American Front (70 page)

She nodded. Disciplining the field hands was a job she undertook from a sense of duty and necessity, not because she enjoyed it. Disciplining a top-flight hand like Cassius was especially delicate. Being too lenient with him would provoke worse indiscipline from the field force. Being too harsh, though, would make another three or four or half a dozen Negroes up and leave the fields for factory work in Columbia or down in Charleston.

But disciplining him didn’t look so repugnant as it usually did, not when the alternative was paying more of the bills that made her capital flow away like the waters of the Congaree—in fact, more swiftly than the lazy waters of the river. She nodded again. “Send him in.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Scipio turned and murmured to his companion in the hallway. Cassius showed himself for the first time. His shapeless cotton garments, brightened only by the blue bandanna he wore round his neck, made a sharp contrast to Scipio’s formal livery.

Anne glared at Cassius for a few seconds without saying anything. Scipio silently slipped away, not wanting to hear—or to be known to hear—whatever punishment the mistress of Marshlands meted out.
He respects Cassius’ position on the plantation, too
, Anne thought. Yes, she had to proceed with caution.

Cassius could not long bear up under her scrutiny. He cast his eyes down to the hardwood floor. Anne watched him intently. His gaze flicked to right and left, taking in the books that filled the office. She’d deliberately summoned him here, to add the intimidating alien environment to the moral effect of taking punishment from a white.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” she asked, her voice crisp and businesslike. “It had better be good.”

He interlocked the fingers of his hands, a gesture almost prayerful in its supplication. “I is sorry, Miss Anne, I truly is,” he said. “I couldn’t he’p myself.” The dialect of the Negroes of the Congaree district spilled thick as molasses from his lips. A white from Charleston would have had trouble understanding it; a white from, say, Birmingham would have been all at sea. So would a black from Birmingham, for that matter. Anne followed his speech as readily as she followed Scipio’s formal, precise language. She’d grown up with the Negro dialect all around her. As a child, she’d spoken it half the time, till trained out of it by parents and teachers.

She didn’t think of speaking it now. Using her own brand of English helped remind Cassius who was superior, who inferior.

“‘Sorry’ might be enough to make amends for being gone a day or two,” she snapped. “You were gone for four mortal weeks. Where did you go? What did you do? Did you think you could just show up here again one day and go on about your business as if nothing had happened? Answer me!”

Cassius did some more hand-wringing. He was good at it—too good to be altogether convincing. He had a foxy gleam in his eye, too, one that never quite went away no matter how contrite and woebegone the rest of his face looked. “Whe’ I was at? Miss Anne, I was up de country a ways. I was huntin’.” He nodded in sudden assurance, “Dat’s what I was doin’—huntin’.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” she answered. “If you wanted to go on a long hunting trip, you know you wouldn’t have had any trouble arranging it with me. You’ve done that before—never for four weeks, but you’ve done it.”

He hung his head again. Now she thought she recognized the expression on his face. If he’d been white, he would have blushed. After a long silence, he said, “Miss Anne, kin Ah talk to you like you was a man?”

Not
a white man
, she noted, just
a man
. A suspicion began forming in her mind. “Go ahead,” she told him.

He twisted his hands once more, this time, she judged, in embarrassment. She wasn’t a man; no one who was had any cause to doubt that. “Miss Anne,” Cassius said, “what I huntin’, she ’bout nineteen year ol’, an’ you kin put yo’ han’s roun’ she waist”—he made a circle to show what he meant—“an’ yo’ fingers, dey touches theyselves.
Dat’s
what I was huntin’, fo’ true.”

Since he’d been gone that long, Anne reckoned he’d bagged her, too. He was a good deal more than nineteen—he was a good deal more than twice nineteen—but those things happened. She knew those things happened. She was still angry at the hunter, but not so angry as she had been. “What’s her name?” she said. “Whereabouts exactly does she live? How did you meet her?”

“She name Drusilla, Miss Anne. She live on de Marberrys’ plantation, over by Fo’t Motte. She come into St. Matthews dis one time, I see she, I know I got to have she.”

