II
Saul Goldman was a fussy little fellow, but good at what he did. “Everything’s ready now, Mr. President,” he said. “Newsreel photographers, newspaper photographers, and the wireless web connection. By this time tomorrow, everyone in the Confederate States will know you’ve signed this bill.”
“Thanks, Saul,” Jake Featherston said with a warm smile, and the little Jew blossomed under the praise. Jake knew Goldman was exaggerating. But he wasn’t exaggerating by much. The people who needed to know he was signing the bill would hear about it, and that was what mattered.
At a gesture from the communications chief, klieg lights came on in the main office of the Gray House. Featherston smiled at the camera. “Hello, friends,” he said into the microphone in front of him. “I’m Jake Featherston. Just like always, I’m here to tell you the truth. And the truth is, this bill I’m signing today is one of the most important laws we’ve ever made in the Confederate States of America.”
He inked a pen and signed on the waiting line. Flashbulbs popped as the photographers did their job. Jake looked up at the newsreel camera again. “We’ve had too many floods on our big rivers,” he said. “The one in 1927 came close to drowning the middle of the country. Enough is enough, I say. We’re going to build dams and levees and make sure it doesn’t happen again. We’ll use the electricity from the dams, too, for factories and for people. We’ve needed a law like this for years, and now, thanks to the Freedom Party, we’ve got it.”
“Mr. President?” A carefully prompted reporter from a Party paper stuck his hand in the air. “Ask you a question, Mr. President?”
“Go right ahead, Delmer.” Featherston was calm, casual, at his ease.
“Thank you, sir,” Delmer said. “What about Article One, Section Eight, Part Three of the Constitution, sir? You know, the part that says you can’t make internal improvements on rivers unless you aid navigation? Dams don’t do that, do they?”
“Well, no, but they do lots of other things the country needs,” Jake answered.
“But won’t the Supreme Court say this law is unconstitutional?” the reporter asked.
Featherston looked into the cameras as if looking at a target over open sights. He had a long, lean face, a face people remembered if not one conventionally handsome. “Tell you what, Delmer,” he said. “If the Supreme Court wants to put splitting hairs ahead of what’s good for the country, it can go right ahead. But if it does, I won’t be the one who’s sorry in the end. Those fools in black robes will be, and you can count on that.”
He took no other questions. He’d said everything he had to say. The microphones went off. The bright lights faded. He leaned back in his swivel chair. It creaked. Saul Goldman came back into the room. Before Jake could ask, his head of communications said, “I think that went very well, Mr. President.”
“Good.” Featherston nodded. “Me, too. Now they know what I think of ’em. Let’s see how much nerve they’ve got.”
Ferdinand Koenig walked into the office. The attorney general was one of Featherston’s oldest comrades, and as close to a friend as he had these days. “You told ’em, Jake,” he said. “Now we find out how smart they are.”
“They’re a pack of damn fools, Ferd,” Jake said scornfully. “You watch. The people who’ve been running this country are damn fools. All we need to do is give ’em the chance to prove it.”
Koenig had got to the office faster than Vice President Willy Knight. Knight was tall and blond and good-looking and very much aware of how good-looking he was. He’d headed up the Redemption League till the Freedom Party swallowed it. One look at his face and you could see he still wished things had gone the other way. Too bad, Jake thought. Knight wasn’t so smart as he thought he was, either. He never would have taken the vice-presidential nomination if he were. The vice president of the Confederate States couldn’t even fart till he got permission from the president.
Four months on the job, and Knight still hadn’t figured that out. He went right on laboring under the delusion that he amounted to something. “For God’s sake, Jake!” he burst out now. “What the hell did you go and rile the Supreme Court for?” A Texas twang filled his voice. “They’ll throw out the river bill for sure on account of that, just so as they can get their own back at you.”
“Gosh, Willy, do you think so?” Jake sounded concerned. He watched Koenig hide a smile.
Willy Knight, full of himself as usual, never noticed. “Think so? I’m sure of it. You did everything but wave a red cloth in their face.”
