'Too goddamn fancy for me,' Jenkins whispered back. 'What I want to do is, I want to smash those damnyankee bastards. If he'd tell me how we're going to do that, I'd be a sight happier.'
'We must stay the course,' Wilson said, though a few soldiers drifted away as others came to listen. 'We must not swerve suddenly in the middle of the great conflict upon which we have embarked. Giving ourselves over to foolish radicalism at a time like this would only spell disaster for our nation and for all we hold dear.'
A light dawned on Reggie. He'd wondered why Wilson had come to the base camp when speaking before soldiers was so obviously unnatural, even uncomfortable, to him. 'Presidential election's less than three months off,' he said. 'He wants to make sure we don't go and elect the Radical Liberal.'
'He don't have a hell of a lot to worry about,' Jenkins said. 'We've never sent one of those crazy bastards to Richmond yet, and I don't reckon we will this time, neither.'
'Politicians take all sorts of crazy chances — don't suppose we'd be in this damn war if they didn't,' Bartlett said. 'But they sure as hell don't take chances about what happens to their party. Wilson can't run again himself, so he wants to make damn sure the vice president, whatever the devil his name is, gets the job.'
'Sims? Sands? Something like that,' Jenkins said. 'Whoever the hell he is, I'm gonna vote for him.'
'Me, too, I think,' Reggie said, 'but I've got better things to do than listen to speeches that tell me to do what I'm already going to do.'
'Yeah,' Jenkins agreed, and they both walked off. Signboards here and there in the base camp listed attractions. 'Let's go watch a boxing match,' Reggie suggested.
'White men or colored?' somebody asked.
Bartlett ran his finger down the list of matches to see who was fighting whom. 'Our division's colored champion is taking on a fellow from the Confederate Marines who's touring base camps,' he said. 'That's gonna be the best fight today, no doubt about it.'
Nobody argued with him. The crowd around the squared circle was al ready large by the time he got there. He and Jasper Jenkins so effectively used their elbows to get closer to the ring that they almost started a couple of fights of their own.
They cheered Commodus, the division champion, and lustily booed the Negro from the Confederate Marines, whose name was Lysis. 'Which,' shouted the soldier doing duty as announcer, 'means Destruction.' More boos.
Reggie bet another soldier two dollars that Commodus would win. He had to pay up depressingly soon: Lysis knocked Commodus cold in the third round. Attendants had to flip water into the fallen champion's face before he could get up and groggily stagger out of the ring.
'That's one tough nigger,' Bartlett said as Lysis swaggered around with arms upraised in victory. He gave the fellow he'd bet a two-dollar bill. Then a strange thought struck him: 'I wonder how he'd do against a white man his size.'
'Bet he wonders, too,' the fellow who'd won his money answered. 'If he's a smart nigger, he won't let anybody know it, though. Wouldn't be much point if he did — nobody'd let a fight like that happen any which way.'
'You're right, I expect,' Reggie said. 'Niggers start thinking they can fight white men, we got more trouble than we need. And seeing as how we've already got more trouble than we need — '
At that moment, as if on cue in a stage play, one leg started to itch in an all too familiar way. He scratched and swore and scratched again. The Floden disinfector was like an artillery barrage — it made the lice put their heads down, but it didn't get rid of all of them. Some nits always survived and hatched out after you'd had your clothes on for a while. He sighed and scratched still more. No matter what you did, you couldn't win.
Anne Colleton wrote a check, computed the balance remaining in the account, and made a nasty face. Everything cost more these days — niggers' wages, their food, the manure to keep the cotton fields fertile, the kerosene for the lamps in the nigger cottages-everything. She'd got more money than usual for the latest crop she'd brought in, but the rise in prices hadn't stopped since then. If anything, it had got steeper.
A discreet tap at the door to her office made her look up. There stood Scipio, starched, immaculate, stolid. In his deep, rumbling voice, he said, 'Ma'am, as you ordered, I have brought the Negro Cassius here for your judgment at his recent abscondment.'
