American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (91 page)

 
  Because I have a brain, and you haven’t. Because my mouth isn’t hooked up to the toilet. Because
I’ve had more baths this week than you have this year.
 If Scipio said any of that, he was a dead man.

  He looked down at the sidewalk, the picture of a submissive Negro. Softly, he said, “Suh, I been waitin’

  table forty year now. I’s right good at it.”
What are
you
good at, besides causing trouble? Not much,
I’ll bet.
 One more thing he dared not say.

  “You know how many white folks is hungry, and you’re marchin’ off to work in your goddamn fancy penguin suit?” the man in overalls snarled. “I ought to kick your black ass around the block a few times, teach you respect for your betters.”

  He drew back his foot as if to do just that. All Scipio could do was take it or try to run. He intended to run—he didn’t want his outfit damaged. Getting it repaired or, worse, having to buy a new one would cost him money he didn’t have. But then one of the other white men said, “Hell, let him go. Ain’t his fault he has to dress up like a damn fool to go to work.”

  “Thank you, suh,” Scipio whispered. “I thanks you from de bottom of my heart.” The white man with the Freedom Party pin glanced around at the little crowd. Most people nodded at what the other fellow had said. Scowling, the Freedom Party man said, “All right. All right for now, goddammit. But when Jake Featherston gets elected, we’ll put every damn nigger in his place, not just the ones in the fancy suits.” He strutted down the street as if he were a mover and shaker, not a man with no more than a fifty-fifty chance of being able to write his own name.

  “Thank you,” Scipio said once more.

  “I didn’t do it for you,” said the man who’d urged he be left alone. “I did it on account of I purely can’t stand the Freedom Party.” He laughed bitterly. “And I wonder how long I’ll be allowed to say that in public if Featherston
does
win.”

 
  Somebody’s not blind, anyhow,
 Scipio thought as he hurried up the street toward the Huntsman’s Lodge.
But if Featherston wins, this fellow can change his mind. He can say he was for the
Freedom Party all along, and he’ll get on fine. I’m black. I didn’t choose that, and I can’t change
it.

  As far as he could see, he had no choices at all if the Freedom Party won.

  Getting to the restaurant was a relief. For one thing, he did make it on time. If he got in trouble for any reason, he could be back pounding the pavement looking for work. He knew that all too well—how could he help knowing? For another, the rhythms and rituals of work kept him too busy to worry . . .

  much.

  He was obsequious to the prosperous white men and their sleek female companions who dined at the Lodge, but that bothered him much less than having to be obsequious to whites on the street. A white waiter in New York City would act subservient on the job. Acting subservient was part of a waiter’s job—which went a long way towards explaining why there were so few white waiters in the Confederate States, where whites thought subservience the province of blacks alone. But that waiter in New York City became his customers’ equal as soon as he left his job. Scipio didn’t, and never would.

  A portly, middle-aged man eating pheasant looked up from his meal and said, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  With a small thrill of horror, Scipio realized the man had danced attendance upon Anne Colleton at Marshlands before the war. Had his own past come back to haunt him after all these years? He shook his head and put on his thickest accent to answer, “Ah don’ reckon so, suh.” The customer shrugged. “You must be right. The boy I knew spoke better than I do myself.”
 Boy.
 Even then, Scipio had been in his thirties. Whites in the CSA refused to take Negroes seriously. He supposed that was why the Red uprising during the war had got as far as it had. Not even clever whites like Miss Anne had imagined Negroes could conceive of grievances serious enough to make them take up arms for redress.

  All that went through his head in a flash. To reassure the white man—he was Tony Somebody, and Anne Colleton had thought him a pompous ass—he said, “Ah talks lahk I talks, suh. Dis heah de onliest way Ah knows how.” He wondered if he
could
speak like an educated white man any more. Or would that dialect of English have disappeared from his tongue like a foreign language seldom used?

  “All right. Never mind,” the customer said, and went back to his pheasant. When he walked out, he left a fifty-cent tip, as if to apologize for bothering Scipio.
Noblesse oblige,
 Scipio thought, and made the silver coin disappear. These days, there were men desperate enough to kill for half a dollar.

