'That is good,' Andersen said with a connoisseur's approval.
Chester Martin nodded, too. Roosevelt knew about the harder path. Along with Custer, though on a slightly smaller scale because he'd been just a colonel of volunteers, he'd come out of the Second Mexican War a hero, and his stock had been rising ever since. No nation could have hoped for a better leader in time of war.
All the same, sitting in a firing pit that had started life as a shell hole, surrounded by the stench of death, the rattle of machine guns, the occasional roar of U.S. and Rebel artillery, lice in his hair, Martin couldn't help wondering whether Teddy Roosevelt had ever walked a path as hard as this one.
Scipio bowed and said in tones of grave regret, 'I am sorry to have to inform you, sir, that we have no more champagne.'
'No more champagne? Merde!' Marcel Duchamp clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. Everything the modern artist did, as far as Scipio could tell, was deliberately dramatic. Duchamp was tall and thin and pale and in the habit of dressing in black, which made him look like a preacher-until you saw his eyes. He didn't behave like a preacher, either, not if half-not if a quarter-of the stories Scipio heard from the maids and kitchen girls were true. Now he went on, 'How shall I endure this rural desolation without champagne to console me?'
Whiskey was the first thought that came to Scipio's mind. If it worked for him, if it worked for the Negroes who picked Marshlands' cotton, it ought to do the job for a dandified Frenchman. But he'd been trained to give the best service he could, and so he said, 'The war has made importing difficult, sir, as it has disturbed outbound travel. But perhaps my mistress, Miss Colleton, would be able to procure some champagne in New Orleans and order it sent here for you. If you like, I will send her a telegram with your request.'
'Disturbed outbound travel: yes, I should say so,' Duchamp replied. 'No one will put out to sea from Charleston, it seems, for fear of being torpedoed or cannonaded or otherwise discommoded.' He rolled those disconcerting eyes. 'Would you not agree, the risk of going to the bottom of the sea is only slightly less than the risk of staying here?'
By now, Scipio knew better than to try to match wits with Duchamp. The artist's conversation was as confusing as his paintings; he used words to reflect back on one another till common sense vanished from them. Stolidly, the butler repeated, 'Would you like me to wire my mistress about the champagne, sir?'
'I give you the advice of Rabelais: do as you please,' Duchamp said, which helped not at all. The Frenchman cocked his head to one side. 'Your mistress, you say. In what sense is she yours?'
'I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir,' Scipio said.
Marcel Duchamp stabbed out a long, pale forefinger. 'You are her servant. You were, at one time, her slave, is it not so?' He waved a hand to encompass not just the dining room of the Marshlands mansion but the entire estate.
'I was a slave of the Colleton family, yes, sir, although I was manumitted not long before Miss Anne was born,' Scipio said, nothing at all in his voice now. He didn't like being reminded of his former status, even if his present one represented no great advance upon it.
Duchamp sensed that. He didn't let it deter him; if anything, it spurred him on. 'Very well. You are her servant. She may dismiss you, punish you, give you onerous duties, do as she likes with you. Is it not so?'
'It may be so in theory,' Scipio said warily, 'but Miss Colleton would never-'
Duchamp waggled that forefinger to interrupt him. 'Never mind. It is in this sense of the word that you are her servant. Now, you say she is your mistress. How may you, in your turn, punish her if she fails of the requirements of a mistress?'
'What?' Even Scipio's politeness to a guest at Marshlands, and to a white man at that (not that the Marshlands estate was likely to entertain a colored guest), proved to have limits. 'You ought to know I can't do that, sir.'
'Oh, I do know it. I know it full well. Many have accused me of being mad, but few of being stupid.' The artist winked, as if to say even here he did not expect to be taken altogether seriously. But he was, or at least he sounded, serious as he went on, 'So how is the charming and wealthy Miss Colleton yours, eh, Scipio? You cannot punish her, you cannot control her, you cannot possess her, either in economic terms or in the perfumed privacy of her boudoir, you-'
Scipio abruptly turned on his heel and walked out of the dining room, out of the mansion altogether. That Frenchman was crazy, and the people who'd told him so knew what they were talking about. In the Confederate States of America, you had to be crazy if you talked about a Negro servant possessing a white woman in her bedroom-even if you called it a boudoir. Oh, such things happened now and again. Scipio knew that. They always ended badly, too, when they were discovered. He knew that, too. But whether they happened or not, you didn't go around talking about them. You sure as the devil didn't go around suggesting them to a Negro.
