“Food!” that second Negro said. “We’s powerful hungry, suh.”
“I’m spreading out the ration best way I know how,” Pinkard said, which was true-all the inmates starved at the same rate. “If I had more, I’d share it out, too.” That was also true; he was cruel because he found himself in a cruel situation, not because he enjoyed cruelty for its own sake. He understood the difference. Whether a scrawny black prisoner did…mattered very little to him.
When the scrawny black looked at him, it wasn’t at his fleshy face but at his even fleshier belly. You ain’t missed no meals. The thought hung in the air, but the Negro knew better than to say it. He turned away instead, hands curling into useless fists.
As for the man with the family, he was already gone. He must have realized he wouldn’t get any help from Jeff Pinkard. And he was right. He wouldn’t. Other blacks came up with their futile requests. Jeff listened to them, not that it did the blacks much good.
Every once in a while, though, somebody betrayed an uprising or an escape plot. All by itself, that made these prowl-throughs worth doing. The ones who did squeal got their reward, too: a big supper where the other inmates could watch them eat, and a ride out of Camp Determination…in one of the sealed trucks that asphyxiated their passengers.
That was a shame, but what could you do? The CSA had no room for Negroes any more, not even for Negroes who played along.
Guards kept a long file of men moving toward the bathhouse. “Come on!” one of them called. “Come on, goddammit! You don’t want to be a bunch of lousy, stinking niggers when we ship your asses out of here, do you?”
Jeff Pinkard smiled to himself. By the time the Negroes got out of the bathhouse, they wouldn’t care one way or the other-or about anything else, ever again. But as long as they didn’t know that beforehand, everything was fine.
“You, there! Si, you. Mallate!”
Scipio stared in alarm. Were he white, he would have turned whiter. The guard with the sergeant’s stripes was pointing at him. He hadn’t been in Camp Determination long before he realized you didn’t want guards singling you out for anything at all. And mallate from a Sonoran or Chihuahuan, as this fellow plainly was, meant the same thing as nigger from an ordinary white Confederate.
He had to answer. The only thing worse than getting singled out by a guard was pissing one off. “Yes, suh? What you need, suh?”
“You named, uh, Xerxes?” asked the swarthy, black-haired sergeant.
“Yes, suh. That’s my name.” At least the man wasn’t asking for him as Scipio. Even though he used it here himself, hearing it in a guard’s mouth might mean his revolutionary past in South Carolina had popped up again. If it had, he was a dead man…a little sooner than he would be anyway. Once you landed in here, your chances weren’t good any which way.
The guard gestured with his submachine gun. “You come here.” Did some special school teach guards that move? They all seemed to know it. It was amazingly persuasive, too.
“I’s comin’,” Scipio said. If you told a guard no, that was commonly the last thing you ever told anybody.
Legs light with fear, Scipio stepped away from Barracks 27. Even I’s comin’ might be the last thing he ever told anyone. That sergeant and his two white flunkies looked ready to chalk him up to “shot while attempting to escape.”
“You know two women named Bathsheba and Antoinette?” the guard demanded. In his mouth, Scipio’s wife’s name came out as Bat’cheba; Scipio almost didn’t recognize it.
But he nodded. “Yes, suh, I knows dey,” he said. Fear and hope warred, leaving his voice husky. “Is dey-Is dey all right?” He had to fight to get the words out.
“They all right, si.” The guard nodded, too. “They say, they hope you all right, too.”
“Do Jesus!” Relief flooded through Scipio. “Thank you, suh. Thank from from de bottom o’ my heart. You see dey again, you tell dey I’s doin’ fine.” No black in Camp Determination was doing fine. His wife and daughter were bound to know that as well as he did. They didn’t want him to worry, though, and he didn’t want them to, either.
“I tell ’em.” The guard sergeant from Sonora or Chihuahua gave him one more brusque nod, then strode away, the two bigger men still at his heels.
Bathsheba and Antoinette were still alive. There was still hope. And Lubbock belonged to the Yankees. Like a lot of Negroes in the CSA, Scipio would have been a patriot if only the whites around him let him. The Confederate States were the only country he had. But if his own homeland set out to do horrible things to him and the people he loved, then its enemies became his friends.
He laughed, not that it was funny. From everything he’d heard, the Mormons up in Utah were as firm in denying Negroes equality as white Confederates were, even if they had different reasons. He sympathized with them now, no matter what they believed. What the United States were doing to them wasn’t that different from what the Confederate States were doing to blacks.
And yet you never could tell. Even in this hellhole, that guard went out of his way to deliver the message from Bathsheba and Antoinette. He didn’t have to do that. He could have refused them straight out. He could have promised to pass along their words and then gone on about his business. He hadn’t. Decency cropped up in the strangest places.
Scipio looked north. He could see the women’s barracks, there on the other side of the railroad line that brought his family here. Not one but two barbed-wire perimeters separated him from his loved ones. He drew himself up a little straighter. The train ride from Augusta didn’t kill him. If it didn’t, could anything? He didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.
His gaze swung from the north, the unattainable, toward the northwest. The Yankees might well come down to Camp Determination. If Lubbock was gone, other west Texas towns could fall. He just had to stay alive till U.S. troops arrived.
Just. That made it sound easier than it was.
He still didn’t know how many people died in that cattle car. He didn’t know why he still lived, either. Plenty of men and women younger and stronger than he was were dead. If he could make the Yankees listen to his story, maybe his survival would mean something. Bathsheba would say so. She believed things happened for reasons. She believed God watched over people.
Scipio wished he could do the same. He also wished God did a better job of watching over the Negroes in the CSA. He wished God did any kind of job of watching over them. As far as he could see, God was out to a film, leaving them to fend for themselves. The only trouble with that was, the Freedom Party had a lot more fending power than the Negroes did.
“Labor gang!” a guard shouted. “Need fifty volunteers for a labor gang!”
Labor gangs left the camp with men chained to one another like criminals. They worked killing hours on little food. When they came back, the men in them were worn to nubs.
The guard could have got five hundred volunteers, or five thousand. Work on a labor gang was real work, and you did come back when you went out. Nobody knew what happened when you got shipped to another camp. A lot of people muttered about that. If you muttered too loud, you had a way of getting shipped out yourself. Then other people muttered about what happened to you.
Except for the labor gangs, there was nothing to do inside the camp but stew and starve. If the Confederate authorities were smart, they could have set up factories where the Negroes they’d dragged from the cities and countryside could make things for them. The authorities didn’t bother. They just didn’t care.