The Victorious Opposition (29 page)

Flora did sit. A waitress came over to her and David. They both ordered. The pause meant she didn’t have to call him on what she knew to be an evasion. He was, after all, here at Kaplan’s. He could have come to Socialist Party headquarters once in a while, too. He could have, but he hadn’t.

Politics estranged them. Flora had never thought that could happen in her family, but it had. Her brother had come out of the war a staunch Democrat. It was as if, having been crippled, he didn’t want his wound to have been in vain, and so joined the party that was hardest on the CSA.

Flora reached into the jar across the table, pulled out a pickled tomato, and bit into it. She smiled; the taste and the vinegar tang in the air and the crunch took her back to her childhood. “Can’t get things like this in Dakota, or even down in Philadelphia,” she said.

That won her a grudging smile from David. “No, I don’t suppose you would,” he said, and then fell silent again as the waitress brought his pastrami sandwich and Flora’s corned beef on rye. He sipped from an egg cream, which had neither egg nor cream in it. Flora’s drink was a seltzer with a shpritz of raspberry syrup on top, something else unmatchable outside of New York City.

“Is your family well?” Flora asked.

“Well enough,” he answered. “Amazing how fast children grow.”

She nodded; Joshua had taught her that. She said, “I’m glad—” and then broke off, hoping he would think she’d intended it for a complete sentence. David had feared no one would ever want to marry a one-legged man. She’d started to say she was glad he’d been wrong about that, but hadn’t known how he would take it.

By his tight-lipped smile, he knew where she’d been going. But then he shrugged, visibly setting aside annoyance. He said, “These past couple of years, I see you’ve finally started to understand what nice people the Confederates really are. Better late than never, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“It’s not the Confederate people. It’s the Freedom Party,” Flora said. “Reactionaries have seized control of the apparatus of the state, the same as they have in France.”

David Hamburger rolled his eyes. “I don’t suppose that would have happened if the people hadn’t voted them in, now would it?”

“Well . . .” Flora winced. Her brother’s comment was painfully pungent, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

“Yes. Well,” he said. “Listen, if it comes to a fight we’d better be ready. That’s the big thing I wanted to tell you. We’ve got to, you hear me? Otherwise, this”—he made a fist and hit his artificial leg, which gave back a sound like knocking on a door—“was for nothing, and I don’t think I could stand that.”

“It won’t come to war,” Flora said in genuine alarm. “Not even Hoover thinks it’ll come to war.”

“Hoover’s one of the best men we’ve ever had for getting things done,” David said, “and one of the worst for figuring out what to do. That’s how it looks to me, anyhow. Of course, I’m no political bigwig.
Nu,
am I right or am I
meshuggeh
?”

“You’re a lot of things, but you’re not
meshuggeh
,” Flora answered. He’d summed up Hoover better than most editorial columnists she’d seen. “I still think you worry too much about the CSA, though. They have more
tsuris
than we do.”

“Just because you have
tsuris
doesn’t mean you can’t give it.” David finished his sandwich. He used one hand to help lever himself upright. Taking hold of the cane, he said, “They’ll send you back to Congress in a couple of days. I’m not telling you to listen to me—when did you ever? But keep your eyes open.”

“I always do,” Flora insisted. Her brother didn’t argue. He just walked out of Kaplan’s, with a slow, rolling gait like a drunken sailor’s. That let the knee joint in the artificial leg lock each time he took a step, and kept it from buckling under him. Flora wanted to go after him, but what was the point? They hadn’t had anything in common for years. A sad lunch talking politics proved as much, as if it needed proof.

That evening, she made a speech in a union hall, and got cheered till her ears rang. More loud cheers greeted her after her two speeches the day before the election. She shook hands till her own was swollen and sore—and she knew how to minimize the damage while she did it.

She expected she would win reelection, too. Her district was solidly Socialist; it had gone Democratic for a little while in the despair following the collapse, but then repented of its folly. What she didn’t know—what nobody knew—was whether the country would have its revenge on Herbert Hoover, as it had had its revenge on her husband four years earlier.

Tuesday, November 3, was cold and rainy. Flora went out and voted early, so the reporters and photographers who waited at her polling place could get their stories and pictures into the papers before the polls closed. She knew her Democratic opponent was doing the same thing. This way, their appearances canceled each other out. If she hadn’t come early, he would have grabbed an edge—a small one, but an edge nonetheless.

