The Victorious Opposition (6 page)

She hadn’t gone far before another man fell into step with her. “You made a good speech,” he said. “You told them what they needed to hear. Then, when you were done, you shut up. Too many people never know when to shut up.”

“Ernie!” Sylvia exclaimed. She gave the writer a hug. If Joe Kennedy happened to be watching, too damn bad. “What are you doing back in Boston? Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

He shrugged. He had broad shoulders, almost a prizefighter’s shoulders, and dark, ruggedly handsome features. He looked more like a bouncer, a mean bouncer, than the man who’d put Sylvia’s words on paper in
I Sank Roger Kimball
. Considering the wound he’d taken driving an ambulance up in Quebec during the war, he had more right than most men to seem, to be, mean.

When he saw she wouldn’t be content with that shrug, he raised one eyebrow in a world-weary way that made him look older than she was for a moment, though he had to be ten years younger. He said, “I am looking for work. Why does anyone go anywhere these days? Maybe I will find something to write about. Maybe I will find something someone will pay me to write about. The first is easy. The second is hard these days.”

“Are you hungry?” Sylvia asked. Ernie didn’t answer. He had more pride than two or three ordinary men. Pride was a luxury Sylvia had long since decided she couldn’t afford. She said, “Come on. I’ll buy you supper.” Before he could speak, she held up a hand. “I’ve got the money. Don’t worry about that. And I owe you.” She found herself talking as he did, in short, choppy sentences. “Not just for the book. You warned me my bank would fail. I got my money out in time.”

“Good I could do something,” he said, and scowled. He’d wanted her. She’d wanted him, too, the first time she’d really wanted a man since her husband was killed at—after—the end of the Great War. Considering his wound, that surge of desire had been nothing but one more cruel irony.

“Come on,” she said again.

Ernie didn’t tell her no, a likely measure of how hard up he was. She took him to an oyster house. He ate with a singleminded voracity she hadn’t seen since her son was growing into a man.

She put money on the table for both of them. He frowned. “I still hate to have a woman pick up the tab for me.”

“It’s all right,” Sylvia said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s the least I can do. I told you that already. And I bet I can afford it a lot better than you can.”

His pain-filled bark of laughter made people all over the place stare at him. “You are right about that. You must be right about that. I do need to land a writing job. I need to do it right away. If I do not, I will wind up in a Blackfordburgh.”

“You could do something else,” she said.

“Oh, yes.” Ernie nodded. “I could step into the ring and get my block knocked off. I have done that a couple of times. It pays even worse than writing, and it is not so much fun. Or I could carry a hod. I have done that, too. The same objections apply. I am glad to see you doing so well for yourself.”

“I’ve been lucky,” Sylvia said. “I feel lucky, seeing you again.”

“Me?” Another sour laugh. “Not likely. I have tried to write books that show how things were in the war. People do not want to read them. No one wants to publish them any more. Everyone wants to forget we ever had a war.”

“They haven’t forgotten down in the Confederate States,” Sylvia said.

“Sweet Jesus Christ. I
am
lucky. I have found someone who can see past the end of her nose. Do you know how hard that is to do these days?”

The praise warmed Sylvia. It wasn’t smarmy, the way Joe Kennedy’s always seemed. Ernie wasn’t one to waste his time with false praise. He said what he meant. Sylvia tried to match him: “Jake Featherston hasn’t exactly been hiding what he thinks about us.”

“No. He is a real son of a bitch, that one, a rattler buzzing in the bushes by the road,” Ernie said. “One of these days, we are going to have to settle his hash.”

“I say things like that on the stump, and people look at me like I’m crazy,” Sylvia said. “Sometimes I start to wonder myself, you know what I mean?”

He leaned forward and, with startling gentleness, let his hand rest softly on hers. “You have more sense than anybody I have seen for a hell of a long time, Sylvia,” he said. “If anyone tries to tell you any different, belt the silly bastard right in the chops.”

That had to be the oddest romantic speech Sylvia had ever heard. But, where most of the so-called romantic speeches she’d heard either made her want to laugh or made her want to kill the man who was making them, this one filled her with heat. That in itself felt strange and unnatural. She’d known desire only a handful of times since her husband didn’t come back from the war.

