American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (37 page)

  More applause from the crowd. Cries of, “Tell ’em, Jake!” and, “Give ’em hell!” rang out over the general din. They might have been listening to a preacher on the revival circuit, not an ordinary politician.

  Jake Featherston
wasn’t
an ordinary politician, which was both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength.

  “They’ve gone and dropped it,” he repeated—again, as a preacher might have. “What else would you call it when here in the middle of July, a good month after the flood finally started going down, the Confederate States of America have still got more than half a million people—half a million, I tell you, and I’m not lying; it’s what the Confederate Red Cross says—living in tents? If that’s not a shame and a disgrace, you tell me what it is.”

  A lot of those people, maybe a majority, were colored cotton pickers who worked for white plantation owners in what differed from slavery in little more than name. More often than not, Jake would have gloated at their suffering. But if he could use them as a club with which to beat the present administration, he would.

  He went on, “Up in the USA, there’s not a soul still stuck in a tent. Oh, I know they didn’t get hurt as bad as we did, but it makes a point. When the Yankees need to get things done, they up and do ’em. When we need to get things done, what happens?” He threw his arms wide in extravagant disgust. “Not a damn thing, that’s what! I tell you, folks, you’re just lucky New Orleans didn’t go out to sea, on account of the government in Richmond wouldn’t’ve done a thing—not a single, solitary thing—to stop it if it had.”

  That drew more applause: baying, angry applause.
They know I’m telling the truth,
 he thought. Being a Whig meant doing as little as you could to get by.

  The line wasn’t in the text of his speech, but he used it, adding, “Folks say that works all right. Maybe it did, once upon a time. But this here ain’t no fairy tale, and we haven’t got no happy ending. People, we need a government in Richmond that’ll stand up on its hind legs and
do
things.

  “Who stumbled into the war? The Whigs! Who let the niggers stab us in the back without even knowing they were going to? The Whigs! Who went and
lost
the war? The Whigs!” Now the crowd shouted out the name of the CSA’s longtime ruling party with him. He rolled on: “Who let the damnyankees steal Kentucky? The Whigs! Who let ’em steal Sequoyah? The Whigs! Who let ’em cut Texas in half? The Whigs! Who let ’em take northern Virginia away from us? The Whigs! I fought in the Army of Northern Virginia, and I’m proud of it, but the Yankees have taken the place away from us. And who let the Yankees tell us what we could do with our Army and Navy? Who left us too weak to fight back when those bastards started throwing their weight around? The Whigs again!” He slammed his fist down on the podium. The crowd in the hall roared. They might have been so many coon dogs taking a scent. Featherston took a scent from them, too. If he didn’t make a crowd hot and sweaty, he wasn’t doing his job. His nose told him he was tonight.

  “They’ve done everything they could to tear this country down,” he went on. “Now they had their day once. I give ’em that. Jeff Davis was a great president. Nobody can say different. So was Lee. So was Longstreet. But that was a long time ago. We had friends back then. Where are our friends now? The Frenchmen have the Kaiser on their back. England’s trying to keep from starving every year. We’re on our own, and the Whigs are too damn dumb to know it. God helps the people who help themselves. And as long as the Whigs hang on in Richmond, God better help us, ‘cause we’ll need it bad!” That got him a laugh. He’d known it would. He understood that it should. But it wasn’t funny to him. The contempt and hatred he felt for the Whigs—for all the Confederate elite, including the second- and third-generation officers who’d done so much to lose the Great War—were big as the world. They hadn’t given him a chance to show what he could do, no matter how right he’d been. In fact, they’d scorned him all the more
because
he’d been right.

 
  Just see what I do if I win this election, you sons of bitches,
 he thought.
Just you see then.

  Meanwhile, he had this speech to finish: “If you want to go on the way the Confederate States have been going, you vote Whig,” he thundered. “If you want your country to go straight down the toilet, that’s the way to vote.” He got another laugh there, an enormous one. He continued, “The Supreme Court says you can keep on having just what you’ve had—and aren’t you lucky?” Their day would come, too. He’d promised himself that. “But if you want change, if you want strength, if you want pride—if you want to be able to look at yourselves in the mirror and look the USA straight in the eye, y’all vote . . .”

 
  “Freedom!”