She nodded. Disciplining the field hands was a job she undertook from a sense of duty and necessity, not because she enjoyed it. Disciplining a top flight hand like Cassius was especially delicate. Being too lenient with him would provoke worse indiscipline from the field force. Being too harsh, though, would make another three or four or half a dozen Negroes up and leave the fields for factory work in Columbia or down in Charleston.
But disciplining him didn't look so repugnant as it usually did, not when the alternative was paying more of the bills that made her capital flow away like the waters of the Congaree — in fact, more swiftly than the lazy waters of the river. She nodded again. 'Send him in.'
'Yes, ma'am.' Scipio turned and murmured to his companion in the hallway. Cassius showed himself for the first time. His shapeless cotton garments, brightened only by the blue bandanna he wore round his neck, made a sharp contrast to Scipio's formal livery.
Anne glared at Cassius for a few seconds without saying anything. Scipio silently slipped away, not wanting to hear-or to be known to hear- whatever punishment the mistress of Marshlands meted out. He respects Cassius' position on the plantation, too, Anne thought. Yes, she had to proceed with caution.
Cassius could not long bear up under her scrutiny. He cast his eyes down to the hardwood floor. Anne watched him intently. His gaze flicked to right and left, taking in the books that filled the office. She'd deliberately summoned him here, to add the intimidating alien environment to the moral effect of tak ing punishment from a white.
'What do you have to say for yourself?' she asked, her voice crisp and businesslike. 'It had better be good.'
He interlocked the fingers of his hands, a gesture almost prayerful in its supplication. 'I is sorry, Miss Anne, I truly is,' he said. 'I couldn't he'p myself.' The dialect of the Negroes of the Congaree district spilled thick as molasses from his lips. A white from Charleston would have had trouble understanding it; a white from, say, Birmingham would have been all at sea. So would a black from Birmingham, for that matter. Anne followed his speech as readily as she followed Scipio's formal, precise language. She'd grown up with the Negro dialect all around her. As a child, she'd spoken it half the time, till trained out of it by parents and teachers.
She didn't think of speaking it now. Using her own brand of English helped remind Cassius who was superior, who inferior. ' 'Sorry' might be enough to make amends for being gone a day or two,' she snapped. 'You were gone for four mortal weeks. Where did you go? What did you do? Did you think you could just show up here again one day and go on about your business as if nothing had happened? Answer me!'
Cassius did some more hand-wringing. He was good at it — too good to be altogether convincing. He had a foxy gleam in his eye, too, one that never quite went away no matter how contrite and woebegone the rest of his face looked. 'Whe' I was at? Miss Anne, I was up de country a ways. I was huntin'' He nodded in sudden assurance. 'Dat's what I was doin'-huntin'.'
'I don't believe a word of it,' she answered. 'If you wanted to go on a long hunting trip, you know you wouldn't have had any trouble arranging it with me. You've done that before — never for four weeks, but you've done it.'
He hung his head again. Now she thought she recognized the expression on his face. If he'd been white, he would have blushed. After a long silence, he said, 'Miss Anne, kin Ah talk to you like you was a man?'
Not a white man, she noted, just a man. A suspicion began forming in her mind. 'Go ahead,' she told him.
He twisted his hands once more, this time, she judged, in embarrassment. She wasn't a man; no one who was had any cause to doubt that. 'Miss Anne,' Cassius said, 'what I huntin', she 'bout nineteen year ol', an' you kin put yo' han's roun' she waist' — he made a circle to show what he meant- 'an' yo' fingers, dey touches theyselves. Dat's what I was huntin', fo' true.'
Since he'd been gone that long, Anne reckoned he'd bagged her, too. He was a good deal more than nineteen — he was a good deal more than twice nineteen-but those things happened. She knew those things happened. She was still angry at the hunter, but not so angry as she had been. 'What's her name?' she said. 'Whereabouts exactly does she live? How did you meet her?'
'She name Drusilla, Miss Anne. She live on de Marberrys' plantation, over by Fo't Motte. She come into St.