“Let’s go to my flat,” she murmured. “My son’s married and on his own, and my daughter works the evening shift.”

Ernie jerked his hand away as if she were on fire. “Did you forget?” he asked harshly. “I am no good for that. I am no damn good for that at all.”

He’d told her the same thing once before. It had balked her then. Now . . . “There are other things we could do. If you wanted to.” She looked down at the tabletop. She felt the heat of embarrassment, too. She didn’t think she’d ever said anything so risqué.

“I will be damned,” Ernie muttered, and then, “You will not be disappointed?”

“Never,” she promised.

“Christ,” he said again, only this time it sounded more like a prayer than a curse. He got to his feet. “Maybe you are lying to me. Maybe you are lying to yourself. I am asking to get wounded again. I know goddamn well I am. But if you do not change your mind in one hell of a hurry—”

“Not me,” Sylvia said, and she got up, too.

Closing the door to the apartment behind them, locking it afterwards, seemed oddly final, oddly irrevocable. Going into the bedroom once she’d done that might almost have been anticlimax. Sylvia wished it could happen without undressing in front of a near stranger. She knew too well she’d never been anything out of the ordinary for looks or for build.

Ernie treated her as if she were, though. By the way he touched her and stroked her and kissed her, she might have been a moving-picture actress, not a fisherman’s widow. He did know what to do to please a woman when he was no longer equipped to do one thing in particular. Sylvia rediscovered just how lonely taking care of herself was by comparison.

Only a little at a time did she realize how much courage he’d needed to bare himself for her. His body was hard and well-muscled. His mutilation, though . . . “I’ll do what I can,” Sylvia said.

“I’ll tell you a couple of things that sometimes can help, if you don’t mind,” Ernie said.

“Why would I mind?” Sylvia said. “This is what we came here for.”

He told her. She tried them. George had liked one of them. The other was something new for her. It wouldn’t have been high on her list of favorite things to do, but it did seem to help. Ernie growled like some large, fierce cat when he finally succeeded.

“Lord,” he said, and bent down to pull a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of the trousers that lay crumpled by the bed. Lighting one, he went on, “There is nothing like that in all the world. Nothing else even comes close. Sometimes I forget, which is a small mercy. Once in a while, everything goes right. That is a large mercy. Thank you, sweetheart.” He kissed her. His lips tasted of sweat and tobacco.

“You’re welcome,” Sylvia said.

“Damn right I am,” he told her.

She laughed. Then she said, “Give me a smoke, too, will you?” He did. She leaned close to him to get a light from his. He set a hand companionably on her bare shoulder. She liked the solid feel of him. He would have to go before Mary Jane came home. Scandalizing her daughter wouldn’t do. But for now . . . For now, everything was just fine.

S
cipio wasn’t a young man. He’d been a little boy when the Confederate States manumitted their slaves in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. He’d lived in Augusta, Georgia, since not long after the end of the Great War. Everyone here, even Bathsheba, his wife, knew him as Xerxes. For a Negro who’d played a role, however unenthusiastic, in the running of one of the Red republics during the wartime revolt, a new name was a better investment than any he could have made on the bourse.

He’d seen a lot in those mad, hectic weeks before the Congareee Socialist Republic went down in blood and fire. In all the years since, he’d hoped he would never see anything like that again. And, up till now, he never had.

Up till now.

White rioters roared through the Terry, the colored district in Augusta. Some of them shouted, “Freedom!” Some were too drunk to shout anything that made sense. But they weren’t too drunk to burn anything that would burn, to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, and to smash any Negroes who tried to stop them.

In the early stages of the riot, what passed for Augusta’s black leaders—a double handful of preachers and merchants—had rushed to the police to get help against the hurricane overwhelming their community. Scipio had happened to be looking out the window of his flat when they came back into the Terry. Most of them, by their expressions, might have just scrambled out of a derailed train. A couple looked grim but unsurprised. Scipio would have guessed those men had seen some action of their own in 1915 and 1916.

“What’ll they do for us?” somebody shouted from another window.

“Won’t do nothin’,” one of the leaders answered. “
Nothin’.
Said we deserves every bit of it, an’ mo’ besides.”

