Liberating Atlantis (2 page)

With a sigh, Frederick said, “Hate to climb into the monkey suit today. Gonna roast my bones for the sake of swank.”

Helen looked at him. “You sooner go out and weed amongst the cotton plants? How’d you like to swing a hoe all day?”

“Oh, I’ll wear the monkey suit,” Frederick said, resignation in his voice. “But I don’t have to like it.”

“If the other choice is worse, you better like the one you got,” Helen said. She was in no way an educated woman—she could barely read, and could not even sign her name—but she had her share of common sense and then some.

Frederick, stubborn and more hot-tempered, had just enough sense to realize Helen had more. He sighed again. “Reckon you’re right,” he said, and leaned over to give her a kiss.

She brought up a hand and rubbed first her cheek and then his. “Better shave, too—you’re all scratchy. Miz Clotilde, she’ll yell at you if she got to tell you that.”

Once more, it wasn’t as if she were wrong. “I shaved yesterday,” Frederick protested feebly. Helen just looked at him. He let out another resigned sigh and scraped his cheeks and chin smooth with a straight razor. He had a heavier beard than most Negro men did, and as for copperskins. . . . That probably came down from his white grandfather. Like the rest of his inheritance from Victor Radcliff, it did him no good at all.

He kissed Helen again after he finished. She smiled and nodded. That was worth a little something, anyway.

Then he put on the white shirt with the tight collar, the cravat, the black wool trousers, the black wool jacket, the black socks, and the tight black shoes that pinched his feet. “Don’t you look fine!” Helen said.

Sweat was already running down his face. “Maybe I do,” he said, “but I sure won’t be sorry to take this stuff off again come the night.” He left it there. His woman was right: wearing the monkey suit had to be an improvement on a field hand’s shapeless, colorless homespun.

An early-rising woodpecker’s drumming punctuated the dawn stillness. The cooks already had coffee boiling in the kitchen. Frederick and Helen gulped big, snarling cups only partly tamed by sugar. A cook gave them bowls of cornmeal mush and chopped salt pork. A couple of young colored maids were in there eating, too. Soon they’d be off on one last orgy of sweeping and dusting. Everything today had to be
right
.

Feathers flew in the kitchen—literally. Black hands plucked chickens, ducks, a Terranovan turkey, and a couple of oil thrushes the master had shot in the woods the day before. The worm-eating Atlantean birds made mighty fine eating. They couldn’t fly, and they had no great fear of man. They were so tasty, and so stupid, they grew ever scarcer.

In a way, Frederick pitied them. How could a man who dared not run away not pity a flightless bird? Pity them as he would, though, he ate of them whenever he got the chance.

And if that doesn’t suit me to be a slaveowner, may I be damned if I know what would
, Frederick thought. He poured himself more coffee.

Outside, another rhythmic thunking noise joined the wood-pecker’s percussive syncopation. One of the field hands was chopping firewood. As Frederick poured down the strong, brown brew—darker than he was, if not a great deal—he nodded to himself. No matter how warm the day, the kitchens would go through a great plenty of pine and cypress today.

He’d heard white men newly come from England complain about the lack of hardwoods. Oak and maple and hickory, they said, burned longer and hotter than Atlantean lumber. He hadn’t noticed that the lack made them pack up and go back where they came from. All it did was give them something to complain about. He understood that. Everybody needed something of the sort.

A slave, by the nature of things, had plenty to complain about. The only trouble was, complaining didn’t do him any good.

Clotilde Barford swept into the kitchen in a rustle of silk. The dress she wore was a pretty good copy of what had been almost the height of fashion in Paris eight or nine years earlier. She wasn’t yet attired for receiving company. Before her guests arrived, she would put on a pretty good copy of what had been almost the height of fashion in Paris year before last. That would be plenty to let her keep up with the other women.

Now she was dressed for cracking the whip. “Get moving, you lazy niggers!” she snapped. Almost all the house slaves
were
Negroes; whites trusted them further than copperskins. That shamed Frederick more than it pleased him. The mistress didn’t care one way or the other. “Sitting around lollygagging! The nerve of you people!”