Featherston shrugged. “It’s done now. We’ll just have to make the best of it. It may turn out all right.”
“How can it?” Knight demanded. “Sure as the sun comes up tomorrow, somebody’s gonna sue. You can already hear the Whigs licking their chops, slobbering over the chance to make us look bad. Whatever district court gets the law’ll say it’s no goddamn good.”
“Then we’ll take it to the Supreme Court,” Ferdinand Koenig said.
“They’ll tell you it’s unconstitutional, too, just like that reporter fellow said they would,” Willy Knight predicted. “They’re looking for a chance to pin our ears back. Once they get those black robes on, Supreme Court justices think they’re little tin gods. And there’s not a Freedom Party man among ’em.”
“I’m not too worried, Willy,” Jake said. “This here’s a popular bill. Not even the Whigs left in Congress voted against it. The country needs it bad. Folks won’t be happy if the court tosses it in the ashcan.”
“I tell you, those fuckers don’t care,” the vice president insisted. “Why should they? They’re in there for life… .” He paused. His blue eyes widened. “Or are you saying they won’t live long if they try and smother this bill?”
Featherston shook his head. “I didn’t say anything like that. I won’t say anything like that. We could get away with it if that damn Grady Calkins hadn’t shot President Wade goddamn Hampton V. Not now. We don’t want to get the name for a pack of lousy murderers.” We’ve done plenty of murdering on the way up, and we’ll do as much more as we have to, but looks count. The Supreme Court justices aren’t the right targets for stalwarts. We’ve got other ways to deal with them.
“If I were in your shoes, I’d put the fear of God in those sons of bitches,” Knight insisted.
Jake Featherston spoke softly, but with unmistakable emphasis: “Willy, you aren’t in my shoes. You try and put yourself in my shoes, you’re just measuring yourself for a coffin. You got that?”
Knight was not a coward. He’d fought, and fought well, in the trenches during the Great War. But Featherston intimidated him, as Featherston intimidated almost everyone. “Yeah, Jake. Sure, Jake,” he mumbled, and left the Confederate president’s office in a hurry.
Laughing, Featherston said, “He doesn’t get it, Ferd. And he’s gonna be as surprised as a ten-year-old when the magician pulls the rabbit out of his hat when we give those justices what they deserve.”
“The difference is, this way we’ll kill ’em dead, and everybody’ll stand up and cheer when we do it,” Koenig said. “He doesn’t see that.” He hesitated, then asked, “You’re sure you want one of our people filing suit against the law?”
“Hell, yes, as long as nobody can trace him back to us,” Jake answered without hesitation. “Whigs’d take weeks to get around to it, and I want this to happen just as fast as it can.”
“I’ll take care of it, long as you know your own mind,” the attorney general said. “You know I’ve always backed your play. I always will, too.”
“You’re a good fellow, Ferd.” Featherston meant every word of it. “Man on the way up needs somebody like you to guard his back. And once he gets where he’s going, he needs somebody like you more than ever.”
“When we started out, they ran the Freedom Party out of a cigar box in the back of a saloon,” Koenig said reminiscently. “Did you ever figure, back in those days, that we’d end up here?” His wave encompassed the Confederate presidential mansion.
“Hell, yes,” Jake replied without hesitation. “That’s why I joined: to pay back the bastards who lost us the war—all the bastards: coons and our own damn generals and the Yankees—and to get to the top so I could. Didn’t you?” He asked it in genuine perplexity. He could judge others only by what he did himself.
Koenig shrugged broad shoulders. He was beefy fat, with a hard core of muscle underneath. “Who remembers now? For all I know, I went to that saloon and not some other place on account of the beer was good there.”
“It was horse piss,” Jake said. “I remember that.”
“Now that I think back on it, you may be right,” Koenig admitted. He looked around as if he couldn’t believe the office where they sat. “But hell, we were all just a bunch of saloon cranks in those days. Nobody thought we’d amount to anything.”
“I did,” Featherston said.