After that, a few Negroes had tried to fight back against the rampaging mob. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Dark bodies hung from lamp posts, silhouetted against the roaring, leaping flames.

From behind Scipio, Bathsheba said, “Maybe we ought to run.”

He shook his head. “Where we run
to
?” he asked bluntly. “The buckra catch we, we hangs on de lamp posts, too. Dis buildin’ don’ burn, we don’ go nowhere.”

He sounded altogether sure of himself. He had that gift, even using the slurred dialect of a Negro from the swamps of the Congaree. Back in the days when he’d been Anne Colleton’s butler, she’d also made him learn to talk like an educated white man:
like an educated white man with a poker up his ass,
he thought. He’d seemed even more authoritative then. He hadn’t always been right. He knew that, as any man must. But he’d always
sounded
right. That also counted.

Raucous, baying laughter floated up from the street. Along with those never-ending shouts of, “Freedom!” somebody yelled, “Kill the niggers!” In an instant, as if the words crystallized what they’d come into the Terry to do, the rioters took up the cry: “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!
Kill the niggers!
”

Scipio turned to his wife. “You still wants to run?”

Biting her lip, she got out the word, “No.” She was a mulatto, her skin several shades lighter than his. She was light enough to go paler still; at the moment, she was almost pale enough to pass for white.

“Why they hate us like that, Pa?” Antoinette, their daughter, was nine: a good age for asking awkward questions.

In the Confederate States, few questions were more awkward than that one. And the brute fact was so much taken for granted, few people above the age of nine ever bothered asking why. Scipio answered, “Dey is white an’ we is black. Dey don’ need no mo’n dat.”

With the relentless logic of childhood, his son, Cassius, who was six, turned the response on its head: “If we is black an’ they is white, shouldn’t we ought to hate them, too?”

He didn’t know what to say to that. Bathsheba said, “Yes, but it don’t do us no good, sweetheart, on account of they’s stronger’n we is.”

That
yes
had led directly to the Red uprisings during the Great War. The rest of her sentence had led just as directly to their failure.
What do we do?
Scipio wondered.
What
can
we do?
He’d wondered that ever since he’d seen his first Freedom Party rally, a small thing at a park here in Augusta. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to worry about it. That hope, like so many others, lay shattered tonight.

“Kill the niggers!” The cry rang out again, louder and fiercer than ever. Screams said the rioters were turning words into deeds, too.

Gunfire rang out from the building across the street from Scipio’s: a black man emptying a pistol into the mob. Some of the screams that followed burst from white throats.
Good!
Savage exultation blazed through Scipio.
See how you like it, you sons of bitches! Wasn’t keeping us cooped up in this poor, miserable place enough for you?

But the white men didn’t and wouldn’t think that way, of course.
Cet animal est méchant. On l’attaque, il se defende.
That was how Voltaire had put it, anyhow.
This animal is treacherous. If it is attacked, it defends itself.
Thanks to Miss Anne (though she’d done it for herself, not for him), Scipio knew Voltaire well. How many of the rioters did? How many had even heard of him?

A fusillade of fire, from pistols, rifles, and what sounded like a machine gun, tore into the building from which the Negro had shot. More than a few bullets slammed into the building in which Scipio and his family lived, too. Then some whites chucked a whiskey bottle full of gasoline with a burning cloth wick into the entryway of the building across the street. The bottle shattered. Fire splashed outward.

The white men whooped and hollered and slapped one another on the back with glee. “Burn, baby, burn!” one of them shouted. Soon they were all yelling it, along with, “Kill the niggers!”

“Xerxes, they gwine burn this here place next,” Bathsheba said urgently. “We gots to git out while we still kin.”

He wished he could tell her she was wrong. Instead, he nodded. “We gits de chillun. We gits de money. An’ we
gits
—out de back way to de alley, on account o’ we don’ las’ a minute if we goes out de front.”

Maybe the building wouldn’t burn. Maybe the white men rampaging through the Terry would go on to some other crime instead. But if the roominghouse did catch fire, his family was doomed. Better to take their chances on the streets than to try to get out of a building ablaze.