Frederick glanced over at Helen. Helen’s eyes had already swung his way. They carefully didn’t smile. The mistress was in a state, all right. She got this way every time her friends and neighbors gathered here. The abuse mostly didn’t mean anything. Mostly.

She pointed a pale, pudgy forefinger at Frederick, aiming it as Henry Barford must have aimed his shotgun at the oil thrushes. “Everything better be perfect when they get here. Perfect, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He scooped up his last few spoonfuls of mush double-quick so she could see he was hurrying. Like any sensible slave, he moved no faster than he had to. Why should he, when he was working for someone else’s benefit rather than his own?

Sometimes, though, you had no choice. If the mistress or the master stood over you, you had to step lively. And Clotilde was liable to have her beady little blue eyes on him every livelong minute till her gathering proved the triumph she’d known all along it would be—known all along it had better be, anyhow. Frederick took a heroic swallow that drained the coffee mug and almost drowned him. He hurried out of the kitchen. Helen wasn’t more than half a step behind him.

He wondered if the mistress would pursue them. Not yet. She stayed in there and laid down the law to the cooks as if she were Moses and they the children of Israel. Most of them had heard the speech before. Frederick certainly had. That didn’t stop Clotilde Barford from coming out with it again. Stop her? It didn’t even slow her down.

“She does go on,” Helen said.

“And on, and on, and on,” Frederick agreed, rolling his eyes. They both smiled. But they also both spoke in low voices, and neither one of them laughed. You never could tell who might be listening. You never could tell who might be tattling, either.

The house slaves had been scouring the big house—so called in contrast to the overseer’s cottage and the slaves’ shacks—for more than a week now. Wood glowed with oily, strong-smelling polish. The good china had been scrubbed and scrubbed again. Even the silver had been polished, and shone dazzlingly in the sun and more than well enough in the shade.

But, of course, everything had to be done one more time on the day itself. The housemaids bustled around, dusting and shining. They slowed down whenever they didn’t think Frederick could see them. As he feared they might tell on him for saying unkind things about the mistress, so they worried he would tell on them if he caught them slacking. As coal and wood fed a steam engine, so fear and distrust fed the engine of slavery.

“Careful, there!” one maid warned another, who was swiping crystal goblets with a rag. “You drop one of them, it’ll come out of your hide.”

“Don’t I know it?” the other one replied. “Now why don’t you find somethin’ for your own self to do, ’stead of standin’ there playin’ the white man over me?”

Playin’ the white man over me
. Frederick’s mouth twisted. Overseers who were slaves themselves commonly failed, and often ended up hurt or dead. Negroes and copperskins didn’t care to follow orders from their own kind. They thought their fellows who tried to give those orders were getting above their station.

They were right about that. What they didn’t see was that whites who ordered them around were also above
their
station. Whites had more than looks on their side, of course. They had the weight of centuries of tradition behind them. And, if that weight turned out not to be enough, they also had whips and dogs and guns.

With such cheerful reflections spinning inside his head, Frederick nodded respectfully, as he had to nod, to Henry Barford as his owner came down the stairs. “Mornin’, Master Henry,” he said.

“Mornin’, Fred,” Barford replied. He was dressed in a shirt that had seen better days and trousers that had seen better years—they were out at both knees. He hadn’t bothered putting on shoes or stockings. He often didn’t. He seemed happy enough to let his hairy toes enjoy the fresh air. Maybe his wife would talk him into dressing up for her guests. More than likely, he’d stay comfortable and sit this one out with a jug, the way he did most of the time. He caught Frederick’s eye again. “Clotilde’s already in the kitchen checkin’ up on things, is she?”

Even if he hadn’t known her habits, anyone not deaf as a stump would have had no trouble figuring out where she was and what she was doing. Frederick nodded economically. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, she’d better turn Davey loose long enough to sizzle me some bacon and fry up a couple of eggs in the grease, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.” Barford hurried past Frederick. The view from behind showed his pants were out at the seat, too. Frederick couldn’t imagine how much trouble
he’d
get in for wearing such disreputable clothes. No, he could imagine it, much too well. But the master did as he pleased. That was what liberty was all about. Henry Barford took it for granted.

