XVI
“He’s kept us out of war.” Flora Blackford repeated the Socialist Party slogan to a street-corner crowd in her district. “He’s kept us out of war, and he’s done everything he could to keep food on the working man’s table. If you want to see what the Democrats will do about that, look at what Herbert Hoover did. Nothing, that’s what.”
People in the mostly proletarian crowd clapped their hands. A sprinkling of hecklers at the back started a chant: “Taft! Taft! Robert Taft!”
Flora pointed at them. “I served in Congress with Senator Taft’s father. William Howard Taft was an honorable man. So is Robert Taft. I don’t say any differently. But I do say this: Senator Taft would be horrified at the way his supporters are bringing Freedom Party tactics into this campaign.”
That got more applause. Next to nobody in this strongly Socialist district had a good word to say about Jake Featherston’s gang. But one of the hecklers yelled, “Al Smith’s the one who’s in bed with the Freedom Party!”
“Al Smith is against war. I am against war. I had a brother-in-law killed and a brother badly wounded in the Great War,” Flora said. “If you are going to tell me you are for war—if you are going to tell me Senator Taft is for war—you will have a hard time selling that to the people of this district.”
“Taft is for keeping Kentucky and Houston,” the heckler called.
“How can you keep a state in the country when its own people don’t want to be here?” Flora asked. “That was the lesson of the War of Secession—you can’t. Some things you can buy at too high a price.”
The crowd applauded again, but less enthusiastically than before. Flora understood why: they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too; to have peace and to hold on to Kentucky and Houston. She wanted the same thing. She understood the people who said the USA had sacrificed too much even to think about giving back the two states. At least half the time, she felt that way herself. She would have liked the idea much better if it didn’t involve giving them back to Jake Featherston.
“I don’t love the Freedom Party,” she said. “But it is in power in the Confederate States, and we can’t very well pretend it isn’t and hope it will go away. What can we do if we don’t try to deal with it?” She was trying to convince herself as well as her audience, and she knew it.
“I’d sock it in the nose!” that iron-lunged heckler yelled. “Taft will sock it in the nose!”
“No, he won’t.” Flora shook her head. “If he does, he’ll have a war on his hands, and I can’t believe he wants one. He may talk tough, but his foreign policy won’t look much different from President Smith’s. And his domestic policy …” She rolled her eyes. “He grows like an onion—with his head in the ground.” She said it in English. Some of the people her age and older in the crowd echoed it in Yiddish.
She managed to get through the rest of her speech without too much harassment. She had a pretty good idea why, too: the Democrats didn’t think they could beat her. She’d never lost an election in this district. The Democrats had elected a candidate here while she was First Lady, but she’d trounced him as soon as she returned to the hustings.
At the end, she said, “If you’re in favor of what President Smith has done, you’ll vote for him again, and you’ll vote for me. If you’re not, you’ll vote for Taft. It’s about that simple, my friends. Forward with Smith or back with Taft?”
She stepped down from the platform with applause ringing in her ears. When she’d started agitating for the Socialists, she hadn’t had a platform—not a real one. She’d made her first few speeches standing on crates or beer barrels. She was right around the corner from the Croton Brewery, where she’d spoken at the outbreak of the Great War. She’d opposed war then; she still did. In 1914, her party hadn’t gone along with her. This year, it did.
Why aren’t I happier, then? she wondered.
In 1914, the Confederate States hadn’t been that different from the United States. Most of the oppressed proletariat in the CSA had been black, but capitalists had oppressed workers almost as savagely in the USA. Now … Things were different now.
A middle-aged man in a homburg limped up to her, leaning on a stick. “Good speech,” he said. A Soldiers’ Circle pin showing a sword through his conscription year in a silver circle sparkled on his lapel.
“Thank you, David,” Flora said with a sigh. That her own brother could belong to a reactionary organization like the Soldiers’ Circle—and not only belong but wear the pin that showed he was proud to belong—had always dismayed her. The Soldiers’ Circle wasn’t the Freedom Party, but some of its higher-ups wished it were.
“Good speech,” David Hamburger repeated, “but I’m still going to vote for Taft.”