“And so you just went off after her.” For all her effort, Anne couldn’t make herself sound as severe as she would have liked. Men had their appetites, and whether they were white or black didn’t seem to matter much there. A pretty face, a nice shape, and they were off like a shot. Sounding exasperated came easier: “I don’t suppose anyone bothered checking your passbook?”

“No, ma’am.” Cassius shook his head. But he might have said the same thing before the war. He was far and away the best hunter on the plantation; he was liable to make himself invisible to anyone who wanted to keep an eye on him.

Well, now that he’d come back, he wasn’t invisible any more. Turning up the intensity of her glare, Anne said, “I am going to check on you. If I find out you are lying to me, you will regret it.”

“I ain’t lyin’, Miss Anne. I is a truthful man.”

“Scipio!” Anne called. When the butler came back, she said, “Take Cassius downstairs and have him wait there. We shall see what we shall see.”

She picked up the telephone, rang Jubal Marberry’s home, and put her questions to him. “What? Drusilla?” he said, shouting at her; he was old and deaf. “Yes, there’s been some new buck nigger sniffing around Drusilla. There’s always a buck or two sniffing around Drusilla, same as there’s always flies buzzing around sugar water, heh, heh.” The last was a wheezy chuckle. Anne wondered if Marberry was too old to go sniffing around Drusilla himself.

But that, whether or not it was his affair, was his concern. He’d told her what she needed to know. She summoned Cassius back to the office. “All right—it seems you were where you say you were. You could have gotten into worse mischief. Even so…Of course your pay for the time you were gone is gone, too.” Cassius grimaced, but didn’t say anything. Anne could have done worse. She did, in fact, do worse: “I’m also going to dock you every other week’s pay for the next eight, to take out a matching sum. Losing both may remind you to stay here where you belong and not go chasing after every pretty woman you happen to see.”

“Maybe, Miss Anne, but I doubts it.” Cassius’ grin was jaunty and very, very male. Anne wanted to throw something at him. Instead, she made a sharp gesture of dismissal. Grinning still, Cassius took his leave.
Just like a nigger
, she thought.
Too happy-go-lucky to care he’s thrown away two months’ pay, plus whatever he wasted on that Drusilla tart
. Anne hoped the Negro wench had soaked Cassius good.

She went back to her bill-paying. A few minutes later, the telephone rang. She was alert as she picked it up—maybe Jubal Marberry had done some more checking and found out that the Negro who’d been keeping Drusilla company wasn’t Cassius after all. But the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t old and rheumy, but young and vigorous: “Miss Anne? This here’s Roger Kimball. I was just callin’ to ask how your brother was doin’.”

I was just calling to find out whether the coast is clear for me to go up there and sleep with you
. Anne Colleton almost laughed in the submariner’s face. She could have mortally offended him if she’d told him how much he reminded her of her black hunter. But, instead, she answered the question he’d asked: “I’m sorry, Roger; I’m afraid I have to tell you he’s not much improved.”

“Oh. I’m right sorry to hear that.”
Sorry both ways, probably
, she thought; the wounded tone in his voice certainly suggested he was sorry she wasn’t inviting him up despite poor Jacob’s condition. And then he said, “Maybe you could come down to Charleston one day and pay me a visit, then.”

Anne almost slammed down the earpiece of the telephone. The arrogance Kimball displayed infuriated her—but, as it had on the train to New Orleans, also attracted her. What with Jacob, what with the never-ending bills, what with escapades like Cassius’, didn’t she deserve a little amusement, a little escape, a little plain, old-fashioned physical relief? Life was about more things than simply running Marshlands. And so, instead of hanging up, she said, “Maybe I will, Roger. Maybe I will.”

XVIII

Jefferson Pinkard shoveled a last forkful of ham and eggs into his mouth, then sprang to his feet. Emily, who’d already finished breakfast, was about to head out the door, and he didn’t want to let her go without getting a kiss. Every time he took her in his arms, he felt like a brand new bridegroom. He knew how lucky he was, to have that feeling still after years of marriage.

All things considered, though, he’d had better kisses than the one he got this morning. “You all right, darlin’?” he asked his wife.

