bitch!'
Because I have a brain, and you haven't. Because my mouth isn't hooked up to the toilet. Because I've had more baths this week than you have this year. If Scipio said any of that, he was a dead man. He looked down at the sidewalk, the picture of a submissive Negro. Softly, he said, 'Suh, I been waitin' table forty year now. I's right good at it.' What are you good at, besides causing trouble? Not much, I'll bet. One more thing he dared not say.
'You know how many white folks is hungry, and you're marchin' off to work in your goddamn fancy penguin suit?' the man in overalls snarled. 'I ought to kick your black ass around the block a few times, teach you respect for your betters.'
He drew back his foot as if to do just that. All Scipio could do was take it or try to run. He intended to run-he didn't want his outfit damaged. Getting it repaired or, worse, having to buy a new one would cost him money he didn't have. But then one of the other white men said, 'Hell, let him go. Ain't his fault he has to dress up like a damn fool to go to work.'
'Thank you, suh,' Scipio whispered. 'I thanks you from de bottom of my heart.'
The white man with the Freedom Party pin glanced around at the little crowd. Most people nodded at what the other fellow had said. Scowling, the Freedom Party man said, 'All right. All right for now, goddammit. But when Jake Featherston gets elected, we'll put every damn nigger in his place, not just the ones in the fancy suits.' He strutted down the street as if he were a mover and shaker, not a man with no more than a fifty-fifty chance of being able to write his own name.
'Thank you,' Scipio said once more.
'I didn't do it for you,' said the man who'd urged he be left alone. 'I did it on account of I purely can't stand the Freedom Party.' He laughed bitterly. 'And I wonder how long I'll be allowed to say that in public if Featherston does win.'
Somebody's not blind, anyhow, Scipio thought as he hurried up the street toward the Huntsman's Lodge. But if Featherston wins, this fellow can change his mind. He can say he was for the Freedom Party all along, and he'll get on fine. I'm black. I didn't choose that, and I can't change it.
As far as he could see, he had no choices at all if the Freedom Party won.
Getting to the restaurant was a relief. For one thing, he did make it on time. If he got in trouble for any reason, he could be back pounding the pavement looking for work. He knew that all too well-how could he help knowing? For another, the rhythms and rituals of work kept him too busy to worry… much.
He was obsequious to the prosperous white men and their sleek female companions who dined at the Lodge, but that bothered him much less than having to be obsequious to whites on the street. A white waiter in New York City would act subservient on the job. Acting subservient was part of a waiter's job-which went a long way towards explaining why there were so few white waiters in the Confederate States, where whites thought subservience the province of blacks alone. But that waiter in New York City became his customers' equal as soon as he left his job. Scipio didn't, and never would.
A portly, middle-aged man eating pheasant looked up from his meal and said, 'Don't I know you from somewhere?'
With a small thrill of horror, Scipio realized the man had danced attendance upon Anne Colleton at Marshlands before the war. Had his own past come back to haunt him after all these years? He shook his head and put on his thickest accent to answer, 'Ah don' reckon so, suh.'
The customer shrugged. 'You must be right. The boy I knew spoke better than I do myself.'
Boy. Even then, Scipio had been in his thirties. Whites in the CSA refused to take Negroes seriously. He supposed that was why the Red uprising during the war had got as far as it had. Not even clever whites like Miss Anne had imagined Negroes could conceive of grievances serious enough to make them take up arms for redress.
All that went through his head in a flash. To reassure the white man-he was Tony Somebody, and Anne Colleton had thought him a pompous ass-he said, 'Ah talks lahk I talks, suh. Dis heah de onliest way Ah knows how.' He wondered if he could speak like an educated white man any more. Or would that dialect of English have disappeared from his tongue like a foreign language seldom used?
'All right. Never mind,' the customer said, and went back to his pheasant. When he walked out, he left a fifty-cent tip, as if to apologize for bothering Scipio. Noblesse oblige, Scipio thought, and made the silver coin disappear. These days, there were men desperate enough to kill for half a dollar.