“I hadn’t expected anything different,” she said. David had gone into the Great War a Socialist like the rest of the family. He’d come out a conservative Democrat. He’d also come out with one leg gone above the knee. Flora had no doubt the two were related.
She asked, “And will you vote for Chaim Cohen, too?” Cohen was the latest Democrat to try to unseat her.
Her brother turned red. “No,” he said. “I don’t like all of your ideas—I don’t like most of your ideas—but I know you’re honest. And you’re family. I don’t let family down.”
“Being family isn’t reason enough to vote for me,” she said.
“I think it is.” David laughed. “And you may not like my politics, but at least I care about things. Did you see your sisters or your other brother or Mother and Father at your speech?”
Now Flora was the one who had to say, “No.” Sophie and Esther and Isaac had their own lives, and lived them. They were proud when she won reelection, but they didn’t even come to Socialist Party headquarters any more. As for her parents … “Mother and Father don’t get out as much as they did.”
“I know. They’re getting old.” David shook his head. “They’ve got old. Bis hindert und tzvantzik yuhr.”
“Omayn,” Flora said automatically, though she know her mother and father wouldn’t live to 120 years. People didn’t, however much you wished they would. A stab of loss and longing for Hosea pierced her. She was grateful her parents had lived to grow old. So many people didn’t, even in the modern world.
“Have you got plans for tonight, or can you go to dinner with your reactionary tailor of a little brother?” David asked.
“I can go,” Flora said. “And it’s on me. I know I make more money than you do.” She knew she made a lot more money than he did, but she didn’t want to say so out loud.
With his usual touchy pride, David said, “I’m doing all right.” He’d never asked her or anybody else for a dime, so she supposed he was. With a wry grin, though, he went on, “I’ll let you buy. Don’t think I won’t. How does that go? ‘From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs’? Something like that, anyhow.”
“I never heard anybody quote—I mean misquote—Marx to figure out who’s getting dinner before,” Flora said, and she couldn’t help laughing. “Since I’m buying, how does Kornblatt’s sound?”
“Let’s go,” her brother said, so the delicatessen must have sounded good.
When they got there, he ordered brisket and a schooner of beer. Flora chose stuffed cabbage, which just wasn’t the same in Philadelphia. What she got at Kornblatt’s wasn’t the same as what she’d helped her mother make when she lived on the Lower East Side all the time, but it came closer.
David attacked the brisket as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He’d devoured almost all of it before he looked up and said, “You really think we ought to give back what we won in the war? Give it back to those ‘Freedom’-yelling mamzrim?”
“If the people who live there don’t want to be part of the country, how can we keep them?” Flora asked.
“They were pretty quiet till Featherston started stirring them up,” David said, which was true, or at least close to true. He speared his last bite of meat, chewed it, swallowed, and went on, “If we’re not doing the same thing with the shvartzers in the CSA, we’re missing a hell of a chance.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Flora said.
“Somebody ought to,” her brother said, and somebody probably did. If the United States weren’t trying to use Negroes in the Confederate States to make life difficult for the government there, then the War Department was indeed falling down on the job. Flora disliked a lot of the people and policies in the War Department, but she did not think the men at the top there were fools. Over almost a quarter of a century of public life, she’d learned the difference between someone who couldn’t do his job and someone who simply disagreed with her about what the job should be.
“Say what you want,” she told David, “but we’d just have endless trouble if we tried to keep those states.”
David didn’t reply with words, not right away. Instead, he rapped his artificial leg with his knuckles. By the sound that came from it, he might almost have been knocking on a door; it was made of wood and canvas and leather and metal. “You know how many men like me there are in the USA—men without legs, men without arms, men without eyes, men without faces? If we don’t keep what we won, why did we get shot and blown up and gassed? Answer me that one, and then I’ll say good-bye to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah.”
“There is no answer,” Flora said. “Sometimes something looks like a good idea when you do it but turns out not to be later on. Or haven’t you ever had that happen?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve seen that. Who hasn’t? But this one is kind of large to treat that way. And what do we do if giving back those states turns out to be that same kind of mistake? Taking them again would get expensive.”
“I don’t know,” Flora said.