“I think Smith will whip him,” Hosea Blackford said when Flora came back to their apartment after voting: he was still registered in Dakota, and had cast an absentee ballot. He’d stayed on the sidelines during the campaign. For one thing, his own reputation wouldn’t help either Flora or the Socialist Party. For another, he was getting ever more fragile. He still managed pretty well as long as he stuck close to home. Out in crowds these days, though, he seemed not only frail but also slightly baffled. That worried Flora.

She took her son with her to Socialist Party headquarters for the Fourteenth Ward, then, but not her husband. Most of her family was there, too, although her nephew, Yossel, was serving out his time as a conscript on occupation duty in Canada, and David, as usual, gave the Socialists a wide berth.

Flora was glad Yossel had been sent north rather than down to Houston. That was a running sore that would not heal. Hoover had made a mess of things there, but Flora had no idea what a Socialist president might have done to make things better.

When she came in, Herman Bruck boomed, “Let’s all welcome Congresswoman Hamburger!” He turned red as a bonfire. “Congresswoman Blackford!” he said, blushing still. “But I knew her when she
was
Congresswoman Hamburger.”

He had, too. It was twenty years now—and where had the time gone?—since she’d beaten him for the nomination to this seat when Myron Zuckerman, the longtime incumbent, fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. If that hadn’t happened . . .

With a shake of her head, Flora tried to drive that thought out of her mind. It wasn’t easy. The past couple of years, there’d been a spate of what people called “worlds of if” novels. If the USA had won the War of Secession or the Second Mexican War, if the Negro uprising had succeeded in the CSA, if the Red uprising had succeeded in Russia . . . If, if, if. Dealing with the world as it was was hard enough for most people. Flora didn’t think the “worlds of if” fad would last.

Bruck turned on a wireless set. He got loud music, and then, as he turned the dial, a quiz show. A couple of young women perked up at that, but he kept changing stations till he found one that was giving election returns. “With the polls just closing in New York . . .” the announcer said. A burst of static squelched him.

Another station farther down the dial came in better. It was announcing early returns from Massachusetts. Cheers rang out in the Socialist headquarters when the broadcaster said Smith was leading Hoover three to two. The station switched to an interview with a Boston Democratic leader. “Doesn’t look good for us heah,” the man said in a gravelly, New England–accented voice. “Have to hope Smith and Borah don’t drag the local candidates down too fah.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,” the interviewer said.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Kennedy!” Maria Tresca said. She and Flora grinned at each other. The two of them had been friends for more than twenty years, too. It was partly a matter of living in a largely Jewish district, partly sheer luck, that Flora and not Maria had succeeded in politics.

As soon as Flora heard Al Smith was ahead in Massachusetts, she knew the night would belong to the Socialists. And so it proved. She handily won her own race; her Democratic opponent called before eleven o’clock to throw in the towel. That brought more cheers in the headquarters, though by then everyone was starting to get hoarse. The air was blue with cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke, which helped make throats raw.

President Hoover’s spokesman kept issuing statements along the lines of, “The current trend cannot be overlooked, but the president will not concede the election before he is sure his victory is impossible.”

Herman Bruck pulled out a bottle of champagne, an upper-class touch for the party of the proletariat. He brought Flora a glass—not a fancy flute, but an ordinary water glass. “Here’s to Hoover! His victory is impossible!” he said.

“Alevai, omayn!”
Flora drank. The bubbles tickled her nose.

Bruck had a glass, too. “Did you ever imagine, when we first started here, we would win Powel House, lose it, and win it back?” he asked. “Did you ever imagine you would be First Lady?”

“Don’t be silly.” She shook her head. “How could I? How could anyone?”

He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. People all around them cheered. Flora laughed. She wasn’t so sure Herman had done it just to congratulate her. He’d been sweet on her before she won her first election and went to Philadelphia, even if she hadn’t been sweet on him. Now they’d both been married to other people for years. But he just smiled when she wagged a finger at him, and everyone else laughed and cheered some more. On a night full of victory, she didn’t push it.

VIII

“H
appy New Year, darlin’!” Scipio said to Bathsheba. “Do Jesus! I was borned in slavery days, I don’t never reckon I lives to see 1937.”