It was after ten when the Huntsman's Lodge closed. Scipio worried less about being on the street in black tie and tails than he had during the day. Fewer whites would be out there to see him than during the day-and, with Augusta's bad street lighting, whoever was there wouldn't be able to get that good a look at him anyhow.
But as soon as he opened the door, he closed it again in a hurry and ducked back into the restaurant. 'What's the matter with you, Xerxes?' demanded his manager, a skinny, energetic young white man named Jerry Dover. 'Go on home. Get the hell out of here.'
'Marse Jerry, I reckons I waits a while,' Scipio answered. 'Dem Freedom Party white folks'-he almost said buckra, but caught himself before using that word in front of a white-'is marchin' down de street. Don't want them seein' me, you don't mind too much.'
He had no idea what Dover's politics were. Talking politics with a white man could only be futile and dangerous. But whatever else Dover might have been, he was no fool. The other three colored waiters in the place showed no eagerness to leave. 'All right,' the manager said. 'Don't worry about it. Stay as long as you need to. Sooner or later, those folks out there'll be done, and then y'all can go on about your business.'
But, staring out through the small panes of glass set into the door of the Huntsman's Lodge at eye level, Scipio wondered if Jerry Dover knew what he was talking about. Block after well-organized block of men and women-mostly men-paraded past on Marbury Street. Some carried Confederate flags. Some carried Freedom Party flags. Some carried torches, to make the rest easier to see and the gathering as a whole more impressive.
A lot of the men marched in step. Most of the ones who did wore the white shirts and butternut trousers of Freedom Party stalwarts. Some few of the disciplined marchers, though, were in what was almost but not quite Confederate uniform. They carried Tredegars whose bayonets gleamed bloody in the torchlight.
'Feather ston! Feather ston! Feather ston!' The endless chant came close to making Scipio long for the old cry of, Freedom! That had been a frustrated shout, the cry of men who didn't fully understand what they wanted or how to go about getting it. This… This promised trouble right around the corner, and said just what kind of trouble it was, too.
And the parade went on and on and on. Scipio wouldn't have believed that Augusta held so many people, let alone that it held so many Freedom Party backers. Jake Featherston wasn't in town. Neither was Willy Knight. These people had nothing special to lure them out of their houses. But they came. Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.
At last, after half an hour, the procession ended. Jerry Dover hadn't gone outside, either. He had pushed Scipio and the other blacks out of the way a few times to look at things for himself. 'Well, well, well,' he said when it was over and the raucous cries of Featherston! at last ebbed away. 'I always wondered, but now I know. Those bastards really are crazy.'
Scipio and the other waiters exchanged glances. Dover didn't need to say that. What white man in the CSA needed to make Negroes like him? The question was so ridiculous, it might not even have occurred to Scipio without the goad of something as massive as the Freedom Party procession.
The sheer scope of it got through to Dover, too. He spoke again: 'Crazy or not, though, there's a hell of a lot of 'em, ain't there? Don't see how they're going to lose the election. Wish to God I did.' He made pushing motions at the waiters. 'They're gone. You can disappear, too.'
Searchlights blazed from Allen Park, not far off to the west. With the door open, the rhythmic shouting of Jake Featherston's name grew louder and more frightening. Scipio scuttled back toward the Terry, a black dust mote adrift on that dreadful sea of sound.
J efferson Pinkard came to the Freedom Party meeting in his jailer's uniform. No time to go back to his apartment and put on the usual white shirt and butternut trousers, not if he wanted to be sure of having a place to sit down when he got to the old livery stable. Party meetings had never been so crowded. He saw faces he hadn't seen for years, and he saw plenty of faces he'd never seen before-more at every meeting, it seemed.
Now people want to hop on the train-when it looks like it's just about to get to the station, he thought, eyeing with no small scorn the strangers who suddenly called themselves Freedom Party men. He'd been with the
