V
Sylvia Enos and Ernie lay side by side on her bed. He was as rigid as he would have been some hours after death. By the look on his face, he wished he were dead. “It is no good,” he said, glaring straight up at the ceiling. “It is no goddamn good at all.”
“Not tonight, sweetheart,” Sylvia said. “But sometimes it is. Things don’t always work perfect for a woman every time, either, you know.”
“But I am a man. Sort of a man. A piece of a man.” He raised up on one elbow to look down at himself. “A missing piece of a man. Times like this, I want to blow my brains out. One of these days …”
“You stop that.” Sylvia put a hand over his mouth. Then, as if fearing that wasn’t enough to drive such thoughts from his mind, she took the hand away and kissed him instead. “Don’t be stupid, you hear me?”
“Is it stupid to want to be a man? Is it stupid to want to do what men can do?” He answered his own question by shaking his head. “I do not think so.”
“It’s stupid to talk that way. This … this is just one of those things, like … I don’t know, like a bad leg, maybe. You have to make the best of it and do what you can to live your life. Sometimes things are all right, you know.”
“Not often enough,” he said. “It is not you, sweetheart. You do everything you know how to do. But it is no damn use. I might as well try to drive a nail with half the handle of a hammer. A wound like this is not like a leg. It goes to the heart of a man, to what makes him a man. And if it is not, he is not.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about, either,” Sylvia said. “All I know is, you’re scaring me.” George had never scared her. Infuriated her, yes, when he wanted other women after being away from her too long. But she could understand that, no matter how mad it made her. It was … Her mind groped till she found the word. It was normal, was what it was. It had none of the darkness that made Ernie’s furious gloom so frightening.
Naked, he got to his feet and headed for the kitchen. “Christ, but I need a drink.”
“Fix me one, too,” Sylvia said.
“All right. I need my pipe, too. Cigarettes are not the same.” Ernie never smoked the pipe in Sylvia’s apartment. Cigarettes were all right, because she smoked, too. But pipe tobacco would have made the place smell funny to Mary Jane when she got home.
“Thanks,” Sylvia said when he brought her whiskey over ice.
He gulped his, still in that black mood. “For a long time after I got wounded, I could not do anything with a woman,” he said, his voice hard and flat. “Not anything. A dead man could do more. I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to! But I could not.”
“Ernie,” she said nervously, “wouldn’t it be better not to think about … about the bad times?”
She might as well have saved her breath. He went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “I bought a rifle. I went hunting. I hunted and hunted. I shot more kinds of animals than you can think of. Sometimes, if you cannot love, killing will do.”
“I told you once to cut that out,” Sylvia said. “I’m going to tell you again. I don’t like it when you talk that way. I don’t like it a bit.”
“Do you think I like what happened to me? Do you think I like what does not happen with me?” Ernie laughed a strange, harsh laugh. “If you do, you had better think again. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
That sounded like poetry, not quite like the way he usually talked. But Sylvia didn’t know what it was from, and she was damned if she would ask him. She said, “You’re the first man I’ve cared about since the Confederates killed my husband. If you think I’m going to let you get away, you’d better think again.”
“If I decide to go, nobody will stop me.” Somber pride rang in Ernie’s voice. “Not you, not anybody. Do you know something?”
“What?” she asked warily.
“I am jealous of you. I am more jealous of you than I know how to say.”
“Of me? How come?”
“You had your revenge. You went to the Confederate States. You knocked on Roger Kimball’s door. When he opened it, you shot him. Your husband can rest easy.”
You were never a seaman, Sylvia thought. Like most sailors, George Enos had had a horror of dying at sea, of having his body end up food for fish and crabs. He’d had the horror, and then it had happened to him. Yes, she’d avenged herself, but poor George would never rest easy.
Ernie added, “I can never have my revenge. I do not know which English pilot shot me. He may not know he shot me. It was war, and I was a target. He went on his way afterwards. I hope he got shot down. I hope he burned all the way. But even then, it would be over for him. I go on, a quarter of a man.”
“You’re more of a man than you think you are.” Sylvia pressed herself against him. “Do you think I’d want you to stay with me if you didn’t make me happy?”
