'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!'1 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 cafe. 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