His wife sighed. “Better be a happy year,” she said darkly. “Last couple-three sure ain’t.”

“We is on our feets,” Scipio said. “We gots a place again.” The flat wasn’t much worse than the one they’d lived in before white rioters torched so much of the Terry, and they weren’t paying much more for it. Compared to so many people who were still living in churches or in tents, they were amazingly lucky. That they’d managed to bring their money out with them had helped a lot. Money usually did.

Bathsheba refused to look on the bright side of things. “What happens the next time the buckra decide they gots to go after all the niggers in town? Where we stay then?”

“Ain’t been bad”—Scipio correct himself—“ain’t been
too
bad since.”

“Bully!” In Bathsheba’s mouth, the old-fashioned white man’s slang sounded poisonously sarcastic.

“We gots to go on. We gots to do what we kin.” Scipio knew he was trying to convince himself as well as her.

“Wish we could go somewheres else,” his wife said.

“Like where?” Scipio asked. She had no answer. He knew she wouldn’t. The United States had made it very plain they didn’t want any Negroes from the Confederate States, no matter what happened to blacks in the CSA. The Empire of Mexico was farther away and even less welcoming. “We is stuck where we’s at.”

“Gots to be some way.” Like most people, Bathsheba saw what she wanted to see, regardless of whether it was really there.

He didn’t try to argue with her. They’d argued too much lately. She still hadn’t stopped nagging him about who he was and who and what he had been. He gave short answers, knowing that the more he said, the more dangerous it was for him. Short answers didn’t satisfy her. She wanted to know—she was convinced she had the right to know—where and how and why and when he’d learned to talk like an educated white man. As far as he was concerned, the less said, the better. Secrecy had become deeply ingrained in him since he came to Augusta. Only by keeping his past secret did he, could he, survive.

Neither of them stayed up long after midnight. They had planned to get out with the children on New Year’s Day, but a cold, nasty rainstorm rolling down from the north put paid to that. Instead, they spent the day cooped up in the flat. They were all on edge, Scipio’s son and daughter from disappointment at an outing spoiled, himself and his wife over worry about what the new year might bring.

It was still raining the next day: the sort of steady, sullen rain that promised to hang around for days. January second was a Saturday. The Huntsman’s Lodge, which had been closed for New Year’s, reopened. Scipio put on his formal clothes, then put a raincoat of rubberized cloth on over them. With that and an umbrella, he left the block of flats full of a relief he dared not show.

He had no trouble getting to the Lodge. Because of the rain, only people who had to be out and about were, and no one seemed in the mood to harass a Negro. Also, the raincoat concealed the fancy jacket, wing-collared boiled shirt, and satin-striped trousers he wore beneath it. Not standing out in the crowd undoubtedly helped.

Jerry Dover greeted him when he came in the door: “How are you, Xerxes? Happy New Year!”

“I thanks you, suh. De same to you,” Scipio answered. With Dover, the work came first. If you could do it well, nothing else mattered. If you couldn’t, nothing else mattered, either, and he would send you packing. But if you could do it, he would stand by you. Scipio respected that, and responded to it.

Today, though, Dover didn’t seem happy. “Got a few words to say when the whole crew comes in,” he told Scipio. “Won’t take long.”

Anything that broke routine was worrisome. “What de trouble be?” Scipio asked.

His boss shook his head. “I’ll tell you soon. I don’t want to have to do this more than once. You’ll hear, I promise.”

That convinced Scipio the news, whatever it was, wouldn’t be good. He couldn’t do anything about it but wait. Naturally, one of the other waiters chose that day to show up late. When he finally did come in, he was so hung over, he could barely see. “New Year’s Eve night befo’ last,” somebody told him. He managed a sheepish grin, then took two aspirins from his pocket and dry-swallowed them.

“Listen, people, anybody see a paper the past couple days or listen to news on the wireless?” Jerry Dover asked.

None of the waiters and assistant cooks and dishwashers and janitors said anything. Scipio might have bought a
Constitutionalist
if rain hadn’t kept newsboys off the street. He wasn’t sure how many of the other Negroes in the crew could read. Wireless? Sets were cheap these days, but nobody here got rich at his job.

