American Front (4 page)

“I got you, boss,” Cincinnatus assured him. The trooper nodded and went on his way. When his back was turned, Cincinnatus allowed himself the luxury of a long, silent sigh of relief. That hadn’t turned out so bad as it might have, not anywhere near. He was resigned to playing the servant to every white man he saw; if you didn’t want to end up swinging from a lamppost, you did what you had to do to get by. And the state trooper had even given him what the man meant as good advice. That didn’t happen every day.

As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, the fellow was crazy, but that was another matter. Keep all the black folks away from the Covington docks? “Good luck, Mr. Trooper, sir,” Cincinnatus said with a scornful laugh. Every longshoreman and roustabout on the docks was colored. White men dirty their hands with such work? Cincinnatus laughed again.

Then, all at once, he sobered. Maybe the state trooper wasn’t so crazy after all. If war came, no riverboats would come down the Ohio from the United States or up it from the Mississippi and the heart of the Confederacy. Both sides had guns up and down the river trained at each other. Without that trade, what would the dockworkers do? For that matter, what would Cincinnatus do?

He looked toward the Ohio himself. One thing he wouldn’t do, he figured, was try to run off to the United States, no matter how the trooper worried about that. In the Confederacy, there were more Negroes around than whites wanted (except when dirty work needed doing), so the whites gave them a hard time. In the United States, which had only a relative handful of Negroes, the whites didn’t want any more—so they gave them a hard time.

“Shit, even them big-nosed Jews got it better up there than we-uns do,” Cincinnatus muttered. Somebody could doubt whether you were a Jew. Wasn’t any doubting about whether he was black.

Wasn’t any doubt he’d spent too long daydreaming in the truck, either. A big-bellied white man in overalls and a slouch hat came out of the warehouse office and shouted, “That you out there, Cincinnatus, or did Tom Kennedy get hisself a real for-true dummy for a driver this time?”

“Sorry, Mr. Goebel,” Cincinnatus said as he descended. For once, he more or less meant it. He knew he had been sitting when he should have been working.

“Sorry, he says.” Goebel mournfully shook his head. He pointed to a hand truck. “Come on, get those typewriters loaded. Last things I got in this warehouse.” He sighed. “Liable to be the last Yankee goods we see for a long time. I ain’t enough to remember the War of Secession, but the Second Mexican War, that was just a little feller. This one here, it’s liable to be bad.”

Cincinnatus didn’t remember the Second Mexican War, he was within a year either way of twenty-five. But the newspapers had been screaming war for the past week, troops in butternut had been moving through the streets, politicians were ranting on crates on every corner…“Don’t sound good,” Cincinnatus allowed.

“If I was you, I’d get out of town,” Goebel said. “My cousin Morton, he called me from Lexington yesterday and said, Clem, he said, Clem, you shake your fanny down here where them cannons can’t reach, and I reckon I’m gonna take him up on it, yes I do.”

White folks take so much for granted
, Cincinnatus thought as he stacked crated typewriters on the dolly and wheeled it out toward the Duryea. If Clem Goebel wanted to get out of Covington, he just upped and went. If Cincinnatus wanted to get out of town and take his wife with him, he had to get written permission from the local commissioner of colored affairs, get his passbook stamped, wait till acknowledgment came back from the state capital—which could and usually did take weeks—then actually move, reregister with his new commissioner, and get the passbook stamped again. Any white man could demand to see that book at any time. If it was out of order—well, you didn’t want to think what could happen then. Jail, a fine he couldn’t afford to pay, anything a judge—bound to be a mean judge—wanted.

The typewriters were heavy. The stout crates in which they came just added to the weight. Cincinnatus wasn’t sure he’d be able to fit them all into the bed of the truck, but he managed. By the time he was done, the rear sagged lower on its springs. Sweat soaked through the collarless, unbleached cotton shirt he wore.

Clem Goebel had stood around without lifting a finger to help: he took it for granted that that sort of labor was nigger work. But he wasn’t the worst white man around, either. When Cincinnatus was done, he said, “Here, wait a second,” and disappeared into his little office. He came back with a bottle of Dr Pepper, dripping water from the bucket that kept it, if not cold, cooler than the air.