  The shout from the crowd, more than a thousand voices speaking as one, made his ears ring. He threw up his hands. “That’s right, folks. Thank you. And remember—no matter what else you do,
fight hard!
”

  More applause shook the hall as he stepped away from the podium. The house lights came up, so he could see the people he’d been haranguing. He waved to them again. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” they chanted, over and over again. The rhythmic cry rolled through him, rolled under him, and swept him along on its crest. He’d read somewhere that in the Sandwich Islands the natives rode waves lying or even standing up on flat boards. He supposed that was true. If it weren’t true, who could make it up? He felt something like that now, buoyed up by the crowd’s enthusiasm.

  As he went offstage, the bodyguards and other men who’d come west from Virginia with him pumped his hand and told him what a great speech he’d given. “Thanks, boys,” he said, and then, “For Christ’s sake, somebody get me a drink!”

  Louisiana had never surrendered to the siren song of prohibition. He could drink his whiskey here without shame or hypocrisy. It seared his throat and sent warmth exploding out from his middle. As soon as he emptied the glass, somebody got him a fresh one.

  He sipped the second drink more slowly.
Got to keep my wits about me,
 he thought. Not everybody was going to like the speech as well as his flunkies had.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a tall, blond, handsome man in a suit that must have cost plenty came up and shook hands with him. “You gave ’em hell out there tonight, Jake,” he said, a Texas twang in his voice.

  “I thank you kindly, Willy,” Featherston answered. Willy Knight had headed up the Redemption League, an outfit with goals much like those of the Freedom Party, till the bigger Party enfolded it. He wasn’t the best number-two man around, mostly because he still had thoughts of being number one.

  “Damn good speech,” agreed Amos Mizell. He led the Tin Hats, the biggest Confederate veterans’

  organization. The Tin Hats weren’t formally aligned with the Freedom Party, but they shared many of the same ideas.

  “Thank you, too,” Jake Featherston said. Mizell wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his shirt. “You were out there, same as me. You know how the Whigs sold us down the river. You know how they’ve been selling us down the river ever since.”

  “Sure do.” Mizell nodded. “What Willy and I aren’t so sure of, though, is whether you’re the fellow who’s going to kick ’em out on the street where they belong.”

  “No, huh?” Featherston looked from one of them to the other. “You boys felt like that, how come you didn’t try and keep me from getting the nomination last month?” He wanted his enemies out there in the open where he could see them and smash them, not lurking in dead leaves like a couple of rattlesnakes.

  “Wouldn’t’ve been much point to that, on account of we’d’ve lost,” Willy Knight said. “We’ll see how you do come November, and we’ll go from there. You really think you’re going to win?” Featherston made an impatient, scornful gesture. “That’s to keep the troops happy, and you know it as well as I do. I’m hoping I finish ahead of the damn Rad Libs, and that we hold our ground in Congress. I think we can do that.” He hoped the Freedom Party could do that. Before the great flood, he wouldn’t even have bet on so much. But the flood had shown that the Whigs weren’t so slick as they thought they were, and that they didn’t respond well in emergencies. Some voters, at least, would see the light.

  Knight and Mizell looked at each other. “All right, Jake,” Knight said at last. “That sounds fair. If the Party does that well come fall, we’ll keep on backing your play. But if we take another hammering, the way we did in the last couple of Congressional elections, everybody’s gonna have to do a lot of thinking.”

  “I carried the Freedom Party on my back, God damn it,” Jake growled.

  “Nobody says you didn’t, so keep your shirt on.” Willy Knight was a bigger man than Featherston, but Jake, in a fury, was a match for anybody. Knight knew it, too. Still speaking placatingly, he went on,

  “Moses took the Hebrews out of Egypt, but he wasn’t the one who got ’em into the Promised Land.” Amos Mizell nodded. “If the Party’s vote slips again, the Tin Hats will have to think about getting what we want some other way.”

  Featherston had thought he wanted enemies openly declared. Now he had them, and wished he didn’t.

  “And I suppose the two of you will try and screw me over so we don’t get what I said we would.” They almost fell over themselves denying it. “As long as we do what you said we’d do, we’re still in business,” Knight said. “If we fall down now, who knows if there’ll be any pieces worth picking up later on? We’re still with you.”