“I think so,” she said. “Lately I’m just tired all the time. That’s what it is, I reckon. They’re workin’ us hard. We got our quota kicked up again the other day—got to turn out more shells, make up for the ones the soldiers’re shootin’ at the damnyankees.”

“Damnyankees,” Pinkard muttered. The war had passed a year old now, no end in sight. “Who woulda thought they could fight like this here?” They stood in western Virginia, in Kentucky, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. They were pushing Confederate forces out of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and giving the Canadians and British a hard time, too. “Ain’t like it was in the last two wars.”

Emily nodded, pecked him on the cheek, and hurried off to catch the trolley. Her step didn’t have the bounce to it he’d once taken for granted. She wasn’t pink and perky, either, the way she had been; maybe working to fill the increased quota was what made her seem so wrung out, so sallow.

“God damn the war,” Jeff said sincerely. He grabbed his dinner pail and headed for the Sloss works.

As they did every morning, Agrippa and Vespasian greeted him with polite respect. He accepted that as nothing less than his due. “Leonidas ain’t got here yet,” Vespasian told him.

“Why ain’t I surprised?” Pinkard said scornfully. “You ever hear anything about Pericles?”

“No, suh,” Vespasian said. “He still in the jailhouse. I dunno if they ever gonna let him out.”

“Hope to Jesus they do,” Jeff said. “That Leonidas, he don’t have the brains God gave a possum. Hell, the two of you do better’n I do with him, on account of I got to carry all my own weight and about three quarters of his. I been yellin’ for a replacement—an’ I don’t care if he’s black or white, long as he ain’t stupid—but no luck so far.”

Vespasian and Agrippa looked at each other. Pinkard wondered if he’d offended them, calling Leonidas stupid. So much landed on Negroes in the Confederacy, they stuck together and defended their own whether their own deserved it or not. But, God damn it to hell, Leonidas
was
stupid. He would have been stupid if he were white. Hell, he would have been stupid if he were green.

Slowly, cautiously, Vespasian said, “Mistuh Pinkard, suh, this here would be a different place if mo’ people cared about gettin’ the job done an’ less of ’em cared about who was doin’ it.” When Jeff didn’t blow up at that remark, the black steelworker made another, even more wary, comment: “Not jus’ a different place. A better place.”

“Get your ass out of here. Go on, go home,” Pinkard said. “You don’t want those policemen throwin’ you in the jug for sedition.”

Vespasian took off, Agrippa right behind him. Pinkard looked after them with something as close to approval as he was likely to give two Negroes. They did their job, they didn’t complain—much, they didn’t try to rock the boat. What more could you want from people?

He looked around. Still no sign of Leonidas. He didn’t miss him. A lot of ways, he was better off without him. Handling his shift by himself would leave him dog-tired when the closing whistle blew, but the world wouldn’t end on account of that. Jeff knew what he was doing.

Leonidas came in about half an hour late. The floor foreman reamed him out about it as he started to work. When the fellow finally let him be, he shook his head and said, “Lord, I wish that man would shut hisself up. Got me a hangover, make my po’ head ring like a bell.”

Pinkard grunted. He’d done that—once in a great while. When your head already felt as if somebody were forging steel in there, going to a place where they really were forging steel wasn’t high on the list of enjoyable things. Leonidas had been working here for only a couple of months, and this was a long way from the first time he’d strolled in a good deal the worse for wear.
Stupid
, Jeff thought again. Some people belonged in the cotton fields.

Leonidas got through the day without maiming either himself or Pinkard. He managed partly by not doing much, but that didn’t matter, since he never seemed to do much. Pinkard minded less than he would have with a more capable partner. The more Leonidas did, the more he was liable to foul up.

The quitting whistle made the young Negro jerk as if he’d sat on a nail. “Thank God, I can get out of here,” he said, and proceeded to do just that, moving faster than he had out on the floor.

Pinkard followed more slowly. He was just as tired as he would have been had Leonidas stayed home with an ice bag or whatever his preferred hangover cure was. He hadn’t had to do quite so much as he would have had Leonidas stayed home, but being careful for two was hard work.

