'Heaven forbid such a thought from ever crossing my mind.' Donovan sounded pious as a preacher. Such fine phrases meant exactly nothing, as Potter knew perfectly well. Maybe Donovan would remember them, maybe he wouldn't. Potter also knew which way he would guess.
Being in the line of work he was, he had a telephone back at his flat. As he took the mouthpiece off the hook, a black excitement filled him. 'Operator, I'd like to make a long-distance call, please,' he said, and gave the telephone number he'd never scratched out of his address book.
'One moment, sir, while I place the call,' the operator replied. 'And whom shall I say is the calling party?' Potter gave her his name. The call took longer than the promised moment to complete. He listened to clicks and pops on the line and a couple of faint, almost unintelligible, conversations between operators.
Then a telephone rang. He heard that quite plainly. 'Hello?' There was Anne Colleton's voice, almost as clear as if she were down the block instead of halfway across the state. Telephones had come a long way since the Great War. The operator announced the long-distance call and gave her Potter's name. 'Yes, I'll speak to him,' Anne said at once, and then, 'How are you, Clarence? What's this all about?'
'I'm fine,' he answered. 'How have you been? Haven't talked to you in a while.'
'No-you chose your party, and I chose mine,' Anne said. 'When November rolls around, we'll see who chose better.'
Clarence knew then his call was hopeless. He went ahead anyway: 'That's what I wanted to talk to you about. You've met Jake Featherston. You must know as well as I do, he's got a few screws loose up there. Lord knows we're sinners here in the CSA, Anne, but do we really deserve Jake for president? What ever we may have done to make God angry at us, it's not that bad.'
Anne laughed. 'What does he say that's wrong? That we need to get back on our feet? We do. That the niggers rose up and stabbed us in the back? They did. That the War Department didn't know what was going on till way too late? It didn't. That we ought to stand up to the United States? We should. If any of that's crazy, then I'm crazy, too.'
'Wherever you want to go, there are lots of ways to get there,' Potter said stubbornly. As long as they were talking, he'd give it his best try even if he was sure it wasn't good enough. 'Featherston's going over the rocks and through the swamp. You ask me, he's more likely to put us on our backs than on our feet.'
'I didn't ask you, Clarence,' Anne said. 'You made this call.'
'I'm trying to tell you the man's dangerous.'
'I know he is-to everybody who wants to keep us down.'
'No, to us,' Potter insisted. 'Is he going to pay the niggers back or scare them into another uprising? Wasn't one bad enough?'
'If they try it twice, they'll never try it three times.' Anne sounded almost as if she looked forward to crushing another Negro revolt.
Even so, Potter went on, 'If he cleans out the War Department, who goes in instead? His drinking buddies? Will they be any better?'
'How could they be any worse?' Anne returned.
'I don't know. I don't want to find out, either. And do you really want us to fight the United States again and lose?'
'No. I want us to fight those goddamn sons of bitches again and win,' Anne said. 'And so does Jake Featherston, and I think we will.'
'How?' Potter demanded. 'Think straight, Anne. I know you can if you want to. They're bigger than we are. They're stronger than we are. They would be even if they hadn't stolen two of our states and pieces of others. Whatever we want to do to them-and I don't love them, either; believe me, I don't-what chance have we got to actually do it?'
'We haven't got any chance if we don't try,' Anne said. 'Good-bye, Clarence.' She hung up. Potter wondered if he ought to call her again and try to make her see reason. Slowly, he shook his head. She wouldn't do it. That seemed only too plain. With a soft curse, he set the mouthpiece back in its cradle.
L ike most Confederate veterans, Jefferson Pinkard belonged to the Tin Hats. They weren't nearly so important in his life as the Freedom Party. He paid his dues every year, and that was about it. Still, when Amos Mizell, the longtime head of the Tin Hats, came to Birmingham to make a speech on a bright spring Sunday, Jeff went over to Avondale Park to hear what he had to say.
