Liberating Atlantis (51 page)

“You drink enough of it, and it’ll get to you any which way,” Frederick said.

“Well, yeah, but . . .” Lorenzo sighed. “You know what I want now? I want the scale of the snake that bit me, that’s what. Got any?”

“Not in here,” Frederick said.

“I’m gonna go get me some, then.” Lorenzo turned back toward the tent flap.

“Take it easy this time,” Frederick warned.

“Yes, Mother,” the copperskin said once more. He added, “I pour down that much shit two days in a row, I’m liable to wake up dead tomorrow morning.”

“Doesn’t stop some people,” Frederick said. More than a few of the people it didn’t stop were copperskins.

But Lorenzo said, “I bet Stafford’s lookin’ for the scale of the snake right now, too. Like I say, he’s quite a fella.” Away he went, muttering a low-voiced curse at the bright sunshine outside.

“Quite a fella,” Frederick echoed. He wished he did have something strong inside the tent now. He didn’t feel like getting drunk, but he sure could have used a knock.

 

Things were going better than Leland Newton had dreamt they could. His colleague from Cosquer had stuck to his agreement that the slaves in the USA would have to be freed. Newton hadn’t really expected that. He knew Stafford had got head-over-heels drunk after agreeing, but he hadn’t thought even getting drunk would make him go on.

Go on Stafford did, though. Something might have happened
while
he was drunk. If it had, the Consul from Cosquer didn’t want to talk about it. Newton had probed a couple of times, as discreetly as he knew how. He wasn’t discreet enough. Stafford rebuffed every query.

Newton did notice Stafford and Lorenzo the copperskin eyeing each other whenever the two sides met in the tumbledown tavern. They still differed, often loudly, but they didn’t seem ready—no, eager—to go at each other with knives any more. Newton asked Stafford about that, too.

“Oh, he’s a rotten copperskin, but he’s not such a bad fellow,” the other Consul answered.

“You never said anything like
that
before,” Newton observed.

Stafford only shrugged. “If we’re going to make this work, we need to make it work,” he replied, and Newton couldn’t very well quarrel with that.

Agreeing that Negroes and copperskins needed to be free turned out to be the easy part of the bargain. Agreeing on what that freedom meant and how far it should stretch proved much harder.

Frederick Radcliff knew what he wanted. “If we’re gonna be equal, we gotta be
equal
,” he said, over and over again. “Anything a white man can do, a black man or a copperskin has to be able to do. If you can vote, we can vote. If you can make contracts, we can make contracts. If you go to school, we go to school with you. We especially need to go to school, on account of you people wouldn’t let us do that for so long.”

That
especially
made Consul Stafford stir. “If you want to be equal, you shouldn’t get to claim you especially deserve to do something.”

Radcliff looked back at him. “Haven’t you been saying we especially can’t marry white folks?”

Stafford turned red. “Miscegenation is contrary to nature.”

“Who told
you
?” the leader of the insurrection retorted. “Sure never bothers white men when they feel like laying colored women. If you don’t believe me, you oughta ask my grandfather.”

That made Stafford turn redder. “There’s a difference,” he mumbled.

“How come?” Lorenzo asked him. “Miscegenation either way, ain’t it? Don’t matter whether a white man sticks it in or a white woman gets it stuck into her.”

“You are crude, sir,” Newton told him. His own ears felt as if they were on fire—he wasn’t used to such blunt talk.

“Fucking is crude,” Lorenzo answered. “Don’t need fancy clothes to do it in. Hell, clothes just get in the way.”

Newton did his best to turn the subject: “Maybe we can make a bargain. If you give up the right to intermarry, we can consider granting you preferential access to schooling.”

“Yes. That might be possible.” Stafford almost fell over himself agreeing. He didn’t like the idea of educated Negroes and copperskins in the USA. But he liked the idea of their walking down the aisle with white women even less. That was what politics was all about: yielding something you didn’t care for so you wouldn’t have to accept something you really couldn’t stand.

The proposition made Frederick Radcliff and Lorenzo hesitate, anyhow. They put their heads together and argued in low voices. At last, Radcliff said, “Let’s talk some more in the mornin’, if that’s all right by you. We got to take this back to our people, see how they feel about it.”