“No?” Dover shrugged. “All right. I suppose you heard about the colored fellow who took a shot at President Featherston at the Olympics.” Again, nobody said anything.
Too bad he missed,
was what Scipio was thinking. His boss went on, “There’s an order from the president that colored folks—all colored folks—have got to pay a fine to the government on account of that. And there’s an order that anybody who’s got colored folks working for him has to take twenty dollars out of their pay and send it to Richmond to make sure that fine gets paid. So that’s what’ll happen. I’m sorry, but I can’t do a thing about it.”

“Twenty dollars?” The pained echo rose from the throats of all the men there. Twenty dollars was a lot of money—a week’s wages for the ones who made the most, two weeks’ for the rest. Scipio cursed softly under his breath. A twenty-dollar hole in his budget wouldn’t be easy to fill. Somebody asked, “How is we supposed to git by without that money?”

Jerry Dover spread his hands. “I can’t answer that. All I can tell you is, I don’t dare try to duck this, not with what they’ll do to me if I get caught.”

From a lot of men, that would have been a polite lie. Scipio believed the manager of the Hunstman’s Lodge; Dover treated the black men who worked for him like human beings. “Mistuh Dover, suh!” he called.

“What is it, Xerxes?”

“Kin you dock we a dollar, two dollars, a week, so it don’t hurt so bad?”

“Yeah!” Several other men spoke up. Others nodded. One of the assistant cooks said, “I buys everything on the installment plan. I should oughta pay this here fine the same way.”

But Dover shook his head. “I would if I could, but I can’t. The order says it’s got to come out of your next pay. It’s
supposed
to hurt. That’s why they’re doing it. I’m sorry, Xerxes. It was a good idea.”

Dully, Scipio nodded.
It’s supposed to hurt.
He’d known that from the minute the Freedom Party won in 1933. No, he’d known it from the moment he first heard Jake Featherston speak in a park here in Augusta, back when the Party was young and small. He asked, “Mistuh Dover, suh, what keep de gummint from takin’ away anudder twenty dollar from we whenever dey please?”

Jerry Dover looked startled. He was, within his limits, a decent man. Plainly, that hadn’t occurred to him. It hadn’t occurred to some of Scipio’s fellow workers, either, not by their horrified exclamations. And Dover proved his honesty, for he answered, “I’ll be damned if I know.”

The Huntsman’s Lodge was a glum place that night. Some of the men who came to dine there wore Freedom Party pins on their lapels. Somehow or other, waiters contrived to spill hot or greasy food on several of them, or on their wives or girlfriends. The whites were furious. The Negroes were apologetic. So was Jerry Dover. “I’m sure it was an accident, sir,” he said repeatedly. “We have a very fine staff here, but they are human.”

Freedom Party men don’t want to believe that,
Scipio thought. He’d taken his tiny revenge on a man with one of those enamel pins on his tuxedo jacket. Cleaning the jacket wouldn’t come cheap, but it wouldn’t come to twenty dollars, either.

By contrast, two or three waiters found themselves with unusually large tips. The men who gave them might have been silently saying they didn’t approve of collective fines. You could always tell when a man got an unexpected tip. He would straighten and smile in delighted surprise before he could catch himself. Scipio kept hoping he would find a sympathetic customer like that. He kept hoping, and he kept being disappointed.

When he left the Lodge at half past twelve, the rain was still coming down. He didn’t mind. Fewer troublemakers, white or black, were on the streets in weather like this. So he thought, anyhow. And, indeed, no one troubled him. But he was going up the front steps of his apartment building when he heard gunfire from the white part of town. It wasn’t just a pistol shot; it was a regular fusillade from several Tredegars. Back during the brief and bloody history of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he’d come to know the sound of military rifles much better than he ever wanted to. Some things you didn’t forget, no matter how much you wished you could.

“What was that?” Bathsheba asked worriedly when he went inside.

“Dunno,” he answered. That was technically true, but he had his suspicions—his fears.

So did his wife. “You reckon some niggers doin’ somethin’ stupid?” She sounded frightened, too. And she didn’t know about the fine the government was levying.

“Wouldn’t be surprised. We all be sorry if they is. That one nigger, he shoot at the president. . . .” He told her of the fine.

“Twenty dollars!” Bathsheba’s anguish was painful to hear. She knew how much that was, how badly it would hurt their finances.