“Well, that’s honest, anyhow. I said you were,” her brother replied. “Does Al Smith know? Does anybody in the whole wide world know?”
“How can anybody know?” Flora asked, as reasonably as she could. “We’ll just have to see how things turn out, that’s all.”
David paused to light a cigarette. He blew smoke up toward the ceiling, then said, “Seems to me that’s a better reason for not doing something than for doing it. But I’m no politician, so what do I know?”
“It’s going to happen.” Flora knew she sounded uncomfortable. She couldn’t help it. She went on, “If it makes you that unhappy, the thing to do is to vote for Taft. I think it will work out all right. I hope it does.”
“I hope it does, too. But I don’t think so. The Confederates on the banks of the Ohio again?” David Hamburger shook his head. “We had to worry about that for years, and then we didn’t, and now we will again.”
“When they were on the Ohio, they didn’t cross it in the last war,” Flora said.
“They didn’t have barrels then. They didn’t have bombers then, either,” her brother said.
“Even if they do get it back, they’ve promised to leave it demilitarized afterwards,” Flora said.
“Oh, yes. They’ve promised.” David nodded. “So tell me—how far do you trust Jake Featherston’s promises?”
Flora wished he hadn’t asked that. She’d deplored Featherston in the U.S. Congress long before he was elected. She liked him no better, trusted him no further, now that he was president of the CSA. As she had on the stump, she said, “He’s there. We have to deal with him.” Her brother let the words fall flat, which left them sounding much worse than if he’d tried to answer them.
Chester Martin faced Election Day with all the enthusiasm of a man going to a doctor to have a painful boil lanced. His efforts to build a construction workers’ union in antilabor Los Angeles had got strong backing from the Socialist Party. How could he forget that? He couldn’t. But he couldn’t make himself like the upcoming plebiscite, either.
His wife had no doubts. “I don’t want another war,” Rita said. “I lost my first husband in the last one.” She hardly ever spoke of him, but now she went on, “Why should anybody else have to go through what I did? If we don’t have to fight, that’s good news to me.”
But Chester answered, “Who says we won’t?”
“Al Smith does, that’s who.” Rita sent him an exasperated stare. “Or are you going to vote for a Democrat for president again? Look how well that turned out the last time.”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it,” Chester said. Rita looked even more exasperated. She’d always been a Socialist. He’d been a Democrat through the Great War, but the only time he’d voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1932, when he’d chosen Calvin Coolidge over Hosea Blackford. Blackford had had three and a half years to end the business collapse, and hadn’t done it. Coolidge, of course, dropped dead three weeks before taking office, and Herbert Hoover, his running mate, hadn’t done it, either. For that matter, neither had Smith. Chester went on, “Giving back so much of what we fought for sticks in my craw.”
“Giving the country back to the Democrats sticks in my craw,” Rita said. “Do you think Taft cares about what you’re trying to do here? If you do, you’re nuts. His father didn’t stand with the producers, and neither does he.”
That had an unpleasant ring of truth. Plenty of people would think local issues were the most important ones in the election. Half the time, Chester did. But, the other half of the time, he didn’t. He said, “If the Confederates want Houston and Kentucky back and then they’re done, that’s one thing.”
“They say that’s all,” Rita reminded him.
He nodded. “I know what they say. But Jake Featherston says all sorts of things. If he gets them back and starts putting soldiers into them, that’s a different story. If he does that, we’ve got trouble on our hands.”
“Even if he does, we can beat the Confederates again if we have to,” Rita said. “If we tell them to pull back, they’d have to back down, wouldn’t they?”
“Who knows? The point is, we shouldn’t have to find out.” Chester muttered unhappily to himself. He wanted a party with a strong foreign policy, and he also wanted a party with a strong domestic policy. Trouble was, the Democrats offered the one and the Socialists the other. He couldn’t have both. “Maybe I ought to vote for the Republicans. Then I’d have the worst of both worlds.”
“Funny. Funny like a crutch,” his wife said. “Well, I can’t tell you what to do, but I know what I’m going to.”