“Thank you, sir. That’s right kind,” Cincinnatus said when Goebel popped off the cap with a church key and handed him the bottle. He tilted back his head and gulped down the sweet, spicy soda water till bubbles went up his nose. When the bottle was empty, he handed it back to Goebel.

“Go on, keep it,” the warehouseman said. Cincinnatus stowed it in the truck after thanking him again. For once, he felt only half a hypocrite: he’d gladly pocket the penny deposit. He cranked the engine to start it, got the truck in gear, and headed south down Greenup Street toward Kennedy’s storerooms.

A policeman in gray uniform and one of the tall British-style hats that always reminded Cincinnatus of fireplugs held up a hand to stop him at the corner of Fourth and Greenup: a squadron of cavalry, big, well-mounted white men with carbines on their shoulders, revolvers on their hips, and sabers mounted on their saddles, was riding west along Fourth.
Probably going to camp in Devon Park
, Cincinnatus thought.

People—white people—cheered and waved as the cavalry went by. Some of them waved Maltese-cross battle flags like the one that flapped at the head of the squadron, others Stars and Bars like the sixteen-star banner above the post office across the street from Cincinnatus. The cavalrymen smiled at the pretty girls they saw; a couple of them doffed their plumed hats, which looked much like the one the Kentucky state trooper had worn but were decorated with the yellow cord marking the mounted service.

After the last horse had clopped past, the Covington policeman, reveling in his small authority, graciously allowed north-south traffic to flow once more. Cincinnatus stepped on the gas, hoping his boss wouldn’t cuss him for dawdling.

He’d just pulled up in front of Tom Kennedy’s establishment when a buzzing in the air made him look up. “God almighty, it’s one o’ them aeroplanes!” he said, craning his neck to follow it as it flew up toward the Ohio.

“What are you doing lollygagging around like that, goddamn it?” Kennedy shouted at him. But when he pointed up into the sky, his boss stared with him till the aeroplane was out of sight. The head of the shipping company whistled. “I ain’t seen but one o’ those before in all my born days—that barnstorming feller who came through town a couple years ago. Doesn’t hardly seem natural, does it?”

“No, sir,” said Cincinnatus, whose acquaintance with flying machines was similarly limited. “That wasn’t no barnstormin’ aeroplane, though—did y’all see the flag painted on the side of it?”

“Didn’t even spy it,” Kennedy confessed. “I was too busy just gawpin’, and that’s a fact.” He was a big, heavyset fellow of about fifty, with a walrus mustache and ruddy, tender Irish skin that went into agonies of prickly heat every summer, especially where he shaved. Now he turned a speculative eye toward Cincinnatus. He was a long way from stupid, and noticed others who weren’t. “You don’t miss much, do you, boy?”

“Try not to, sir,” Cincinnatus answered. “Never can tell when somethin’ you see, it might come in handy.”

“That’s a fact,” Kennedy said. “You’re pretty damn sharp for a nigger, that’s another fact. You aren’t shiftless, you know what I mean? You act like you want to push yourself up, get things better for your wife, the way a white man would. Don’t see that every day.”

Cincinnatus just shrugged. Everything Kennedy said about him was true; he wished he hadn’t made his ambition so obvious to his boss. It gave Kennedy one more handle by which to yank him, as if being born white weren’t enough all by itself. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with ambitions that would probably end up breaking his heart. Sure, he wanted to push himself up. But how far could you push when white folks held the lid on, right above your head? The wonder wasn’t that so many Negroes gave up. The wonder was that a few kept trying.

Seeing he wasn’t going to get anything more than that shrug, Kennedy said, “You pick up the whole load of typewriters all right?”

“Sure did, sir. They was the last things left in Goebel’s warehouse, though. He ain’t gonna be left much longer his own self—says he’s headin’ down to Lexington with his cousin. This war scare got everybody jumpy.”

“Can’t say as I blame Clem, neither,” Kennedy said. “I may get out of town myself, matter of fact. Haven’t made up my mind about that. Wait till it starts, I figure, and then see what the damnyankees do. But you, you got nowhere to run to, huh?”

“No, not hardly.” Cincinnatus didn’t like thinking about that. Kennedy had more in the way of brains than Clem Goebel. If he didn’t think Covington was a safe place to stay, it probably wasn’t. He understood Cincinnatus was stuck here, too. Sighing, the laborer said, “Let me unload them typing machines for you, boss.”