His longtime comrade laughed. “You must’ve been the only one. Those first few months after the war, a thousand different parties sprang up, and every goddamn one of ’em said it’d set the Confederate States to rights.”
“Somebody had to have it straight. We did.” Jake Featherston had never lacked for confidence. He’d never doubted. And his confidence had fed the Party. During the dark years after Calkins gunned down President Hampton, his confidence had been all that kept the Party alive. That and the wireless, he thought. I figured out the wireless a couple of jumps ahead of the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. They ran after me, but they never caught up. They never will, now.
“We’ve got some old bills to pay, you know,” he told Koenig. “We’ve got a lot of old bills to pay, matter of fact. About time we started doing that, don’t you think? We’ve looked meek and mild too long already. That isn’t our proper style.”
“Had to get this bill through Congress,” the attorney general said. “One thing at a time.”
“Oh, yes.” Featherston nodded. “It’s been one thing at a time ever since we didn’t quite win in 1921. That’s a hell of a long time now. I’m going to be fifty in a few years. I haven’t got all the time in the world any more. I want the whole pie, not just slices. I want it, and I’m going to get it.”
“Sure thing, Sarge,” Ferdinand Koenig said soothingly. “I know who you want to pay back first. I’ll start setting it up. By the time we do it, everything’ll go just as slick as boiled okra. You can count on that.”
“I do. You’d best believe I do,” Jake said. “Pretty soon now, we have some things to tell the USA, too. Not quite yet. We’ve got to put our own house in some kind of order first. But pretty soon.”
“First we take care of this other stuff.” Koenig was not a fiery man. He never had been. But he kept things straight. Jake needed somebody like that. He was shrewd enough to know it. He nodded. Koenig went on, “Besides, the next step puts the whole country behind us, not just the people who vote our way.”
“Yeah.” Featherston nodded again. A wolfish grin spread across his face. “Not only that, it’ll be a hell of a lot of fun.”
Sylvia Enos looked out at the crowd of fishermen and merchant sailors and shopgirls (and probably, in a hall near the wharves, a streetwalker or two—you couldn’t always tell by looking). By now, she’d been up on the stump often enough that it didn’t terrify her the way it had at first. It was just something she did every other year, when the election campaigns started heating up.
Joe Kennedy went to the microphone to introduce her: “Folks, here’s a lady who can tell you just why you’d have to be seventeen different kinds of fool to vote for anybody but a Democrat for Congress—the famous author and patriot, Mrs. Sylvia Enos!”
He always laid the introductions on too thick. He didn’t do it to impress the crowd. He did it because he wanted to impress Sylvia, impress her enough to get her into bed with him. And there was his own wife sitting in the front row of the crowd. Was she oblivious or simply resigned? She must have seen him chase—must have seen him catch—plenty of other women by now.
“Thank you, Mr. Kennedy.” Sylvia took her place behind the microphone. “I do think it’s important to reelect Congressman Sanderson in November.” With Boston sweltering in August, November was hard to think about. She looked forward to cooler fall weather. “He’ll help President Hoover keep the United States strong. We need that. We need it more than ever, with what’s going on down in the Confederate States.”
Joe Kennedy applauded vigorously. So did his wife. She never showed that anything was wrong between them. The crowd clapped, too. That was what the Democrats needed from Sylvia. That was why, when she finished her speech, he gave her a crisp new fifty-dollar bill, with Teddy Roosevelt’s bulldog features and swarm of teeth on one side and a barrel crushing Confederate entrenchments on the other.
“Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,” Sylvia said again—she didn’t want to bite the hand that fed her.
“My pleasure,” he answered. “May I take you out to get a bite to eat now?” He didn’t mean a bite with him and his wife. Rose would stay wherever Rose stayed while Joe did as he pleased. And no, supper wasn’t all he had in mind.
She wondered what he saw in her. She was in her mid-forties, her brown hair going gray, fine lines not so fine any more, her figure distinctly dumpy. Maybe he didn’t believe anybody could say no to him and mean it. Maybe her saying no was what kept him after her. If she ever did give in to him, she was sure he would forget all about her after one encounter.
