Walk in Hell

said. “Weren’t for them, wouldn’t hardly have to worry about passbooks at all, not the way things were going. We wanted bodies so bad, we didn’t care. But now it’s gonna cost you money to get fixed up right, on account of what they did. Too bad, boy.” He spoke with the soppy condescension that seemed to be as close as a Confederate white could come to showing sympathy for a black.

“When do I start?” Scipio asked.

“Tomorrow morning, seven o’clock,” the clerk answered. He shoved the form across the desk at Scipio and handed him a pen. “Put your mark right on the line here. We’ll get you a time card made. Foreman’ll punch it for you-you don’t need to worry about pickin’it out. Just so you know to tell him, you’re Nero number three.”

Scipio placed an X on the line the clerk indicated. By what he saw of the form, his spelling and handwriting were considerably better than Staunton’s. He didn’t aim to show that. The less the white man knew about him, the better he liked it.

But, even though he’d written an X, the way he’d taken the pen, as if his hand was accustomed to it, made the clerk’s eyes narrow. “House nigger,” Staunton said, half to himself. “You read and write some, don’t you, boy?”

“Some, yes, suh,” Scipio answered cautiously. Damn it, why couldn’t he have dealt with a dull, bored white clerk rather than an alert, grasping one?

But Staunton visibly decided not to make an issue of it. “Go on, get out of here,” he said. “You ain’t here at seven sharp tomorrow, don’t ever come round again, neither.” He pushed his chair back from his desk and swiveled so he could put Scipio’s paperwork in a file cabinet. That was the first time the Negro had the chance to see his right leg was missing from halfway down the thigh.

After that, Scipio got out of there in a hurry. He had a couple of dollars in his pocket, from odd jobs he’d done on farms and in little towns before he decided the big city was safer. As he walked along Columbia’s busy streets, he wondered if he’d made a mistake.

Probably not, he decided. Negroes were on the streets, and a lot of them looked as ragged as he did. Soldiers tramped along the streets, too, some of them regulars in butternut, some recalled militia in old-fashioned gray that made them look like policemen. They didn’t seem to be checking blacks’ papers, just showing themselves to keep trouble from breaking out.

Columbia had seen trouble during the Red insurrections. It was a city of fine and stately homes and shops, many of them dating from before the War of Secession. Here and there, a block would have a house missing, like a man with a missing front tooth. A couple of places in town, whole blocks were missing, even the rubble cleared away. The Negroes might have lost, but they’d put up a fight.

Much good it did them, Scipio thought gloomily. He ducked into a store whose sign forthrightly proclaimed CHEAP CLOTHES and bought a pair of dungarees and a couple of collarless cotton shirts. He wouldn’t be able to afford any new clothes for the next month, not on sixty-two and a half cents a day he wouldn’t.

A bowl of thin stew cost him another fifteen cents, and a mattress in a tiny, airless cubicle a quarter on top of that. He was left with the munificent sum of half a dollar with which to face the world. It was Wednesday night. Payday would be Friday. He had enough for a bed tomorrow night, and for some bread or mush to keep the hole in his belly from getting any worse. Sighing, he tried to sleep.

On that uncomfortable bed, in that uncomfortable roomlet, waking up in time to be at the munitions plant was not the problem. Sleeping at all before then was. When dawn began showing through the small, rectangular window that wouldn’t open, he gave up, put on the dungarees and one of the shirts he’d bought the evening before, and then discovered he had to pay the flophouse proprietor a dime to watch the clothes he had left so they’d be there when he got back. Day-old bread, he thought, and sighed again.

“Nero number three, eh? All right, you’re on time, boy,” the foreman said when he got to the factory: grudging approval, but approval. The white man punched his card into the clock, then took him back into the factory. “They stack the crates of empty shells here, at the end of this line,” the fellow said, pointing. “You haul ’em over there, where they pick ’em up to be filled. You got that?”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Several crates already stood there. “I do ’em one at a time by hand, suh?”

