gave him a two-foot length of thick doweling-as formidable a club as any policeman carried. 'We'll teach the niggers they can't get away with putting on airs like they was as good as white folks.'
Some of the Freedom Party men brought their own lead pipes or bottles or other chosen instruments of mayhem. With seventy or eighty of them all together, all dressed pretty much alike, they made a formidable force. Jeff's spirit soared at being part of something so magnificent. It soared again when a gray-clad policeman on horseback waved and tipped his cap to the Freedom Party force.
'Let's go,' Barney Stevens said, as if they were about to head out of their trenches and over the top. And so, in a way, they were. 'Remember, this is war. Hurt the enemy, help your pals, stay together, obey my orders. If I go down and out, Bill McLana-han's next in line. Now-form column of fours.' The veterans obeyed without fuss. They'd done it before, countless times. 'For'ard-haarch!' Stevens barked.
Magnolia Park, where the Negroes were holding their rally, was only a few blocks away. Their speaker stood on a platform on which Confederate flags fluttered. That made Jeff's blood boil, even more than Birmingham summer did. A dozen or so cops sufficed to keep a couple of dozen white hecklers away from the rally. Those white men weren't organized. The company from the Freedom Party was.
Cries of alarm rose from black throats when the Freedom Party men came into sight. 'Double line of battle to the left and right,' Barney Stevens shouted, and the men performed the evolution with practiced ease. Stevens pointed with his club as if it were a British field marshal's baton. 'Charge!'
'Freedom!' Jeff yelled, along with his friends. A couple of policemen made halfhearted efforts to get between the Freedom Party men and the Negroes. The tough young veterans in white and butternut rolled over them.
Jeff swung his club. It smacked into black flesh. A howl of pain rose. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. He swung again and again and again. A few of the black veterans fought back. Far more fled, though. Some few of them might have gained the vote, but a Negro who fought a white man in the CSA fought not just his foe but also the entire weight of Confederate society and history.
Inside five minutes, the rally was broken up, destroyed. Some of the white hecklers had joined the Freedom Party men. None of the cops had made more than a token effort to hold them back. A lot of Negroes were down with broken heads. Jeff felt as if he'd just stormed a Yankee position in west Texas. He stood tall, the sweat of righteous labor streaming down his face. Just for the moment, he and his comrades were masters of all they surveyed.
The Speaker of the House pointed toward Flora Hamburger. 'The chair recognizes the honorable Representative from New York,' he intoned.
'Thank you, Mr. Speaker,' Flora said. That was more than a mere courtesy; Seymour Stedman of Ohio was himself a Socialist, the first non-Democrat to be Speaker since the first Congress of President Blaine's disastrous term at the start of the 1880s. 'Mr. Chairman, I move that the House pass a resolution whose text I have conveyed to the Clerk, deploring and condemning the assaults against law-abiding Negroes now taking place within the Confederate States.'
'Mr. Speaker!' Several Congressmen tried to gain Stedman's attention. As had been arranged, he recognized Hosea Blackford. 'Second!'' Blackford said in a loud, clear voice. He and Flora grinned at each other.
'It has been moved and seconded that we adopt the resolution Miss Hamburger has conveyed to the Clerk,' Congressman Stedman said. 'The Clerk will now read the resolution for debate.'
Read the clerk did, in a deadly drone. As soon as he finished stating the resolution Flora had summarized, hands shot up all around the House chamber. Speaker Stedman said, 'The chair recognizes his honorable colleague from Ohio.'
'Thank you, Mr. Speaker.' William Howard Taft rose ponderously to his feet, then turned toward Flora. 'I should like to inquire of the distinguished Representative from New York why she does not include in her resolution the disorders currently taking place in China, Russia, South America, France, and Spanish Morocco, all of those being no less beyond the boundaries of the United States and the purview of the House of Representatives than the events condemned in the Confederate States.'
Flora glared at Taft, and there was a lot of him at which to glare. With the Socialists and Republicans holding a slim majority in the House, he no longer chaired the Transportation Committee, and could not use his power there to make her life miserable. He seemed to have trouble realizing that; a lot of Democrats did. They took power for granted, even when it wasn't there.
'I would answer the gentleman from Ohio in two ways,' she said. 'First, what happens in the Confederate States is vitally important to the United States, because the Confederate States are so close and so closely related to us. And second, the attacks on the Negroes there are fierce, unjustified, and altogether unprovoked.'
'They're only niggers, for Christ's sake,' somebody called out without waiting to be recognized. 'Who the devil cares what the Rebs do to them?'
'Order!' Speaker Stedman slammed down the gavel. 'The chair recognizes the honorable Representative from Dakota.'
'Thank you, Mr. Speaker,' Hosea Blackford said. 'That unmannerly fellow gives me the chance to quote Donne, and I shall not waste it: 'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.' If the Confederates now permit the terrorizing of their Negroes, as appears to be true from the reports reaching us, who can guess what they may permit a year from now, or five years, or ten?'
'I have two questions for the gentleman from Dakota,' said the Democrat who rose to reply to Blackford. 'The first is, why do you think the Confederate States will pay any attention to a resolution from this House? The second is, if you Socialists want us to do something the Confederate States will pay attention to, why have you taken a meat axe to the War Department budget?'
The second question, in particular, made Flora wince. She'd urged and voted for cutting the military budget, too, and the reasons for which she'd done so-chief among them that the country could no longer afford to keep spending as it had-still seemed good to her. But she had to admit that a warning delivered under credible threat of war would have done far more to deter the thugs who called themselves the Freedom Party than any resolution from the House of Representatives.
As debate went on, she also began to see that even the resolution was going to have a hard time passing. A lot of Democrats proclaimed that they did not care to be seen meddling in the internal political affairs of a neighboring sovereign state. Speaker Stedman countered that one with a sardonic gibe: 'As we won't meddle in the affairs of the Republic of Quebec? Had we not meddled in those affairs, there would be no Republic of Quebec.'
But the Congressman who'd said, 'They're only niggers,' had spoken for a great many of his colleagues, whether they would come out and admit it or not. Flora had expected little better from the Democrats. But the Republicans, mostly farm-belt Congressmen from the Midwest, also proved to have little sympathy for the colored man's plight. And even one Socialist stood up and said, 'This is not an issue that concerns the people of my district.'
'The people of your district don't care about pogroms?' Flora shouted angrily, which made Speaker Stedman bang the gavel against her.
When Stedman called the question, Flora's resolution fell eighteen votes short of passage. 'As the hour now nears six, I move that we adjourn for the day,' the Speaker said. His motion carried by voice vote, without a single dissenter heard. The House floor emptied rapidly.
Still furious, Flora made no effort to hide it. 'What will they do when the bell tolls for them?' she demanded of Hosea Blackford.
'Who can guess, till the time comes?' he answered with a wry smile. 'You don't win all the time, Flora. For a lot of years, we hardly won at all. We are on the record, even if the resolution failed. If things go on, we can bring it up again later in the session.'
'You take the long view of things,' she said slowly.
'I'd better, after all the worthwhile resolutions and bills I've seen die.' Blackford flashed that wry grin again. 'For now, what sort of view do you take toward supper?'
'I'm in favor of it,' Flora admitted. 'With luck, someplace where they know how to serve up crow.'
'Oh, I think we can do a little better than that,' he said, and took her to a chophouse they'd visited a couple