Chester didn’t. He went through October and into November unsure and unhappy. Autumn in Los Angeles was nothing like what it had been in Toledo. It was the one season of the year where he might have preferred his old home town. Trees didn’t blaze with color here. Most of them didn’t even lose their leaves. The air didn’t turn crisp and clean, either. It rained once, toward the end of October. That was the only real way to tell summer was gone for good. The Sunday before the election, it was back up to eighty-one. That wouldn’t have happened in Toledo, but there was nothing wrong with sixty-one, either. Forty-one and twenty-one were different, to say nothing of one. Los Angeles might see forty-one as a low. Twenty-one? One? Never.
Picketing was a lot easier when you weren’t freezing while you carried a sign. Chester and his fellow construction workers kept on getting help from the local Socialist Party. He did grumble about the plebiscite with Party men, but never very loudly. Like most people, he was shy about biting the hand that fed him. The Socialists probably wouldn’t have dropped support for his young, struggling union if they knew he might vote for Taft, but why take chances?
Houses and apartment buildings and factories and shops went up all over Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs, but not many went up without pickets around the construction sites. The Los Angeles Times kept screaming that the pickets were nothing but a bunch of dirty Reds who ought to be burned alive because hanging was too good for them. But the Times screamed that about everything it didn’t like, and it didn’t like much. Strikers and cops began to learn to get along, if not to love one another. Even the insults and cries of, “Scab!” as men crossed the picket line came to have a certain ritualistic quality to them.
November 5 dawned bright and clear, though the day plainly wouldn’t reach the eighties. “What are you going to do?” Rita asked at breakfast.
“Vote.” Martin reached for the pepper shaker and spread pungent black flakes over his fried eggs.
Rita made an irritated noise. “How?”
“Oh, about like this.” He mimed picking up a stamp and making an X on a ballot with it.
“Thank you so much.” Somehow, no sarcasm flayed like a spouse’s. His wife asked a question he couldn’t evade: “Who are you going to vote for?”
“To tell you the truth, honey, I won’t know till I get inside the voting booth,” Chester answered.
“If you don’t vote for Al Smith, you’ll end up sorry,” Rita said. “You were when you didn’t vote for Blackford eight years ago.”
“I know I was. I think Coolidge might have been better than Hoover, but we’ll never know about that, will we?” He spread butter and grape jam on a piece of toast, then started to throw out the empty jam jar.
“Don’t do that,” Rita said. “I’ll wash it out and use it for a glass. Jelly glasses are better for Carl—they don’t hold as much as real ones, and they’re thick, so they don’t break as easy if he drops them.”
“All right,” Martin said with his mouth full. He put the jam jar back on the table. When he finished the toast, he gave Rita a quick, greasy kiss, stuck a cloth cap on his head, and hurried out the door. Rita took a deep breath, as if to call something after him, but she didn’t. She must have realized it wouldn’t change his mind.
The polling place was in the auditorium of an elementary school three or four blocks from the apartment. Chester got there as it opened. As always, the child-sized chairs made him smile. Once upon a time, he’d fit into seats like those. No more, no more. He gave his name and address to the white-mustached man in charge of the list. The man matched it against the entry, then handed him a ballot. “Take any empty voting booth,” he droned. How many times had he said that, and in how many elections? How many more would he say it today?
There it was, the big question, right at the top of the ballot. Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith? Chester ignored the Republicans’ candidate. Not many people outside of his native Indiana cared about the businessman they’d nominated, which meant they weren’t about to win with Willkie. Besides, how could a Wendell hope to prevail against the brute simplicity of Al and Bob? Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith?
Chester stamped the X by Taft’s name, hoping he was doing the right thing. Had he voted for Smith, he would have had the same hope, and would have been just as unsure of himself. It’s done, anyhow, he thought, and went down the rest of the ballot in a hurry. Most of the candidates he voted for were Socialists. That salved his conscience, at least a little.
He carried the finished ballot back to the table where he’d got it. Another old man took it, folded it, and thrust it through the slot in the ballot box. “Mr. Martin has voted,” he intoned, the words as formal and unchanging as any this side of the Mass.
Having voted, Chester Martin hurried to the trolley stop. He rode across town to Westwood, not far from the Pacific and even closer to the southern campus of the University of California. Orange groves were going down, houses were going up, and union labor, as usual in Los Angeles, was being ignored.