“No, thanks, Mr. Kennedy,” she said now, politely but firmly. “I have to get home.” She didn’t. With her son newly married and her daughter working, she had less need than ever to go home. But the lie was polite, too. She wanted to make a lot more speeches before Election Day, and she wanted to get paid for each and every one of them.
Kennedy bared his teeth; he seemed to have almost as many as TR. “Maybe another time,” he said.
Shrugging, Sylvia got down from the stage. As soon as her back was to him, she let out a long sigh of relief. Every time she got away from Joe Kennedy, she felt like Houdini getting out of the handcuffs in the straitjacket in the tub of water.
She hadn’t gone far before another man fell into step with her. “You made a good speech,” he said. “You told them what they needed to hear. Then, when you were done, you shut up. Too many people never know when to shut up.”
“Ernie!” Sylvia exclaimed. She gave the writer a hug. If Joe Kennedy happened to be watching, too damn bad. “What are you doing back in Boston? Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
He shrugged. He had broad shoulders, almost a prizefighter’s shoulders, and dark, ruggedly handsome features. He looked more like a bouncer, a mean bouncer, than the man who’d put Sylvia’s words on paper in I Sank Roger Kimball. Considering the wound he’d taken driving an ambulance up in Quebec during the war, he had more right than most men to seem, to be, mean.
When he saw she wouldn’t be content with that shrug, he raised one eyebrow in a world-weary way that made him look older than she was for a moment, though he had to be ten years younger. He said, “I am looking for work. Why does anyone go anywhere these days? Maybe I will find something to write about. Maybe I will find something someone will pay me to write about. The first is easy. The second is hard these days.”
“Are you hungry?” Sylvia asked. Ernie didn’t answer. He had more pride than two or three ordinary men. Pride was a luxury Sylvia had long since decided she couldn’t afford. She said, “Come on. I’ll buy you supper.” Before he could speak, she held up a hand. “I’ve got the money. Don’t worry about that. And I owe you.” She found herself talking as he did, in short, choppy sentences. “Not just for the book. You warned me my bank would fail. I got my money out in time.”
“Good I could do something,” he said, and scowled. He’d wanted her. She’d wanted him, too, the first time she’d really wanted a man since her husband was killed at—after—the end of the Great War. Considering his wound, that surge of desire had been nothing but one more cruel irony.
“Come on,” she said again.
Ernie didn’t tell her no, a likely measure of how hard up he was. She took him to an oyster house. He ate with a singleminded voracity she hadn’t seen since her son was growing into a man.
She put money on the table for both of them. He frowned. “I still hate to have a woman pick up the tab for me.”
“It’s all right,” Sylvia said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s the least I can do. I told you that already. And I bet I can afford it a lot better than you can.”
His pain-filled bark of laughter made people all over the place stare at him. “You are right about that. You must be right about that. I do need to land a writing job. I need to do it right away. If I do not, I will wind up in a Blackfordburgh.”
“You could do something else,” she said.
“Oh, yes.” Ernie nodded. “I could step into the ring and get my block knocked off. I have done that a couple of times. It pays even worse than writing, and it is not so much fun. Or I could carry a hod. I have done that, too. The same objections apply. I am glad to see you doing so well for yourself.”
“I’ve been lucky,” Sylvia said. “I feel lucky, seeing you again.”
“Me?” Another sour laugh. “Not likely. I have tried to write books that show how things were in the war. People do not want to read them. No one wants to publish them any more. Everyone wants to forget we ever had a war.”
“They haven’t forgotten down in the Confederate States,” Sylvia said.
“Sweet Jesus Christ. I am lucky. I have found someone who can see past the end of her nose. Do you know how hard that is to do these days?”
The praise warmed Sylvia. It wasn’t smarmy, the way Joe Kennedy’s always seemed. Ernie wasn’t one to waste his time with false praise. He said what he meant. Sylvia tried to match him: “Jake Featherston hasn’t exactly been hiding what he thinks about us.”
