If that last sentence wasn’t a summary of Negroes’ troubles in the Confederate States, Cincinnatus had never heard one. And the government and the Freedom Party had always moved more carefully in Kentucky than rumor said they did farther south. Kentucky had spent a generation in the USA. Negroes here knew what it meant to be citizens, not just downtrodden residents. Even some whites here were… less hostile than they might have been.
That meant the barbed-wire perimeter that went up around Covington’s colored district came as a special shock. Cincinnatus had heard that such things had happened elsewhere. He didn’t think they could here. Finding he was wrong rocked him. Finding he was wrong also trapped him. The perimeter included the bank of the Licking River, and included motorboats with machine guns on the river to make sure nobody tried cutting the wire there.
The first place Cincinnatus went when he found out what was going on was, inevitably, Lucullus Wood’s barbecue shack. He found the plump proprietor in a worse state of shock than he was. “They told me they wasn’t gonna do this,” Lucullus said. “They told me. They fuckin’ lied.” He sounded as dazed as a man staggering out of a train wreck.
Seeing Lucullus struck all in a heap discomfited Cincinnatus worse than the barbed wire itself. “What you gonna do about it?” he demanded. “What can you do about it?”
“Do Jesus! I dunno,” Lucullus answered. “They done ruined me when they done this.” Odds were he had that right. Almost as many whites as blacks had come to his place. No more. That perimeter would keep people out as well as keeping them in.
“You can still get word through.” That was a statement, not a question. Cincinnatus refused to believe anything different.
“What if I kin?” Lucullus didn’t deny it. He just spread his hands, pale palms up. “Ain’t gonna do me a hell of a lot of good. Who’s gonna pay any mind to a nigger all shut up like he was in jail? They gonna haul us off to them camps nobody never comes out of.”
That had a chilling feel of probability to Cincinnatus. Even so, he gave Lucullus the best answer he could: “What about Luther Bliss?” He hated the man, hated and feared him, but Bliss’ remained a name to conjure with. He hoped hearing it would at least snap Lucullus out of his funk and make him start thinking straight again.
And it worked. Lucullus very visibly gathered himself. “Mebbe,” he said. “But only mebbe, dammit. Freedom Party fellas is hunting Bliss right now like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Hell I wouldn’t,” Cincinnatus said. “If they know he’s around, they’ll want him dead. He’s too dangerous for them to leave him breathin’. Ain’t that all the more reason for you to git back in touch with him?”
“Mebbe,” Lucullus said again. “What kin he do, though? They gots police an’ them damn stalwarts all around. Anytime they wants to come in an’ start gettin’ rid of us…”
“We got guns. You got guns. You ain’t gonna tell me you ain’t got guns, ’cause I know you lie if you do,” Cincinnatus said. “They come in like that, they be sorry.”
“Oh, yeah.” Lucullus’ jowls wobbled as he nodded. “They be sorry. But we be sorrier. Any kind o’ fight like that, we loses. Guns we got is enough to make them fuckers think twice. Ain’t enough to stop ’em. Cain’t be, and you got to know that, too. They uses barrels, we ain’t got nothin’ ’cept Featherston Fizzes against ’em. They sends in Asskickers to bomb us flat, we ain’t even got that. We kin hurt ’em. They kin fuckin’ kill us, an’ I reckon they is lookin’ fo’ the excuse to do it.”
Cincinnatus grunted. Lucullus had to be right. Against the massed power of the CSA, the local Negroes would lose. And the Confederate authorities might well be looking for an excuse to move in and wipe them out. Which meant… “You got to git hold o’ Bliss,” Cincinnatus said again.
“What good it do me?” Lucullus asked sourly. “I done told you-”
“Yeah, you told me. But so what?” Cincinnatus said, and Lucullus stared at him. The barbecue cook usually dominated between them. Not now. Cincinnatus went on, “We’re all shut up in here. Bad things start happenin’ out past the wire, how could we have much to do with ’em? But you kin get hold of Luther Bliss, and that son of a bitch got other ofays who’ll do what he tell ’em to.”
Lucullus kept right on staring, but now in a new way. “Mebbe,” he said once more. This time, he didn’t seem to mean, You’re crazy. Even so, he warned, “Luther Bliss don’t care nothin’ about niggers just ’cause they’s niggers.”
“Shit, I know that. Luther Bliss hates everybody under the sun,” Cincinnatus said, startling a laugh out of Lucullus. “But the people Luther Bliss hates most are Freedom Party men and the Confederates who run things. We hate them people, too, so we’s handy for him.”
“Well, yeah, but the people he hates next most is Reds,” Lucullus said. “You got to remember, that don’t help me none.”
“You got any better ideas?” Cincinnatus demanded, and then, “You got any ideas at all?”
Lucullus glared at him. If anything, that relieved Cincinnatus, who didn’t like seeing the younger man paralyzed. Cincinnatus would have done almost anything to get Lucullus’ wits working again; enraging him seemed a small price to pay. Lucullus said, “I kin git hold o’ him. He kin do dat shit, no doubt about it. But how much good it gonna do us?”
“What do you mean?” Cincinnatus asked.
“They got the wire around us. We is in here. Whatever they wants to do with us-whatever they wants to do to us-they got us where they wants us. How we get out? How we get away?”
Cincinnatus laughed at him. “They gonna let us out. They gonna let a lot of us out, anyways.” Lucullus’ jaw dropped. Cincinnatus drove the point home: “Who’s gonna do their nigger work for ’em if they don’t? Long as they need that, we ain’t cooped up in here all the time.”
“You hope we ain’t,” Lucullus said, but a little spirit came back into his voice.
“Talk to Luther Bliss,” Cincinnatus repeated. “Hell, they let me out for anything, I’ll talk to him.”
“Like he listen to you,” Lucullus said scornfully. “You ain’t got no guns. You ain’t got no people who kin do stuff. I tells you somethin’-you git outa the barbed wire, you try an’ get your black ass back to the USA. Ain’t far-jus’ over de river.”
“Might as well be over the moon right now,” Cincinnatus said with a bitter laugh. “Confederate soldiers holdin’ that part of Ohio. By what I hear, they’re worse on colored folks than the Freedom Party boys are here. They reckon they’re United States colored folks, an’ so they got to be the enemy.” Cincinnatus thought that was a pretty good bet, too. He added, “ ’Sides, I ain’t leavin’ without my pa.”
“You is the stubbornest nigger ever hatched,” Lucullus said. “Onliest thing that hard head good for nowadays is gittin’ you killed.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go on. Git. I don’t want you ’round no mo’.”
Cincinnatus didn’t want to be in the barbecue place anymore. He didn’t want to be in Covington anymore. He didn’t want to be in Kentucky at all anymore. The trouble was, nobody else gave a damn what he wanted or didn’t want.
Cane tapping the ground ahead of him, he walked out for a better look at what the whites in Covington had done. He’d seen more formidable assemblages of barbed wire when he was driving trucks in the last war, but those had been made to hold out soldiers, not to hold in civilians. For that, what the cops and the stalwarts had run up would do fine.
Normally, making a fence out of barbed wire would have been nigger work. Whites had done it here, though. That worried Cincinnatus. If whites decided they could do nigger work, what reason would they have to keep any Negroes around in the CSA?