'Kin you dock we a dollar, two dollars, a week, so it don't hurt so bad?'
'Yeah!' Several other men spoke up. Others nodded. One of the assistant cooks said, 'I buys everything on the installment plan. I should oughta pay this here fine the same way.'
But Dover shook his head. 'I would if I could, but I can't. The order says it's got to come out of your next pay. It's supposed to hurt. That's why they're doing it. I'm sorry, Xerxes. It was a good idea.'
Dully, Scipio nodded. It's supposed to hurt. He'd known that from the minute the Freedom Party won in 1933. No, he'd known it from the moment he first heard Jake Featherston speak in a park here in Augusta, back when the Party was young and small. He asked, 'Mistuh Dover, suh, what keep de gum-mint from takin' away anudder twenty dollar from we whenever dey please?'
Jerry Dover looked startled. He was, within his limits, a decent man. Plainly, that hadn't occurred to him. It hadn't occurred to some of Scipio's fellow workers, either, not by their horrified exclamations. And Dover proved his honesty, for he answered, 'I'll be damned if I know.'
The Huntsman's Lodge was a glum place that night. Some of the men who came to dine there wore Freedom Party pins on their lapels. Somehow or other, waiters contrived to spill hot or greasy food on several of them, or on their wives or girlfriends. The whites were furious. The Negroes were apologetic. So was Jerry Dover. 'I'm sure it was an accident, sir,' he said repeatedly. 'We have a very fine staff here, but they are human.'
Freedom Party men don't want to believe that, Scipio thought. He'd taken his tiny revenge on a man with one of those enamel pins on his tuxedo jacket. Cleaning the jacket wouldn't come cheap, but it wouldn't come to twenty dollars, either.
By contrast, two or three waiters found themselves with unusually large tips. The men who gave them might have been silently saying they didn't approve of collective fines. You could always tell when a man got an unexpected tip. He would straighten and smile in delighted surprise before he could catch himself. Scipio kept hoping he would find a sympathetic customer like that. He kept hoping, and he kept being disappointed.
When he left the Lodge at half past twelve, the rain was still coming down. He didn't mind. Fewer troublemakers, white or black, were on the streets in weather like this. So he thought, anyhow. And, indeed, no one troubled him. But he was going up the front steps of his apartment building when he heard gunfire from the white part of town. It wasn't just a pistol shot; it was a regular fusillade from several Tredegars. Back during the brief and bloody history of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he'd come to know the sound of military rifles much better than he ever wanted to. Some things you didn't forget, no matter how much you wished you could.
'What was that?' Bathsheba asked worriedly when he went inside.
'Dunno,' he answered. That was technically true, but he had his suspicions-his fears.
So did his wife. 'You reckon some niggers doin' somethin' stupid?' She sounded frightened, too. And she didn't know about the fine the government was levying.
'Wouldn't be surprised. We all be sorry if they is. That one nigger, he shoot at the president…' He told her of the fine.
'Twenty dollars!' Bathsheba's anguish was painful to hear. She knew how much that was, how badly it would hurt their finances.
'Ain't nothin' I kin do about it,' Scipio said. More gunfire burst out in the white part of Augusta: Tredegars again, and then the smaller answering pops of pistols. Black attackers and roused whites fighting back with whatever weapons they had handy, Scipio judged.
A moment later, a hard hammering made him shiver, even though it wasn't close. Somebody had a machine gun. He'd seen what such reaping machines of death could do. By the way the rifle fire suddenly slacked off, the machine gun didn't belong to the raiders.
Bathsheba's face was a mask of pain. She had to be thinking the same thing. 'Them poor boys,' she whispered. 'Them poor boys gettin' all shot up.'
Scipio nodded heavily. But his pain wasn't just for the raiders who'd bitten off more than they could chew. Bitter as wormwood, Revelations said. He understood that now, where he never had before. 'Them damn fools give de buckra de excuse to come down on we even harder'n ever.'
