Walk in Hell

“I’m gonna have to give my boy a good kick in the slack o’ his britches,” Apicius said, and then, to Cincinnatus this time, “Well, come in and shut that thing behind you, ’fore people out front start payin’more heed to what’s goin’on in here than they should ought to.” To Kennedy, he said, “Sorry, Mister Tom. Didn’t ’spect we’d get interrupted.”

“Could be worse,” Kennedy said. “Cincinnatus and me, we’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve done a deal of work together. You know about that, I suppose.”

His tone was-cautious was the word on which Cincinnatus finally settled. Cincinnatus had put firebombs into U.S. supply dumps over much of central Kentucky. He’d gone right on doing that after Conroy’s general store burned down. He didn’t like doing it, but he thought it would be wise. The Confederate underground hadn’t troubled him, so he supposed he’d made the right choice. Buildings did sometimes burn down without firebombs, after all, or seem as if they did. There had, in fact, been a fire in a livery stable down the block from the general store a couple of nights later.

“Well, all right, you’re here,” Apicius said roughly. He slid down on the bench he was occupying to give Cincinnatus room to sit beside him. “What you got to say that won’t keep for nothin’?”

But Cincinnatus didn’t say anything, not right away. He kept an eye on Tom Kennedy. Kennedy had used Apicius and his sons to help spread Confederate propaganda in occupied Kentucky. Cincinnatus didn’t know whether Kennedy knew Apicius headed a Red cell in Covington. Till he found out, he wasn’t going to say anything to let Kennedy in on the secret. The war between the Reds and the Confederate government was liable to continue, here in this land neither of those two sides controlled.

Kennedy said, “I was just telling Apicius here about what I told you months ago would come true-more rights for Negroes in the CSA on account of the war and on account of the goddamn uprising.”

“You did tell me about that, Mr. Kennedy-that’s a fact,” Cincinnatus said. “I own I didn’t reckon you knew what you was talking about, but it do look like you did.”

“Got to get through the Congress before it’s real, and the Congress don’t move what anybody’d call real quick,” Apicius observed.

“I think Congress will move quicker here than you figure,” Kennedy said. “You read the papers-”

Apicius shook his head. “Felix does, and Lucullus. Not me. All I knows is how to cook meat till it fall off the bone into yo’ mouth.”

And how to sandbag, Cincinnatus thought. Maybe Apicius was illiterate. If he was, he had the remarkable memory people who couldn’t read and write often developed; details never slipped his mind.

The display of ignorance didn’t impress Kennedy, either. “You know what’s going on,” he corrected himself impatiently. “You know the Confederate States need all the help they can get against the USA, and you know that if that means giving Negroes more, they’ll do it.”

“Reckon I do know that,” the cook said. “Question is, do I care? The CSA is a pack o’ capitalists and oppressors, an’ de USA is a pack o’ capitalists and oppressors, too. Why the devil does we care what the devil happens to one pack o’ capitalists and imperialists or the other?”

Cincinnatus knew he was staring. Apicius chuckled. Tom Kennedy chuckled, too, a little self-consciously. They both started to talk at the same time. With a wave of the sort he’d probably learned as a boy back in slavery days, the black man deferred to the white. Kennedy said, “When you’re underground, things are different. Down in Mississippi, I’d hang Apicius from the first branch-well, the first really big branch-I could find…if he didn’t bushwhack me first. Up here, we both worry about the USA more than we do about each other.” He nodded to Cincinnatus. “I know who I’m working with. And I know who’s working with me, too.”

Was that a warning about Conroy’s store? What else could it be? But if Kennedy had drawn his own conclusions about that…Cincinnatus wondered why he was still breathing, in that case.

Apicius said, “That don’t mean what I said beforehand don’t hold. You got to remember that, Mister Tom. Most of the black folks who think about politics at all, we is Marxists. We is oppressed so bad, what else can we be? The war you got, it’s an imperialist war. Why shouldn’t we sit by and let the capitalists shoot each other full of holes?” Cincinnatus wondered how long the cook had been a Red, to talk that way if he couldn’t read the words.