When he got back to his house, he built up the fire in the stove, sliced a few potatoes, and set them to frying in lard in a black iron skillet likely made from metal worked at the Sloss foundry. They’d go nicely with the pork roast Emily had put in the oven over a low fire before she went off to work. It wasn’t really cooking, he told himself, only a way to save time and have supper ready sooner.

Emily came in about twenty minutes after he did. “Smelled those potatoes outside, comin’ up the walk,” she said. “They always smell so good like that, give me some of my appetite back.”

“You haven’t hardly been eating enough to keep a bird alive,” Pinkard said. He took the potatoes off the stove so they wouldn’t burn while he was kissing his wife. He wondered if she was finally in a family way, only not far along enough to be sure. She was tired all the time, she hadn’t been eating well, and he’d noticed at breakfast how sallow she was.

He took another look at her in the evening sunlight pouring through the kitchen window. She wasn’t just sallow—her skin was downright yellow. “Honey, what the dickens is the matter with you?” he demanded, and heard the alarm clanging in his voice.

“What do you mean, what’s the matter with me?” Emily said.

He held her hand up in a sunbeam. It looked all the more yellow against his own rough, red, scarred skin. “I mean you’re only a couple steps this way from bein’ the color of a baby chick, that’s what.”

“Oh, that,” his wife answered. “I didn’t even hardly notice. It happens to a lot of the girls who work around the smokeless powder like me. It does somethin’ to your liver, blamed if I know what, but it makes you yellow that way. Like I say, some of the girls are almost lemon color.”

“Does it get better?” Jeff demanded.

“Oh, yeah, it does,” Emily said casually. “When somebody gets sick—not just yellow, I mean, but really sick—they move her to another section of the plant for a while, till she gets over it. We haven’t had but a couple of people come down that bad.”

“Oh.” Pinkard was about to shout at her, to demand that she quit her job and come back home where she belonged. The words died unspoken. People got killed every year at the Sloss works, and had been getting killed there long before the war pushed everybody up into a higher gear. He remembered poor Sid Williamson. Emily and her comrades were making munitions for the CSA. The country depended on them, hardly less than it did on the courage and tenacity of the Confederate soldiers.

“It’ll be all right, darlin’,” Emily said. “Now why don’t you go sit down? I’ll finish doin’ up the potatoes and bring you your supper.”

Jeff went and sat down. His wife had the right way of looking at things, and he couldn’t very well complain about it. He had to hope her supervisors or foremen or whatever they called them there were paying attention to what they were doing. From what she’d said, it sounded as if they were.

When she came in with a full plate for him, he asked anxiously, “This color you’re getting, it will go away if you stop doin’ what you’re doin’, right?”

She nodded. “I’ve seen it happen with some of the other girls, the ones they had to move away from the powder. But this here, what I’ve got, it ain’t hardly nothin’. And besides”—she cocked her head at a saucy angle and stuck out her hip—“ain’t you got a yen for a high-yellow gal?”

He’d just taken his first mouthful, and almost choked on it. Men told smoking-car and after-supper stories about Negro women with a lot of white blood in them. They were supposed to provide some of the fanciest stock in the fanciest sporting houses all over the CSA. Jeff didn’t know anything about fancy sporting houses, not from experience. Some of the stories about high-yellow women were pretty fancy all by themselves, though.

He tried to sound severe: “The way you do talk.” He couldn’t do it; he started laughing. So did Emily. He said, “Gal I got a yen for is you. An’ if I say that after the day I put in, you better know it’s the truth.”

“I like that,” Emily said. “I feel the same way about you.” She’d always been a bold-talking woman. A lot of men, Pinkard supposed, wouldn’t have liked that. He didn’t understand why. As far as he was concerned, thinking about it and talking about it were almost as much fun as doing it.

After supper, he dried pots and dishes, as he’d been doing for a while. No sooner had he put the last plate back in the cupboard than Emily said, “You are the helpingest man. That’s another reason I love you.”

