American Front (12 page)

As butler, Scipio was of course a house servant, with quarters within Marshlands for himself. But, not least because he’d been chief cook before becoming butler, he kept up a closer relation with the outside Negroes than most servants of similar station would have done. He knew how much the larder depended on their ingenuity and goodwill: if they said hunting and fishing weren’t going well, how could he prove they were lying? But the outside food bill would go up, and he’d catch the devil for that from the mistress.

Lightning bugs flashed on and off as he made his way out to the rows of Negro cottages behind Marshlands. He had every right to make the trip, but glanced back over his shoulder anyhow. It wasn’t the mistress he thought was staring at him: it was Marshlands itself. The three-story Georgian mansion had been sitting here for more than a hundred years, and seemed to have a life of its own, an awareness of what went on inside and around it. The mistress would have called that superstitious nonsense. Scipio didn’t care what she called it. He knew what he knew.

Perhaps, today, he also still felt the presence of Woodrow Wilson, though the president had gone back to St. Matthews to reboard his train and continue on down to Charleston. His mistress associated with any number of prominent people—which meant he did, too, not that they paid him much attention. He was, after all, only a Negro.

A groom coming out of the barn stared at him through deepening twilight. “Evenin’,” he said, nodding. “Almos’ didn’t rec’nize you—gettin’ dark earlier nowadays.”

“I is still me,” Scipio answered. Wherever white folks could hear him, he talked like an educated white man. That was what the mistress wanted, and what she wanted, she got. Among his own people, he spoke as he had since the day he first began forming words. He hadn’t made a mistake switching back and forth between his two dialects in more than ten years.

Candles and kerosene lamps lighted the Negro cottages. Marshlands had had electric lights for a long time now. The mistress had plenty of money for paintings, but for wires for the help? Scipio shook his head. If he held his breath waiting, he’d be blue under his black.

Some of the little brick cottages were already dark. If you worked in the fields sunup to sundown, you needed all the rest you could get sundown to sunup. But you needed a little time to live, too. From out of open windows and doors flung wide against the muggy heat came snatches of song, cries of joy or dismay as dice went one way or the other, and the racket of children. More children made more racket outside, running after one another and pretending to be soldiers. None of them ever admitted he’d been killed. Scipio shook his head again. Too bad the real war didn’t work out that way.

Here and there, a mother or a father taught children to read, mostly from books and magazines and newspapers the white folks had thrown away. Scipio, who’d been in his teens when manumission came, remembered the days when teaching a Negro to read had been against the law. He’d managed to pick up the knowledge anyway, as had a good many of his friends—too many things were being printed to keep them all out of Negroes’ hands. Black literacy was legal now, but South Carolina still had no school for Negroes.

Scipio walked past Jonah’s cottage, and was surprised to find no light burning in there. Jonah and his woman Letitia were always ones for singing and playing and dancing and carrying on. When he got to Cassius’ cabin, though, the door was open and light streamed out into the night.

“Is you in there?” he called: good manners, by the standards of the field hands. The mistress’ standards were something else again. Scipio moved between two sets of etiquette as readily as he did between dialects. If he ever thought about how he did what he did, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it any more.

“No, ain’t nobody to home here,” Cassius answered. That drew raucous laughter from whoever else wasn’t in there with him.

Snorting, Scipio went inside. If you took Cassius seriously, you were in trouble. He’d pull your leg till it came off in his hands, then walk off and leave you to hop home without it. But he was also the best hunter on the plantation, and that had been so for a long time. If you wanted something special for the larder, as Scipio did tonight, he was the man to talk to, even if you had to take your chances on everything else.

Now Cassius threw a hand up before his eyes. “Lord, Kip, you gwine blind we, the light shinin’ off them brass buttons that way.” Again, his crew of rascals and easy women laughed with him. The only thing that surprised Scipio about the inside of the cottage was that he didn’t see any quart whiskey bottles on the mantel or sitting atop one of the rickety tables—or clamped in somebody’s fist.

Cassius and the rest of the male field hands wore unbleached cotton shirts and trousers with no shape to them, nothing like Scipio’s fancy suit of clothes—though better suited to this breathless heat. A couple of them had bright bandannas on their heads or wrapped around their necks to give themselves a spot of color. The women, by contrast, were in eye-searing calicoes and plaids and paisleys, with no shade of red too hot, no green too vibrant.

