But not deep enough, not here. Dover set the live cigarette in the ashtray, steepled his fingertips on the desk, and looked at Scipio over them. “It would be a good idea if you got ’em here,” was all he said. His own way of speaking didn’t come close to matching Scipio’s. By his nervous chuckle, he knew it, too.
Scipio wanted to ask, A good idea how? Why? He wanted to, but he didn’t. He’d pushed the white man as far as Dover was willing to go. Returning to the Congaree dialect that was his natural speech, Scipio said, “Reckon I do it, den.”
“Good,” Dover said. “I knew you were a smart fellow. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have wasted my time banging my gums at you in the first place. Now get your ass out there and go to work.”
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said, relieved to be back on familiar ground.
When his shift ended, policemen let him through the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding the Terry. They knew him. He had a dispensation to be out after curfew. He made it back to his block of flats without getting knocked over the head.
Then he had his next hurdle: persuading Bathsheba not to do what she usually did. “Why for he want us there?” she demanded.
“Dunno,” Scipio answered. “But he want it bad enough to use my fo’-true name.”
“Did he?” That made Bathsheba sit up and take notice. Worry in her voice, she asked, “You reckon he do somethin’ nasty if we don’t come?”
“Dunno,” Scipio said again, more unhappily than ever. “But I reckons y’all better do it.”
Bathsheba sighed heavily. “Miz Kent, she ain’t gonna be real happy with me. Miz Bagwell neither. But we come.”
When his children got up the next morning, they were even more bemused than his wife was. “Somethin’ bad liable to happen, Pa,” Cassius said. His hands bunched into fists. “Can we fight back?” He was more like the hunter and guerrilla for whom he’d been named than he had any business being.
“Odds is bad,” was all Scipio said. That gave his son very little to react against.
“Don’t know that I ever wants to go into the ofay part of Augusta no more,” Antoinette said. “They hates us there.”
“They hates we here, too,” Scipio answered. “You should oughta come, though. I don’t reckon Mistuh Dover playin’ games.” That wasn’t quite true. But he didn’t know what kind of game the manager was playing, and he couldn’t afford not to play along.
His wife and children dressed in their Sunday best for the unusual excursion. Since he was in his own formalwear, the family looked as if they were bound for a fancy wedding or a banquet. When they got to the barbed-wire perimeter, the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards stared at them. There seemed to be more whites manning the perimeter than usual. Or is it just my nerves? Scipio wondered-nervously.
The policeman who checked passbooks had sent Scipio through any number of times. He raised an eyebrow to see the black man’s family accompanying him, but didn’t say anything about it. He was, within the limits of his job and his race, a decent fellow. A stalwart came up to talk to him. Scipio wondered if they would yell at him to halt and send Bathsheba and the children back. They didn’t, though.
When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he found that Aurelius also had his wife-a plump, dignified, gray-haired woman named Delilah-with him. Something was going on. He still didn’t know what, and wished he did.
They all got suppers of the sorts the cooks turned out for the waiters. Two or three other waiters and cooks-all of them men who’d worked at the Lodge for a while, and all of them also men who lived not far from Scipio and his family-also had family members with them.
Jerry Dover hovered over the Huntsman’s Lodge’s uncommon customers. He was fox-quick, fox-clever, and also, Scipio judged, fox-wary. “Thank y’all for being here today,” he said. “I’ve worked with your husbands and fathers for years, and I’ve never met y’all before. Hope I do again before too long.”
He was saying something between the lines. But not even Scipio, who knew he was doing it, could make out the words behind the words. He wanted to scratch his head. Instead, he had to go out and work his shift as if everything were normal.
It only seemed to last forever. In fact, it went as smoothly as most of the shifts he put in. He pocketed a few nice tips and got stiffed once, by a lieutenant-colonel with his left arm in a sling. Scipio hoped the next Yankee who shot him took better aim.
When he left the dining room after the Lodge closed, he found his family on the ragged edge of mutiny. “If I was any more bored, I’d be dead,” Cassius snarled.
“Thanks for bringin’ ’em by, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said-now he used the alias that seemed to fit Scipio better than his real name these days. “Glad you could do it.”
“Uh-huh,” Scipio said, still puzzled about what was going on. Something, yes-but what? He nodded to Bathsheba, who was yawning. “Let’s go.”
The streets of the white part of Augusta were quiet and peaceful. When they got back to the fence around the Terry, another cop who knew Scipio let them through without any trouble about being out after curfew. He laughed as he opened a barbed-wire gate much like the one that would keep livestock in a pen. “You ain’t hardly gonna know the place,” he said. The rest of the goons at the gate thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
Only little by little did Scipio and his family discover what they meant. At first, he just thought things seemed too quiet. Curfew or no curfew, there was usually a lot of furtive life on the dark streets of the Terry. A lot of it was dangerous life, but it was life. Tonight, no.
Tonight… Cassius figured it out first, from the number of doors standing open that shouldn’t have. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed, his voice echoing in the empty street. “They done had another cleanout!”
As soon as he pointed it out, it was obvious he was right. The northern part of the Terry had been scooped up and sent off to camps-or somewhere-months before. As far as Scipio knew, nobody’d come back, either. Now the heart had been ripped out of the colored part of Augusta. And all in one day, Scipio thought dazedly. All in half a day, in fact. How long had they been planning this, to bring it off with such practiced efficiency? And where had they got the practice?
Bathsheba squeezed his hand, hard. “If it wasn’t fo’ Jerry Dover, they’d’ve got us, too,” she whispered.
And that was as true as what Cassius had said. Somehow, Dover had known ahead of time. He’d done what he could-or what he’d wanted to do. Now Scipio owed him not just one life but four. He thanked the God he mostly didn’t believe in for the debt. And he wondered how Jerry Dover would want it repaid.
For there would be a price. There was always a price. Scipio knew that in his bones, in his belly, in his balls. For a Negro in the CSA, there was always a price.
After his mother died, Cincinnatus Driver had watched his father like a hawk. He knew the stories about old, long-married couples where, when one spouse died, the other followed soon after, as if finding life alone not worth living.
But Seneca Driver seemed as well as ever. If anything, he seemed better than he had for some time. His shoulders came up; his back straightened. “I is free of a burden,” he said once. “That weren’t your mama we laid in the ground. Your mama was gone a long time ago. What we buried, that there was just the husk.”
Cincinnatus nodded. “I saw that, Pa. I saw that real plain and clear. Wasn’t sure you could.”
“Oh, I seen it,” his father said. “Couldn’t do nothin’ about it, but I seen it.”