Breakthroughs

realized he’d forgotten the milk in the barn. Cursing under his breath, he went back and retrieved it. When he went into the farmhouse, the first breath of warm air inside was almost as shocking as going the other way had been. “What took you so long, Pa?” Mary asked.

“I was working,” he told his youngest daughter. Mary’s gingery eyebrows rose; she knew how long his chores should have taken. He didn’t care, not at the moment. Turning to his wife, he asked, “What smells so good?”

“Blackberry pie-our own berries from down by the creek.” Maude asked him no questions about why he’d worked so long in the barn. She never asked him any questions about things like that. He didn’t think she wanted to know. But she never told him to stop, either.

Along with a good part of Greenville, South Carolina’s, population-both white and black-Scipio spent a Sunday afternoon in City Park watching Negro recruits for the Confederate Army practice marching and countermarching over the broad expanse of grass.

“Ho there, Jeroboam!” called one of the colored men who worked at the same textile mill as did Scipio. “How you is?”

“I’s middlin’,” he answered. “How you is, Titus?” Jeroboam was a safer name than his own. As Scipio, he had a price on his head. The government of the Confederate States and the government of South Carolina would both hang him if they caught him. He’d been a leader in the revolutionary Congaree Socialist Republic, one of the many black Socialist republics that had flared to life in the great uprising at the end of 1915-and been crushed, one after another, the following year.

Bayonets glittered on the black recruits’ Tredegars. Scipio wondered how many of those soldiers who now wore butternut had worn the red armband of revolution a year earlier. Without a doubt, some had. Why were they serving the government they had tried to overthrow? To learn what they had not known before, what they would need to know to make their next uprising succeed? Or-

Titus came up alongside Scipio. Like Scipio’s, his hair had some gray in it. He said, “Wish I was young enough to jine up my own self. Them sojers, when they gets out, they be as good as white in the eyes of the law.”

“De gummint say so,” Scipio answered dubiously. “De gummint need we niggers now. De gummint don’ need we no mo’, what happen den?” His accent was thicker and richer than Titus’: the accent of the swamp country down by the Congaree River, south and east of Greenville.

When he chose, he could also speak like an educated white. Before he unwillingly became a revolutionary, he’d been the butler at Anne Colleton’s Marshlands plantation. If God was kind, he would never have to talk like a white man again. If God was very kind, he would never see Anne Colleton again.

Titus said, “They git to vote, don’t they, once they’s done bein’ sojers? They git to sit on juries, don’t they, once they’s out o’ the Army?”

“De gummint say so,” Scipio repeated. “I hopes de gummint tell de truth. But it de gummint.”

That got through to Titus. “Maybe so, Jeroboam. Maybe so. They make a law today say one thing, they make another one tomorrow, say somethin’ else.” He pointed. “But the law they make today, it give ’em niggers with guns. Niggers with guns, they ain’t so easy to trifle with.”

Scipio nodded. Titus couldn’t read and signed his name with an X, but he wasn’t stupid. Black men who’d carried rifles and shown they could fight would be harder to cheat after the war was over. Maybe it was only because the Negro had shown he could fight in the Red uprisings that the Confederate government had decided to put him into the line against the United States. If the USA crushed the CSA, the Confederate way of life was wrecked forever. If the Negro helped save the CSA, change would also come, but perhaps less of it.

A white drill sergeant put the black troops through their paces. “By the right flank…harch! ” he barked, and they went as one man to the right. “To the rear…harch!” The recruits turned back on themselves. “By the left flank…harch!” They changed direction once more. “Eyes…right!” Their heads swung so that they looked into the crowd as they marched past Scipio and Titus. “Count cadence-count!”

“One!..Two!..Three!..Four!” the Negro soldiers shouted in unison, calling out a number at every other step. Then they doubled the pace of the count: “One two three four! One two three four!”

