changes and additions. If you want something done right, do it yourself, she thought. After everything satisfied her, she headed back to the flat where she’d lived most of her life. The years on the floor of Congress had sharpened her debating; she had no trouble discouraging Bruck from walking along with her.
Coming in through the door reminded her anew of how much her life had changed. The apartment where she lived alone in Philadelphia was far bigger than this one, which housed her parents, two brothers, two sisters, and a toddler nephew, and which had housed her as well. It hadn’t seemed particularly crowded before she went away: everyone she knew lived the same way, and sometimes took in boarders to help make ends meet. Now she knew there were other possibilities.
Her sisters, Sophie and Esther, helped her mother in the kitchen. The smell of beef-and-barley soup rising from the pot on the stove mingled with the scent of her father’s pipe tobacco to make the odor of home. Her brothers, David and Isaac, bent over a chess board at one corner of the dining-room table. All was as it had been there, too, save for the crutch on the floor by David’s chair.
David moved a knight and looked smug. Isaac grunted, as if in pain. Looking up from the board, he consciously noticed Flora for the first time, though she hadn’t been particularly quiet. “Hello,” he said. “Got my conscription notice today.” He was eighteen, two years younger than his brother.
“You knew it was coming,” Flora said, and Isaac nodded: everyone put in his two years. Flora quietly thanked the God in Whom her Marxist exterior did not believe that Isaac would serve in peacetime. By the way David’s face twisted for a moment, that thought was going through his mind, too.
“How does the leg feel?” she asked him.
He slapped it. The sound it made was nothing like that of flesh: closer to furniture. “Not too bad,” he said. “I manage. I only need one leg for a sewing-machine treadle, and it doesn’t much matter which.” At that, guilt rose up and smote Flora. Seeing it, her brother said, “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. It’s just the way things are, that’s all.”
A fresh puff of smoke rose from behind the Daily Forward their father was reading. Abraham Hamburger said, “It’s usually not a good idea to say anything that makes you explain yourself afterwards.”
“I wish more Congressmen would pay attention to that advice, Father,” Flora said, which caused fresh smoke signals to rise from behind the Yiddish newspaper.
Little Yossel Reisen grabbed Flora by the leg and gravely said, “Wowa”: the closest he could come to her name. Then he walked on unsteady feet to Sophie and said, “Mama.” That he had down solid.
Sophie Reisen stirred the soup, then picked him up. Yossel’s father, after whom he was named, had never seen him; he’d been killed in Virginia long before the baby was born. Had he not got Sophie in a family way, they probably wouldn’t have been married before he met a bullet.
When supper reached the table, the tastes of home were as familiar as the smell. Afterwards, Flora helped her mother with the dishes. “You will win again,” Sarah Hamburger said with calm assurance.
She would have thought the same had Flora reckoned herself out of the running. As things were, Flora nodded. “Yes, I think I will,” she answered, and her mother beamed; Sarah Hamburger had known it all along.
Going to sleep that night was a fresh trial for Flora. She’d got used to dozing off in quiet surroundings, queer as the notion would have struck her before she went to Congress. The racket in the apartment, the sort of noise that had once lulled her, now set her teeth on edge because she wasn’t accustomed to it any more. Even having to answer Esther’s “Good night” struck her as an imposition.
She stumped hard through the last few days of the campaign. On Tuesday the fifth, she voted at Public School 130. The Socialist poll-watcher tipped his cap to her; his Democratic opposite number did not raise his expensive black homburg.
Then it was back to Socialist Party headquarters to wait for the polls to close in the district and across the country. As the night lengthened, telephone lines and telephone clickers began bringing in reports. By the third set of numbers from her district, she knew she was going to beat Marcus Krauskopf: her lead was close to two to one.
Well before midnight, Krauskopf read the writing on the wall and telephoned to concede. “Mazeltov,” he said graciously. “Now that you’ve won, go right on being the conscience of the House. They need one there, believe me.”
“Thank you very much,” she said. “You ran a good race.” That wasn’t quite true, but matched his graciousness.
“I did what I could.” She could almost hear him shrug over the wire. “But you’ve made a name for yourself, it’s a Socialist district anyhow, and I don’t think this is a Democratic year.”
As if to underscore that, Maria Tresca exclaimed, “We just elected a Socialist in the twenty-eighth district in Pennsylvania. Where is that, anyhow?”
People looked at maps. After a minute or so, Herman Bruck said, “It’s way up in the northwestern part of the state. We’ve never elected a Socialist Congressman from around there before—too many farmers, not enough miners. Maybe the people really have had enough of the Democratic Party.”
“Even if they are finally fed up, it’s taken them much too long to get that way,” Maria said. As far as she was concerned, the proletarian revolution was welcome to start tomorrow, or even tonight.
The later it got, the more returns came in from the West. The first numbers from Dakota showed Hosea Blackford handily ahead in his district. “A sound man,” Herman Bruck said.
“Sound? Half the time, he sounds like a Democrat,” Maria Tresca said darkly.
But even her ideological purity melted in the face of the gains the Socialists were making. A couple of districts in and just outside Toledo that had never been anything but Democratic were going Socialist tonight. The same thing happened in Illinois and Michigan and, eventually, in distant California, too.
