them first.
'Nobody fucks with anybody under U.S. authority in this town,' he told the horrified locals in a voice like iron, while the bodies still lay there bleeding. 'Nobody, you hear?'
'Jesus God, it was only a nigger!' a woman shrilled.
'Anybody who comes out with that kind of shit from now on, I figure you just volunteered for hostage duty,' Wallace said. 'Far as I can see, the black folks around here are worth at least ten of you assholes apiece-I mean at least. They didn't start murdering people for the fun of it. You 'Freedom!'-yelling cocksuckers did.'
'We didn't know what happened to the colored folks who got shipped out,' an old man quavered.
'Yeah-now tell me another one. You give me horseshit like that, you're a volunteer hostage, too,' Captain Wallace said. 'You didn't know! Where'd you think they were going, you goddamn lying bucket of puke? To a fucking football game?'
Cassius didn't know what he'd thought Yankees would be like. This chilly ferocity wasn't it, though-he was sure of that. A lot of U.S. soldiers hated the enemy with a clear and simple passion that shoved everything else to one side.
'You know, I never had much use for smokes,' a skinny corporal who needed a shave told Cassius out of the blue one day. 'But shit, man, if Featherston's fuckers have it in for you, you gotta have somethin' going for you.'
Was that logical? Cassius wondered what his father would have thought of it. But there was a brutal logic that beat down the more formal sort. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That was working here.
It had a flip side. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. As Cassius and Gracchus patrolled Madison, Cassius said, 'Ain't never gonna be safe for niggers around here without Yankees close by from now on.'
'Reckon not,' Gracchus said, 'but how safe was it for us 'fore the damnyankees done got here?'
That question answered itself. His family hauled out of church and taken off to a camp. His own life on the run ever since. The precarious life black guerrillas led, knowing there would be no mercy if they got caught.
'Well, you got me,' Cassius said.
They tramped into the town square. A bronze plaque was affixed to a small stone pillar there. Somehow, the little monument had come through the fighting that leveled half the town without even a nick. Gracchus pointed to the plaque. 'What's it say?' he asked. Cassius had taught him his letters, but he still didn't read well.
'Says it's the Braswell Monument,' Cassius said. 'Says in 1817 Benjamin Braswell done sold thirteen slaves after he was dead so they could use the money to educate white chillun. Says they raised almos' thirty-six hundred dollars. Ain't that grand?'
'Sold niggers to help ofays. That's how it goes, sure as hell.' Gracchus strode up to the Braswell Monument, unbuttoned his fly, and took a long leak. 'Show what I thinks o' you, Mr. Benjamin fuckin' Asswell.'
A couple of white women with wheeled wire shopping carts were hurrying across the square. They took one look Gracchus' way and walked even faster. 'They don't like your dark meat,' Cassius said.
'My meat don't like them, neither,' Gracchus replied. 'I start fuckin' white women, I ain't gonna start fuckin' no ugly white women, an' they was dogs.'
They hadn't been beautiful. Some Negroes in U.S. service didn't care. They took their revenge on Confederate women for everything Confederate men had done to them. A few U.S. officers reacted as badly to that as Confederate men might have. Not everyone in the USA loved Negroes, not by a long shot. But most men who wore green-gray uniforms hated the enemy worse than the blacks he'd oppressed.
'Know what I feel like?' Gracchus said as he and Cassius resumed their patrol. 'I feel like a dog that jus' pissed somewhere to say, 'This here place mine.''
'Dunno if it's yours or not,' Cassius said. 'Sure as shit don't belong to the Confederate ofays no mo'.'
As if to emphasize that, the U.S. troops had run up a barbed-wire stockade just outside of Madison to hold C.S. prisoners of war. Cassius wasn't the only Negro drawn to that stockade as if by a magnet. Seeing soldiers in butternut-and, better still, seeing Freedom Party Guards in brown-splotched camouflage-on the wrong side of the wire, stuck inside a camp, disarmed and glum while he carried a weapon, was irresistibly sweet.
