never open now. 'Suppose they come, an' suppose they kill the Confederate sojers an' the ofays who put on white shirts and yell, 'Freedom!' all the goddamn time.'
Gracchus was gnawing on a drumstick from a chicken liberated from a white man's coop. 'Then we wins,' he said, swallowing. 'Then we starts puttin' our lives back the way they was 'fo' all this shit happen.'
In a way, that sounded wonderful. In another way…'How? How we do dat, boss?' Cassius asked. 'All the Yankee sojers in the world ain't gonna give me my ma an' pa an' sister back again. They ain't gonna bring back all the niggers the ofays done killed. We is like ghosts of the folks what used to be here but ain't no more.'
Gracchus scowled as he threw the leg bone aside. 'We ain't ghosts,' he said. 'The ones who got killed, they's ghosts. I bet this whole country have more hants'n you kin shake a stick at, this war finally done.'
Cassius didn't exactly believe in hants. He didn't exactly not believe in them, either. He'd never seen one, but so many people were sure they had, he had trouble thinking they were all crazy or lying. He did say, 'Hants ain't slowed down the ofays none.'
'Might be even worse without 'em,' another Negro said.
'How?' Cassius asked, and nobody seemed to want to answer that.
He didn't want to take the argument with Gracchus any further. He didn't want the guerrilla chieftain to think he was after that spot himself. As far as Cassius was concerned, Gracchus was welcome to it.
But, even if he kept quiet, he still thought he was right. Blacks in the CSA had had a vibrant life of their own, much of it lived right under the white majority's noses. With so many Negroes dead, how would the survivors ever start that again? How could they even live alongside the whites who hadn't tried to stop Freedom Party goons from stuffing them into trains for one-way journeys to camps, who'd often cheered to see them disappear? What could they be but a sad reminder of something that had once been alive but was no more? And if that wasn't a ghost, what was it?
The next morning, a scout came back in high excitement. 'The Mexicans, they's pullin' out!' he said.
'They ain't goin' up to the front to fight?' Gracchus asked. 'You sure?'
'Sure as I's standin' here,' the scout replied. 'They's marchin' south.'
'They ain't here to fight the damnyankees,' Cassius said. 'They is here to keep us in line.'
Francisco Josй's men were less enthusiastic about going after Negroes than white Confederates were. But their being here let the Confederacy put more men in the field against the United States. They did inhibit the rebel bands…some.
'If they's buggin' out fo' true, they must reckon the Confederate Army can't hold the Yankees back no mo'.' Gracchus' voice rose with excitement. 'Do Jesus, I hope they's right!'
The black guerrillas got another surprise the next day. A Confederate captain approached a scout with a flag of truce. The scout blindfolded him and brought him into camp. No one offered to take the blindfold off once he got there, either.
That didn't seem to faze him. 'I have a proposition for you people,' he said.
'Go on. Say your say. Tell your lies,' Gracchus answered.
'No lies. What I ask is very simple: leave us alone while we fight the USA,' the C.S. officer said. 'You stay quiet, we won't come after you. We'll even give you rations so you don't have to plunder the countryside.'
'Put rat poison in 'em first, I reckon,' Gracchus said.
'If you agree, I will come back as a hostage and food taster,' the captain said. 'Don't jog our elbow. That's all we want. You tell us no, you'll get the stick instead of the carrot. I promise you that.'
'Shoulda started leavin' us alone a hell of a long time ago,' Cassius said.
Shrugging, the soldier said, 'Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. Too late to worry about it now, though. It's water under the bridge.'
'Easy fo' you to say, ofay.' Some of Gracchus' rage and hatred came out. 'You ain't got no dead kinfolks.'
'Hell I don't,' the captain said, and Cassius realized he hated them at least as much as they hated him. 'Damnyankee bombs blew up my mother and father and sister. Another sister'll limp forever on account of 'em. And you're helping the USA. Far as I'm concerned, we ought to feed you rat poison, and better than you deserve. But I don't give those orders. I just follow them.'