“You done been talking wid de president,” Cassius said. “You don’ reckon you too good to talk wid de likes of we now?”

“I talks wid de president,” Scipio agreed with a weary sigh. “De president, he don’t talk wid me. You hear what I say?”

Cassius nodded. That was how things worked for blacks in a white man’s world. “So—what kin I do fo’ you this day, Kip?” he asked. “You come here, you always want somethin’.” It could have been an accusation, but it came out like a good-natured joke, which relieved Scipio, for it happened to be true.

In spite of that invitation, coming straight out with what you wanted was rude. “Where Jonah?” Scipio asked. “I see he cabin dark, an’ he usually carry on damn near much as you do.”

“Jonah?” Cassius shook his head. “He ain’t here no more, not he. He leff this afternoon. Gone fo’ good, I reckon.”

“He
leff
? What you mean, Cass, he leff? That nigger pick cotton here since he big enough to do it, an’ Letty, too.”

“Not no mo’,” Cassius said. “He say he light out fo’ Columbia, he work in one o’ them factories makin’ shells and things.”

Scipio stared. “They don’ let no niggers work in they factories. Those is jobs fo’ white folks, nobody else.”

“Whole powerful lot o’ white folks is gone to be sojers,” Cassius pointed out. “But they still got to have they shells to shoot, o’ the damnyankees kick they butts. Nigger kin do the job, nigger gonna get the job. They don’ pay he like he was white folks, so the factory bosses, they happy, an’ Jonah, he happy, too, ’cause they do pay more’n he make here. An’ Letty, she gwine try an’ fin’ work at one of they tex-tile plants takin’ care o’ the cotton
after
it picked ’stead o’ befo’.”

“Mought do that my own self,” said one of Cassius’ friends, a big man called Island for no reason Scipio had ever been able to learn. “Mo’ money fo’ less work sound right good.”

“Mo’ money, yeah,” Cassius said. “Less work?” He snorted. “When you ever know white folks give mo’ money ’cep’ fo’ mo’ work, an’ heaps o’ times not then, neither.”

Island thought about that, then nodded. But he said, “Hard to think o’ anything bein’ mo’ work’n growin’ cotton.”

Scipio, who knew how lucky he was to have escaped the fields, also nodded. Plenty of field hands would think the same way; he was sure of that. Jonah and Letitia wouldn’t be the only ones to head off the plantation for the factory. He was sure of that, too. And how would the mistress like it? Not much, he figured. Could she do anything about it? He wasn’t sure about that. She was a power, but not the only one in the state, not by a long shot.

Marshlands, though, wasn’t the state. Here, for those who remained here, her word was still law. Scipio said, “Mistress want a couple gobblers for she dinner party tomorrow night. Kin you get ’em, Cass?”

“Reckon I kin,” the hunter answered. His eyes, cool and confident, flicked to the shotgun above the mantel. “Yeah, reckon I kin.”

Scipio’s eyes also went to the gun and the mantel. On the length of pine wood sat a pamphlet or little book, upside down and open. “What this?” Scipio asked, and reached for it, expecting to find a religious tract. And sure enough, the bright blue paper cover said,
DR. GILRAY’S COLLECTION OF CHRISTIAN HYMNS, PRINTED IN RICHMOND, CSA, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD
1912.

Idly, he picked it up, wondering what hymn Cassius, who’d never struck him as pious, was learning. At that same moment, Island slammed the door to the cottage shut. Scipio hardly noticed. He was staring down at the page to which the pamphlet had been opened. The printing was as bad and smudgy as he’d expected. The words were anything but what he’d expected:
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the
…

He noticed how quiet it had grown inside the cottage. He looked up from the page and saw Cassius and Island and the rest of the people who’d been in there with him, and how they were all staring at him. He didn’t like what he saw in their eyes. Those intent looks frightened him even more than the book he held in his hands, and that wasn’t easy.

“Do Jesus!” he said softly. “The mistress find out you got this, she not gwine whip you. She gwine
hang
you. Ain’t gonna bother with no law, ain’t gonna bother with no cou’t. Niggers what spread revolutionary propaganda”—he brought out those two words in his educated voice, as he’d never imagined saying them in the dialect he’d been born speaking—“they gots to die.”

