At noon, another black man took over Cassius' beat. Cassius went back to the tents outside of town to see if the U.S. Army cooks had any hot food. Sure enough, big kettles of chicken stew simmered over crackling fires. Cassius dug out his mess kit and got in line.
"How'd it go?" asked the white soldier in front of him. "Any trouble with the local yokels?"
"Nah." Cassius shook his head. But then he corrected himself: "Well, a little. This kid who don't like niggers-an' I know he don't like niggers-tried to bum food offa me."
"Hope you told him to fuck himself," the soldier said. "Little asshole can starve for all I care. Just save somebody on our side the trouble of shooting him once he grows up."
"You reckon another war's comin'?" Cassius asked as the line snaked forward.
"Shit, don't you?" the white man replied. "Sooner or later, we'll let these Confederate bastards back on their feet. A half hour after we do, they'll clean the grease off the guns they got stashed away and start greasin' us."
Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there? Cassius didn't know. He did know Confederate whites despised both blacks and U.S. whites. He'd always known C.S. Negroes didn't love whites-and how little reason they had to love them. Now he'd discovered that white soldiers from the USA couldn't stand Confederate whites, either. That was reassuring.
Plainly, quite a few soldiers in green-gray didn't like Negroes, either. But they hated Confederate whites more-at least while they were down here. Confederate whites wanted them dead, and were willing-no, eager-to pick up weapons and make sure they died. Negroes in the CSA, by contrast, made natural allies. The enemy of my enemy…is at least worth dishing out rations to, Cassius thought.
The cook loaded his mess kit with as much chicken stew as anybody else got. "Here y'are, buddy," he said, his lips barely moving because of the cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth.
"Thanks." Cassius moved on.
When he got a cup of coffee to go with the stew, he found it heavily laced with chicory. But it came from the same big pot-almost a vat-that served the U.S. soldiers. No one was giving him particularly lousy coffee. The good stuff was hard to come by-that was all. As long as he got his fair share of what there was, he had no kick coming.
He made sure he washed his mess kit after he finished eating. The U.S. Army came down hard on you if you didn't. One dose of a jowly sergeant screaming in his face about food poisoning and the galloping shits was enough to last him a lifetime. He did notice that the sergeants screamed just as loud at white men they caught screwing up. Again, as long as they tore into everybody equally, Cassius could deal with it.
Once he'd policed up-a term that had sounded funny when he first heard it, but one he was used to now-he went over to the POW camp outside of Madison. Watching Confederate soldiers behind barbed wire was even more fun than looking at animals in cages had been when his father took him to the zoo.
The Confederates were like lions-they'd bite if they got half a chance. But he had claws of his own. The Tredegar's weight, which often annoyed him, seemed more like a safety net close to the prisoners. "I had a gun myself, I'd shoot you for totin' that thing," a POW said, shaking his fist.
"You could try," Cassius answered. "Some other ofays done tried before, but I'm still here."
"You know what happens to uppity niggers?" the POW said.
"Sure do. They git shot." Cassius started to unsling the rifle. "Same thing happens to uppity prisoners." The Confederate shut up. Cassius let his hand drop.
Some of the other POWs weren't uppity. They were just hungry. They begged from U.S. soldiers, and they begged from Negroes, too. "Got any rations you don't need?" one of them asked, stretching out his hands imploringly to Cassius.
"You feed me if I was in there?" Cassius asked.
"Well, I hope so," the man answered after a perceptible pause for thought. "I'm a Christian, or I try to be."
"Reckon Jake Featherston's a Christian, too?"
"Sure he is," the POW said, this time without hesitation. "He loves Jesus, same as you'n me. Jesus loves him, too."
"Fuck you, you ofay asshole." Cassius turned away. "You can starve."
"You ain't no Christian," the Confederate called after him.
"If Jake Featherston is, I don't want to be." Cassius walked off. He wondered if the POW would cuss him out as he went. But the man kept quiet. A few untimely demises had convinced the C.S. prisoners that they needed to watch their mouths around the surviving Negroes.
Cassius' mother would have landed on him like a thousand-pound bomb if she heard him say he didn't want to be a Christian. She prayed even when things looked worst-no, especially when they did. And she got caught in church, and went straight from church to one of Jake Featherston's murder factories. What did that say about how much being a Christian was worth? Not much, not so far as Cassius could see.
Maybe she was in heaven, the way she always thought she would be. Cassius hoped so. He had trouble believing it, though. He had trouble believing anything these days.
He found Gracchus that evening. Gracchus thought about things, too. "You reckon we'll ever fit in again?" Cassius asked.
The former guerrilla leader didn't even pretend not to understand what he was talking about. "In Georgia? Naw." Gracchus shook his head.
"Don't just mean Georgia," Cassius said. "I mean anywhere. The Confederate ofays all hate us." He didn't love whites in the CSA, either, but he left that out of the mix, continuing, "Ofays from the USA don't all hate us, I reckon, but they's so different, ain't no way we belong in Yankeeland, neither. So what does that leave?"
"Nothin'." Gracchus managed a crooked grin. "When you ever know a nigger who had more'n dat?"
"You got somethin' there," Cassius admitted. His father had had more: a kingdom of the mind, a kingdom whose size and scope Cassius was only beginning to realize he'd never fully grasped. But what did all of Xerxes' quiet wisdom win him in the end? Only another place on the train bound for hell on earth. Cassius said, "I could kill ofays for the rest o' my life an' not even start payin' them fuckers back."
"It's a bastard, ain't it?" Gracchus said. "Maybe Jake Featherston wins, an' maybe he loses. But we-uns, we-uns already done lost." Cassius started to answer, but what could he say that Gracchus hadn't?
Y es, the front was Richmond. There had always been a danger in putting the Confederate capital so close to the U.S. border. Richmond made a magnet for U.S. ambitions. McClellan had threatened it in the War of Secession; a better general likely would have taken it then. Even in the Second Mexican War, the USA dreamt of marching in. During the Great War, the flood tide of green-gray had reached Fredericksburg on its way south before the Confederate government decided it had had enough.
And now…Now Jake Featherston was red-hot, almost white-hot, with fury, but not even his unending, unyielding rage could stiffen the Confederate armies north of the capital. "God damn it to hell!" he screamed at Nathan Bedford Forrest III. "We need to bring more men into the line up there!"
"Sir, we haven't got any more men to move," Forrest replied.
"Get 'em from somewhere!" Jake said.
"Where do you recommend, sir?" the chief of the General Staff asked. "Shall we pull them out of Georgia? Or maybe out of Alabama?"
"No! Jesus Christ, no!" Featherston exclaimed. "The fucking country'll fall apart if we do." The country was falling apart anyway, but he knew it would fall apart faster if he pulled soldiers away from the sectors where they were fighting hardest. "What have we got left in the Carolinas?"