Ogelthorpe turned back to the other waiter. “How come you reckon he’s a waiter, Fabius?”
“On account of he knows the difference ’tween a soup spoon and a teaspoon, and where each of ’em goes on the table,” the other Negro-Fabius-said.
“That a fact?” Ogelthorpe said, and Fabius nodded. The white man who owned the restaurant turned to Scipio and asked, “Where’d you learn the business, Xerxes?”
“Here an’ dere, suh,” Scipio answered. “I been doin’ factory work since de war start, mostly, but de factories, dey’s shuttin’ down.”
“Here and there?” Ogelthorpe rubbed his chin. “You tell me you got anything like a passbook, I’m liable to fall over dead from the surprise.”
“No, suh,” Scipio said. “Times is rough. Lots o’ niggers ain’t got none dese days, on account of we’s moved around so much.”
“Or for other reasons.” No, Ogelthorpe wasn’t stupid, not even close. A frown twisted his narrow mouth. “Wish you didn’t talk like you been pickin’ cotton all your born days.”
Had Scipio wanted to, he could have talked a great deal more elegantly than Ogelthorpe. He’d used that ability to speak like a polished white man to help escape from the swamps of the Congaree. But, if he didn’t speak like a polished white man, speaking like a field hand was all he could do. He’d never before missed his lack of a middle way. Now he did, intently.
“I’s powerful sorry, suh,” he said. “I tries to do better.”
“You read and write and cipher?” Ogelthorpe looked as if anything but a no there would have surprised him, too.
But Scipio read the names and prices of the soups and sandwiches and stews and meat dishes on the wall. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper on the counter and wrote his name and Fabius’ and Ogelthorpe’s in his small, precise script. Then he handed Ogelthorpe the paper and said, “You write any numbers you wants, an’I kin cipher they out fo’you.”
He’d wondered if his demonstration would make Ogelthorpe not bother, but the white man scrawled a column of figures-watching, Scipio saw they were the prices of items he served-and thrust back the sheet and the pencil. “Go ahead-add ’em up.”
Scipio did, careful not to make any mistakes. “They comes to fo’ dollars an’ seventeen cents all told,” he said when he was done.
Ogelthorpe’s expression said that, while they did indeed come to $4.17, he rather wished they didn’t. Fabius, on the other hand, laughed out loud. “You got anything else you want to give him a hard time about, boss?”
“Don’t reckon so,” Ogelthorpe admitted. With a sigh, he turned back to Scipio. “Pay’s ten dollars a week, an’ tips, an’ lunch an’ supper every day you’re here. You play as good a game as you talk, I’ll bump you up a slug or two in a month. What do you say?”
“I says, yes, suh. I says, thank you, suh,” Scipio answered. He wouldn’t get rich on that kind of money, but he wouldn’t starve, especially not when he could feed himself here. And he’d be able to get out of the grim Terry flophouse and into a better room or even a flat.
Ogelthorpe said, “You can tell me I’m crazy if you want, but I got the idea you ain’t got a hell of a lot of jack right now. You’re clean enough, I’ll say that, but I want you to get yourself black trousers an’ a white shirt like Fabius is wearin’, and I want you to do it fast as you’re able. You don’t do it fast enough to suit me, back on the street you go.”
“I takes care of it,” Scipio promised. He thought Fabius was dressed up too fancy for the kind of food the place dished out, but realized his own tastes were on the snobbish side. One more thing I can blame on Miss Anne, he thought. Maybe, now that he was outside of South Carolina, she wouldn’t be able to track him down. He hoped to Jesus she couldn’t.
Outside, a clock started chiming noon. A moment later, two steam whistles blew. “Here comes the lunch crowd,” Ogelthorpe said. “All right, Xerxes, looks like you get baptism by total immersion. Me, I got to get my ass back to the stove.” He disappeared into the rear of the restaurant.
Fabius just had time to hand Scipio a Gray Eagle scratch pad before the place filled up. Then Scipio was working like a madman for the next hour and a half, taking orders, hustling them back to Ogelthorpe, carrying plates of food to the customers, taking money and making change, and trading dirty china and silverware for clean with the dishwasher, an ancient black man who hadn’t bothered to come out and see whether he’d be hired.
Some of the customers were white, some colored. By their clothes, they all worked at the nearby hash cannery or the ironworks or one of the several factories that made bricks from the fine clay found in abundance around Augusta. Whites and Negroes might come in together, sometimes laughing and joking with one another, but the whites always sat at the tables on one side of the restaurant, the blacks at those on the other.
Scipio wondered if Fabius would wait on the whites and leave the Negroes for him. The whites would undoubtedly have more money to spend. Scipio presumed that would translate into better tips. But the two waiters split the crowd evenly, and Scipio needed less than half an hour to find out his idea wasn’t necessarily so. The idea of tipping a colored waiter had never crossed a lot of white men’s minds. When they did tip, they left more than their Negro counterparts, but the blacks were more likely to leave something, if often not much. Taken all together, things evened out.
By half past one, after the last lunch shift ended, the place was quiet again, as it had been before noon. Panting like a hound, Fabius said, “Reckon you see why Mistuh Jim hired hisself a new waiter. We got more business’n two can handle, let alone one like I was doin’.”
“You one busy nigger ’fore today, sure enough,” Scipio said.
“You done pulled your weight,” Fabius said. “Never had to hustle you, never had to tell you what to do. You said you know about waitin’ on tables, you wasn’t lyin’.”
“No, I weren’t lyin’,” Scipio agreed. “We git our ownselves somethin’ to eat now? Plumb hard settin’ it in front o’ other folk wif so much empty inside o’me.”
“I hear what you say.” Fabius nodded. “I done et ’fore the rush started, but you go on back there now. Mistuh Ogelthorpe don’t feed you good, you take a fryin’ pan and whack him upside the head.”
Ogelthorpe also nodded when Scipio did head back to the cooking area. “You know what you were doin’, sure as hell,” he said.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Compared to the fancy banquets Anne Colleton had put on, this was crude, rough, fast work, but the principles didn’t change.
“Chicken soup in the pot,” Ogelthorpe said. “You want a ham sandwich to go along with it?”
“Thank you, suh. That be mighty fine.” Scipio had carried a lot of ham sandwiches out to hungry workers. He knew they were thick with meat and spears of garlicky pickle and richly daubed with a mustard whose odor tickled his nose. He’d just ladled out a bowl of soup when Ogelthorpe handed him a sandwich of his own.
The first bite told him why people crowded into the restaurant. Miss Anne would have turned up her nose at such a rough delicacy, but she wasn’t here. Scipio was. He took another big bite. With his mouth full, he said, “Suh, I’s gwine like this place jus’ fine.”
“Here you are, ma’am,” the cabbie said to Flora Hamburger as he pulled to a stop at the corner of Eighth and Pine. “Pennsylvania Hospital.”
“Thank you,” she answered, and gave him half a dollar, which included a twenty-cent tip. That was enough to make him leap out of the elderly Duryea and hold the door open for her with a show of subservience that made her most uncomfortable. Socialism, to her, meant equality among all workers, no matter what they did.
But she had no time to instruct him, not now. She hurried past the statue of William Penn toward the front entrance to the hospital, whose cornerstone, she saw, bore an inscription dating from the reign of George II.