Breakthroughs

those from South Carolina. Here, Scipio was just one more anonymous black man looking for work.

He was looking harder than he’d expected, too. Factories weren’t hiring the way they had been a year before. “We’re already letting people go,” a clerk told Scipio. “What’s the point of bringing more onto the lines when the war orders are gonna dry up and blow away any minute now?”

“I understands that, suh,” Scipio said, “but I gots to eat, too. What is I s’posed to do?”

“Go pick cotton,” the white clerk answered. “Reckon that’s what you were up to before the war started. Won’t hurt you to get on back. When the Army shrinks, the soldiers’ll need their own jobs back again.”

White men will need their old jobs back again, Scipio thought. And the Negroes who were doing those jobs? Well, the hell with them. They might have been good enough to help out for a little while, but now they’re going to have to learn their place again.

He’d got rebuffs from every factory he tried. For a while, he’d wondered if he would have to work in the fields. The money he’d earned from odd jobs as he made his way across South Carolina was almost gone. His life at Marshlands had convinced him of one thing: he did not want to be a field hand. But he did not want to starve, either.

And then he passed a little restaurant on Telfair Street with a sign in the window: WAITER WANTED. He started to go in, then shook his head. Reluctantly, he spent a couple of quarters on a shirt and a pair of pants that, if long past their salad days, were not ragged and falling to pieces. Then he went back to his flophouse in the Terry, the Negro district in the southeastern part of town, and bathed in a tin tub that plainly hadn’t been used as often as it should have. Only after his clothes and he were as fresh as he could make them did he head back toward the restaurant.

Inside, a colored fellow was setting cheap silverware on a table. “What you want?” he asked in neutral tones as he slowly put down the last couple of pieces.

“I seen the sign in the window,” Scipio answered. “I’s lookin’ for work. I works hard, I does.” He wondered if the proprietor had already hired the other man, in which case he’d parted with money he couldn’t afford to lose.

But the other Negro just shrugged and asked, “You wait tables befo’?”

“I’s done that.” Scipio nodded emphatically. He pointed to the place setting the fellow had just finished laying out. “De soup spoon belong on the udder side o’de teaspoon.”

Smiling now, the fellow reversed them. “You has waited tables.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Mistuh Ogelthorpe! I think we got you a waiter here.”

A white man in his late fifties came out of the back room. He walked with the aid of a stick. Scipio wondered if he’d been wounded in this war or the Second Mexican War. More likely the latter, by his age-or, of course, he might just have been in a train wreck or some other misfortune. He looked Scipio over with gray eyes that were far from foolish. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.

“I’s called Xerxes, suh,” Scipio replied. He’d been called a lot of different things lately. He was glad he could keep them straight and remember who he was supposed to be at any given moment.

Ogelthorpe turned back to the other waiter. “How come you reckon he’s a waiter, Fabius?”

“On account of he knows the difference ’tween a soup spoon and a teaspoon, and where each of ’em goes on the table,” the other Negro-Fabius-said.

“That a fact?” Ogelthorpe said, and Fabius nodded. The white man who owned the restaurant turned to Scipio and asked, “Where’d you learn the business, Xerxes?”

“Here an’ dere, suh,” Scipio answered. “I been doin’ factory work since de war start, mostly, but de factories, dey’s shuttin’ down.”

“Here and there?” Ogelthorpe rubbed his chin. “You tell me you got anything like a passbook, I’m liable to fall over dead from the surprise.”

“No, suh,” Scipio said. “Times is rough. Lots o’ niggers ain’t got none dese days, on account of we’s moved around so much.”

“Or for other reasons.” No, Ogelthorpe wasn’t stupid, not even close. A frown twisted his narrow mouth. “Wish you didn’t talk like you been pickin’ cotton all your born days.”