Back in Victor Radcliff’s day, the Proclamation of Liberty had announced to the world that Atlantis was free from England. Had the Atlantean Assembly, convening in the little town of Honker’s Mill, noticed how many people the Proclamation of Liberty left out? Not many of the laws the United States of Atlantis had passed since gave much sign of it.

There had been uprisings, here in the southern parts of Atlantis where slavery remained a legal and moneymaking operation (assuming there were differences between the two). Planters and farmers and white townsfolk put them down with as much brutality as they needed, and a little more besides to give the slaves second thoughts next time. Once or twice, the Atlantean army helped local militias smash revolts. What were the odds the army wouldn’t do the same thing again?

Frederick sighed one more time. You couldn’t win, not if you were colored. You couldn’t even break even—not a chance. And they would hunt you with hounds if you tried to run off to the north, where Negroes and copperskins were free. They weren’t sure to catch you, but they had a pretty good chance.

He’d never had the nerve to flee. Things weren’t
too
bad where he was. He could tell himself they weren’t, anyhow. The top circle of hell wasn’t supposed to be
too
bad, either. Good pagans went there, didn’t they? The only thing they were missing was the presence of God. Frederick nodded to himself. Yes, that about summed things up.

 

The first carriage rattled up to the big house before ten in the morning. A black man in clothes as fancy as Frederick’s drove it. A frozen-faced Negro in an even more splendid getup—he looked ready to hunt foxes—rode behind. When the carriage stopped, he jumped down and opened the door so Veronique Barker could descend.

Like Clotilde Barford, she was from an old French family that had married into the now-dominant English-speaking wave of settlers who’d swarmed south after France lost its Atlantean holdings ninety years before. Henry Barford wasn’t a bad fellow. By everything Frederick had ever heard, Benjamin Barker was a first-class son of a bitch.

Sure enough, Clotilde had changed into her new gown by the time Veronique arrived. The mistress swept down to greet her guest in blue tulle and a cloud of rosewater almost thick enough to see. “So good to have you here, dear!” she trilled. Then she switched to bad French to add, “You look lovely!”

“Oh, so do you, sweetheart,” Veronique answered in the same language, spoken about as well. Frederick could follow them—his own French was on the same level. Here in the southern Atlantean states, most people had at least a smattering, though English gained year by year.

Arm in arm, chattering in the two languages, Clotilde and Veronique went into the big house. Veronique thought nothing of leaving her driver and footman standing there in the hot sun. Frederick’s mistress probably would have been more considerate, but there were no guarantees.

Pointing, Frederick told the driver, “Why don’t you put the carriage under those trees? Horses can graze there if they want, and they won’t cook.”

“I do that,” the driver agreed. “Marcus and me, we won’t cook in the shade, neither.”

“That’s a fact,” said the footman—presumably Marcus.

“Before too long, we’ll bring you out something to eat, something to drink,” Frederick promised.

“Got me somethin’ to drink.” The driver pulled a flask from one of his jacket pockets, then quickly made it disappear before anyone white could see it. “Food’d be mighty good, though. When the white ladies gits together, all the niggers who takes ’em gits together, too.”

“That’s a fact,” Marcus said again. When he reached into
his
pocket, he pulled out a pair of dice instead of a flask. “Me, I aim to head on back to Master Barker’s with some of their money.”

“Good luck,” Frederick said, wondering how much luck would have to do with the dice games ahead. Maybe those were honest ivories. Then again, maybe the footman had reason for his confident smile. Frederick decided he wouldn’t risk any of his small, precious hoard of coins against Marcus.

Odds were he’d be too busy to get the chance even if he wanted it. Here came two more carriages, almost bumping axles as they rolled up the narrow path side by side. They rode that way so the women inside them could talk together. A handkerchief fluttered from a carriage window as one of those women made some kind of point.

Out came Clotilde Barford again to greet the newcomers. The women went in talking a blue streak. They hadn’t even begun on the punch yet—though the guests might have got a head start before leaving home.