“Carpet munching,” he muttered. “A bull dyke could do it better than I can.”
“But that’s not what I want,” Sylvia said. “What I want is you, and you’re plenty of man for me.” If he really believed it, maybe he wouldn’t be quite so ready to blow his brains out.
He was mule-stubborn, though. “I am not plenty of man for me, sweetheart.” He finished the drink, got out of bed, got dressed, and left her apartment without another word and without a backwards glance. She wondered why that didn’t infuriate her, as it would have if some different man had done it. She couldn’t say. All she knew was, it didn’t.
As things turned out, she was glad Ernie left, because she got a knock on the door about fifteen minutes later. She was in a housecoat by then, washing out the glasses that had held whiskey so she could put them away and so Mary Jane wouldn’t notice they’d been out. She’d already dumped Ernie’s cigarette butts down to the bottom of the wastepaper basket.
“Who is it?” she called, wondering if a neighbor wanted to chat or to borrow something. It was a little late for that, but not impossibly so.
“It’s me—George.” The voice was eerily like her dead husband’s. She’d thought so ever since George Jr. went from a boy to a man.
She hurried to open the door. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you with Connie? Did you get drunk when your boat came back to T Wharf, and think you still live here instead of with your wife?”
“No, Ma. I just had a couple of drinks,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes at her. Good, she thought. He’s less likely to notice the booze on my breath. He went on, “I know where I live and all just fine. I’ll go back there soon enough, too. But I wanted to stop by and say hello. You raised me, after all.”
He was a big man, bigger than Ernie, wide-shouldered and solid and not at all inclined to talk frightening nonsense. How had he got so big? Hadn’t he been a little boy raising hell in the Coal Board offices just a few months ago? So it seemed to her, anyhow. Slowly, she answered, “I must have done something right back then. I couldn’t ask for a better son.”
“Aw, Ma.” Now she’d embarrassed him—easier when whiskey helped make him maudlin. He paused for a moment, then went on, “I want you to be happy. Mary Jane and I both want you to be happy.”
“You both make me happy,” Sylvia said. “You make me very happy.”
“That’s good, Ma.” George Jr. hesitated again. “If … if you was to meet a fella who made you happy, neither one of us’d mind or anything. We talked it over one time. If he was a nice fella, I mean.”
How much did they know about Ernie? Did they know anything? Sylvia thought Mary Jane might. Her daughter had never caught him here (though she’d come close a couple of times), but Sylvia wouldn’t have been surprised if the neighbors gossiped. What were neighbors good for besides gossiping?
And how to answer George Jr.? Carefully, that was how. Sylvia said, “Well, that’s sweet of both of you. If I find somebody like that, I’ll remember what you said.” She shook her head. She needed to tell him a little more: “You know, I’m a grownup myself. If I want to look for a fellow, I don’t really need anybody’s permission to go ahead and do it.”
“Oh, no. I know that. I didn’t mean you did. I just meant … you know. That we aren’t upset or anything.”
Not that we wouldn’t be upset. They did know, then. Or they knew something, anyhow. Sylvia doubted they knew some of the things she’d been doing not too long before. Children always had trouble imagining their parents doing anything like that. And they wouldn’t know how Ernie was mutilated and some of the makeshifts Sylvia and he had to use.
“As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters,” George Jr. said.
“I am, dear,” she answered. Most of the time I am, anyhow. When Ernie starts talking about guns—that’s a different story.
“All right, Ma.” Her son stooped and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to go on home. I hope they give me a little time before I have to head out again, but you never can tell.” He touched the brim of his low, flat cap and ducked out of the apartment where he’d grown up, the apartment that would never be his home again.
The next morning, Sylvia left Mary Jane, who’d come in late, in bed asleep and went down to T Wharf to see what she could get in the way of seafood. With her husband and her son both fishermen, she had connections ordinary people could only envy. She bought some lovely scrod at a price that would have turned an ordinary housewife green, and, better yet, got the young cod without any jokes about the pluperfect subjunctive. She didn’t know how many times she’d heard those from fish dealers and fishermen. She did know it was too many.
She was on her way back to the flat when someone called her name. She turned. “Oh,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Kennedy.”