“Ain’t nothin’ I kin do about it,” Scipio said. More gunfire burst out in the white part of Augusta: Tredegars again, and then the smaller answering pops of pistols. Black attackers and roused whites fighting back with whatever weapons they had handy, Scipio judged.

A moment later, a hard hammering made him shiver, even though it wasn’t close. Somebody had a machine gun. He’d seen what such reaping machines of death could do. By the way the rifle fire suddenly slacked off, the machine gun didn’t belong to the raiders.

Bathsheba’s face was a mask of pain. She had to be thinking the same thing. “Them poor boys,” she whispered. “Them poor boys gettin’ all shot up.”

Scipio nodded heavily. But his pain wasn’t just for the raiders who’d bitten off more than they could chew.
Bitter as wormwood,
Revelations said. He understood that now, where he never had before. “Them damn fools give de buckra de excuse to come down on we even harder’n ever.”

“How they come down on us harder’n they already doin’?” his wife asked.

“Suppose Georgia fine de niggers in de state? Suppose Augusta fine de niggers in de city? Richmond do it. Dey reckons dey kin do it, too, mebbe,” Scipio said. Bathsheba flinched as if he’d hit her, then reluctantly nodded. With the Freedom Party in the saddle, anything was possible, anything at all. That was a big part of what made it so frightening.

A
nother Inauguration Day. Nellie Jacobs wondered how many she’d seen. She hadn’t gone to all of them. Work, indifference, and war had kept her away at one time or another. This year, though, February first fell on a fine, bright Monday. The temperature got up close to fifty. It might almost have been spring. She decided to close the coffeehouse and go hear what Al Smith had to say.

She took Clara with her: the high school closed for the day. That her younger daughter, her accidental daughter, should be in high school still struck her as amazing, to say nothing of unnatural. Hadn’t Clara been born just a few weeks ago? That was how it seemed to Nellie. But Clara was taller than she was. She’d grown up while Nellie wasn’t looking.

She’d grown snippy while Nellie wasn’t looking, too. “Do we have to go with Edna and Merle and Armstrong?” she said.

The last name was the problem. Clara and Armstrong Grimes had never got along, not since she was a toddler and he was a baby. She didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and she wasn’t shy about letting the world know as much, either.

“He’s my only grandson, and Edna’s my daughter just as much as you are, Miss Smarty-Britches, and Merle Grimes is a good man—and I don’t say that about many men,” Nellie answered. “So you’ll come along and act polite, or you’ll find out you’re not too big for me to warm your backside.”

One of these days, that kind of argument wouldn’t work. She’d have a fight on her hands if she tried it. She remembered that from dealing—trying to deal—with Edna. She got by with it today, though. Clara might be snippy, but she wasn’t ready to fight back hard yet.

Merle Grimes wore his Purple Heart. Edna had on her Order of Remembrance, Second Class. Nellie wished she’d worn her medal. She’d earned it, where Edna hadn’t come close to deserving hers.

They got pretty good bleacher seats on the Mall in front of the Washington Monument. Nellie remembered when it had been blasted down to a stump. Now it stood tall again. All it needed were hieroglyphics carved on the sides to make it seem perfectly Egyptian.

Nellie endured the parade of soldiers and workers and bands. They weren’t what she’d come to see or hear, though they entranced both Clara and Edna, and Merle tapped the tip of his cane up and down between his feet in time to the music. Armstrong also seemed bored with parades and bands, but Armstrong made a habit of seeming bored with everything, so Nellie wasn’t sure what that meant.

She leaned forward when the big black limousine carrying Hoover and Smith and La Follette pulled up to the platform on which the new president and vice president would take the oath of office. She hadn’t voted for Smith, but she wanted to hear what he had to say for himself.

Chief Justice Cicero Pittman probably hadn’t voted for Al Smith, either. He was a Hoover appointee, replacing at last the fierce and venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a veteran of the War of Secession: he’d outlasted even George Custer in public life. Pittman was round and benign-looking, unlike the hawk-faced, piratically mustached Holmes.

Charlie La Follette took the vice-presidential oath first. No outgoing vice president congratulated him, for Hoover, having been elected as vice president himself, had no replacement when propelled to the presidency on Calvin Coolidge’s death. Hoover did rise to shake Al Smith’s hand. The atmosphere on the platform was what diplomats called correct: people who despised one another did their best to behave as if they didn’t.