“Hey, Chester!” another organizer called as he came up. “You vote yet?”
“Sure did, before I came here,” Martin answered. Westwood wasn’t bright and sunny. Fog lingered here, and probably wouldn’t burn off till midmorning. “How about you, Ralph?”
“I’ll take care of it on the way home,” Ralph answered. “Who’d you vote for?” He winked and laughed uproariously. He was sure he already knew, which meant Chester didn’t have to tell him. Under the circumstances, that came as something of a relief.
The strikers carried their picket signs around and around the construction site. They stayed on the sidewalk. Once, at a different site, a man had stumbled and gone onto what would be a lawn. The cops nabbed him for trespassing. Not here, not today.
“Scabs!” the picketers shouted—along with other things, even less complimentary—when workers crossed the picket line and went into the construction site. They had to watch what they said, too. The police had been known to run strikers in for public obscenity. Still, endearments like “You stinking sack of manure!” got the message across.
Most of the strikebreakers went in with their heads down. Watching them cross the picket line was one thing that made Chester glad he’d chosen this side. He had yet to see a scab who didn’t act as if his conscience bothered him. A man might go and decide he had to eat any way he could, but he seldom seemed happy about it.
One of the scabs here, a big man on whom the picketers had showered a lot of abuse, finally got fed up and shouted back: “Wait till the Pinkertons get into town, you bastards! They’ll kick your asses but good!”
Not one but two foremen ran up to the strikebreaker. They both started cussing him up one side and down the other. The cops didn’t jug them for the language they used, any more than they’d arrested the scab.
Chester didn’t stop marching or yelling. But he sure as hell did prick up his ears. If the bosses were bringing in Pinkerton men, they were going to try breaking the union. The more notice he had about that, the better he could fight back, because the Pinkertons, notorious union-busters, fought dirty, really dirty. If he’d been one of those foremen, he would have cussed out that scab, too, for tipping the other side’s hand.
At lunch, Ralph came up to him and said, “Pinkertons, is it? Well, there’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
“You bet there will,” Chester said. “We can lick ’em, though. They’re bastards, sure as hell, but we can lick ’em. And if we do, what have the bosses got left to throw at us? Soldiers? Whose side would they be on?”
“Pinkertons.” Ralph made a disgusted face. “I fought those fuckers years ago, in Pittsburgh. Never thought I’d see their ugly mugs again.”
Martin nodded. “Same with me in Toledo. They’re goons, all right. You think we’re going to back down, though? I sure as hell don’t. I’ve got brass knucks, and I can always get a .45 if it looks like I need one.”
The other union man looked worried. “You gotta be careful with that, though. You pull it, the cops have the perfect excuse to blow you to kingdom come.”
“I know. I know. Like I said, I did this before,” Chester said. “But I know something else, too—if they get us on the run, we’re in trouble. I don’t aim to let that happen.”
Cincinnatus Driver refused to buy a paper as he steered his truck toward the railroad yard. He was too disgusted to want to hear anything more about Al Smith’s reelection than he had the night before on the wireless. He’d stayed up till the West Coast returns came in, and poured down three cups of coffee to try to make up for not enough sleep. Taft, behind in the race, had needed to sweep the Coast to win enough electoral votes to overtake the president. He’d won in California, but lost Oregon and Washington—and the election.
They’re gonna hold the plebiscite, Cincinnatus thought dolefully. They’re gonna hold it, and the Confederate States are gonna win. That meant he had to get his mother and father out of Kentucky before it left the USA and returned to the CSA. He knew what being a Negro in the Confederate States was like—and it was bound to be even worse now, under Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, than it had been before the Great War.
He wished his mother were in better shape than she was. He could have sent his father and her train fare, and they would have ended up in Des Moines not long afterwards. As things were, with her sinking ever deeper into her second childhood, he knew he would have to go down to Covington to help his father bring her out. Elizabeth wouldn’t like it—he didn’t like it himself—but he saw no way around it.