“Good morning to you, Mrs. Enos.” As always, Joseph Kennedy’s smile displayed too many teeth. It was not a friendly smile; it looked more like a threat. “So you prefer a hack writer to me, do you?”
“Ernie’s no hack!” Sylvia said indignantly.
“Anyone who writes an ‘as-told-to’ book is a hack,” Kennedy said, still smiling. He wanted to wound with those teeth; he wanted to bite. That Sylvia had said no to him was bearable as long as she said no to everyone else, too. That she’d said no to him and yes to somebody else … that irked him.
“He’s a fine writer,” Sylvia said. “Times are hard. Everybody’s got to eat.”
“Yes.” Kennedy made the word into a hiss. “Everybody does. The campaign will start early next year, since President Hoover’s going to run for reelection. You would have had a part in it, but… .” He shrugged. “You’d sooner have half a man.”
Sylvia wanted to slap him in the face with a scrod. Instead, in a deadly voice, she answered, “Half of him makes a better man, and a bigger man, than all of you.”
He went fishbelly pale under the brim of his boater. Sylvia hadn’t bothered keeping quiet. Several people sniggered. A woman pointed at Kennedy. He fled. Sylvia knew she’d pay later, but oh, triumph was sweet for now.
The Alabama Correctional Camp (P) lay in the Black Belt, the cotton-growing part of the state, forty miles south of Montgomery and a hundred forty south of Birmingham. Except for his time in the Confederate Army and his stint down in the Empire of Mexico, Jefferson Pinkard had never been so far from home. The camp lay between cotton fields and pecan groves not far from a town of about a thousand people called Fort Deposit. Once upon a time, the fort had protected settlers from Indians. Now only the name was left to commemorate the stockade that had once stood there.
Fort Deposit did boast a train station, a little clapboard building with a roof that hung out over the track so people could board and leave a train when it was raining. And raining it was when Pinkard stood on the rickety platform by the track waiting for the northbound Louisville and Nashville Railroad train to take him up to Birmingham. He wore his warden’s uniform, his Freedom Party pin on proud display on his left lapel. He kept hoping someone would want to argue politics, but nobody did.
Up chugged the train. It wheezed to a halt, iron wheels squealing against iron rails. Most of the people who got off and boarded were Negroes with work-weary faces and cardboard luggage. A couple of cars up at the front of the train were for whites, though. Jeff climbed in and sat down in one of those. A few minutes later, the train rattled north again.
Five hours later, the train came into the Louisville and Nashville station in Birmingham. The station was at Twentieth and Morris, only a few blocks west of the Sloss Works, where Pinkard had worked for so long. He took a cab back to his apartment closer to the center of town. The Freedom Party was picking up a good part of the tab for the place.
He didn’t stay there long—only long enough to get out of uniform and into the white shirt and butternut trousers of a Freedom Party stalwart. He wasn’t the only one wearing that almost-uniform who converged on Birmingham Party headquarters. Oh, no—far from it.
Inside Caleb Briggs had already started talking, warming up the men for what they would be doing. “Tomorrow is election day,” rasped the dentist who headed the Party in Birmingham. His voice was only a ruin of its former self; he’d been gassed in the war, and he’d never recovered. “We got to make sure the fellows who get elected vote our way. All of ’em, y’all hear me?”
“Freedom!” the men roared, Pinkard loud among them.
Briggs nodded. “That’s right. Freedom. We’ve already got the House in Richmond, and we’ll keep it. But we got to get the Senate, too, and that’s tougher, on account of the state legislatures pick the Senators. So we have to take care of those. Y’all reckon we can do it?”
“Yes!” the stalwarts shouted, and, “Hell, yes!” and a great many other things besides. The louder they yelled, the more excited they got.
“Good.” Caleb Briggs grinned a wide, crooked grin. “Not so many Whig and Rad Lib gatherings as there used to be. But the Whigs are holding one tonight in Capitol Park, smack in the middle of town. We got to make sure they don’t go through with it, and that they don’t do any voting tomorrow. Make sure you grab your clubs and whatnot, and we aren’t going there to take prisoners.”