“Fair enough,” Newton said before Stafford could respond. The other Consul didn’t object. Newton hadn’t thought he would: Stafford might recognize the need for these bargaining sessions, but that didn’t mean he cared for them.

After Radcliff and Lorenzo had left, Stafford turned to Newton and asked, “How would you like your sister or your daughter marrying a nigger?”

“I wouldn’t like it much,” Newton answered honestly. “I don’t think any of the women would like the notion very much, either. I doubt whether many white women would. That’s why I hope the insurrectionists will give up their claim to intermarriage in exchange for schooling.”

“Hmp. You’ve got some sense, anyhow. Who would have thought so?” Stafford managed a crooked grin.

“May I speak to this point?” Colonel Sinapis asked.

Newton and Stafford both eyed him in surprise. Neither intermarriage nor education had much to do with soldiering, which was his province. But Newton said, “By all means, Colonel,” and Stafford nodded.

“Thank you, your Excellencies,” Sinapis said. “In Europe we have only a handful of copperskins and Negroes—not enough for people to get excited about. What we have instead is a great plenty of Jews.”

“We have some here, too,” Newton said. “We treat them more or less like any other white men.” Consul Stafford nodded again. Newton finished, “My secretary, Mr. Ricardo, is a Jew, and a very able man.”

“I have seen what you do here. Even in your army you have some officers who are Jews—not many, but some. In Europe, this would never happen.” By the way the colonel sounded, he approved of the European practice. But he went on, “I understand why this is so, too. You have not so many Jews here. And you have so much dislike for colored people, not much for Jews is left over.”

“That’s an . . . interesting way of looking at things,” Consul Newton said uncomfortably. It made more sense than he wished it did.

“But what’s your point, Colonel?” Stafford asked.

“Ah. My point, yes.” Before coming to it, Balthasar Sinapis made a small production of lighting a cigar. Once it was drawing well, he went on, “In my lifetime, European laws against intermarriage with Jews have mostly fallen into disuse. Some people said the sky would fall or the Antichrist would come after this happened, but the world still goes on as it always did. Maybe things would turn out the same way here.”

“Maybe they would,” Newton said thoughtfully. “We can hope so, anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t bet anything I wasn’t ready to lose,” Stafford said. “Marrying Jews, at least you’re marrying money. Marrying a nigger . . .” His disgusted look told what he thought of that.

“No one would
make
anybody marry someone of a different color,” Newton said. “The question is whether it ought to be legally possible.”

“I know what the question is,” Stafford replied. “I know what the answer ought to be, too.”

“When you make a treaty to settle a war, you do not always get everything you want,” Colonel Sinapis said.

“I understand that. But I’d like to get some of what I want,” Consul Stafford said.

“So would the Negroes and copperskins,” Newton reminded him. Stafford’s expression said he didn’t need—or, more likely, didn’t want—reminding.

 

Every time Frederick Radcliff walked into the tumbledown tavern to talk with the white Consuls and colonel, he felt like a trainer sticking his head into a tiger’s mouth. He’d come away safe every time up till now, but things only had to go wrong once and. . . .

He felt doubly nervous walking in there this particular morning. It must have shown, because Lorenzo said, “Don’t worry. This is what we decided. If the white folks don’t like it, that’s their hard luck.”

Frederick shook his head. “Liable to be everybody’s hard luck. That’s what I’m worried about.”

“We whipped them,” Lorenzo said. “Let them sweat.”

With an effort, Frederick made himself nod. The white men sat there waiting for him and Lorenzo to join them. Frederick didn’t trust any of them. Consul Stafford was an open enemy. Consul Newton was less of one, at least openly, but Frederick wondered what he thought down deep of Negroes and copperskins. As for Colonel Sinapis . . . Maybe it was Frederick’s imagination, but he thought the foreign officer looked down on the two Consuls almost as much as they looked down on the uprisen slaves they faced. That puzzled Frederick. Did coming from Europe count for so much? He thought Colonel Sinapis thought it did.

“Good morning,” Newton said as Frederick and Lorenzo sat down across the table from him. “What have you decided about my proposal?”

