Listening to somebody talk about how lucky he'd been to get shot struck Scipio as strange, but he'd heard white veterans go on the same way. He said, 'So you fit the war and done everything the gummint want?' The customer nodded. Scipio hurried back to get his breakfast and bring it to him, then asked, 'And now you is a citizen? Now you kin vote an' do like the buckra all kinds o'ways?'
'Can't marry no white woman.' The veteran shrugged. 'Don't want to marry no white woman-like the colored gal I got. But yeah,' he went on with quiet pride, 'I's a citizen.' He reached into his pocket and displayed an elaborately printed form attesting to his service in the war. 'I carry this here 'stead of a passbook.'
Scipio hadn't thought about the aspect of citizenship. He was deeply and sincerely jealous of the veteran, who enjoyed a liberty he was unlikely ever to know. 'Freedom Party give you trouble?' he inquired. He didn't know why he asked the question: was he trying to ease his own mind about what the Freedom Party could do, or was he hoping to make the veteran feel bad in spite of the privilege he'd earned?
The man's mouth tightened. His eyes narrowed. A vertical groove appeared between them, and other lines by the edges of his lips. 'Them bastards,' he said quietly. 'You know any niggers don't get trouble from them?'
'Sure enough don't,' Scipio answered. 'I was hopin' you did.'
'Ain't none.' The Negro veteran spoke with assurance. 'Ain't nothin' we can do about it, neither, nothin' I can see. Yeah, I'm a citizen. I punch one o' them sons o' bitches for callin' me names or givin' me some other kind o' hard time, what happen then? White folks' jury send me to jail for about twenty years. That Freedom Party man kick me in the balls, what happen then? White folks'jury say he didn't do nothin' wrong.' He didn't try to hide his bitterness.
'But you kin vote against they,' Scipio said. 'Most black folks can't do nothin' a-tall.'
'I can vote.' The veteran nodded. 'I went an' did it last election, an' I'll do it again come November. But so what? So what, God damn it? Ain't but one o' me, an' all them Freedom Party white folks. Even if all the niggers in the country could vote, wouldn't be enough of us. White folks can do what they want, near enough. Why shouldn't they let me vote? They can afford it.'
He got up, laid two million dollars on the table, and stamped out without waiting for change.
'Hope you didn't ride Antiochus so hard, he don't come back,' Erasmus said. 'That ain't good business.'
'Sorry,' Scipio answered, which was true in the business sense if in no other. 'You hear what he say?' He waited for Erasmus to nod, then went on, 'You still reckon we ain't got nothin' to fear from no Freedom Party?'
Erasmus nodded again. 'I keeps tellin' you an' tellin' you, the white man ain't gwine do the work hisself If he ain't gwine do it hisself, he ain't gwine do us no harm-or no worse'n usual, anyways. You show me them Freedom Party fellas out in the cotton fields at pickin' time, then I commence to worry. Till then-' He shook his head.
Scipio wished he could take matters in stride the way his boss did. Rationally, everything Erasmus said made sense. That should have sufficed for Scipio, himself a man rational by inclination and education both. It should have, but it didn't.
The past few years had been hard on rationality. If the Negro uprising of 1915 hadn't been an exercise in romanticism, he didn't know what was. The Reds hadn't had a chance, but they'd risen anyhow. He didn't think the Freedom Party had a chance of restoring the status quo ante bellum, either. That didn't stop whites from flocking to its banners. Most whites liked the way things had been before the war just fine.
And there were, as the Negro veteran had said, a lot of whites. If they got behind the Freedom Party, Jake Featherston and his pals might win. How far could they turn back the clock? Finding out would be as big a romantic folly as the Red uprising. But nothing had stopped Cassius and the other Red leaders, and likely nothing would stop Featherston, either.
Scipio sighed. 'Life ain't easy, and at the end you can't do nothin' but up and die. Don't seem right.'
Erasmus busied himself making a fresh pot of coffee. When he was through, he said, 'So tell me then, you gwine kiss your lady friend good-bye? You gwine lay in bed by your lonesome, waitin' for to drop dead?'