“No. He is a real son of a bitch, that one, a rattler buzzing in the bushes by the road,” Ernie said. “One of these days, we are going to have to settle his hash.”
“I say things like that on the stump, and people look at me like I’m crazy,” Sylvia said. “Sometimes I start to wonder myself, you know what I mean?”
He leaned forward and, with startling gentleness, let his hand rest softly on hers. “You have more sense than anybody I have seen for a hell of a long time, Sylvia,” he said. “If anyone tries to tell you any different, belt the silly bastard right in the chops.”
That had to be the oddest romantic speech Sylvia had ever heard. But, where most of the so-called romantic speeches she’d heard either made her want to laugh or made her want to kill the man who was making them, this one filled her with heat. That in itself felt strange and unnatural. She’d known desire only a handful of times since her husband didn’t come back from the war.
“Let’s go to my flat,” she murmured. “My son’s married and on his own, and my daughter works the evening shift.”
Ernie jerked his hand away as if she were on fire. “Did you forget?” he asked harshly. “I am no good for that. I am no damn good for that at all.”
He’d told her the same thing once before. It had balked her then. Now … “There are other things we could do. If you wanted to.” She looked down at the tabletop. She felt the heat of embarrassment, too. She didn’t think she’d ever said anything so risqué.
“I will be damned,” Ernie muttered, and then, “You will not be disappointed?”
“Never,” she promised.
“Christ,” he said again, only this time it sounded more like a prayer than a curse. He got to his feet. “Maybe you are lying to me. Maybe you are lying to yourself. I am asking to get wounded again. I know goddamn well I am. But if you do not change your mind in one hell of a hurry—”
“Not me,” Sylvia said, and she got up, too.
Closing the door to the apartment behind them, locking it afterwards, seemed oddly final, oddly irrevocable. Going into the bedroom once she’d done that might almost have been anticlimax. Sylvia wished it could happen without undressing in front of a near stranger. She knew too well she’d never been anything out of the ordinary for looks or for build.
Ernie treated her as if she were, though. By the way he touched her and stroked her and kissed her, she might have been a moving-picture actress, not a fisherman’s widow. He did know what to do to please a woman when he was no longer equipped to do one thing in particular. Sylvia rediscovered just how lonely taking care of herself was by comparison.
Only a little at a time did she realize how much courage he’d needed to bare himself for her. His body was hard and well-muscled. His mutilation, though … “I’ll do what I can,” Sylvia said.
“I’ll tell you a couple of things that sometimes can help, if you don’t mind,” Ernie said.
“Why would I mind?” Sylvia said. “This is what we came here for.”
He told her. She tried them. George had liked one of them. The other was something new for her. It wouldn’t have been high on her list of favorite things to do, but it did seem to help. Ernie growled like some large, fierce cat when he finally succeeded.
“Lord,” he said, and bent down to pull a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of the trousers that lay crumpled by the bed. Lighting one, he went on, “There is nothing like that in all the world. Nothing else even comes close. Sometimes I forget, which is a small mercy. Once in a while, everything goes right. That is a large mercy. Thank you, sweetheart.” He kissed her. His lips tasted of sweat and tobacco.
“You’re welcome,” Sylvia said.
“Damn right I am,” he told her.
She laughed. Then she said, “Give me a smoke, too, will you?” He did. She leaned close to him to get a light from his. He set a hand companionably on her bare shoulder. She liked the solid feel of him. He would have to go before Mary Jane came home. Scandalizing her daughter wouldn’t do. But for now … For now, everything was just fine.
Scipio wasn’t a young man. He’d been a little boy when the Confederate States manumitted their slaves in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. He’d lived in Augusta, Georgia, since not long after the end of the Great War. Everyone here, even Bathsheba, his wife, knew him as Xerxes. For a Negro who’d played a role, however unenthusiastic, in the running of one of the Red republics during the wartime revolt, a new name was a better investment than any he could have made on the bourse.
