“If walking around Augusta involved anything even approaching freedom-lowercase f, mind you-I would be grateful,” Scipio said. “But this is only a slightly more spacious prison. I don’t ask for much, Mr. Dover. I could accept living as I did before the war began. It was imperfect, but I know it was as much as I could reasonably expect from this country. What I have now, sir-I do believe a preacher would call it hell.”
He’d hoped his passion-and his accent-would impress the white man. Maybe they even did. But Dover said, “All I got to tell you is, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You go on about a preacher? You ought to get down on bended knee and thank God you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Where Scipio had rocked him before, now he shook the black man. He sounded as if he knew exactly what he was talking about. “Mr. Dover, if what you say is true, then my family and I have even more urgent reasons to leave Augusta immediately.”
“Bullshit,” Dover said. Scipio blinked as if he’d never heard the word before. “Bullshit,” Dover repeated. “What the hell makes you think things are better anywhere else, for crying out loud?”
Scipio bit down on that like a man breaking a tooth on a cherry pit in his piece of pie. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed, startled for a moment back into his usual way of talking. He’d always thought of Augusta as an aberration, a disaster. If it wasn’t…
“Jesus ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” Jerry Dover said brutally. “Don’t be dumber than you can help, all right? If you reckon you’re the only one in the world with troubles, what does that make you? Besides a damn fool, I mean?”
“Do Jesus!” Scipio said again, softly this time. “What am I gonna do?”
He wasn’t asking the question of the restaurant manager. He wasn’t asking God, either. He was asking himself, and he had no more answers than either God or Dover did.
Dover thought he had one: “Get your ass out there, do your job, and keep your head down.”
Had Scipio been alone in the world, that might even have sufficed. As things were, he shook his head. “I got a wife, Mistuh Dover. I got chilluns.” He couldn’t talk like a white man now; that would have hurt too much. “I wants dem chilluns to do better’n I ever done. How kin dey do dat? Likely tell, dey don’t even git to grow up.” Tears filled his eyes and his voice.
Dover looked down at his desk. “I don’t know what you want me to do about it.”
“He’p me!” Scipio burst out. “You gots to he’p me. Git me outa here.”
“How? Where?” the restaurant manager demanded. “You reckon I got some magic carpet that’ll fly you to Mexico or the USA? If you do, give me some of whatever you’re drinking, on account of I want to get goofy, too.”
Scipio looked wildly around him. The walls of Dover’s office seemed to be closing in. Except it wasn’t the office alone… “You know somethin’, Mistuh Dover?” he said. “This whole country-this whole goddamn country-ain’t nothing but a prison camp fo’ black folks.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t do nothin’ about that, neither,” Jerry Dover said. “All I can do is run this place here. And if you aren’t out there waiting tables in five minutes, I start having trouble doing that.”
“No, suh,” Scipio said, and Dover blinked; whites in the CSA seldom met outright refusal from Negroes. Scipio went on, “Reckon you do more’n dat. Reckon you never woulda sent me to Savannah, you didn’t do more’n dat.” He still didn’t know why the white man had sent him there. He didn’t care, either. That he’d gone gave him a weapon. “You got to he’p me. You got to he’p my chilluns.”
“I already have,” Dover said quietly. Scipio grimaced. That was true. Dover went on, “You want me to do more than I can do. You want me to do more than anybody can do. I can’t make you turn white. That’s what you really want out of me, isn’t it?”
He made Scipio grimace again. Even when times were relatively good for blacks in the CSA, skin lighteners and hair straighteners-a lot of them, especially the lighteners, only quack nostrums-sold briskly. The worse times got, the better they sold, too. These days, anyone who could possibly pass for white was doing it. Scipio’s own skin was far too dark even to let him think about it. Bathsheba was lighter, but not light enough. Neither were Antoinette and Cassius. They were all irredeemably marked as what they were.
“Damn you, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said dully.
“I’m sorry. Hell, I am sorry. I didn’t want things to turn out like this,” Jerry Dover said. “I’m no goddamn Freedom Party goon. You know that. But I can’t stick my neck out too far, either, not unless I want it chopped.”
Scipio tried to hate him. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Dover wasn’t as big a man as he might have been. But plenty were smaller, too, and not all of them were white. Dover didn’t even use his advantage in color and class to order Scipio out of his office. He just waited. Scipio could tell no hope was to be had here. He left by himself.
Taking orders in the restaurant, bringing them back to the kitchen, and carrying food out again felt strangely surreal. The prosperous white men and their sleek companions treated him as they always would have: like a servant. They talked as if he weren’t there. Had he been a U.S. spy, he could have learned some interesting things about railroad repairs and industrial bottlenecks. He could have picked up some pointers on barrel deployment from an officer trying-the wrong way, in Scipio’s view-to impress a really beautiful brunette.
He kept waiting to hear word about the Terry, about yet another cleanout. He’d been doing that ever since the night when the Angel of Death, thanks to Jerry Dover, passed over his family and him. But the whites in the Huntsman’s Lodge never talked about things like that. Maybe they didn’t want to think about them while they were eating venison or duck in orange sauce and drinking fancy French wine. Or maybe they weren’t quite so oblivious to the colored staff as they let on.
It was probably some of each. Scipio wouldn’t have wanted to think about sending people off to camps while he was enjoying a fine meal, either. And, while whites in the CSA often pretended to ignore Negroes, they knew they couldn’t really afford to do it very often. They would pay, and pay high, if they did.
He got through the evening. He clocked out of the Huntsman’s Lodge and walked through Augusta’s dark, silent streets-the city remained under blackout even if no Yankee bombers had ever appeared overhead-toward the Terry. It was like going back to jail-with the barbed wire all around, just like that.
“Halt!” called one of the policemen and stalwarts at the gate. “Advance and be recognized. Slow and easy, or you never get another chance.”
They were jumpy tonight. Scipio didn’t like that; it was too likely a harbinger of trouble. “Ain’t nobody but me,” he said. What would the ruffians have done if he’d used his white man’s voice with them? Shot him, probably, for not being what they expected.
As things were, they laughed. “It’s the old spook in the boiled shirt,” one of them said. The gate creaked as they opened it. “Go on through.” They didn’t even ask for his passbook. Whatever the shape of the trouble they were flabbling about, it wasn’t his.
The Terry’s streets were even quieter than those of the white part of Augusta. Scipio imagined he heard ghosts moaning along them, but it was only the breeze… or was it? With more than half the Negroes scooped out of the place and carried off to a fate unknown but unlikely to be good, ghosts were bound to be wandering the streets where so many real people no longer went.
His apartment was dark. Bathsheba had got a couple of kerosene lamps after the electricity was cut off, but kerosene was hard to come by these days, too. They used it only when they had to. He navigated with the confidence of a man who knew where everything was whether he could see it or not. His wife had left his nightshirt out for him on a chair by the bed. He sighed with relief at escaping the tuxedo. Sleep dissolved night terrors.