As the men assembled for the march on the park, they told stories of other elections, other brawls. A lot of them talked about 1933, when Jake Featherston won the presidency. Pinkard was one of the smaller number who could talk about 1921, when Featherston almost won. Nobody talked about the presidential election of 1927; the Party had wandered in the wilderness then. Even Jeff, a stalwart among stalwarts, had wondered if it would ever emerge.
Policemen tipped their hats to the advancing stalwarts. The dustup in the park that followed came almost as an anticlimax. The Whigs weren’t what they had been two years earlier. They’d been fighting for their lives then, and known it. Now … Now it was as if they sensed it was all over but the shouting. A few stubborn men fought hard to hold back the Freedom Party avalanche, but only a few. The rest fled. So did the Whig candidate for governor, and just in time. The stalwarts would surely have beaten him had they caught him, and they might have strung him up.
“That’ll teach those sons of bitches,” somebody not far from Pinkard said.
“Yeah.” Jeff nodded. “Not like it was in the old days, when the governor used to sic the National Guard on us to keep us from kicking up our heels.”
“Folks know which side their bread is buttered on nowadays,” the other stalwart said. “And what the hell? We’re holding most of the bread now.”
“That’s right.” Pinkard nodded again, emphatically. “And we’re going to get the rest of it, too.”
He wished he could go to a saloon and have a few drinks with his comrades, but Alabama remained stubbornly dry. Instead, he went home and slept in his own bed for the first time in months. He’d got used to the hard military cot down at the Alabama Correctional Camp (P). His mattress seemed squashy by comparison, and he woke up with a stiff back. Grumbling, he made a cup of coffee—just about all he had in the place—and got into the stalwarts’ almost-uniform again.
When he went back to Freedom Party headquarters, Caleb Briggs sent him to a polling place a few blocks away. “I don’t expect the police’ll enforce the electioneering limits,” Briggs rasped. “Case they do, don’t pick a fight with ’em. Here.” He handed Jeff and the other party men a sheet of newspaper-style photos of men’s faces. “See if y’all can keep these bastards from getting to the booth. They’re nothing but trouble-making trash.”
Jeff grinned at the men with him. They were grinning, too. “You bet,” he said, and took a cudgel from among those stuffed into a sheet-metal trash can. He thwacked the bludgeon into the palm of his left hand. This was the enjoyable part of the job. He pulled a quarter from his pocket, too. “Gonna buy some doughnuts before we get there,” he said. “I’m empty inside.”
The Confederate flag flew in front of an elementary-school auditorium. Sure enough, no one said a word, no policemen appeared, when the Freedom Party men stationed themselves right outside the door. Quite a few of the men going in to vote displayed Party pins, some without the black border that showed a new member, more with. They nodded and tipped their hats to the stalwarts as they went by. The call of “Freedom!” rang out again and again.
About half past eight, Pinkard nudged the stalwart nearest him. “There’s one of the fuckers we’re supposed to stop.”
“Right,” the other fellow said, and stepped into the would-be voter’s path. “You better get the hell out of here, buddy, you know what’s good for you.”
“Are you saying I’m not allowed to exercise my Constitutional right to vote?” the man asked. He was bald, skinny, middle-aged, and wore a suit; he looked like a lawyer or somebody else too smart for his own good.
“He said you better get lost,” Pinkard answered. “And you better, too, or you’ll be real sorry.”
“I will—as soon as I vote.” The clever-looking guy started forward again.
Maybe he had guts. Maybe he was too stupid to know what was coming. All four stalwarts set on him, bludgeons rising and falling. “Freedom!” they shouted as the blows thudded home. Pinkard added, “You should’ve listened, you dumb asshole. You gonna vote now?” The bald man’s wails rose above the thumps of the clubs and the stalwarts’ battle cries.
At last, they let him go. He staggered away, face and scalp bloodied. He didn’t try to go into the polling place, which proved they hadn’t beaten all the brains out of him.
They beat up three or four other men from their sheet of photos; several more abruptly discovered urgent business elsewhere on seeing them waiting. The stalwarts saluted one another with their blood-spattered bludgeons each time that happened. Schoolchildren watched one beating. They laughed and cheered the stalwarts on. No policemen came to bother them. Pinkard hadn’t expected that any would; the Party had been strong in police and fire departments across the CSA for years.