He’d seen a lot in those mad, hectic weeks before the Congareee Socialist Republic went down in blood and fire. In all the years since, he’d hoped he would never see anything like that again. And, up till now, he never had.
Up till now.
White rioters roared through the Terry, the colored district in Augusta. Some of them shouted, “Freedom!” Some were too drunk to shout anything that made sense. But they weren’t too drunk to burn anything that would burn, to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, and to smash any Negroes who tried to stop them.
In the early stages of the riot, what passed for Augusta’s black leaders—a double handful of preachers and merchants—had rushed to the police to get help against the hurricane overwhelming their community. Scipio had happened to be looking out the window of his flat when they came back into the Terry. Most of them, by their expressions, might have just scrambled out of a derailed train. A couple looked grim but unsurprised. Scipio would have guessed those men had seen some action of their own in 1915 and 1916.
“What’ll they do for us?” somebody shouted from another window.
“Won’t do nothin’,” one of the leaders answered. “Nothin’. Said we deserves every bit of it, an’ mo’ besides.”
After that, a few Negroes had tried to fight back against the rampaging mob. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Dark bodies hung from lamp posts, silhouetted against the roaring, leaping flames.
From behind Scipio, Bathsheba said, “Maybe we ought to run.”
He shook his head. “Where we run to?” he asked bluntly. “The buckra catch we, we hangs on de lamp posts, too. Dis buildin’ don’ burn, we don’ go nowhere.”
He sounded altogether sure of himself. He had that gift, even using the slurred dialect of a Negro from the swamps of the Congaree. Back in the days when he’d been Anne Colleton’s butler, she’d also made him learn to talk like an educated white man: like an educated white man with a poker up his ass, he thought. He’d seemed even more authoritative then. He hadn’t always been right. He knew that, as any man must. But he’d always sounded right. That also counted.
Raucous, baying laughter floated up from the street. Along with those never-ending shouts of, “Freedom!” somebody yelled, “Kill the niggers!” In an instant, as if the words crystallized what they’d come into the Terry to do, the rioters took up the cry: “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!”
Scipio turned to his wife. “You still wants to run?”
Biting her lip, she got out the word, “No.” She was a mulatto, her skin several shades lighter than his. She was light enough to go paler still; at the moment, she was almost pale enough to pass for white.
“Why they hate us like that, Pa?” Antoinette, their daughter, was nine: a good age for asking awkward questions.
In the Confederate States, few questions were more awkward than that one. And the brute fact was so much taken for granted, few people above the age of nine ever bothered asking why. Scipio answered, “Dey is white an’ we is black. Dey don’ need no mo’n dat.”
With the relentless logic of childhood, his son, Cassius, who was six, turned the response on its head: “If we is black an’ they is white, shouldn’t we ought to hate them, too?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. Bathsheba said, “Yes, but it don’t do us no good, sweetheart, on account of they’s stronger’n we is.”
That yes had led directly to the Red uprisings during the Great War. The rest of her sentence had led just as directly to their failure. What do we do? Scipio wondered. What can we do? He’d wondered that ever since he’d seen his first Freedom Party rally, a small thing at a park here in Augusta. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to worry about it. That hope, like so many others, lay shattered tonight.
“Kill the niggers!” The cry rang out again, louder and fiercer than ever. Screams said the rioters were turning words into deeds, too.
Gunfire rang out from the building across the street from Scipio’s: a black man emptying a pistol into the mob. Some of the screams that followed burst from white throats. Good! Savage exultation blazed through Scipio. See how you like it, you sons of bitches! Wasn’t keeping us cooped up in this poor, miserable place enough for you?
But the white men didn’t and wouldn’t think that way, of course. Cet animal est méchant. On l’attaque, il se defende. That was how Voltaire had put it, anyhow. This animal is treacherous. If it is attacked, it defends itself. Thanks to Miss Anne (though she’d done it for herself, not for him), Scipio knew Voltaire well. How many of the rioters did? How many had even heard of him?