After a deep breath, Frederick answered, “Sorry, but we aren’t going to take it.”

Newton looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Are you sure? Many—even most—of your people would benefit from education. Only a handful would take advantage of intermarrying, and chances are some of them would end up sorry they’d ever tried it.”

“You may be right. You likely are. But that isn’t the point,” Frederick said.

“Oh? Suppose you tell me what is, then.” Newton’s voice was light and clear, as usual, but the Consul was provoked enough to show the iron underneath, which he seldom did.

Frederick took another deep breath. He needed one. He tried to hold his own voice steady as he answered, “Point is, if we’re gonna be equal with white folks, we got to be equal every way there is. We deserve to get schooled same as white folks if we’re equal. And we deserve the right to marry no matter what color somebody is. If we say you can take that away from us, what are we sayin’? We’re sayin’ you’re better’n we are, an’ all the talk about bein’ equal is just that—talk.”

The white men glowered at him and Lorenzo. Lorenzo glowered right back. Frederick only sat there waiting. Slowly, Consul Newton said, “It’s hard to negotiate with you if you give us nothing to negotiate about.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s why we rose up,” Frederick said. “How can you negotiate about freedom? Either a man’s free, or he ain’t. If we got to be free, we got to be all the way free.”

“A matter of principle.” Consul Stafford sounded less scornful than he often did.

“That’s right. A matter of principle.” Frederick nodded. The white man had come out with what he was trying to say.

“We have our own principles, you know,” Stafford said.

“Sure you do.” That was Lorenzo, answering before Frederick could speak. “You can buy us and sell us and lay our women whenever you’ve got a stiff dick you don’t know what to do with. Only you can’t, not any more. That’s how come we rose up, too.”

Stafford didn’t explode, the way Frederick thought he might. All he said was, “Getting this past the Senate will be harder than you seem to think.”

“Tell ’em you’re doing what’s right,” Frederick said. “It’s the truth.”

“As if
that
matters,” Leland Newton muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.

“It better matter,” Frederick said. “If it don’t, we got to start over. An’ startin’ over means the Free Republic of Atlantis an’ lots more shootin’.”

“I told you before—we can start shooting again if you push us hard enough. You won’t like what happens if we do,” Stafford said.

“You won’t like it, either,” Lorenzo promised, and exchanged more glares with the Consul from Cosquer. But they weren’t the same kind of glares as they had been before the two leaders drank together on the overgrown streets of Slug Hollow. Then, Stafford might have been scowling at a dangerous dog, Lorenzo eyeing a fierce red-crested eagle. Now each recognized the other as a man. That much was plain. Whether such recognition improved things was, unfortunately, a different question.

“We rose up on account of freedom,” Frederick said. “If we could’ve got it without fighting, we would’ve done that. But it wasn’t about to happen—you folks know it wasn’t, and you know why, too.”

“Do you see the day, then, when one of the Consuls of the United States of Atlantis will be a Negro and the other a copperskin?” Jeremiah Stafford didn’t sound as if he saw that day, but he didn’t—quite—sound as if he were mocking Frederick, either.

Since he didn’t, Frederick judged he deserved a serious answer: “Not any time soon. More white folks than there are colored, and people just naturally vote for their own. But maybe the day will come when nobody cares what color a man is, as long as he’s a good man and he knows what he’s doin’.”

“A noble sentiment,” Consul Newton said softly.

“Well, so it is,” Stafford agreed. He looked across the table at Frederick. “You’d better not hold your breath waiting for that day, though.”

Frederick looked back at him. “No need to worry about that, your Excellency. I don’t aim to.”

“I don’t care if a copperskin gets to be Consul,” Lorenzo said. “What I care about is whether it’s against the law for him to try. Long as he
can
try—long as nobody ties him to the whipping post and stripes his back for even thinking about it—I won’t fuss. Same with marryin’ out of your color: I don’t reckon it’ll happen real often, but there shouldn’t be a law against it.”

“That’s right,” Frederick said. “That’s just right. That’s how it ought to be.”

“Easy enough for you to say so, out here in the middle of nowhere,” Consul Stafford said. “As I told you a little while ago, it won’t be so easy to convince the Senate in New Hastings.”