Off to one side, a field piece began barking, throwing shells into Albany, Georgia. Captain Connolly looked up from his tin cup of coffee and said, “All right, boys, now we go and take their capital away from ’em. About time, I’d say. And doing that’ll just about put the last nail in the coffin. Can’t hardly claim they’ve got a country when they haven’t got a capital any more, can they?”
“Damnyankees do,” Stinky Salley said.
Connolly didn’t catch him opening his mouth. He looked around. “All right, who’s the smart bird?” he demanded. Nobody said anything. He gulped down the rest of the coffee-heavily laced with chicory and God only knew what all else, if it was anything like Jeff’s. Pinkard didn’t care. It was hot and strong and made his heart beat faster. The captain said, “Come on, boys. Time to do it.”
He didn’t tell them what to do and sit back on his duff. He went out with them and helped them do it. Pinkard had appreciated that in a foundry foreman. He appreciated it even more in an officer. After patting himself to make sure he had plenty of spare clips for the Tredegar, he scrambled to his feet and trudged on toward Albany.
The front hereabouts was too wide, with too few men covering too many miles, for proper entrenchment. You dug foxholes where you happened to be, fought out of them, and advanced some more. The survivors of the new regiment to which he belonged weren’t advancing in neat files of men now. They’d learned better. They moved forward in open order, well spread out.
A shot rang out-behind him. One of his comrades went down, clutching at the back of his left thigh. Half a dozen men close by went down, too, hitting the dirt at the first sound of gunfire. Pinkard was one of them. He’d developed a tremendous respect for the horrid things flying lead could do to the human body.
Another shot kicked up red dirt and spat it in his face. “It’s another one of those hideout sons of bitches,” he said unhappily. As their strength faltered, the Reds had formed the nasty habit of digging in with concealed foxholes facing not toward their Confederate foes but away, and holding their fire till the soldiers had gone past them. They’d done considerable damage that way. This fellow looked to have added to it.
Stalking him through the pine woods was a deadly game of hide and seek. He wounded another man before Rodriguez flushed him out of his hole with a grenade and three other soldiers shot him from three different directions. He wasn’t quite dead, even after that. Jeff put a round through his head at close range, which made him stop thrashing and moaning.
“What did you go and do that for?” one of the other Confederates asked. “Bastard deserved to suffer, I reckon.”
“Yeah, but if we went and left him, he might have found a way to do more mischief, even shot up like he was,” Pinkard answered.
“Oh, tactics. That’s all right, then,” said the other soldier, a hulking Tennessean named Finley. “You talk kind of soft on niggers sometimes, so I wondered if you was just doing him a kindness.”
Pinkard bristled. He wasn’t a hardliner, and nobody could make him one-he was a free white man, with a right to his opinion. “Listen,” he said, “there’s ten million of ’em in the CSA, or ten million take away however many got themselves killed in this stupid uprising of theirs. We got to figure out what to do with ’em after this part of the shooting’s done.”
“Put the slave chains back on ’em,” Finley snapped. “Serve ’em right.”
Not many Confederates wanted to go that far, for which Pinkard thanked God. “They done showed they can fight,” he said. “You buy a big buck nigger now, Finley, you think you ever dare turn your back on him?” Finley scowled from under the brim of his helmet. He didn’t say anything, which suited Jeff fine.
They emerged from the woods a few hundred yards outside of Albany. Field pieces were still pounding the town. Answering fire came mostly from the big houses on the north side of the main street: from what had been the white section of the city. Red flags still flew defiantly above several of those houses. “Bastards are doing it on purpose, hurting whites as much as they can,” Finley said. Now Pinkard was the one who didn’t answer.
One of those big houses with a two-story colonnaded porch held a machine gun. It spat death out toward the advancing soldiers in butternut. The fields had been plowed with shell holes. Pinkard jumped into one. Once he was in it, he discovered he shared it with the stinking corpse of a Negro. He stayed where he was, stench or no stench. With bullets whining past overhead, he figured he’d wind up a corpse himself if he moved too soon.
But, however much you might like the notion, you couldn’t huddle in a hole forever. When the machine gun chose a different target, he got up and ran for another hole closer to Albany. He got fired on again, but made it safely.
The Confederates were moving on the city from the west and the north. The Red rebels holed up inside did not have the firepower to keep them out. But instead of fading back into the countryside, the Negroes fought house to house, making the government forces clear them out with grenades and, once or twice, with the bayonet.
At last, the Reds were pushed back to the last couple of houses where they still had machine guns up and firing. A flag still flew from one of them. Inside, the Negroes shouted the defiant cry they’d raised through the whole unpleasant engagement: “The people! Fo’ the people!”
When gunfire eased for a moment, Pinkard shouted back: “Give up, you lying bastards! We
“Liar your own self!” One of those machine guns lashed the rubble in which he lay. He’d expected that, and stayed very low behind the big pile of red bricks that had been a chimney before a shell knocked it down. But his words seemed to have angered the black rebels so much, they didn’t just want to kill him. The same fellow who’d yelled before shouted out again: “You ain’t the people. You is the dogs o’ the aristocracy, is what you is!” He barked derisively.
“The hell you say!” Pinkard answered, a measure of how good his cover was. “Lot more white men than niggers in the CSA.”
“Not in the Black Belt Socialist Republic,” the Red retorted. “Not in the others, neither.” He laughed. “We havin’ our own War o’ Secession, if’n you want to put it like that.”
Jeff didn’t want to put it like that, even to himself. It would have made the fight the Negroes were raising seem altogether too legitimate to him. And then another Red let out a dark, nasty laugh and added, “Sure as hell ain’t mo’ white folks than niggers in the Black Belt Socialist Republic nowadays. We done took care o’ that.”
From off to the side, a Confederate soldier started pitching grenades into the house where the Red revolutionaries were holed up. Pinkard had no idea whether they wounded any of the Negroes. They did set the house on fire.
That left the Reds a desperate choice. They could stay and burn or flee and get shot down. They fled, disciplined enough to carry the machine gun with them to set up again if they found fresh refuge. They didn’t.
One more house and the fighting was done. Captain Connolly carried a red flag as he strode through the shattered wreckage of what had been a prosperous Georgia farming town. “It’s over,” he said. “Here, it’s over.”
Pinkard looked around. He felt giddy, half stunned, half drunk at being alive. Wearily, he shook his head. The fighting might have ended, but the revolt and its aftermath weren’t over. He wondered how many years would pass before they were. He wondered if they ever would be.
Remembrance Day passed quietly in New York City. Soldiers’ Circle men and military bands paraded, as did newly raised units going off to the front. Enough soldiers with glittering bayonets and full clips in their rifles stood along the parade route to have marched on Richmond and taken it in about ten days-that was Flora Hamburger’s sardonic thought, at any rate. The soldiers had orders-highly publicized orders-to shoot to kill at the first sign of trouble and a look that said they would have enjoyed doing it. They seemed disappointed when the Socialists didn’t give them the chance.
“Now it’s our turn,” Flora said back at the Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party offices after the sun set on a day without incident. “May Day next week, and then we show them what we really think of their government and their war.”
“They still may try to find some way to keep us from holding our parade,” Herman Bruck said nervously.
“There is such a thing as the Constitution of the United States,” Flora said. “We have the right to petition for redress of grievances, unless they put New York under martial law the way they did to Utah, and we’ll make absolutely certain we give them no excuse to do that.”