' 'Course not,' Scipio said angrily. Then he stopped and stared at Erasmus. The fry cook had pierced his gloomy pretensions as neatly as any white man with a fancy degree in philosophy might have done-and with a tenth, or more likely a hundredth, as many words. Instead of angry, Scipio felt foolish, to say nothing of sheepish. 'Got to get on with your reg'lar 'fairs,' he mumbled.
'That there make a deal more sense'n what you was spoutin' a minute ago, don't you reckon?' Erasmus demanded.
'Yes, suh,' Scipio said. So far as he could recall, he'd never called a black man sir before in his life. Whites got the title because they had the whip hand in the CSA. He gave it to Erasmus because-because he deserves it, was the thought that ran through Scipio's mind.
Erasmus noticed, too. His head whipped around sharply. Scipio would have bet several million dollars-maybe even a Stonewall- nobody'd ever called him sir before that moment, either. 'Just get back to work, will you?' he said, his voice gruff. He didn't know how to respond to being treated with respect.
Why should he? Scipio thought. It's altogether likely no one has ever shown him any With that, Scipio came closer to understanding why the Reds had rebelled against the Confederate government than he ever had before. Was being treated like a human being worth fighting and dying for? Maybe it was.
What do I know about being treated like a human being? he thought. / was only a butler He didn't think in the dialect of the Congaree, but in the precise, formal English he'd had drilled into him. Sometimes that helped him: it gave him a wider, more detailed map for his world than he would have had if he'd gone to the cotton fields. Sometimes it left him neither fish nor fowl. And sometimes it made him angry at what the Colletons had done to his mind, to his life. They hadn't done it for his sake, either. They hadn't cared at all about him, except as a thing. They'd done it for their own convenience.
'Just got to get through the day and not worry about nothin' you can't change anyways,' Erasmus said. Scipio nodded. The fry cook was pursuing the thought he'd had a little before. But Scipio's thought had veered in a different direction. How can a black man make life worth living in the Confederate States? he wondered. The question was easy to ask. Finding an answer, though…
'Here is the latest report, sir.' Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dow-ling set the document on General Custer's desk.
'Well, let's have a look at it.' The electric lights in the overhead fixture glittered off Custer's reading glasses as he picked up the report and started to go through it. Abner Dowling waited for the explosion he guessed would not be long in coming. He was right. The commander of U.S. forces in Canada slammed the typewritten sheets on the desk. 'Poppycock!' he shouted. 'Twaddle! Harebrained idiocy! Who was the idiot who produced this nonsense?'
'Sir, Captain Fielding, our operative in Rosenfeld, is one of the best we have anywhere in this country,' said Dowling, who had read the report before giving it to Custer. 'If he says there's no evidence this McGregor planted the bomb in Hy's chop house, you can rely on it.'
'If he says there's no bloody goddamn evidence, he can't see the nose in front of his face,' Custer snarled. 'Christ on His cross, McGregor blew up this brilliant operative's'-Custer's sarcasm stung-'predecessor. Otherwise, this imbecile wouldn't have the job in the first place. Look at McGregor's photograph. Does that shifty-eyed devil look like an honest man to you?'
'There's no evidence for that, either, sir,' Dowling said patiently. 'They've searched McGregor's farmhouse and barn and grounds any number of times, and they haven't found a thing to suggest he's the bomber.'
'Which only proves he's not an imbecile, very much unlike our own people down there,' Custer said with a sneer that displayed the fine white choppers in his new upper plate. 'The chap who was there during the war ordered McGregor's son shot, didn't he?'
'Among a good many other executions, yes,' Dowling answered with a sigh he barely tried to hide. He'd been certain ahead of time Custer would take this line. Custer was irresistibly attracted to the obvious.
And, sure enough, Custer charged ahead as if he hadn't spoken: 'Other bombs around Rosenfeld, too. All of them either had to do with families that got his brat in trouble or with people connected to that other operative down there, the one who got himself blown sky high the night the war ended. Coincidence? Are you telling me it's coincidence?'
'Sir, someone's been making bombs, yes,' Dowling said. 'But it's no more likely to be McGregor than anyone else down there. Major Hannebrink-the operative who's dead now-had to hold down the countryside during the war, and he didn't use a light hand. No one used a light hand during the war, sir.'
Again, Custer might not have heard him. He went right on with his own thoughts, such as they were: 'And