“Is it a majority?” Flora asked, a question she hadn’t thought she would need tonight. She’d been optimistic going into the election, but there was a difference between optimism and cockeyed optimism.
Except, tonight, maybe there wasn’t. “I don’t know.” Herman Bruck sounded like a man doing his best to restrain astonished awe. “A lot of these races are still close. But it could be.” He looked toward a map where he’d been coloring Socialist districts red. “It really could be.”
Every time Cincinnatus Driver got downwind of the Kentucky Smoke House, spit gushed into his mouth. He couldn’t help it; Apicius Wood ran the best barbecue joint in Kentucky, very possibly the best in the USA. Negroes from the neighborhood came to the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington’s whites. And so did the men who’d come down from the other side of the Ohio since the Stars and Stripes replaced the Stars and Bars atop the city hall. Nobody turned up his nose at food like that.
Lucullus—Lucullus Wood, now that his father Apicius, like Cincinnatus, had taken a surname—was turning a pig’s carcass above a pit filled with hickory wood and basting the meat with a sauce an angel had surely brought down from heaven. He nodded to Cincinnatus. “Ain’t seen you here for a while,” he remarked. “What you want?”
Cincinnatus stretched out his hands in the direction of the pit. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to revel in the warmth that came from it: the weather outside held a promise of winter. “I want to talk to your pa,” he answered as he began to warm up himself.
Lucullus made a sour face. “Why ain’t I surprised?”
“On account of you know me,” Cincinnatus said. “I’ll be damned if I know how you can look like you done bit into a green persimmon when you’re takin’ a bath in the best smell in the world.”
“Only thing I smell when you come around here is trouble,” Lucullus said. He never missed a beat in turning the carcass or basting it.
With a bitter laugh, Cincinnatus answered, “That’d be funny, except it ain’t. I get into trouble around here, it’s trouble your pa put me in. Now”—he let his voice roughen—“can I see him, or not?”
Lucullus Wood was harder to lean on than he had been. He was twenty now, or maybe a year past, and had confidence in himself as a man. Even so, a show of determination could still make him back down. He bit his lip, then said, “That room in back I reckon you know about.”
“Yeah, I know about that room.” Cincinnatus nodded. “He in there with anybody, or is he by his lonesome?”
“By his lonesome, far as I know,” Lucullus said. “Go on, go on. You barged in before. Barge on in again.” Had his hands been free, he probably would have made washing motions with them to show that whatever happened next was not his fault. As things were, his expression got the message across.
Ignoring that expression, Cincinnatus went down the hall at the back of the Kentucky Smoke House till he got to the door he knew. He didn’t barge in; he knocked instead. “Come in,” a voice from within said. Cincinnatus worked the latch. Apicius Wood looked at him with something less than pleasure. “Oh. It’s you. Reckoned it might be somebody I was glad to see.”
“It’s me.” Cincinnatus shut the door behind him.
With a grunt, Apicius pointed to a battered chair. The proprietor of the Kentucky Smoke House looked as if he’d eaten a great deal of his own barbecue. If that was how he’d got so fat, Cincinnatus didn’t think he could have picked a better way. “Well,” Apicius rumbled, “what we gonna fight about today?”
“Don’t want no fight,” Cincinnatus said.
Apicius Wood laughed in his face. “Ain’t many niggers in this town as stubborn as I am, but you’re sure as hell one of ’em. We don’t see eye to eye. You know it, an’ I know it, too. When we get together, we fight.”
Cincinnatus let out a long sigh. “I ain’t enough of a Red to suit you, I ain’t enough of a diehard to suit Joe Conroy, and I’m too goddamn black to suit Luther Bliss. Where does that leave me?”
“Out on a limb,” Apicius answered accurately. “Well, say your say, so I know what we gonna fight about this time.”
“What you think of the elections?” Cincinnatus asked.
“What the hell difference it make what I think or even if I think?” Apicius returned. “Ain’t like I got to vote. Ain’t like you got to vote, neither. Have to wait till after the revolution for that to happen, I reckon.”
“Maybe not,” Cincinnatus said. “Put ’em together, the Socialists and the Republicans got more seats in the House than the Democrats do. First time the Democrats lose the House in more’n thirty years. They lost seats in the Senate, too.”
“Didn’t lose a one here in Kentucky,” Apicius said. “’Fore they let somebody here vote, they make damn sure they know who he vote for.”
Cincinnatus refused to let the fat cook sidetrack him. “How much you work with the white Socialists before the elections?” he asked.
“Not much,” Apicius said. “Ain’t much to work with. Don’t hardly have no homegrown white Socialists, and every one that come over the Ohio, Bliss and the Kentucky State Police got their eye on him. Don’t want them bastards puttin’ their eye on me any worse than they done already.”
“How hard did you try?” Cincinnatus persisted. “Did you—?”
But Apicius wasn’t easy to override, either. Raising a pale-palmed hand, he went on, “’Sides, them white Socialists ain’t hardly Reds. They’re nothin’ but Pinks, you know what I mean? They jaw about the class struggle, but they ain’t pickin’ up guns and doin’ anything much.”