  “You’d better be,” Jake said. “Let’s see what happens in November, then, and afterwards.” Knight and Mizell both nodded. Featherston shook hands with each of them in turn.
And if you bastards think I’ll
let go without a fight even if things do go wrong, you’re a hell of a lot dumber
than I think you
are.

* * *

 
 I
n the Terry, the colored district of Augusta, Georgia, Election Day meant next to nothing. Only a handful of Negro veterans of the Great War were registered to vote. To most people, it was just another Tuesday.

  As usual, Erasmus was in his fish store and restaurant when Scipio walked in. Scipio got himself a cup of coffee to drink while sweeping up the place. His boss was setting newly bought fish on ice in the counter.

  Scipio said, “What you think? De Whigs gwine win again?”

  “Dunno,” Erasmus said with a shrug. “Them or the Rad Libs, don’t matter one way or t’other. Long as it ain’t that goddamn crazy man.” He threw a crappie into place with more force than he usually used while handling fish. That Election Day meant next to nothing didn’t mean it meant nothing at all.

  “Dat Featherston buckra, he ain’t gwine do nothin’ much,” Scipio said.

  “Better not,” Erasmus answered, and slammed down a gutted catfish. “That son of a bitch win, everything’s even tougher for us niggers. And things is tough enough as they is.” Voice sly, Scipio said. “You ain’t got it so bad. You owns your house free an’ clear—”

  “I ain’t stupid,” Erasmus said, and Scipio nodded. His boss had been damn smart there. He’d paid off his mortgage just when inflation was starting to ravage the CSA, when he’d had a pretty easy time accumulating the money he needed but before Confederate dollars became nothing but a joke. The bankers had taken the money, even if they’d been unhappy about it. A few weeks later and they would have refused him. “I ain’t stupid,” he repeated. “I’m smart enough to know I ain’t got it easy long as I’s a nigger in the CSA.”

  He was right about that. Scipio didn’t need to be a genius to understand as much. He said, “No, you ain’t got it easy—I takes it back. But you has it worse—all us niggers has it worse—if dat Featherston, he win.” Working for Anne Colleton had given him a feel for the way Confederate politics worked.

  Again, though, he didn’t need to be a genius to find the truth in what he’d just said.

  “Not so many parades with them goddamn white men in the white shirts an’ the butternut pants yellin’,

  ‘Freedom!’ this year,” Erasmus observed. “They ain’t been tryin’ to bust up the other parties’ meetin’s, neither, like they done before. They walkin’ sof’ again.”

  “Don’ want to remind nobody what that one buckra done,” Scipio said. “But too many folks, dey recollects any which way.”

  “Hell, yes,” Erasmus said. “Thing of it is, Freedom Party, they needs the white folks to be stupid, or else to
act
stupid on account of they scared. Now, Lord knows the white folks is stupid—”

  “Do Jesus, yes!” Scipio said, as if responding to a preacher’s sermon.

  “But they ain’t
that
stupid, not unless they’s scared
bad
,” Erasmus went on, as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “Things ain’t too bad for ’em right now—money’s still worth somethin’, most of ’em’s got jobs—so they ain’t gwine vote for no Jake Featherston, not this year they ain’t. That’s how I sees it, anyways.”

  “Way
I
sees it, you should oughta write fo’ de newspapers,” Scipio said, not intending it as any sort of flattery. On the contrary—he’d read plenty of editorials about what was likely to happen that didn’t sum things up anywhere near so neatly as his illiterate but ever so shrewd boss had managed in a couple of sentences.

  Erasmus lit a cigarette. He blew out a cloud of smoke, then said, “You bangin’ your gums on all this politics so as you kin git out o’ workin’—ain’t that right, Xerxes?”

  “Oh, yassuh, Marse Erasmus, suh.” Scipio laid on his Low Country accent even thicker than usual. “Ah ain’t nevah done one lick o’ work, not since de day you hire me. Ah jus’ eats yo’ food an’ drinks yo’

  coffee an’ steals yo’ smokes.” He held out his hand, pale palm up, for a cigarette.

  Laughing, Erasmus gave him one, then leaned close so Scipio could get a light from the one he already had in his mouth. He’d just taken his first drag of the morning and coughed a couple of times when the first customer of the day came in, calling for coffee and ham and eggs and, instead of grits, hash browns.