whistled. 'I ain't seen but one o' those before in all my born days-that barnstorming feller who came through town a couple years ago. Doesn't hardly seem natural, does it?'
'No, sir,' said Cincinnatus, whose acquaintance with flying machines was similarly limited. 'That wasn't no barnstormin' aeroplane, though-did y'all see the flag painted on the side of it?'
'Didn't even spy it,' Kennedy confessed. 'I was too busy just gawpin', and that's a fact.' He was a big, heavyset fellow of about fifty, with a walrus mustache and ruddy, tender Irish skin that went into agonies of prickly heat every summer, especially where he shaved. Now he turned a speculative eye toward Cincinnatus. He was a long way from stupid, and noticed others who weren't. 'You don't miss much, do you, boy?'
'Try not to, sir,' Cincinnatus answered. 'Never can tell when somethin' you see, it might come in handy.'
'That's a fact,' Kennedy said. 'You're pretty damn sharp for a nigger, that's another fact. You aren't shiftless, you know what I mean? You act like you want to push yourself up, get things better for your wife, the way a white man would. Don't see that every day.'
Cincinnatus just shrugged. Everything Kennedy said about him was true; he wished he hadn't made his ambition so obvious to his boss. It gave Kennedy one more handle by which to yank him, as if being born white weren't enough all by itself. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with ambitions that would probably end up breaking his heart. Sure, he wanted to push himself up. But how far could you push when white folks held the lid on, right above your head? The wonder wasn't that so many Negroes gave up. The wonder was that a few kept trying.
Seeing he wasn't going to get anything more than that shrug, Kennedy said, 'You pick up the whole load of typewriters all right?'
'Sure did, sir. They was the last things left in Goebel's warehouse, though. He ain't gonna be left much longer his own self-says he's headin' down to Lexington with his cousin. This war scare got everybody jumpy.'
'Can't say as I blame Clem, neither,' Kennedy said. 'I may get out of town myself, matter of fact. Haven't made up my mind about that. Wait till it starts, I figure, and then see what the damnyankees do. But you, you got nowhere to run to, huh?'
'No, not hardly.' Cincinnatus didn't like thinking about that. Kennedy had more in the way of brains than Clem Goebel. If he didn't think Covington was a safe place to stay, it probably wasn't. He understood Cincinnatus was stuck here, too. Sighing, the laborer said, 'Let me unload them typing machines for you, boss.'
That kept him busy till dinnertime. He lived down by the Licking River, south of Kennedy's place, close enough to walk back and forth at the noon hour if he gulped down his corn bread or salt pork and greens or whatever Elizabeth had left for him before she went off to clean white folks' houses.
A shape in the river-a cheese box on a raft was what it looked like- caught his eye. He whistled on the same note Tom Kennedy had used when he saw the aeroplane. By treaty, the United States and the Confederate States kept gunboats off the waters of the rivers they shared and the waters of tributaries within three miles of those jointly held rivers. If that gunboat-the Yankees called the type monitors, after their first one, but Southerners didn't and wouldn't-wasn't breaking the treaty, it sure was bending it.
Cincinnatus whistled again, a low, worried note. More people, higher-up people, than Goebel and Kennedy thought war was coming.
'Mobilize!' Flora Hamburger cried in a loud, clear voice. 'We must mobilize for the inevitable struggle that lies before us!'
The word was on everyone's lips now, since President Roosevelt had ordered the United States Army to mobilize the day before. Newsboys on the corner of Hester and Chrystie, half a block from the soapbox-actually, it was a beer crate, filched from the Croton Brewery next door-shouted it in headlines from the New York Times and the early edition of the Evening Sun. All those headlines spoke of hundreds of thousands of men in green-gray uniforms filing onto hundreds of trains that would carry them to the threatened frontiers of the United States, to Maryland and Ohio and Indiana, to Kansas and New Mexico, to Maine and Dakota and Washington State.