“What you talkin’ about?” Cincinnatus said. “All these strikes—”
Apicius broke in again: “So what? Ain’t much shootin’ goin’ on, not to speak of. When the niggers in the Confederate States rose up, that was a fight worth talkin’ about. We’d have done the same thing here, certain sure, if the Yankees hadn’t taken us out of the CSA by then. Did do some of it anyways.”
That was true, and Cincinnatus knew it. He also knew something else: “Yeah, they rose up, sure enough, but they got whipped. Reds rise up in the USA, they get whipped, too. Got to be more to the class struggle than shootin’ guns all the blame time, or the folks with most guns always gonna win.”
“Not if their soldiers and their police work out whose side they really ought to be on,” Apicius said. This time, he spoke quickly, to make sure Cincinnatus couldn’t interrupt him: “Yeah, I know, I know, it ain’t likely, not the way things is now. I ain’t sayin’ no different.”
“All right, then,” Cincinnatus said. “If it ain’t all struggle with guns, we—you—ought to be workin’ with the white folks, ain’t that right?”
“You ain’t been enough of a Red your ownself to tell me what I ought to be doin’, Cincinnatus,” Apicius said heavily.
“You don’t fancy it, you don’t got to listen,” Cincinnatus returned. “Other thing you ought to be doin’ is, you ought to start workin’ to get black folks the vote. Ain’t impossible, not in the USA.”
“Ain’t possible, not in Kentucky,” Apicius said. “Some of the sons of bitches in the Legislature remember when they used to own us. You was born after manumission. You don’t know how things was. When I was a boy, I was a slave. I don’t know how to tell you how bad bein’ a slave is.”
“My pa was a slave,” Cincinnatus said. “My ma, too. There’s some states in the USA that let niggers vote. If we can’t vote, we might as well still be slaves, on account of we ain’t got no say in what happens to us.”
“Yeah, and you know what states they are,” Apicius said with a toss of the head. “They’re states that ain’t got more than about a dozen niggers, maybe two dozen tops, so havin’’ em vote don’t matter one way or the other. Kentucky ain’t like that. We got to vote here, we’d have us some say. What that means is, we ain’t never gettin’ the vote here. White folks won’t let it happen.”
That held an unpleasant ring of truth. Cincinnatus said, “If we can’t win a fight and we can’t win the vote, what good are we?”
“Damned if I know what good you are, ’cept to drive me crazy,” Apicius said. “What I’m good for is, I make some pretty good barbecue.”
Cincinnatus exhaled in exasperation. “If you don’t try, how the devil you find out what you can do?”
“I go up on the roof at city hall, I don’t need to jump off to know I land in the street,” Apicius said. “What you want I should do, hand Luther Bliss a petition to ask him to tell the gov’nor to give us the vote? Not likely!” That not likely didn’t refer to the orders the chief of the Kentucky secret police might give the governor. But Apicius could never sign such a petition, being unable to read or write.
“This here is one of the United States now,” Cincinnatus said stubbornly. “You and me, we’re citizens of the United States. We weren’t never citizens of the Confederate States. We can try now. Maybe we don’t win, but maybe by the time my Achilles grows up, he be able to vote.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Apicius advised, “or you end up the bluest damn nigger anybody ever seen.”
That also sounded altogether too likely to suit Cincinnatus. But he was not a man to give in to trouble if he could get around it. And, as a U.S. citizen, he had more ways to try to get around it than he’d had as a Confederate resident. “I end up bangin’ my head against a stone wall here, I can move to one of them states where they do let black folks vote.” He didn’t know exactly which states allowed Negro suffrage, but a trip to the library would tell him.
He’d succeeded in startling Apicius. “You’d move up to one of them Yankee states?” The barbecue cook seemed to listen to himself, for he laughed. “Hellfire, this here’s a Yankee state these days, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, except most of the white folks here ain’t figured that out,” Cincinnatus answered. “So why the hell shouldn’t I move? Couldn’t be worse’n what I’ve got now, not in the USA it couldn’t”—the Confederate States were a different story altogether, and both men knew it—“so what’s keepin’ me here? Ought to throw my family in the truck and get on the road.”
“I seen that truck,” Apicius said. “If it ain’t one thing keepin’ you here, damned if I know what is. You be lucky to get over the river into Ohio, let alone anywheres else.”
“Maybe,” Cincinnatus said. “It is a shame and a disgrace, ain’t it?” But, even though he chuckled at the barb, the idea of packing up and leaving stayed in his mind. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed. He wouldn’t have to worry about Luther Bliss, or Apicius and the Reds, or the diehards. He’d seen that white people from the rest of the USA didn’t love Negroes—far from it—but white people in Kentucky didn’t love Negroes, either.
He wondered what Elizabeth would say if he proposed pulling up stakes. He wondered what his mother and father would say, too. All of a sudden, finding out didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. He’d never cast a vote in his life. Being able to do that would be worth a lot.
“You got that look in your eye,” Apicius said.
“Maybe I do,” Cincinnatus answered. “God damn, maybe I do.”