When the polls closed, a couple of Jeff’s comrades headed home. He went back to Party headquarters. As he’d known they would, they had wireless sets blaring out election returns. They also had sandwiches and homebrew.
Results from the Confederate states on the East Coast had a good start on those in Alabama and farther west. “Looks like the Freedom Party landslide that started two years ago is still rolling downhill, folks,” the announcer said. He sounded delighted with the news. People who didn’t sound delighted the Freedom Party was doing well didn’t last on the wireless. This fellow went on, “North Carolina’s going to have a new governor, a Freedom Party man. Same with Georgia. And Party candidates are picking up seat after seat in the legislatures in the Carolinas and Florida. That makes races for the Senate likely to go Freedom, too.”
Jefferson Pinkard turned to the closest stalwart and raised his glass of beer. “Here’s to us, by Jesus! We’ve gone and done it. We sure as hell have.”
“Looks like it,” the other Party man agreed. He sported a mouse under one eye. He must have run into a Whig with more gumption than most. Pinkard hadn’t.
After a while, Alabama returns and others from the western part of the Confederacy started coming in along with those from the Eastern seaboard. The only state where the Freedom Party didn’t seem to be doing well was Louisiana, where the Radical Liberal governor had a solid organization of his own. Somebody not far from Jeff said, “He can laugh now, but that son of a bitch’ll pay before long. You can count on it.” Heads solemnly bobbed up and down, Pinkard’s among them.
With restive Kentucky on its border, Tennessee went Freedom in a big way, and probably would have even without stalwarts outside polling places. With even more restless Sequoyah and stolen Houston on its borders, Texas voted Freedom more spectacularly still. Jeff went back to his apartment and to bed before many returns came in from Chihuahua and Sonora. For one thing, he was confident they’d turn out for the Party, too. For another, they were mostly greasers down there anyhow, and he’d had his fill of greasers fighting in the Empire of Mexico.
He got on the train again the next day, to go back to the Alabama Correctional Camp (P). Newsboys shouted election results. “Freedom Party claims vetoproof majority in both houses of Congress!” was one cry.
Conscious of a job well done, Jeff bought a paper. He read it as the train rumbled south from Birmingham. Then he let it fall to the floor and dozed: no, he didn’t sleep well in his own bed any more.
He got rudely awakened just before the train pulled into Montgomery. He came within inches of getting killed. A bullet blew out the window by his seat, cracking past his head and spraying him with broken glass. More bullets stitched along the length of the car.
“Down! Get down, goddammit!” he shouted, and dove between his seat and the one in front. Quite a few of the men in the car—likely the ones who’d seen combat during the war—did the same thing. Like him, they knew machine-gun fire when they heard it. Screams and wails said some of the bullets hadn’t missed—and that civilians were panicking. Before long, Pinkard’s hands and knees were wet and sticky with someone’s blood.
The last time anybody’d shot up a train in which he was riding, it had been Negro rebels when he was a private on his way to put down one of the Socialist republics the blacks had proclaimed in Georgia. Who was it this time? The country between Birmingham and Montgomery was full of farms and plantations … and the plantations were full of Negroes.
Coincidence? Or the start of a new uprising? Jeff didn’t know—he had no way of knowing—but he muttered under his breath.
Flora Blackford didn’t realize how much she’d missed the floor of Congress till she came back to Philadelphia. “Is it any wonder there is armed struggle against the Freedom Party in the Confederate States?” she demanded. “Is it any wonder at all, after the farce that went by the name of an election in that country two weeks ago?”
A Congressman—a Freedom Party Congressman—from Houston sprang to his feet. “How is that there election different from most of the ones y’all put on in what you call my state?”
He didn’t want to be in the U.S. Congress at all. He would sooner have served in Richmond. “Excuse me, Mr. Mahon, but I have the floor,” Flora said with icy courtesy. “May I go on?”
“That’s right. Ride roughshod over me. You’ve been riding roughshod over my state—what you call my state—ever since you tore us bleeding from Texas and made us join the USA.”