He pulled into the railroad yard at a quarter to seven, yawning despite all the coffee. When he jumped out of his trunk and hurried over to see what cargoes he could pick up, first one railroad dick and then another waved to him. He was accepted here. He belonged. He never remembered belonging in Covington—certainly not in any part of it where he bumped up against white men. The first conductor whose train he approached greeted him with, “Hey, Cincinnatus. How you doing?”
“Not bad, Jack,” he answered. He never would have called a white man in Covington by his first name. “What you got?”
But Jack felt like gabbing. “Four more years of Smith,” he said. “I’m happy. My son got conscripted not long ago, and I don’t want him getting shot at. I saw too goddamn much of that myself twenty-five years ago.”
That gave Cincinnatus a new slant on things. He’d been shot at during the Great War, too, if only as a truck driver behind the lines. But he didn’t have to worry about Achilles getting conscripted. The USA didn’t conscript Negroes, any more than the CSA did. If war came, Achilles would be as safe as anybody. Even so, Cincinnatus said, “You won’t find anybody colored who wants to go back to livin’ in the Confederate States.”
By the way Jack blinked, he’d no more thought about that than Cincinnatus had worried about conscription. The white man said, “I don’t suppose there’s enough colored folks to change the vote, though.”
Cincinnatus grimaced. That was painfully true. Not wanting to dwell on the likely fate of Kentucky (and Houston, and perhaps Sequoyah, but Kentucky mattered most to him), he asked again, “What you got here?”
“Furniture,” Jack said, and Cincinnatus’ eyes lit up. He and Jack haggled for a while, but not too long. He loaded the truck as full as he could, then roared off for the shops taking delivery. If he got rid of everything in a hurry, he thought he could be back for another equally profitable load by lunchtime.
He was, too. Plenty of things held back a colored man: fewer in the USA than in the CSA, but still plenty. Adding laziness on top of everything else would only have made matters worse. Cincinnatus was a lot of different things. Whatever he was, though, he’d never been afraid of hard work.
His back ached when he pulled up to the apartment building that night, but the money in the pocket of his overalls made the ache seem worthwhile. He opened the mailbox in the lobby, crumpled up the advertising circulars, and winced when he saw a letter with a Covington postmark and the sprawling handwriting of his father’s neighbor. News from Covington was unlikely to be good. Because he wished he didn’t have to find out what the letter said, he carried it upstairs without opening it.
When he walked in, Amanda was doing homework. He smiled at her. Gonna have me two high-school graduates soon, he thought proudly. That ain’t bad for a Kentucky nigger who never went to school at all.
From the kitchen came the crackle and the mouth-watering smell of frying chicken. Cincinnatus went in to say hello to Elizabeth, who was turning pieces with long-handled tongs. After a quick kiss, she asked, “What you got there?”
“Letter from Covington.”
“Oh.” She understood his hesitation, but asked the next question anyhow: “What’s it say?”
“Don’t know yet. Ain’t opened it,” he said. The look his wife sent him was sympathetic and impatient at the same time. He tore off the end of the envelope, took out the letter, unfolded it, and read. By the time he got to the end, his face was as long as the train from which he’d taken off furniture.
“What is it?” Elizabeth asked.
“I got to git down there. Got to do it quick,” Cincinnatus said heavily. “Neighbor says my mama, she start wanderin’ off every chance she get. Pa turn his back on her half a minute, she out the door an’ lookin’ for the house where she growed up. Can’t have that. She liable to git lost for good, or git run over on account of she go out in the street and don’t look where she goin’.” Stress and the thought of Covington made his accent thicken.
Elizabeth sighed. Then hot fat spattered, and she yipped and jerked back her hand. She said, “I reckon maybe you do, but, Lord, I wish you didn’t.”
“So do I, on account of Ma and on account of I don’t want to go back to Kentucky, neither,” Cincinnatus said. “But it ain’t always what you want to do. Sometimes it’s what you got to do.” He waited. Elizabeth sighed again, then reluctantly nodded.
He bought a round-trip train ticket, knowing he would have to get one-way fares for his parents in Covington. He sent the neighbor down there a wire to let him know when he’d be getting into town. Then he stuffed a few days’ clothes and sundries into a beat-up suitcase and went to the railroad station to catch the eastbound train.