“’Less you got a servant to do ’em for you, that’s what you do, by Jesus,” the foreman said. “I wanted me a butler, I’d’ve hired a nigger wearin’ different clothes.” He laughed at his own joke.

Scipio, luckily, managed to keep his face straight. “Don’t mind workin’, suh,” he said. “Ain’t what I mean. Jus’ thinkin’ that, you give me a hand truck, I could do mo’ work in de same time.”

The foreman laughed again. “First time I ever heard of a nigger wanting to do more work, ’stead of less.” He rubbed his chin. “It ain’t the worst idea I ever heard, though. Tell you what-you do it this way for today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow. I got to talk with a couple people first.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again. If they think it’s a good idea, I’m going to take the credit for it, was what the white man meant. Scipio couldn’t do anything about that. He strode over to the crates, picked one up, and carried it to where the foreman had told him to put it.

It was heavy. The rough wood bit into his hands. The edge of the crate struck his thighs halfway between knee and hip. He’d be bruised there by evening-hell, he’d be bruised there by noon. He walked back and got another crate. The foreman nodded, satisfied, and went back to supervising check-in.

A Negro in good, well-made work clothes picked up the crate Scipio had set down. The two black man stared at each other. Scipio spoke first. He had to speak first, before the other man used his true name. “How you is, Jonah?” he said. “You ’member ol’ Nero, eh?”

Jonah had been a field hand at Marshlands. He and his woman had gone into Columbia looking for factory work not long after the war started, and not even Anne Colleton had been able to get them back. “Nero,” he said now, after a brief, thoughtful pause. “Yeah, I ’member you good, Nero. So now we is workin’ together again, is we?”

“Dis world a small place,” Scipio said solemnly. He wished it hadn’t been quite so small. If Jonah felt like betraying him, he could. They’d got on well enough at the plantation, but there was always the distinction between house nigger and field nigger. And Jonah might well have heard of the role he’d played in the Congaree Socialist Republic. If, like a good many Negroes, he disapproved of the uprising…

Then Jonah smiled and said, “You come home fo’ supper wid me tonight, Nero. Letitia, she glad to see an ol’ friend.”

“T’ank you,” Scipio said. “I do dat.” It would get him fed and let him save what little money he had left. And it meant-Lord, how he hoped it meant! — Jonah wasn’t going to turn him in to the Confederate authorities. He picked up another clanking crate of shell casings. It hardly seemed to weigh a thing.

The hall was packed. The hot, muggy air would have been thick enough to slice even had it been empty. A small, forlorn electric fan did overmatched battle against the heat of too many bodies, against the fact that a lot of those bodies hadn’t bathed quite so recently as they might have, and against enough cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke to make Flora Hamburger think of poison gas.

Coughing a little, she turned to Maria Tresca. “They’ve come out, no two ways about it,” she said.

Maria nodded. “That works for you, not against you,” she said. “The regulars would sooner see Herman Bruck with the nomination, even after Remembrance Day.” She sniffed; the smoky air turned the sniff into a cough louder than Flora’s. “They’re reactionaries, that’s what they are. How can they be reactionaries and Socialists at the same time? My sister Angelina never was.”

“When they think of it, they’re progressive,” Flora said with a shrug. “You have to think about your ideology; if you don’t think about it, you haven’t got one. But if you don’t think about your social attitudes, it’s not that you don’t have any, it’s just that yours are the same as your neighbor’s.” She sighed. “And if your neighbors are petty bourgeoisie and proletarians who aspire to the petty bourgeoisie-”

Maria Tresca’s face darkened into a frown. “In that case, they might as well be Democrats.”

“No.” Flora shook her head. “That’s not the problem. The problem is making them think about social issues. When they do think instead of feeling, they’re sound enough. They have to stop taking those concerns for granted, that’s all.”

“Or else the revolution, when it comes, will sweep them away with it,” Maria said. “Sometimes I think you’re too gentle, Flora. My sister was the same way, and look what it got her.” Angelina Tresca had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. “If they cannot adapt, they deserve to be swept away.” Maria was as full