“Tell the lady, George!” That was another Freedom Party man from Houston. Two more Congressmen, these from Kentucky, began singing “Dixie.” Neither they nor their constituents wanted to belong to the United States, either.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Congressman La Follette of Wisconsin, the speaker of the House, plied his gavel with gusto. “The gentlemen are out of order,” he declared. “The gentlemen will observe the rules of the House. Mrs. Blackford has the floor.”
“This body is out of order!” George Mahon shouted. “This whole damn country is out of order!” The Kentucky Congressmen sang louder than ever.
Bang! Bang! Bang! “That will be quite enough!” Charles La Follette declared. “The sergeant-at-arms will eject from this chamber any individual flouting the rules of the House. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear, all right,” Mahon said. “It’s clear that even though our own people elected us, you don’t want to let us tell you what they want.” But he sat down after that, and the rowdy singing stopped. The Freedom Party Congressmen knew La Follette meant what he said. He’d ejected them before. Flora wasn’t sure how much good that did, though. Getting thrown out of Congress only made them bigger heroes back home.
“You may continue, Mrs. Blackford,” La Follette said wearily. “Without further interruption, I very much hope.”
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Flora said. “I rose to call upon the administration to take stronger action against the Confederate States than it has done up until this time. President Hoover stayed silent in the wake of the riots—I might even say, the pogrom—aimed against the black residents of the CSA and does not appear to recognize their legitimate right to rise against oppression and brutality. He—”
“The distinguished Congresswoman from New York worries more about the Negroes of the Confederate States not because they are black but because they are Red,” another Congressman broke in. “Most people in the United States worry very little about them for any reason.”
He wasn’t a Freedom Party man. He was a rock-ribbed Democrat from Maine. Speaker La Follette gaveled him to silence, too, but not with the vehemence he’d used against the Freedom Party buffoons. And, to her dismay, Flora saw heads nodding in agreement with what the New Englander had said. The United States had only a handful of Negroes. Border patrols stayed busy keeping would-be colored refugees out. The USA wanted no more blacks; if anything, most people would have been happier with none at all.
Stubbornly, she said, “They are human beings, too, Congressman, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Jefferson was a damned Virginian,” the man from Maine sneered. “Give me Adams and Hamilton any day.” More nods, these from all around the big room. Founding Fathers from states no longer in the USA had a low reputation north of the Mason-Dixon line these days, and had ever since the War of Secession.
“Do you deny, sir, that they are human beings?” Flora asked. “Do you deny that they possess those rights I named?”
“They are in a foreign country,” the Congressman from Maine replied. “I deny that they are any business of the USA.”
He got more nods, from fellow Democrats, from the handful of Republicans and Freedom Party men, and even from a few Socialists. To her dismay, Flora had seen that before. Socialists spoke on behalf of racial equality, but couldn’t get too far ahead of the people who voted them into office. That was how they rationalized it, anyhow.
“Congressman Moran, would you say the same if these persecuted people were Irish?” Flora asked sweetly.
“Since they aren’t Irish, the question does not apply.” Moran was too smart to answer that one the way she asked it.
Because he was, she waited for Speaker La Follette to gavel down his interruption and then introduced her motion of censure against the Confederate States. She knew it would fail; the next motion passed censuring the Confederate States for the way they treated their Negroes would be the first. But she had to make the effort. It wasn’t as if Jews didn’t know pogroms, too. News out of Russia and the Kingdom of Poland (which bore about the same relationship to Germany as the Republic of Quebec did to the USA) wasn’t good.
After the House adjourned, she went across the street to her office. A newsboy waving the Philadelphia Inquirer shouted, “Confederates ask to enlarge their army! Read all about it!”
“I certainly do want to read about that!” Flora exclaimed, and gave him a nickel. He handed her a paper, and smiled broadly when she didn’t wait for change.
She spread the Inquirer out on her desk. That was the lead headline, all right. She zoomed through the story. President Featherston, apparently, had requested permission to boost the Confederate Army to a size significantly larger than that allowed by the treaty ending the Great War. Featherston was quoted as saying, “These soldiers will be used only for internal defense. We have uprisings against the lawful authority of our government in several states, and need the extra manpower to put them down.”