  It was after ten when the Huntsman’s Lodge closed. Scipio worried less about being on the street in black tie and tails than he had during the day. Fewer whites would be out there to see him than during the day—and, with Augusta’s bad street lighting, whoever was there wouldn’t be able to get that good a look at him anyhow.

  But as soon as he opened the door, he closed it again in a hurry and ducked back into the restaurant.

  “What’s the matter with you, Xerxes?” demanded his manager, a skinny, energetic young white man named Jerry Dover. “Go on home. Get the hell out of here.”

  “Marse Jerry, I reckons I waits a while,” Scipio answered. “Dem Freedom Party white folks”—he almost said
buckra
, but caught himself before using that word in front of a white—“is marchin’ down de street. Don’t want them seein’ me, you don’t mind too much.” He had no idea what Dover’s politics were. Talking politics with a white man could only be futile and dangerous. But whatever else Dover might have been, he was no fool. The other three colored waiters in the place showed no eagerness to leave. “All right,” the manager said. “Don’t worry about it. Stay as long as you need to. Sooner or later, those folks out there’ll be done, and then y’all can go on about your business.”

  But, staring out through the small panes of glass set into the door of the Huntsman’s Lodge at eye level, Scipio wondered if Jerry Dover knew what he was talking about. Block after well-organized block of men and women—mostly men—paraded past on Marbury Street. Some carried Confederate flags.

  Some carried Freedom Party flags. Some carried torches, to make the rest easier to see and the gathering as a whole more impressive.

  A lot of the men marched in step. Most of the ones who did wore the white shirts and butternut trousers of Freedom Party stalwarts. Some few of the disciplined marchers, though, were in what was almost but not quite Confederate uniform. They carried Tredegars whose bayonets gleamed bloody in the torchlight.

  “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” The endless chant came close to making Scipio long for the old cry of,
Freedom!
 That had been a frustrated shout, the cry of men who didn’t fully understand what they wanted or how to go about getting it. This . . . This promised trouble right around the corner, and said just what kind of trouble it was, too.

  And the parade went on and on and on. Scipio wouldn’t have believed that Augusta held so many people, let alone that it held so many Freedom Party backers. Jake Featherston wasn’t in town. Neither was Willy Knight. These people had nothing special to lure them out of their houses. But they came.

  Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

  At last, after half an hour, the procession ended. Jerry Dover hadn’t gone outside, either. He had pushed Scipio and the other blacks out of the way a few times to look at things for himself. “Well, well, well,” he said when it was over and the raucous cries of
Featherston!
 at last ebbed away. “I always wondered, but now I know. Those bastards really
are
crazy.” Scipio and the other waiters exchanged glances. Dover didn’t need to say that. What white man in the CSA needed to make Negroes like him? The question was so ridiculous, it might not even have occurred to Scipio without the goad of something as massive as the Freedom Party procession.

  The sheer scope of it got through to Dover, too. He spoke again: “Crazy or not, though, there’s a hell of a lot of ’em, ain’t there? Don’t see how they’re going to lose the election. Wish to God I did.” He made pushing motions at the waiters. “They’re gone. You can disappear, too.” Searchlights blazed from Allen Park, not far off to the west. With the door open, the rhythmic shouting of Jake Featherston’s name grew louder and more frightening. Scipio scuttled back toward the Terry, a black dust mote adrift on that dreadful sea of sound.

 
J
efferson Pinkard came to the Freedom Party meeting in his jailer’s uniform. No time to go back to his apartment and put on the usual white shirt and butternut trousers, not if he wanted to be sure of having a place to sit down when he got to the old livery stable. Party meetings had never been so crowded. He saw faces he hadn’t seen for years, and he saw plenty of faces he’d never seen before—more at every meeting, it seemed.

 
Now people want to hop on the train—when it looks like it’s just about to get to the station,
 he thought, eyeing with no small scorn the strangers who suddenly called themselves Freedom Party men.

  He’d been with the Party train every inch of the way, through ups and downs and derailments. Hell, he’d been at the Alabama State Fairgrounds out at the west end of town when Grady Calkins murdered President Hampton. He hadn’t given up even then, even when things looked blackest.