“We knows,” Cassius said, just as softly. “So they kills we fast ’stead of slow. So what? White folks, they in this big war. They ain’t got time to pay no attention to we, we who is doin’ they work fo’ they. One fine day, they ain’t ’spectin’ it nohow, the revolution come. It a whole new world then.”

“Come the revolution,” one of the women—Cherry, her name was—said with a longing croon in her voice, the way a lot of women sounded in the clapboard Baptist church of a Sunday morning, praying for Jesus’ second coming. “Come the revolution, this here gwine be a
different
country, it sho’ will.”

Something glittered in Island’s hand—a knife. Scipio watched it with horrified fascination. He gathered himself to fight, knowing how bad his chances were. Island glanced over at Cassius. “We got to shut he up. He a
house
nigger, tell everything he know to the mistress.”

Somehow—perhaps by magic—Cassius had produced a knife, too. Almost meditatively, he said, “Kip here, he have the chance to do me wrong plenty times. He never do it oncet, not even. He even take the blame hisself when huntin’ go bad. Maybe he keep a secret here, too. Kip, what you think o’ that book you holdin’?”

“I think niggers rise up against white folks, we get licked,” Scipio answered truthfully. “I think I wish I wasn’t so curious.” How long had Karl Marx been here at Marshlands? The mistress didn’t have the first notion Red revolution was simmering under her nose. Scipio hadn’t the first notion, either. What was that white poet’s line?
Ignorance is bliss
, that was it. That white folks had known what he was talking about.

Cassius said, “Mos’ times, sho’, we get licked. Ain’t so many guns away from the border, now. Ain’t so many white folks to tote ’em, neither. We rise up, they gonna use they army ’gainst we? Damnyankees tromp they into the mud, they try that.” He wasn’t arguing; he’d already made up his mind, and might have been a preacher talking about the Gospel. His gaze sharpened. “Now, tell me true, Kip—you gwine say about this to the mistress?”

“Not a word,” Scipio declared. He thought about adding some strong oath to that, but in the end held his tongue. It was likelier to make Cassius and the others think he was lying than to make them believe him.

“I still say we stick he,” Island said.

But Cassius shook his head. “I don’ think he talk. He pay if he do, on account of we ain’t the onliest ones here, an’ he don’t know who all we is. An’ mistress, she don’ know ’bout, she don’ care ’bout no revolution. All she care about them crazy paintings, look like ’splosion in a shingle factory. She don’ sniff roun’, way some masters do. She start changin’ she mind ’bout that, Kip, he tell us. Ain’t that so, Kip?”

“That so,” Scipio agreed through dry lips. Too much had happened too fast today. Having President Wilson come to Marshlands was a surprise. Knowing Karl Marx had come to Marshlands was a shock. Finding out Marx had come to Marshlands had almost proved deadly.

But he would live. His legs swayed under him in reaction and relief. Then he realized how he would be living from here on out.
Playing both ends against the middle
didn’t begin to describe it. A phrase a preacher had used a few weeks before fit better.
Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea
: that was how he felt, all right.

Corporal Chester Martin paused behind an oak to spy out the ground ahead. Somewhere not far ahead was the Confederate strongpoint his squad had been sent out to find. In this miserable country, they were liable to find it by blundering onto it, in which case none of them would be able to bring the news back to the artillery so the boys with the red piping on their hats could give it a good walloping.

“I think God had His mind on something else when He was making this part of Virginia,” he muttered under his breath.

One of his privates sprawled beneath a bush close enough to let him hear that mutter. Roger Hodges chuckled, almost inaudibly. “You ought to know better’n that,” he answered in an upcountry twang that said he’d been born not far away. “God ain’t had nothin’ to do with it. This here part of the world is the Devil’s business, and no mistake.”

“Won’t get any arguments from me,” Martin answered. “Nothin’ but up-and-down mountains and trees and brush and little creeks that don’t go anywhere. The couple-three farms we found, they look like they’re right out of Daniel Boone. And the people talk even funnier than you do, Roger. Hell of a place to try and fight a war, that’s all I got to say.”