That kept him busy till dinnertime. He lived down by the Licking River, south of Kennedy’s place, close enough to walk back and forth at the noon hour if he gulped down his corn bread or salt pork and greens or whatever Elizabeth had left for him before she went off to clean white folks’ houses.

A shape in the river—a cheese box on a raft was what it looked like—caught his eye. He whistled on the same note Tom Kennedy had used when he saw the aeroplane. By treaty, the United States and the Confederate States kept gunboats off the waters of the rivers they shared and the waters of tributaries within three miles of those jointly held rivers. If that gunboat—the Yankees called the type monitors, after their first one, but Southerners didn’t and wouldn’t—wasn’t breaking the treaty, it sure was bending it.

Cincinnatus whistled again, a low, worried note. More people, higher-up people, than Goebel and Kennedy thought war was coming.

“Mobilize!” Flora Hamburger cried in a loud, clear voice. “We must mobilize for the inevitable struggle that lies before us!”

The word was on everyone’s lips now, since President Roosevelt had ordered the United States Army to mobilize the day before. Newsboys on the corner of Hester and Chrystie, half a block from the soapbox—actually, it was a beer crate, filched from the Croton Brewery next door—shouted it in headlines from the
New York Times
and the early edition of the
Evening Sun
. All those headlines spoke of hundreds of thousands of men in green-gray uniforms filing onto hundreds of trains that would carry them to the threatened frontiers of the United States, to Maryland and Ohio and Indiana, to Kansas and New Mexico, to Maine and Dakota and Washington State.

Just by looking at the crowded streets of the Tenth Ward of New York City, Flora could tell how many men of military age the dragnet had scooped up. The men who hurried along Chrystie were most of them smooth-faced youths or their gray-bearded grandfathers. The newsboys weren’t shouting that the reserves, the men of the previous few conscription classes who’d served their time, were being called up with the regulars—they wouldn’t reveal the government’s plan to the Rebels or to the British-lickspittle Canadians: their terms. But Flora had heard it was so, and she believed it.

The papers told of pretty girls rushing up and kissing soldiers as they boarded their trains, of men who hadn’t been summoned to the colors pressing twenty-dollar goldpieces into the hands of those who had, of would-be warriors flocking to recruiting stations in such numbers that some factories had to close down. The Croton Brewery was draped in red-white-and-blue bunting. So was Public School Number Seven, across the street.

The entire country—the entire world—was going mad, Flora Hamburger thought. Up on her soapbox, she waved her arms and tried to bring back sanity.

“We must not allow the capitalist exploiters to make the workers of the world their victims,” she declared, trying to fire with her own enthusiasm the small crowd that had gathered to listen to her. “We must continue our ceaseless agitation in the cause of peace, in the cause of workers’ solidarity around the world. If we let the upper classes split us and set us one against another, we have but doomed ourselves to more decades of servility.”

A cop in a fireplug hat stood at the back of the crowd, listening intently. The First Amendment remained on the books, but he’d run her in if she said anything that came close to being fighting words—or maybe even if she didn’t. Hysteria was wild in the United States; if you said the emperor had no clothes, you took the risk of anyone who spoke too clearly.

But the cop didn’t need to run her in; the crowd was less friendly than those before which she was used to speaking. Somebody called, “Are you Socialists going to vote for Teddy’s war budget?”

“We are going to do everything we can to keep a war budget from becoming necessary,” Flora cried. Even three days earlier, that answer to that question had brought a storm of applause. Now some people stood silent, their faces set in disapproving lines. A few booed. One or two hissed. Nobody clapped.

“If war comes,” that same fellow called, “will you Socialists vote the money to fight it? You’re the second biggest party in Congress; don’t you know what you’re doing?”

Why weren’t you mobilized?
Flora thought resentfully. The skinny man was about twenty-five, close to her own age-a good age for cannon fodder in a man. Few to match him were left in the neighborhood. Flora wondered if he was an
agent provacateur
. Roosevelt’s Democrats had done that sort of thing often enough on the East Side, disrupting the meetings not only of Socialists but also of the Republicans who hadn’t moved leftward when their party split in the acrimonious aftermath of the Second Mexican War.