'Words,' Scipio said in his educated voice. Then he repeated it in the slurred dialect of the Congaree: 'Words.' Marcel Duchamp played games with them nobody had any business playing.
The hell of it was, this time he did make a corrosive kind of sense. Anne Colleton wasn't his mistress in the same way he was her butler. The two sides of the relationship weren't heads and tails of the same coin, the way they looked to be if you didn't think about them. Few Negroes did think about them, instead taking them for granted… which was precisely what the white aristocracy of the Confederate States wanted them to do.
Scipio looked out toward the cotton fields from which Marshlands drew its wealth-from which Anne Colleton drew her wealth. The Negroes out in those fields were her workers, almost as they had been before manumission. But was she theirs? Hardly. In his own way, Duchamp was an influence as corrupting as The Communist Manifesto.
And Anne Colleton hadn't a clue that was so. There were a lot of things the mistress- his mistress? — he'd have to think about that) didn't have a clue about when it came to what really went on at Marshlands. Scipio hadn't had a clue about them, either, not until he discovered the forbidden book in Cassius' cottage.
He still wished he'd never seen it. But, to protect his own hide, he'd been reading a lot of Marx and Engels and Lincoln, and then talking things over with Cassius. The more you looked at things from an angle that wasn't the one white folks wanted you to use, the uglier the whole structure of the Confederacy looked.
And, as if deliberately sent by a malicious God to make his misgivings worse, here came Cassius, a shotgun over one shoulder, a stick with four possums tied by the tail to it on the other. The possums, presumably, were for his own larder: Scipio tried to imagine what Marcel Duchamp would say if presented with baked possum and greens. He'd learned a little about swearing in French. He figured that would teach him a good deal more.
Cassius couldn't wave, but did nod. 'How you is?' he asked.
'I been better,' Scipio answered, as usual in the dialect in which he was addressed.
Nobody else was in earshot, and it was normal for the hunter and the butler to stand around talking. With a sly grin on his face, Cassius said, 'Come de revolution, all of we be better.'
'You gwine get youself killed, is all, you talk like that,' Scipio said. 'The white folks, they shoot we, they hang we. The poor buckra, they look fo' the chance every day. You want to give it to they?'
'The poor buckra in the Army, fight the rich white folks' war,' Cassius said. 'Not enough leff to stop we, come de day.'
They'd gone round and round on that one, pummeling each other like a couple of prizefighters. Scipio tried a new argument: 'Awright. Suppose we beat the white folks, Cass. What happen then? Ain't just we the white folks is fightin', like you say. We rise up, we give the USA the fight. The USA, they don' love niggers hardly no better'n our own white folks.'
He'd hoped he would at least rock Cassius back on his mental heels, but the hunter-the revolutionary, the Red-only shook his head and smiled, al most pityingly. 'Kip, the revolution ain't jus' here. The USA, they gwine have they own revolution, right along with we.'
Scipio stared at Cassius. Whatever else you could say about him, he didn't think small. At last, cautiously, Scipio said, 'They ain't got enough niggers in the USA to rise up against they gov'ment.'
'They got plenty white folks up no'th what's 'pressed,' Cassius answered. 'You get worked sunup to sundown, don't matter you is black or you is white. You 'pressed the same, either which way. You rise up the same, either which way. The damnyankees, they shoot they strikers same as they shoot niggers here. When the broom of revolution come out, it gwine sweep away the 'pressors in the USA the same as here.'
He sounded like a preacher stirring up the congregation. That was what he was, though he would have been furious had Scipio said so. But a lot of workers on the plantation took The Communist Manifesto as Gospel.