  He sent the Johnny-come-latelies another sour stare. Would they have stuck with Jake Featherston when the going got rough? Not likely, not most of them. They were here because they wanted to ride a winner’s coattails, not because they
believed
. You could use people like that, but could you ever really trust them? He had his doubts.

  Caleb Briggs strode briskly up onto the rostrum. He had a microphone up there these days, to help his gas-ruined voice fill the meeting hall despite the buzz from the big crowd. In the row behind Pinkard, a man who’d been in the party for a while explained to a couple of new fish who Briggs was. Jeff muttered something incredulous under his breath. Didn’t they know
anything
? Evidently not.

  Behind the dentist who headed up the Freedom Party in Birmingham stood Confederate and Party flags.

  He crisply saluted each of them in turn, then stepped up to that microphone and said, “Freedom!”

 
“Freedom!”
 The roar from the crowd made Pinkard’s head spin. The new Party men were good for something, anyhow—they had big mouths.

  Briggs’ smile showed white teeth. “Good to see y’all here,” he rasped, “old friends and new.” A few of the longtime Freedom Party men, Jeff among them, laughed softly. Caleb knew what was what, same as anybody else who’d seen the light a while ago. Smiling still, Briggs went on, “A month to go, boys, and then we get to the Promised Land. We’ve been in the wilderness a long time now, but we’re almost there.”

  Pinkard whooped. “Freedom!” he shouted, as if he were a Negro responding to a preacher’s sermon.

  He wasn’t the only one, either. Far from it.

  But when Briggs held up a hand, silence fell, just like that. By God, the Freedom Party had discipline.

  “The one thing we’ve got to do now,” he said, and paused to draw more air into his ravaged lungs, “is make sure we don’t stumble and fall. We’ve come too far for that. This time, we
win
.” More shouts of, “Freedom!” rang out. So did a chorus of, “Feather
ston
!” Pinkard tried to imagine waking up the morning after Election Day and finding out Jake Featherston had lost again. He didn’t think the Party could survive it. He wasn’t sure he could.

  “We’ve got to make
sure
we win,” Briggs went on. “We’ve been doing plenty, but we’ve got to do more. Just for instance, Hugo Black is coming to town Saturday.” A low murmur ran through the crowd. The Whig vice-presidential candidate was good on the stump—not so good as Featherston or Willy Knight, not as far as Pinkard was concerned, but still a formidable speaker.

  Caleb Briggs grinned a sly, conspiratorial grin. “I’m sure we’ll give him a nice, warm Birmingham welcome when he pays us a call.” He waited for the grins and sniggers to stop, then held up a hand. “It may not be so easy. The Whigs aren’t ashamed to steal our tricks. They’ll have their own tough boys at Black’s rally, you can bet on that.”

  “We’ll lick ’em!” Jeff roared, before anybody else could. Somebody behind him clapped him on the back.

  “We’d better lick ’em,” Briggs said. “We need to make damn sure we do. I want a show of hands for volunteers.”

  Every man in the place raised his hand. Some men held up both hands at once to look more prominent.

  Pinkard thought about doing that, but didn’t. One hand was plenty. He didn’t need to show off.

  Up on the platform, Caleb Briggs grinned. “I knew I could count on you. Be here Saturday at half past twelve. Black’s speaking at two. He reckons he is, anyways.” Half past twelve was a good time to gather. The men who still worked Saturday mornings would have time to put in their half days. A lot of businesses had cut back to five days a week. Men who worked for them wouldn’t have any problems showing up, either. And, of course, the men who were out of work could come whenever the Party needed them, as long as they could scrape up trolley fare.

  Jeff was scheduled to work all day that Saturday. He traded shifts with another jailer, a man who despised politics of all sorts almost as much as he despised prisoners of all sorts. He got to Freedom Party headquarters fifteen minutes early. His shirt was so white, it gleamed like polished marble. His pants were the exact color of the uniform he’d worn during the war. He’d put on a pair of steel-toed shoes he hadn’t worn since leaving the Sloss Works. They weren’t a required part of a stalwart’s outfit, but they let him kick like a mule.