“Is that a fact?” He still didn’t quite know himself how he felt about doing women’s work. He never told anybody at the foundry he did it, for fear people would say he was henpecked. Emily usually didn’t say much about it, either, maybe to keep him from worrying his own mind. Now that she had said it, he felt obliged to answer gruffly: “You know why I’m doin’ this, don’t you?”

“Why, dear, I haven’t got the faintest idea.” Her smile and her voice and the way she stood all conspired to make a liar out of her. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Instead of telling her—or rather, instead of telling her with words—he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. She squealed and beat at his shoulders, but she was laughing while she did it. Getting out of his own clothes was the work of a moment. Getting her out of hers required more complicated unbuttonings, unhookings, unlacings. His hands were big and clumsy, but he managed.

He scraped a match afire and lighted a kerosene lamp on the nightstand by the bed. The light it gave was ruddier than sunlight; by it, he could hardly tell Emily’s skin had changed color. He didn’t care. That wasn’t why he’d lighted it. “You are one
fine
-lookin’ woman,” he told his wife. The words came thick from his throat.

“And what do you propose to do about that?” she asked. He reached out for her and showed her, again without words.

Afterwards, with her curled up, head on his shoulder, both of them drifting off toward sleep, he wondered if Fanny Cunningham had listened to the bedsprings creaking. He and Bedford had teased each other about that every now and again, heading off toward work of a morning. If Fanny heard it now, though, it had to remind her that her husband wasn’t there. Pinkard hoped Bedford was all right. He hadn’t heard anything different, but what did that prove? Not enough.

“Might be my turn next,” he muttered; conscription had scooped more white men out of the Sloss works over the past couple of weeks.

“What’s that, honey?” Emily asked drowsily. “You say somethin’?”

“No,” he said, and she fell asleep. Eventually, he did, too.

Herman Bruck’s face twisted in annoyance. “Why don’t you want to go to the play with me tonight?” he asked in a low voice, doing his best not to draw the notice of anyone else at the Socialist Party office.

“I just don’t, Herman,” Flora Hamburger told him. “When I’m done with work, I’m tired. What I want to do is go home and rest, nothing else.” That wasn’t the entire reason, but it was polite and true, as far as it went.

Bruck, as usual, did not know how to take no for an answer. “But it’s one of Gordin’s best,” he exclaimed. “It has the most powerful arguments against the war I’ve seen anywhere.”

“I’m already against the war,” she reminded him. “I don’t need any fresh arguments to be against it. What educates the proletariat is liable to bore me.”

“But it shows the effect of the war on the poor, on the working classes,” he persisted. “You’ll find things you can borrow and get use of here.”

Flora exhaled. Bruck was drawn to her, and had trouble realizing she was not drawn to him in return. She’d done her best to avoid being rude; after all, whether she went out with him or not, they had to work together. Instead of sharply telling him to go away and stop bothering her, she answered. “I can see the effect on my own family, thank you very much. My sister married to a soldier, my brothers both turning into militarists and liable to go through conscription as soon as they get old enough…I was against this war before it was declared, remember.”

“Do you have to keep throwing that in my face?” he said angrily. “Maybe you were even right. I don’t know. But if the United States win this war and we’re seen as opposing it, we won’t win an election anywhere in the country for the next twenty years. People will vote for the Republicans before they vote for us.”

“I don’t know about that,” Flora said. “I don’t know about that at all. With so many dead, with so many maimed, even winning this war won’t be enough to make anyone glad we fought it.”

“Write that down!” Bruck exclaimed. “It’s a good propaganda point, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else.” He swung from suitor to political animal like a weathervane in a shifting wind.

Flora preferred him as political animal. There his instincts were good, which she would not have said about him as a suitor. She did write down the idea. “We should let it come from someone who isn’t operating out of New York City,” she said. “The Roosevelt propaganda machine has made New York Socialists pariahs, as far as the rest of the country is concerned.”

“That’s not right,” Bruck said. “It’s not fair.” He calmed down. “But it is real, no doubt about that. We’ll manage. Roosevelt can’t censor everything we do, no matter how much he wishes he could.”