Hoover hadn’t said yes and hadn’t said no. A Powel House spokesman had said the president of the United States would give the request serious consideration. Flora wondered what he would do. As a Democrat, he would normally favor a hard line against the CSA. But, as a Democrat, he would also normally favor putting down uprisings of the proletariat, no matter how justified they might be.
Flora wondered how she ought to feel about the request herself. Up till Jake Featherston became president of the Confederate States, the Socialists had favored a softer line with the CSA, easing the country’s return to the family of nations. Some still did. How could the Confederacy become a normal country with a rebellion sputtering in its heartland? But how could one keep from sympathizing with the rebels, considering what they’d been through before picking up rifles (or, as Featherston claimed, cleaning the grease off the ones they’d hidden away in 1916)?
That last made up her mind. She dialed Powel House, wondering how long it would be before these newfangled telephones sent operators into extinction along with the passenger pigeon and the American bison. She worked her way through three secretaries before finally securing an appointment with President Hoover.
When she told her husband that evening what she’d done, Hosea Blackford made a sour face. “He won’t listen to you. You’re my wife. That’s plenty of reason right there for him not to listen to you.”
“This is foreign policy,” Flora answered. “Foreign policy should be bipartisan. You said so yourself, often enough.”
“This is Hoover.” To put it mildly, Blackford did not care for his successor. “You’d do better to recommend the opposite of what you really want. You might have some chance of getting it then.”
Powel House, on Third Street, was a three-story structure of red brick, with wide steps leading up to the broad porch and its wrought-iron railings. Philadelphia’s last pre-Revolutionary mayor had lived there. Since the Second Mexican War, it had also replaced the White House in Washington as the chief presidential residence.
The reception hall onto which the street door opened was large and impressive, with highly polished mahogany wainscoting gleaming a mellow red-brown. The banister leading up to President Hoover’s second-floor office was also of mahogany, the spindles fine examples of fancy lathework. When she’d lived here, Flora had often admired them. Now, worried as she was, she hardly gave them a glance.
Hoover’s bulldog features twisted into a smile when she came in. “Good to see you, Mrs. Blackford,” He waved her to a chair. “Please sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” He didn’t say, Make yourself at home. She’d been at home here. Had the election of 1932 turned out differently, she and Hosea would still be at home here. Hoover went on, “What can I do for you, Congresswoman?”
“Thank you for your time.” Perhaps because she didn’t like President Hoover, Flora took care to be especially polite. “I’ve come to ask you to tell President Featherston you do not approve of his proposed expansion of the Confederate Army. He will use it for nothing but the oppression of his own people.”
“I agree. That is how he will use it,” Hoover said, and astonished hope flamed in Flora. The president continued, “That is why I am disposed to permit the expansion.”
Flora stared. “I don’t understand … Mr. President.”
“If I thought President Featherston intended to use his increased Army against the United States, I would oppose his enlargement of it with every fiber of my being. But I do believe he will use it only for the purpose he says he intends: putting down the Negro uprisings troubling several of his states. Any nation, whether friendly to the United States or not, is entitled to internal peace, stability, and security. If some ill-advised individuals disturb its tranquility, it has the right to use force to put them down.”
“But, Mr. President, one of the reasons the Negroes are in arms against the CSA is that the white majority will not give them—how did you phrase it?—peace, stability, and tranquility,” Flora answered. “The Confederate States made their bed through oppression. Shouldn’t they have to lie in it?”
“Radical elements have controlled blacks in the Confederate States for too long,” Hoover said. “This is not their first rising, if you recall.”
“Oh, yes. Their last one went a long way toward winning us the war,” Flora replied. “Don’t we owe them a debt of gratitude for that?”
The president thrust out his chin. “We owe no foreigners any debts,” he said proudly. “We are at peace with the world. Even the Japanese.” That was a dig at her husband, in whose presidency the war with Japan had broken out.
It was also an infallible sign she wouldn’t get what she wanted. “I hope you will not regret this decision, Mr. President,” she said, rising to her feet.
“My conscience is clear,” Hoover said.
“Which is not the same as being right.” Since she wouldn’t get what she wanted, she did take the last word.