“Companeee-halt!” the drill sergeant shouted. His men might suddenly have turned to stone. He nodded, then looked angry at himself for betraying the slightest hint of approval. “Present-arms!” The Tredegars that had been on the Negroes’ shoulders leaped in front of their faces, held by both hands. “Shoulder-arms!” The rifles returned to the men’s shoulders. “For’ard…harch!” Like a well-oiled machine, the company went back into motion.

After a few minutes, Scipio said, “I’s goin’ on home. See you in de mornin’.” Titus nodded absently. The soldiers seemed to entrance him.

The room Scipio rented was large and cheap. He kept it scrupulously clean. That was a leftover from his days at Marshlands, though he didn’t think of it as such. All he knew was, dirt annoyed him. He bathed more often than most of his fellow boarders, too. He wished he had a bathtub in his own room. The one down at the end of the hall would have to do, though.

He read under the gaslight till six o’clock, then went downstairs to supper. It was a stew of rice and carrots and turnips and okra and a little chicken. A cook at Marshlands who turned out such a stingy supper would have been looking for a new situation the next morning. Scipio ate a big plateful and said not a word. Since the ill-fated black revolt broke out, he’d learned a full belly, however obtained, was nothing at which to sneer.

His cheap alarm clock jangled far too early the next morning. He shaved in cold water at the sink in his room, put on wool pants and a collarless cotton shirt, threw a cotton jacket over the shirt, and plopped a flat cap on his head. Coffee and rolls were waiting downstairs. The coffee was brewed from about as much chicory as the real bean, but it made his eyes come open, which counted for more. The only word he had for the rolls was delicious.

Thus fortified, he made his way to the mill where he worked. The morning was brisk, but not so chilly as to make walking unpleasant. He fell in with a couple of other Negro men who worked at the same mill. One of his friends told a lewd, improbable, and highly entertaining story about his exploits with several women-just how many kept changing from one minute to another.

Black faces streamed in at the entry gate. Only a few whites put salt among the pepper. Most of the white faces belonged to women, the rest to men either unfit for service or too badly injured to go back into the military.

“Befo’ the war,” one of Scipio’s friends said, “niggers couldn’t get these here jobs, ’cept maybe the dirtiest ones an’ the hardest ones. They was all fo’ the buckra, but nowadays the buckra all off fightin’ the Yankees. If us niggers don’t do the work, the work don’t get did.”

“That’s a fac’,” Scipio said. He never expressed an opinion of that sort on his own. To have done so might have drawn attention to him. The more nearly invisible he was, the better. Agreeing with what someone else said, though, seemed safe enough.

He punched the time clock and went to work: throwing heavy bolts of butternut cloth onto a low cart with tiny wheels and pushing the cart from the enormous room where the cloth was woven to the equally enormous one where it was cut into uniforms. He got three dollars a day, up from the $2.50 the mill had paid when he first hired on. Part of the increase was because wages were rising along with prices, though not so fast. The rest came simply from his staying on the job. A lot of men started, lasted a couple of days or a couple of weeks, and quit. Some got better work elsewhere, while others left the factory for the service.

At forty-four-give or take a year-Scipio was too old to join the service. He wasn’t particularly interested in better work, either. The job he had was hard, but not too hard. He had better wind and a slimmer waistline than he’d owned back at Marshlands. He also had work that he did and did well, without anyone giving him orders every other minute.

He hadn’t learned what a luxury that was till his first factory job in Columbia, after he’d managed to escape the collapsing Congaree Socialist Republic. Before then, all he’d ever known were Anne Colleton’s endless commands, and those of her brothers, and, in earlier days, those of her father.

Now all he had to do was shove this cart across fifty feet of bumpy floor, unload the bolts of cloth, and then pull the cart back and fill it up again. He had plenty of time to think while he worked, and his natural pace was fast enough to keep the foreman happy. Had the foreman pushed him, he could easily have worked half again as hard; the fellow never would have lasted as an overseer in the Marshlands cotton fields.

At noon, the lunch whistle blew. Scipio clocked out, hurried to one of the many little greasy spoons across the