A fusillade of fire, from pistols, rifles, and what sounded like a machine gun, tore into the building from which the Negro had shot. More than a few bullets slammed into the building in which Scipio and his family lived, too. Then some whites chucked a whiskey bottle full of gasoline with a burning cloth wick into the entryway of the building across the street. The bottle shattered. Fire splashed outward.
The white men whooped and hollered and slapped one another on the back with glee. “Burn, baby, burn!” one of them shouted. Soon they were all yelling it, along with, “Kill the niggers!”
“Xerxes, they gwine burn this here place next,” Bathsheba said urgently. “We gots to git out while we still kin.”
He wished he could tell her she was wrong. Instead, he nodded. “We gits de chillun. We gits de money. An’ we gits—out de back way to de alley, on account o’ we don’ las’ a minute if we goes out de front.”
Maybe the building wouldn’t burn. Maybe the white men rampaging through the Terry would go on to some other crime instead. But if the roominghouse did catch fire, his family was doomed. Better to take their chances on the streets than to try to get out of a building ablaze.
Herding Antoinette and Cassius along in front of them, he and Bathsheba raced toward the stairway. A door flew open on the far side of the hall. “You crazy?” a woman in that flat said. “We safer in here than we is out there.”
“Ain’t so,” Scipio answered. “Dey likely fixin’ to burn dis place.” The woman’s eyes opened so wide, he could see white all around the iris. She slammed the door, but he didn’t think she’d stay in there long.
He and his family weren’t the only people going down the stairs as fast as they could. Some of the Negroes trying to escape the roominghouse dashed for the front entrance. Maybe they didn’t know about the back way. Maybe, in their blind panic, they forgot it. Or maybe they were just stupid. Blacks suffered from that disease no less than whites. Whatever the reason, they paid for their mistake. Gunshots echoed. Screams followed. So did hoarse bellows of triumph from the mob.
They’ve just shot down people who never did—never could do—them any harm, Scipio thought as he scuttled toward the back door. Why are they so proud of it? He’d seen blacks exulting over what they meted out to whites during the Red revolt. But that exultation had 250 years of reasons behind it. This? This made no sense at all to him.
Out the door. Down the rickety stairs. Pray no white men prowled the alley. The stinks of rotting garbage and smoke and fear filled Scipio’s nostrils. Away, away, away! “Where we run to, Pa?” Antoinette asked as he shoved her on ahead of him.
“Go where it darkest,” Scipio answered. “Whatever you does, don’ let no buckra see you.”
Easy to say. Hard to do. Most nights in the Terry were black as pitch, black as coal, blacker than the residents. The city fathers of Augusta weren’t about to waste money on street lighting for Negroes. But the fires burning here, there, everywhere didn’t just burn people they trapped. They also helped betray others by showing them as they tried to get away.
Down the alley, into another. Scipio stepped in something nasty. He didn’t know what it was, didn’t care to find out. As long as he and his family got away, nothing else mattered. Into a side street that would take them to the edge of town, take them out of the center of the storm.
The side street was dark—no fires close by. It looked deserted. But as Scipio and his kin ran up it, a sharp challenge came from up ahead: “Who are you? Answer right this second or you’re dead, whoever the hell you are.”
Scipio hadn’t used his white man’s voice since not long after the war ended. He’d sometimes wondered if it still worked. Now it burst from him as if it were his everyday speech: “Go on about your business. None of those damned niggers around here.”
Yes, it still held all the punch he’d ever been able to pack into it. “Thank you, sir,” said the white man who’d challenged him, and then, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Scipio echoed gravely. He dropped back into the dialect of the Congaree to whisper, “Come on!” to Bathsheba and the children. They said not a word. They just hurried up the street. No one shot at them.
Nor did anyone else challenge them before they reached a stand of pine woods on the outskirts of Augusta. Scipio didn’t know what he would do come morning. He would worry about that then. For now, he was alive, and likely to stay that way till the sun came up.