It pulled into Covington at eleven that night. The neighbor, Menander Pershing, stood on the platform with his father. Cincinnatus’ father looked older and smaller and wearier than Cincinnatus had dreamt he would. After embracing him, Cincinnatus looked nervously across the brightly lit platform.
“Ain’t none o’ them Kentucky State Police this time,” Seneca Driver said. He’d been born a slave, and still talked like it. After so long hearing the accents of the white Midwest, Cincinnatus found his father’s way of speaking strange and ignorant-sounding, even though he’d sounded like that himself when he was a boy. His father hadn’t even had a surname (and neither had he) till they’d all taken the same one after Kentucky returned to the USA in the Great War.
Cincinnatus couldn’t help looking around some more. As far as he could tell, nobody was paying any attention to him. Little by little, he began to relax. “Freedom Party don’t give you no trouble?” he asked.
“Don’t want trouble from nobody,” his father said. “I minds my business, an’ I don’t git none.”
“Ain’t too bad,” Menander Pershing added. He was about Cincinnatus’ age, lean, with a few threads of gray in his close-cropped hair. He fixed autos for a living, and wore a mechanic’s greasy overalls. “They reckon they win come January, so they bein’ quiet till then.” He jerked a thumb toward the exit. “Come on. I got my motorcar out in the lot.”
U.S. soldiers were searching some passengers’ bags as they left the station. The men in green-gray waved Seneca and his companions through without bothering. It might have been the first time in his life when being colored made things easier for him. The soldiers didn’t think Negroes would back the Freedom Party no matter what. They were likely to be right, too.
Menander Pershing’s auto was an elderly Oldsmobile, but its motor purred when he started it. Getting in, Cincinnatus asked, “How’s Ma?”
“Well, she sleepin’ now. That’s how I come away,” his father answered. “You see in the mornin’, that’s all.” He wouldn’t say anything more.
Even by moonlight, the house where Cincinnatus’ parents lived was smaller and shabbier than he remembered. He lay down on the rickety sofa in the front room and got what sleep he could.
In the morning, heartbreak began. His father had to introduce him to his mother; she didn’t recognize him on her own. After she came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand, she looked at him and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m Cincinnatus, Ma,” he said quietly, and felt the sting of tears.
As long as they stayed in the room together, she seemed to know who he was. When she left to go to the outhouse, though, she came back and looked at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life. As far as she knew, she hadn’t. Fighting the stab at his heart, he introduced himself again.
“She like that,” Cincinnatus’ father said sadly. “She still know me all the time. She better, after all these years. But she don’t know nobody else, not so it stick.”
Cincinnatus pounded a fist into his thigh. “Damn!”
“Don’t you talk like that, young man! I switch you if you cuss in the house!” For two sentences, his mother sounded just the way she had when he was thirteen. Hearing that damn might have flipped a switch in her head. Old things seemed more familiar to her than new ones. But then her eyes went vague again. She forgot her own annoyance. Seeing her forget might have been harder to bear than anything.
Or so Cincinnatus thought, till he too went out back to use the outhouse—a fixture he hadn’t had to worry about for many years—and returned to find his father rushing out to get him. “She run off!” Seneca cried. “I go back in the kitchen for a minute, and she run off!”
“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. “We got to find her.” He and his father hurried out to the front yard. Cincinnatus looked left and right. No sign of her. “You go this way,” he told his father. “I’ll go that way. She ain’t gone real far.”
Off he went, quick as he could. When he got to a corner, he hesitated. Up or down? Either way might prove a dreadful mistake—and he had the chance for another one at every corner he came to. Swearing under his breath, he dog-trotted along the street. Each time he came to a corner, his curses got louder.
But luck was with him. He rounded one last corner and there she was, on the far side of the street, strolling along as if she knew just where she was going. “Ma!” Cincinnatus yelled. “Ma!” She paid no attention to him. Maybe she didn’t hear. Maybe she’d forgotten a grown man could call her his mother.
Cincinnatus ran out into the street after her—and his luck abruptly changed. He remembered a squeal of brakes, a shout, and an impact … and then, nothing.