'They gonna reduce your population!' a Negro from a different band jeered at the POWs. 'They gonna put you on a train, an' you ain't never gettin' off!'
Some of the captured Confederates looked scared-who could know for sure what the soldiers on the other side would do? Some swore at the black guerrilla. One stubborn sergeant said, 'Fuck you in the heart, Sambo. They already put your nappy-headed whore of a mama on the train, and she deserved it, too.'
A few seconds later, he lay dead, a bullet through his chest. A U.S. corporal, hearing the shot, came running. 'Jesus!' he said when he saw the corpse. 'What the hell'd you go and do that for?'
The Confederates in the stockade were screaming and pointing at the Negro who'd fired. The guerrilla was unrepentant. 'He dogged my mother,' he said simply. 'Ain't nobody gonna dog my mother, 'specially not some goddamn ofay fuckhead.'
'Christ, I'm gonna have to fill out papers on this shit,' the noncom groaned. 'Tell me what the fuck happened.'
Several POWs tried to. They did their best to outshout the guerrilla who'd killed the sergeant. Cassius weighed in to balance them if he could.
'He said that to this guy?' the corporal said when he finished.
'He sure did,' Cassius answered.
'Shit on toast,' the noncom said. 'He told me that, I bet I woulda blown his fuckin' head off.' The POWs screamed at him, too. He flipped them off. 'Listen up, assholes-something you better figure out. You lost. These guys'-he pointed at Cassius and the other Negro-'they won. Better get used to it, or a hell of a lot of you are gonna end up dead. And you know what else? Nobody's gonna miss you, either.'
'We won't ever put up with bein' under niggers!' a captive shouted.
'That's right!' Two or three more echoed him.
'Then I figure you'll be underground.' The corporal pointed to the corpse. 'Take your carrion over to the gate. We'll put him where he belongs.'
He got more curses and jeers, and ignored all of them. After he went away, the other Negro stuck out his hand to Cassius. 'Thanks for backin' me. I'm Sertorius.'
'My name's Cassius.' Cassius took the proffered hand. As he had with Gracchus, he asked, 'Reckon we ever be able to do anything down here without the Yankees backin' our play?'
'No,' Sertorius said calmly. 'But so what? Yankees don't come down here, fuckin' Confederate ofays kill us anyways. They really did take my mama, God damn them to hell an' gone.'
'Mine, too, an' my pa, an' my sister,' Cassius answered.
'How come they miss you?'
'On account of I didn't go to church. That's where they got everybody else.'
'I heard stories like that before,' Sertorius said. 'If there's a God, He got Hisself a nasty sense o' humor.'
'Reckon so.' Cassius had wondered about God even before the ofays got his family. He'd always kept quiet, because he knew his mother didn't want him saying-or thinking-things like that. He had the feeling his father was sitting on the same kind of doubts. The older man never talked about them, either. One of these days, the two of them might have had some interesting things to say to each other. They never would now.
The black guerrillas had a camp alongside that of the U.S. soldiers who guarded the POWs and made sure the lid stayed on in Madison. They slept in U.S. Army tents, and used U.S. Army sleeping bags. Those gave them better, softer nights than they'd had most of the time on their own.
They got U.S. Army mess kits, too, and ate U.S. Army chow with the men from north of the Mason-Dixon line. They didn't have to wait till the soldiers in green-gray were served before they got fed. They just took their places in line, and the cooks slapped down whatever they happened to have. Sometimes it was good, sometimes not. But there was always plenty. For Cassius, whose ribs had been a ladder, that was plenty to keep him from complaining.
When he went into Madison, kids would ask, 'Got any rations? Got any candy?'
No. Starve, you little ofay bastards. That was always the first thought that went through his head. But hating children didn't come easy. They hadn't done anything to him. And some of them looked hungry. He knew what being hungry was all about.
Then one of them called, 'Hey, nigger! Got any candy?'
