wasn't wrong. What would the white furniture dealers whose goods hadn't sold think?
And it wasn't just what they would think. What would they do? What could any man do, when he stared at bills and had no money to pay them? Would they put on white shirts and butternut trousers and start shouting, 'Freedom!' at the top of their lungs? If they did, could anybody blame them?
Scipio nodded. I can blame them, he thought, hearing inside himself the precise English he no longer dared speak loud. I can blame them, for the Freedom Party will not make their troubles disappear, even if they think it will. And what the Freedom Party will do to me and mine if ever it should come to power…
That fear had spread all through the colored communities of the CSA in the early 1920s, and then receded as the Party's fortunes ebbed. Now white men were seeing the Confederate States could still know hard times. What would that discovery, that rediscovery, mean for Negroes here? Scipio didn't know. He feared finding out. Try as he would, though, he saw no escape.
'What kin we do?' he said aloud, hoping one of the other men in the place would have a better idea than he did. 'Can't go nowheres.'
'Ain't noplace else wants us,' Erasmus said. 'Not the USA.'
'That's for sure,' Athenaeus agreed. 'They don't like the niggers they got. Ain't got very many, an' sure don't want no more.'
'Stock market in de USA down de sewer, too,' Scipio said. 'They ain't got no money, no spirit, to help nobody else, not when they got trouble helpin' they ownselves.'
'Good things they's down, too, you wants to know what I thinks,' Athenaeus said. 'If they was up, they be lordin' it over us. They do that, jus' git more buckra listenin' to Jake Featherston on the wireless and gittin' all hot and bothered afterwards.'
For a long time before the world finally went mad in 1914, respect for each other's strength had kept the United States and Confederate States from going to war. Scipio had never imagined mutual weakness could do the same, but he couldn't deny Athenaeus had a point. It wasn't one he'd thought of, either.
'Empire of Mexico, mebbe,' he said. But neither Erasmus nor Athenaeus paid much attention to that. Scipio couldn't take it seriously himself. To a Negro in eastern Georgia, the Empire of Mexico might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Besides, what were the odds that Mexicans had any more use for Negroes than white men did?
Erasmus asked a more immediately relevant question: ' 'Fore long, some black folks gwine start runnin' out o' money. What happen to 'em?'
'They git hungry,' Athenaeus said.
'Church help some,' Scipio said.
'Church be swamped,' Erasmus said. Scipio nodded. By all the signs, that would come true, and soon. His boss went on, 'Ain't no use waitin' fo' the gummint to do somethin'. Wait till Judgment Day, gummint won't do nothin' fo' no niggers.'
' 'Fore long, some white folks starts runnin' out o' money and gettin' hungry, too,' Athenaeus said. 'Plenty po' buckra, they ain't hardly better off'n niggers. Gummint worry 'bout the buckra first, you wait an' see.'
'What's a po' nigger gwine do?' Erasmus asked. 'Starve?'
The word hung in the air. Scipio had known a lot of hungry people; during the war, he'd been hungry himself after the Confederates destroyed the Congaree Socialist Republic. But there was a difference between being hungry and starving. He tried to imagine thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Negroes (and whites, too) going without because they had no money with which to buy food.
Outside, the sun shone brightly. The day was hot and muggy. It would stay hot and muggy from now all the way till fall. Even so, Scipio felt a chill. This was liable to be a disaster of Biblical proportions.
'What kin we do?' Athenaeus asked mournfully. 'What kin anybody do?'
'Pray,' Erasmus answered. 'God done made this happen. He kin make us come through it, too, so long as He take it in His mind He want to do dat.'
'Amen,' Athenaeus said. Scipio made himself nod. He didn't want to seem out of place-seeming out of place was one of his greatest fears, because it was deadly dangerous. But if God had really wanted to do something about this disaster, couldn't He have stopped it in the first place?
'More we pray, more He gonna know how much we loves Him,' Erasmus said. Along with being a believer, though, he was a relentlessly practical man. He went on, ' 'Course, we gots to work hard, too. God ain't never gonna pay no heed to nobody who don't work hard.'
Scipio would have bet he'd say that. Erasmus not only believed in the virtues of hard work, he practiced what he preached. Scipio himself was sure it couldn't hurt. What he wasn't sure of was how much it could help.
S omething was wrong in Salt Lake City. Colonel Abner Dowling shook his head. Something was always wrong in Salt Lake City. It wouldn't have been the place, or the sort of place, it was if something hadn't been wrong all the time. But something now was different. Anything different in Salt Lake City automatically roused Dowling's suspicions. As far as he could tell, different and dangerous were two sides of the same coin.
'I'll tell you what it is, sir,' Captain Angelo Toricelli said.
'Go ahead, Angelo,' Dowling urged. 'Tell.'
'Nobody's building anything, that's what,' his adjutant said. 'It's quieter than it ought to be.'
Slowly, Dowling nodded. 'You're right. I'll be damned if you're not right. It isn't on account of they've got everything rebuilt, either. Still plenty of wreckage lying around.'
'Yes, sir,' Captain Toricelli agreed. 'But an awful lot of money that would have paid for more construction all of a sudden isn't there-it's gone.'
Dowling nodded again. He gave Toricelli a sidelong glance. Fortunately, his adjutant didn't notice. The way the younger man watched every penny, he might have been a Jew, not an Italian. Dowling didn't want Toricelli to know he was thinking that. He didn't want to insult his adjutant. And everybody had to pay special attention to money these days, because it was so very thin on the ground.
With a sigh, Dowling said, 'Not much we can do about it. At least we've got the Army paying our salaries.'
'Yes, sir, and I'm damn glad of it, too,' Toricelli answered. 'I just got a letter from New York, from home. My brother-in-law's out of a job.'
'What's he do?' Dowling asked.
'He reads X rays, sir-went to night school to learn the trade,' Toricelli said, not without pride. 'My sister and he've got five children, and another one on the way. I don't know what they'll do if he doesn't find something quick.'
'I hope he does,' Dowling said, on the whole sincerely. 'Who would have thought the bottom could drop out of things so fast?'
'Nobody,' Captain Toricelli answered. 'But it has.'
He was right about that, too. The Army censored Salt Lake City papers pretty hard. Pain came through their pages even so. Stories of half-done buildings abandoned, of banks going under, of people losing jobs, couldn't very well be prettied up. And the only way to leave those stories out of the newspapers would have been to have no papers at all.
Captain Toricelli touched a fat document on his desk. 'Don't tell me what that is,' Dowling said. 'Let me guess: another normalization petition.'
'Right the first time,' his adjutant said.
'It's not as though I haven't seen enough of them,' Dowling said. Every few months, the Mormons of Salt Lake City-and the occasional gentile, too-would circulate petitions asking that Utah finally be treated like any other state in the USA. Dowling had got a couple of dozen since coming to the state capital. With a sigh, he went on, 'They still haven't figured out I'm not the one they ought to send these to, because I have no authority to grant them. They should go to General Pershing-he's supreme commander of the military district.'
A thoroughly precise man, Toricelli said, 'He hasn't got authority to grant them, either. Only the president and Congress can do that.'
'What do you think the chances are?' Dowling asked.
'Better than decent, if the Mormons can keep their noses clean,' Captain Toricelli answered. 'The Socialists seem to want to do it.'
'I know.' Dowling packed a world of meaning into two words. 'They think a zebra can change its stripes, the