'You got nerve.' Gracchus spoke now with a certain reluctant admiration.
'I told you-I've got orders,' the Confederate said. 'So what'll it be? Will you back off and let us fight the United States, or do we come in here and clean out all of you raggedy-ass coons?'
Gracchus didn't answer right away. He wasn't an officer with a chain of command behind him and the automatic authority to bind and to loose. He couldn't order his fighters to obey a truce if they didn't want to. Cassius knew he didn't. He spoke to the captain: 'You coulda done that, reckon you would've a long time ago.'
'You don't get it, boy,' the white said, and never knew how close he came to dying on the spot. He continued, 'Before, you were just a rear-area nuisance. But if you think we'll let you fuck with us when the front's so close, you better think again.'
Maybe he had a point of sorts. But even if he did…'What happens when the Yankees push you outa here?' Cassius ground out. 'You reckon we ain't got us a lot o' bills to pay? You reckon we ain't gonna pay 'em soon as we git the chance?'
That got home. The C.S. captain bit his lip. 'All the more reason for us to get rid of you now,' he said.
'You kin try.' Gracchus seemed to have made up his mind. 'Yeah, you kin try, but I don't reckon you kin do it. When the war started, you coulda got what you wanted from us easy. All you had to do was leave us alone. Well, you didn't do nothin' like that. You know what you done. Like my friend here say'-he named no names-'we owes you too much to set it down. We takes you back to your own folks now. Ain't got nothin' left to say to each other no more.'
As the scout led the blindfolded officer away, Cassius found himself nodding. Gracchus had nailed that, probably better than he knew. All across the Confederate States of America, whites and Negroes had nothing left to say to each other.
'Reckon we better get outa here,' Gracchus said after the white man in butternut was gone. 'They ain't gonna wait around. Soon as he tell 'em we say no, they gonna pound the shit outa where they thinks we's at.'
He proved a good prophet. Artillery started falling not far from their camp inside of half an hour. A couple of Asskickers buzzed around overhead, looking for targets they could hit. The Negroes stayed in the woods till nightfall.
'You reckon they come after us from the same direction as that captain?' Cassius asked Gracchus.
'Mos' likely,' the guerrilla leader answered.
'Maybe we oughta rig us an ambush, then,' Cassius said. 'That'll learn 'em they can't run us like we was coons an' they was hounds.'
'We is coons,' Gracchus said with a grim chuckle. He clapped Cassius on the back. 'But yeah, you got somethin' there. We see what we kin do.'
Next morning, right at dawn, close to a company of Confederate soldiers approached the woods where the guerrillas sheltered. Cassius and a couple of other Negroes fired at them, then showed themselves as they scurried away. That was dangerous. A fusillade of bullets chased them. But nobody got hit.
Shouting and pointing, the Confederates pounded after the fleeing blacks. Down deep, the ofays still thought Negroes were stupid and cowardly. They wouldn't have pursued U.S. soldiers with so little caution.
The machine gun opened up from the flank and cut them down like wheat before the scythe. The Confederates were brave. Some of them tried to charge the gun and take it out with grenades. They couldn't work in close enough to throw them. The white soldiers broke off and retreated. They did it as well as anyone could, leaving not a wounded man behind.
'We done it!' Cassius whooped. 'We fuckin' done it!'
Gracchus was less exuberant. 'We done it this time,' he said. 'Ofays ain't gonna make the same mistake twice. Next time, they don't reckon it's easy.'
That struck Cassius as much too likely. Gracchus moved his band away from the ambush site as fast as he could. Artillery and bombs from above started falling there a few minutes later-probably as soon as the beaten Confederate soldiers could send back word of where they ran into trouble.
Armored cars and halftracks began patrolling the roads around the guerrilla band. The Negroes got one with a mine, but the vehicles trapped them and hemmed them in, making movement deadly dangerous. Before long, they started getting hungry. The rations the Confederate captain had promised in exchange for quiet seemed better to