Taking the trolley to the east side of town, just past the Sloss Works, made him mutter to himself. He hadn't gone that way very often since losing his job at the steel mill. Even the air here tasted different: full of sulfur and iron. The first good lungful made him cough. The second one made him smile. He'd lived with that taste, that smell, for most of his adult life. He hadn't even known he missed it till he found it again.
He wore a clean white shirt and butternut trousers, the not-quite-uniform of the Freedom Party. Most of the people on the trolley car were men about his age, and many of them had on the same kind of outfit he did. He didn't see anybody with a bludgeon. This wasn't supposed to be that kind of meeting. You could belong to the Tin Hats without being a Freedom Party man, and some people did.
When the trolley stopped at the Sloss Works, half a dozen more men got on. He recognized two or three of them. They nodded to one another. 'Good to see you,' one of them said. 'How are you doing?'
'Not too bad, Tony,' Pinkard answered. 'No, not too bad. Party found me a job after I got canned, so I'm eating. And things look mighty good when the election rolls around.'
'Sure do,' Tony said. 'About time, too.'
The trolley stopped, brakes screeching. The motorman clanged his bell. 'Avondale Park!' he said loudly. By the time men finished getting off the car, it was almost empty.
Under that warm, hopeful sun, Jeff walked toward the rostrum from which Amos Mizell would speak. Confederate flags and Tin Hat banners fluttered in the breeze. Here and there in the swelling crowd, men waved Freedom Party flags: the Confederate battle flag with colors reversed, red St. Andrew's cross on blue. Those, though, were unofficial.
Or were they? Up there on the rostrum, chatting with Mizell, stood Caleb Briggs, the head of the Freedom Party in Birmingham. The leader of the Tin Hats leaned closer to hear what Briggs had to say. Even nowadays, Briggs couldn't talk above a rasping whisper; the damnyankees had gassed him during the Great War.
Somebody yelled, 'Freedom!' In an instant, the cry was deafening. Jefferson Pinkard shouted it out at the top of his lungs. The Freedom Party was the most important thing in his life these days. If it weren't for the Party, he hardly would have had a life.
Caleb Briggs grinned out at the crowd. His teeth were white and straight. A good thing, too-he was a dentist by trade. If he'd had a couple of missing choppers, he wouldn't have made much of an advertisement for his own work. He waved. The cries of, 'Freedom!' redoubled.
Amos Mizell grinned and waved, too. A few people started singing 'The Bonnie Blue Flag,' the song the Tin Hats had taken for their own. Only a few, though-'The Bonnie Blue Flag' was hard to make out among the shouts of, 'Freedom!' Mizell's grin slipped, although he kept waving. As at the rally, so across the CSA: these days, the Freedom Party spoke with a louder voice than the Tin Hats. That hadn't always been so. Had things gone a little differently, Mizell might have been standing in Jake Featherston's shoes. He had to be thinking about what might have been.
Then Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. In his ruined voice, he said, 'This is a Tin Hats rally, boys, not one of ours,' and he started singing 'The Bonnie Blue Flag.' That tipped the balance. Following his lead, the Freedom Party men in the crowd sang the Tin Hats' anthem. Amos Mizell tipped his hat to Briggs. He still didn't look perfectly happy, though. The men weren't singing 'The Bonnie Blue Flag' because they'd thought of it themselves, but because a Freedom Party big wig had asked them to. That had to sting.
Jeff pushed and elbowed his way toward the front of the crowd, trying to get as close to the platform as he could. A lot of other determined men were doing the same thing. He didn't get quite so close as he would have liked. Still, he was taller than most, and he could see well enough.
When the loud chorus of 'The Bonnie Blue Flag' ended, Caleb Briggs walked up to the microphone again. He raised both hands in the air, asking for quiet. Little by little, he got it. 'Let's give a big hello to a man who's done a lot for the cause of freedom in the Confederate States,' he said, and paused to draw in a wheezing breath. He sounded as if he'd smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. 'Friends, here's Mr. Amos Mizell.'
Mizell towered over Briggs. He held up both hands, too. He was missing his left little finger-one more man