'How they come down on us harder'n they already doin'?' his wife asked.
'Suppose Georgia fine de niggers in de state? Suppose Augusta fine de niggers in de city? Richmond do it. Dey reckons dey kin do it, too, mebbe,' Scipio said. Bathsheba flinched as if he'd hit her, then reluctantly nodded. With the Freedom Party in the saddle, anything was possible, anything at all. That was a big part of what made it so frightening.
Another Inauguration Day. Nellie Jacobs wondered how many she'd seen. She hadn't gone to all of them. Work, indifference, and war had kept her away at one time or another. This year, though, February first fell on a fine, bright Monday. The temperature got up close to fifty. It might almost have been spring. She decided to close the coffeehouse and go hear what Al Smith had to say.
She took Clara with her: the high school closed for the day. That her younger daughter, her accidental daughter, should be in high school still struck her as amazing, to say nothing of unnatural. Hadn't Clara been born just a few weeks ago? That was how it seemed to Nellie. But Clara was taller than she was. She'd grown up while Nellie wasn't looking.
She'd grown snippy while Nellie wasn't looking, too. 'Do we have to go with Edna and Merle and Armstrong?' she said.
The last name was the problem. Clara and Armstrong Grimes had never got along, not since she was a toddler and he was a baby. She didn't want to have anything to do with him, and she wasn't shy about letting the world know as much, either.
'He's my only grandson, and Edna's my daughter just as much as you are, Miss Smarty-Britches, and Merle Grimes is a good man-and I don't say that about many men,' Nellie answered. 'So you'll come along and act polite, or you'll find out you're not too big for me to warm your backside.'
One of these days, that kind of argument wouldn't work. She'd have a fight on her hands if she tried it. She remembered that from dealing-trying to deal-with Edna. She got by with it today, though. Clara might be snippy, but she wasn't ready to fight back hard yet.
Merle Grimes wore his Purple Heart. Edna had on her Order of Remembrance, Second Class. Nellie wished she'd worn her medal. She'd earned it, where Edna hadn't come close to deserving hers.
They got pretty good bleacher seats on the Mall in front of the Washington Monument. Nellie remembered when it had been blasted down to a stump. Now it stood tall again. All it needed were hieroglyphics carved on the sides to make it seem perfectly Egyptian.
Nellie endured the parade of soldiers and workers and bands. They weren't what she'd come to see or hear, though they entranced both Clara and Edna, and Merle tapped the tip of his cane up and down between his feet in time to the music. Armstrong also seemed bored with parades and bands, but Armstrong made a habit of seeming bored with everything, so Nellie wasn't sure what that meant.
She leaned forward when the big black limousine carrying Hoover and Smith and La Follette pulled up to the platform on which the new president and vice president would take the oath of office. She hadn't voted for Smith, but she wanted to hear what he had to say for himself.
Chief Justice Cicero Pittman probably hadn't voted for Al Smith, either. He was a Hoover appointee, replacing at last the fierce and venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a veteran of the War of Secession: he'd outlasted even George Custer in public life. Pittman was round and benign-looking, unlike the hawk-faced, piratically mustached Holmes.
Charlie La Follette took the vice-presidential oath first. No outgoing vice president congratulated him, for Hoover, having been elected as vice president himself, had no replacement when propelled to the presidency on Calvin Coolidge's death. Hoover did rise to shake Al Smith's hand. The atmosphere on the platform was what diplomats called correct: people who despised one another did their best to behave as if they didn't.
After Chief Justice Pittman administered the oath of office to President Smith, the jurist sat down. Smith stayed behind the forest of microphones that would send his words to the crowd and take them across the country by wireless. His unruly shock of black hair tried to deny that he was in his early sixties, but his jowls affirmed it.
'Workers and people of the United States, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing me here today.' Al Smith's voice was raspy and full of New York City. 'I have a lot of work to do, and I am going to do it. It is
