“Now why would you say something like that?” McDougald inquired. “Haven’t you got confidence in our brilliant leaders? Doesn’t the fact that we’re fighting in Pennsylvania mean victory’s right around the corner?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” O’Doull answered. “The only trouble is, whose victory are you talking about?”
McDougald laughed, for all the world as if they were sitting in a saloon telling jokes. The fate of nations? Who could get excited about the fate of nations if the beer was cold and the joint had a halfway decent free-lunch spread? The medic said, “If we were a little farther back of the line and we talked like this, we’d catch hell for defeatism, you know?”
“Yeah, they’d yell at us,” O’Doull agreed. “But that’s all they’d do. If we talked like this on the Confederate side of the line, they’d probably shoot us.”
“Y’all are damnyankee sympathizers.” McDougald’s Southern drawl wouldn’t get him into espionage. “Y’all can have blindfolds. I ain’t gonna waste good Confederate tobacco on you, though-that’s for damn sure.”
“A Kentucky colonel you’re not,” O’Doull said. But then he thought about the warning that had come in: Confederate soldiers in U.S. uniform were supposed to be operating behind U.S. lines. They were supposed to have good U.S. accents, too. O’Doull had no idea if that was true, or how you went about telling a disguised Confederate from an average screwup. He also wondered what to do if one of those Confederates in U.S. clothing came into the aid station. Then he wondered how the devil he’d know.
Scipio got more frightened every day. Nothing had changed in the Terry since the sweep that would have swept out his family and him. Nothing had changed, no, but trouble was in the air. Something new was stirring, and he didn’t know what it was.
He came right out and asked Jerry Dover. The manager at the Huntsman’s Lodge just shrugged and said, “I haven’t heard anything.”
“Do Jesus!” Scipio said. “Them Freedom Party stalwarts, they looks like they gwine kill all o’ we, an’ you ain’t heard nothin’?”
“If I had, I’d tell you,” Dover said. “This time, I think you’re flabbling over nothing.”
“Ain’t you got no mo’ errands fo’ me to run? Ain’t you got no errands fo’ me an’ my whole fambly to run?” Scipio paused, then switched dialects to the one he hardly ever used: “Mr. Dover, please understand me-I am a desperate man, sir.” He had to be desperate to use his white man’s voice.
It rocked Dover, the way it would have rocked any white in the CSA. Biting his lip, the restaurant manager muttered, “If I’d known you were that goddamn sharp, I never would’ve sent you to Savannah.”
Scipio wanted to laugh, or possibly to scream. Jerry Dover had worked alongside him for more than twenty years. If that didn’t give Dover the chance to figure out what kind of brains he had… Scipio knew what the trouble was, of course. All that time, he’d talked like a nigger, and an ignorant nigger at that. Perception clouded reality. Like so many whites, Dover had assumed anybody who sounded like an illiterate field hand had to be as ignorant and probably as stupid as a field hand.
Of course, there were holes in that line of thought. Dover had known all along that he could read and write and cipher. Set that against sounding like a buck from the Congaree swamps, though, and it suddenly became small potatoes.
“What was in that envelope I took there?” Scipio pressed his advantage. He didn’t get one very often, and knew he had to make the most of it. “Something for the United States? Something for the Freedom Party? Something for a lady friend of yours, perhaps?” Even to himself, he sounded smarter when he talked like a white man. If that wasn’t a measure of what living in the Confederate States his whole life had done to him, he didn’t know what would be.
Jerry Dover turned red. “Whatever it was, it’s none of your damn beeswax,” he snapped. “The less you know about it, the better off we both are. Have you got that?”
He made sense, no matter how much Scipio wished he didn’t. If they arrested Scipio instead of just hauling him off to a camp, he couldn’t tell them what he didn’t know. Of course, he could tell them Dover’s name, at which point they’d start tearing into the restaurant manager. And how would he stand up to the third degree? Scipio almost looked forward to finding out. If Dover’s ruin didn’t so surely involve his own, he would have.
“Somethin’ else you better keep in mind,” Dover said. “Wasn’t for me, you’d be dead. Wasn’t for me, you’d be in wherever niggers go when they clean out part of the Terry. Instead, you’re still walkin’ around Augusta, and you don’t seem any too goddamn grateful for it.”
“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.”