other privileges whites in Kentucky took for granted.
Back in the days before the war, he'd spent a lot of time looking across the Ohio. Negroes didn't have it easy in the USA. He knew that. Had he not known it, he would have got his nose rubbed in it during the war. A lot of men down from the United States thought they had to act like slave drivers to get any kind of work out of Negroes. But not all of them did, and laws restricting what blacks could do were milder in the USA than in the CSA: he didn't have to worry about a passbook any more, for instance.
One reason for such mildness, of course, was that blacks were far thinner on the ground in the United States than in the Confederate States. That did worry Cincinnatus. He'd always spent most of his time among his own kind. That would be much harder now. Covington hadn't had a huge colored community, but what would he do in a town with only a handful of blacks?
Down off the bridge, down into Cincinnati, went the truck. The waterfront on the northern bank of the Ohio didn't look much different from the one with which Cincinnatus was so familiar. But Elizabeth noted one difference right away: 'Look at all the white folks doin' roustabouts' work. Wouldn't never seen nothin' like that in Covington. Wouldn't never see nothin' like that nowhere in the CSA. White folks doin' nigger work?' She shook her head.
'This here's what I been tellin' you, honey,' Cincinnatus said. 'Ain't no such thing as nigger work in the USA, or not hardly. Ain't enough niggers to do all the dirty work that needs doin', so the white folks have to lend a hand. A lot of 'em is foreigners, I hear tell, but not all of'em, I don't reckon.'
'What's a foreigner, Pa?' Achilles asked.
'Somebody who's in a country he wasn't born in,' Cincinnatus replied.
His son thought about that, then asked, 'How do you tell a foreigner from somebody who ain't?'
'A lot of times, on account of he'll talk funny-they don't talk English in a lot of them foreign places,' Cincinnatus said. By that standard, though, a foreigner's son, somebody who went to school in the USA, would turn into an American indistinguishable from any other. If Achilles ended up as educated and eloquent as Teddy Roosevelt, he still wouldn't be an American indistinguishable from any other. That struck Cincinnatus as unfair.
He shrugged. It was unfair, no two ways about it. His hope was that Achilles would find things less unfair elsewhere in the USA than in Kentucky.
People were looking at him: people on the sidewalk, people in motorcars, even a couple of men who stopped painting a sign to stare. They were all white. Cincinnati had some Negroes; Cin-cinnatus knew as much. But he saw none on the streets. That was a change, a jolting change, from the way things were back in Covington, over on the other side of the river.
A fat, red-faced policeman held up his hand. Cincinnatus stopped in front of him, as he should have done. He was very pleased at how well the spavined old Duryea was behaving. He'd spent a lot of time getting the truck into the best shape he could, but the only thing that would really have cured its multifarious ills was a new truck, and he knew it.
The expression of distaste on the cop's face was broad enough for him and the truck both. The fellow jerked a thumb toward the curb. 'Pull over that wagon,' he said in gutturally accented English. 'I will with you speak.'
'Is he a foreigner, Pa?' Achilles asked excitedly. 'He talks funny, like you said.'
'Reckon he might be,' Cincinnatus answered. 'They do say Cincinnati's chock full of Germans.'
'Real live Germans?' Achilles' eyes were enormous. The USA's European allies were folk to conjure with, just as Frenchmen had been in the CSA… until the war came, and France lost.
When Cincinnatus stopped the truck by the curb, the policeman strutted over. 'You are from where?' he demanded.
'Covington, Kentucky, suh-just the other side of the river,' Cincinnatus answered. He wouldn't have got uppity with a Covington cop, and he wasn't so rash as to think the police would be much friendlier on the north side of the Ohio.
'What do you do here?' the policeman asked. 'Why don't you stay on the other side of the river where you belong?'
'I ain't plannin' on settling down in Cincinnati, suh,' Cincinnatus said hastily. 'My family and me, we're just passin' through.'
'Where are you going to?' the policeman inquired.
'Headin' for Iowa,' Cincinnatus told him. 'Des Moines, Iowa.'
'This is a good long way from Cincinnati,' the cop said, as much to himself as to Cincinnatus. 'You will the worry of the people in Iowa be, not the worry of the people here. Very well. You may go on.' He even condescended to stop traffic and let Cincinnatus pull out once more. Cincinnatus would have been more grateful had it been less obvious that the policeman was getting rid of him.
'Welcome to the United States,' Elizabeth remarked. 'Welcome-but not very welcome.'
'I was thinking that myself, not very long ago,' Cincinnatus said. 'Better here than if we'd headed down to Tennessee.'
His wife didn't argue about that. He went back to concentrating on his driving. He knew where he was going, but he wasn't completely sure how to get there. Road maps left a lot to be desired. He'd studied as many as he could at the Covington library, so he knew how far from perfect they were. He also mistrusted road signs. Oh, roads in towns had names and numbers; he could rely on that. But he'd seen during the war that roads between towns might change names without warning or might never have had names in the first place. That made traveling more interesting for strangers.
He managed to get out of Cincinnati, and congratulated himself on that. Only after he'd been out of town for a while did he realize he was going due north, not northwest toward Indianapolis.
'Don't fret yourself about it none,' Elizabeth said when he cursed himself for fourteen different kinds of a fool. 'Sooner or later, you'll come across a road that runs into the one you should have used. Then everything'll be fine again.'
'Sure, I'll come across that blame road,' Cincinnatus snarled, 'but how the devil will I know it's the right one? It won't look no different than any other road, and it won't have no sign on it, neither.' He felt harassed.
He felt even more harassed a couple of minutes later, when one of the truck's inner tubes blew out with a bang that would have put him in mind of a gunshot had he not heard more gunshots than he'd ever wanted to hear the past few years. He guided the limping machine to the side of the road and began the slow, dirty business of repairing the puncture.
Motorcars and trucks kept rolling past him as if he weren't there. Every one of them-every one he noticed, anyhow-had a white face behind the wheel. Most, no doubt, wouldn't have stopped to help a white man, either. But would all of them have sped past a strange white without more than a single hasty glance? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe not, too.
At last, when he was wrestling the wheel back onto the axle, a Ford did pull up behind the truck. 'Give you a hand?' asked the driver, a plump blond fellow in a straw hat and overalls.
'Just about done it now,' Cincinnatus said. 'Wish you'd come by a half hour ago; I don't mind tellin' you that.'
'Believe it,' the white man said. 'Where you bound for?'
'Des Moines,' Cincinnatus answered, and held up a filthy hand. 'Yeah, I know I'm on the wrong road. I missed the right one down in Cincinnati. You know how I can get back to it from here?'
'Go up… lemme see… four crossings and then turn left. That'll put you heading toward the highway to Indiana,' the white man said. He cocked his head to one side. 'You got family in Des Moines?'
'No, suh,' Cincinnatus said. 'Just lookin' for a better place to live than Kentucky.' He waited to see how the white man would take that.
'Oh. Good luck.' The fellow climbed into his automobile and drove away.
'Thanks for the directions,' Cincinnatus called after him. He couldn't tell whether the white man heard. He shrugged. The man had stopped, and had given him some help. He couldn't complain about that-even if, worn as he was, he felt sorely tempted. 'Des Moines,' he said. He'd be on the road again soon.
'Come on,' Sylvia Enos said impatiently to George, Jr., and Mary Jane as they made their way across the Boston Common toward the New State House. 'And hold on to my hands, for heaven's sake. If you get lost, how will I find you again in this crowd?'
U.S. flags fluttered from the platform that had gone up in front of the New State House. Red-white-and-blue bunting wreathed it. Although President Roosevelt wasn't scheduled to start speaking for another hour, the crowd