Had Scipio wanted to, he could have talked a great deal more elegantly than Ogelthorpe. He’d used that ability to speak like a polished white man to help escape from the swamps of the Congaree. But, if he didn’t speak like a polished white man, speaking like a field hand was all he could do. He’d never before missed his lack of a middle way. Now he did, intently.

“I’s powerful sorry, suh,” he said. “I tries to do better.”

“You read and write and cipher?” Ogelthorpe looked as if anything but a no there would have surprised him, too.

But Scipio read the names and prices of the soups and sandwiches and stews and meat dishes on the wall. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper on the counter and wrote his name and Fabius’ and Ogelthorpe’s in his small, precise script. Then he handed Ogelthorpe the paper and said, “You write any numbers you wants, an’I kin cipher they out fo’you.”

He’d wondered if his demonstration would make Ogelthorpe not bother, but the white man scrawled a column of figures-watching, Scipio saw they were the prices of items he served-and thrust back the sheet and the pencil. “Go ahead-add ’em up.”

Scipio did, careful not to make any mistakes. “They comes to fo’ dollars an’ seventeen cents all told,” he said when he was done.

Ogelthorpe’s expression said that, while they did indeed come to $4.17, he rather wished they didn’t. Fabius, on the other hand, laughed out loud. “You got anything else you want to give him a hard time about, boss?”

“Don’t reckon so,” Ogelthorpe admitted. With a sigh, he turned back to Scipio. “Pay’s ten dollars a week, an’ tips, an’ lunch an’ supper every day you’re here. You play as good a game as you talk, I’ll bump you up a slug or two in a month. What do you say?”

“I says, yes, suh. I says, thank you, suh,” Scipio answered. He wouldn’t get rich on that kind of money, but he wouldn’t starve, especially not when he could feed himself here. And he’d be able to get out of the grim Terry flophouse and into a better room or even a flat.

Ogelthorpe said, “You can tell me I’m crazy if you want, but I got the idea you ain’t got a hell of a lot of jack right now. You’re clean enough, I’ll say that, but I want you to get yourself black trousers an’ a white shirt like Fabius is wearin’, and I want you to do it fast as you’re able. You don’t do it fast enough to suit me, back on the street you go.”

“I takes care of it,” Scipio promised. He thought Fabius was dressed up too fancy for the kind of food the place dished out, but realized his own tastes were on the snobbish side. One more thing I can blame on Miss Anne, he thought. Maybe, now that he was outside of South Carolina, she wouldn’t be able to track him down. He hoped to Jesus she couldn’t.

Outside, a clock started chiming noon. A moment later, two steam whistles blew. “Here comes the lunch crowd,” Ogelthorpe said. “All right, Xerxes, looks like you get baptism by total immersion. Me, I got to get my ass back to the stove.” He disappeared into the rear of the restaurant.

Fabius just had time to hand Scipio a Gray Eagle scratch pad before the place filled up. Then Scipio was working like a madman for the next hour and a half, taking orders, hustling them back to Ogelthorpe, carrying plates of food to the customers, taking money and making change, and trading dirty china and silverware for clean with the dishwasher, an ancient black man who hadn’t bothered to come out and see whether he’d be hired.

Some of the customers were white, some colored. By their clothes, they all worked at the nearby hash cannery or the ironworks or one of the several factories that made bricks from the fine clay found in abundance around Augusta. Whites and Negroes might come in together, sometimes laughing and joking with one another, but the whites always sat at the tables on one side of the restaurant, the blacks at those on the other.

Scipio wondered if Fabius would wait on the whites and leave the Negroes for him. The whites would undoubtedly have more money to spend. Scipio presumed that would translate into better tips. But the two waiters split the crowd evenly, and Scipio needed less than half an hour to find out his idea wasn’t necessarily so. The idea of tipping a colored waiter had never crossed a lot of white men’s minds. When they did tip, they left more than their Negro counterparts, but the blacks were more likely to leave something, if often not much. Taken all together, things evened out.

By half past one, after the last lunch shift ended, the place was quiet again, as it had been before noon.