Just by looking at the crowded streets of the Tenth Ward of New York City, Flora could tell how many men of military age the dragnet had scooped up. The men who hurried along Chrystie were most of them smooth-faced youths or their gray-bearded grandfathers. The newsboys weren't shouting that the reserves, the men of the previous few conscription classes who'd served their time, were being called up with the regulars-they wouldn't reveal the government's plan to the Rebels or to the British-lickspittle Canadians: their terms. But Flora had heard it was so, and she believed it.
The papers told of pretty girls rushing up and kissing soldiers as they boarded their trains, of men who hadn't been summoned to the colors pressing twenty-dollar gold pieces into the hands of those who had, of would-be warriors flocking to recruiting stations in such numbers that some factories had to close down. The Croton Brewery was draped in red-white-and-blue bunting. So was Public School Number Seven, across the street.
The entire country-the entire world-was going mad, Flora Hamburger thought. Up on her soapbox, she waved her arms and tried to bring back sanity.
'We must not allow the capitalist exploiters to make the workers of the world their victims,' she declared, trying to fire with her own enthusiasm the small crowd that had gathered to listen to her. 'We must continue our ceaseless agitation in the cause of peace, in the cause of workers' solidarity around the world. If we let the upper classes split us and set us one against another, we have but doomed ourselves to more decades of servility.'
A cop in a fireplug hat stood at the back of the crowd, listening intently. The First Amendment remained on the books, but he'd run her in if she said anything that came close to being fighting words-or maybe even if she didn't. Hysteria was wild in the United States; if you said the emperor had no clothes, you took the risk of anyone who spoke too clearly.
But the cop didn't need to run her in; the crowd was less friendly than those before which she was used to speaking. Somebody called, 'Are you Socialists going to vote for Teddy's war budget?'
'We are going to do everything we can to keep a war budget from becoming necessary,' Flora cried. Even three days earlier, that answer to that question had brought a storm of applause. Now some people stood silent, their faces set in disapproving lines. A few booed. One or two hissed. Nobody clapped.
'If war comes,' that same fellow called, 'will you Socialists vote the money to fight it? You're the second biggest party in Congress; don't you know what you're doing?'
Why weren't you mobilized? Flora thought resentfully. The skinny man was about twenty-five, close to her own age-a good age for cannon fodder in a man. Few to match him were left in the neighborhood. Flora wondered if he was an agent provacateur. Roosevelt's Democrats had done that sort of thing often enough on the East Side, disrupting the meetings not only of Socialists but also of the Republicans who hadn't moved leftward when their party split in the acrimonious aftermath of the Second Mexican War.
But she had to answer him. She paused a moment to adjust her picture hat and pick her phrases, then said, 'We will be caucusing in Philadelphia day after tomorrow to discuss that. As the majority votes, the party will act.'
She never would have yielded so much a few days before. Here in New York City, sentiment against the war still ran strong-or stronger than most places, anyhow. But many of the Socialists' constituents-the miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the farmers of Minnesota and Dakota and Montana-were near one border or another, and were bombarding their representatives with telegrams embracing, not the international brotherhood of labor, but rather the protection of the American frontier.
Almost pleadingly, Flora said, 'Can we let the madness of nationalism destroy everything the workers not just here in the United States but also in Germany and Austria and in France and England and even in Canada and the Confederacy? — yes, I dare say that, for it is true,' she went on over a chorus of boos, 'have struggled shoulder to shoulder to achieve? I say we cannot. I say we must not. If you believe the sacred cause of labor is bound up in the idea of world politics without war, give generously to our cause.' She pointed down to a washed-out peach tin, the label still on, that sat in front of her crate. 'Give for the workers who harvested that fruit, the miners who by the sweat of their brow dug out the iron and tin from which the can is made, the steelworkers who made it into metal, the laborers in the cannery who packed the peaches, the draymen and drivers who brought them to market. Give now for a better tomorrow.'
A few people stepped up and tossed coins into the peach tin. One or two of them tossed in banknotes. Flora had plenty of practice in gauging the take from the racket the money made. She would have done better today working in a sweatshop and donating her wages to the cause.