Kennedy answered, “Because whoever’s left on top is going to lick the tar out of you if you do. You aren’t strong enough to go it alone. You’ve seen that. If you couldn’t lick the CSA when we had one hand and half of the other one tied behind our backs, you’ll never do it. You can’t fight, not well enough. You have to deal.”

“Who says we didn’t lick the CSA?” Apicius asked quietly. “The U.S. soldiers, they down in Tennessee these days. You think you ever gonna see soldiers in butternut back on the Ohio? Don’t hold your breath, Mister Tom.”

“The Yankees can put soldiers on every railroad track and streetcorner in this state. That doesn’t mean they can run it.” Kennedy would have been more impressive if he hadn’t sounded as if he were whistling in the dark.

“It don’t matter nohow,” Apicius said. “In the long run, Mister Tom, it don’t matter a-tall. The revolution gonna come in the CSA, and the revolution gonna come in the USA. Not all the soldiers in the world can stop it, on account of it’s the way things gonna work out everywhere in the world. You kin fight it an’ go under, or you kin be progressive an’ make yourself part of the risin’ power o’ the proletariat.”

“If the Yankees weren’t holding us both down-” Kennedy said. Apicius nodded, his heavy-jowled face calm and certain. Cincinnatus had seen that look before, most often on the faces of preachers convinced of their own righteousness than anywhere else.

He wondered if Apicius really knew what he was talking about. If the united workers of the world were so strong-“If the workers are so strong,” he said, more thinking aloud than intending to criticize, “why didn’t they all say two years ago they didn’t want to go out and kill each other, instead of lining up and cheering and waving their flags?”

But disagreeing with both of them at the same time, he did the same thing the U.S. invasion of Kentucky had done: he got Apicius and Tom Kennedy to unite against him, though for divergent reasons. “Why? Because they’re patriots, that’s why,” Kennedy said. “And they’ll go on being patriots, too, even the colored ones, when they find out they have something worth fighting for.”

Apicius shook his head. “They fight on account of they is mystified into thinking country and race count for more than class. The capitalists got them fooled, is why they go off cheerin’.”

“Nothing counts for more than country and race,” Kennedy said with conviction.

Although Cincinnatus had worked with the Confederate underground, he did not think of himself as Tom Kennedy’s political ally. But he had the feeling Kennedy was right here. You could usually tell a man’s race just by using your eyes. You could usually tell a man’s country just by using your ears to hear how he talked. Set against those basics, the idea of class seemed as fragile as something made from spun sugar.

As if to cleanse himself of agreeing with a white man against a black (and if that wasn’t race in action, what was it?), Cincinnatus said, “Some of the states in the USA, I hear tell, they already let their colored men vote.”

Kennedy accepted the challenge without flinching; he had nerve, no doubt of that. “Sure they do, Cincinnatus. They don’t have enough blacks to worry about. You think the white men of Kentucky are going to feel the same way?”

Apicius smiled a nasty smile. “Maybe that don’t matter none. Maybe the Yankees, they only think about who wants to do things for them, and about who they reckon they can’t noway trust. Maybe when the war is over, maybe only the black folks in Kentucky gets to vote. How you gonna like that there, Mister Tom?”

Kennedy’s face showed how well he would like that. He said, “There’d be an uprising so fast, it’d make your head swim. And you know what, Apicius? A lot of the damnyankee soldiers would join it, too.”

Cincinnatus thought about Lieutenant Kennan. Would he back whites against blacks and against his own government? He might. But Kennan wasn’t the only kind of Yankee there was. “Not all of them would,” he said with as much certainty as Kennedy had shown not long before. “Not all of them would, not by a long shot.”

“What are you doing here, then?” Kennedy asked. “You like the Yankees so well, why aren’t you with them?”

“Because I saved your neck, Mr. Kennedy, once upon a time,” Cincinnatus answered. That made Kennedy