The only sport in camp was watching new fish come in. Scipio had been a new fish himself, not so long before. Now he watched other dazed, thirsty, half-starved-or sometimes more than that-men stagger into Camp Determination. Their astonishment was funny, as his must have been to those who arrived before him.
“What you lookin’ at?” a black man would yell at the newcomers. “Y’all reckon you’s in New Yawk City?”
Scipio didn’t understand why, but talking about New York City never failed to send the prisoners into gales of laughter. For as long as he could remember, the biggest town in the USA had been the symbol of degeneracy and depravity to white Confederates. In films made in the CSA, New York City seemed entirely populated by villains and lounge lizards and slutty women. Maybe that was part of it.
But New York City was also full of riches and luxury. No matter how white Confederates despised the place, they couldn’t deny or ignore it. That probably made the camp jokes funnier. And sometimes things didn’t have to make any sense at all to be funny. Sometimes not making sense was the point of the joke.
“You park your Cadillac car outside befo’ you come in?” the wit would call to the new fish. It was always a Cadillac car, never just a Cadillac. Scipio didn’t know why that was so, but it was. It was one more thing that made the jokes funnier.
Sometimes a new fish would have spirit enough to say something like, “You niggers crazy.”
That would send the camp veterans into capers as wild as they had the energy to perform. “We sure is crazy,” someone would say. “If you ain’t crazy in dis here place, you gots to be nuts.”
At one level, that made no sense at all. At another level, it held a profound truth. Scipio was used to thinking in terms like that. Anne Colleton made sure he was thoroughly educated, not for his sake but so he made a better butler, a better ornament, for the Marshlands plantation. Marshlands was a ruin today. Anne Colleton was dead, killed in the early days of the war when U.S. carrier-based bombers hit Charleston.
And here I am, in Camp Determination. Much good my education did me, Scipio thought. The one thing that mattered in the CSA was his color. How smart he was? That he could quote Shakespeare from memory? Nobody white cared a bit.
The Negro who’d made the crack about craziness was just making a joke. Scipio was sure he didn’t see that he was kidding on the square. He talked like a field hand. He certainly wasn’t educated. He probably wasn’t very smart. What difference did it make? Here he was, and here Scipio was. They had equality of a sort-equality of misery.
This batch of new fish had no trouble finding bunks-a large number of men were transferred to other camps just a couple of days before they got here. People came into Camp Determination. They went out. Nobody seemed to stay very long. That could have been why all the rumors swirled around the trucks and the bathhouses. Scipio hoped that was the reason.
And then he got the chance to find out for himself. When his barracks lined up for roll call one morning, a guard shouted, “We’re gonna ship your asses to Abilene. Head on over to the bathhouse. Don’t want you bringin’ lice an’ fleas an’ shit like that with you, so we’re gonna wash you off and delouse you.”
“Befo’ breakfast?” somebody said in dismay.
“You’ll get breakfast on the trucks that take you east,” the guard said. “They got bread an’ all kinds of good stuff. From what I hear, they feed you better in Abilene than we do here.” That sent a buzz through the assembled Negroes. Whatever the food in Abilene was like, it couldn’t very well be worse than it was here.
Nobody raised any particular fuss as the guards marched the Negroes to the bathhouse. Anyone who did raise a fuss would have been sorry; the guards carried automatic rifles as well as submachine guns, and looked very ready to use them. Among the guards was the Mexican-looking sergeant who’d delivered the message from Bathsheba and Antoinette. Seeing him made Scipio feel better. He didn’t think the man would let anything bad happen to him.
Inside the bathhouse, the guards ordered the Negroes to take off their rags and store them in cubbies. One of the gray-uniformed men who watched them do it said, “Remember where your shit’s at. Anybody tries stealing somebody else’s duds, he’s gonna wish he was never born.”
A sign pointed the way to the delousing station. The naked black men walked along the corridor in that direction. It was a big chamber, but they filled it up. Scipio noticed the door was steel, with rubber gasketing around the edges. His unease began there. But for a few metal columns with grillwork at the bottom, the chamber was bare. A sign over a door in the far wall said, TO THE BATHS.
He’d heard veterans, both white and black, go on about Great War delousing stations. Either they’d changed the way things worked since or…
Some kind of gas started pouring out of the grillwork. Even a tiny whiff of it set Scipio’s lungs on fire. He ran toward that door in the far wall. Other blacks got there ahead of him. They screamed in despair-the door didn’t open. They fooled us, Scipio thought. They fooled us good, damn them. Half crushed in the panic, half poisoned by the gas, he crumpled. Blackness enfolded him.
IV
Up until a few years earlier, sharecroppers lived in this sorry little collection of shacks. Now the buildings stood sad and vacant under Georgia’s mild spring sun. “Where did everybody go?” Jonathan Moss asked. “Did the Freedom Party catch the people who were here and send them to a camp?”
To his surprise, Spartacus shook his head. “Don’t reckon so,” the black guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon they went to town, to look for work there. Weren’t no’ mo’ work here, that’s fo’ damn sure.”
“Why the hell not?” Nick Cantarella asked. “You got nothin’ but miles and miles of cotton farms and tobacco farms and shit like that.”
Spartacus surprised Moss again, this time by chuckling in grim amusement. “You is a city fella,” Spartacus said, not unkindly. “You is a city fella, an’ you don’t see how the country work. Used to be plenty jobs fo’ nigger field hands, yeah. Then the Freedom Party make all these tractors an’ harvesters an’ shit, throw Lawd only know how many niggers outa work. Goddamn bastards.”
“That’s not all it did,” Cantarella said. “Factories they built to turn out those tractors and harvesters, they’re making barrels and armored cars nowadays. You can bet your ass on that.”
“Sly,” Moss said. “Sly twice, because it let them drive the Negroes off the fields and let them gear up for turning out war machines without making the USA flabble about it.”
“Fuck me,” Spartacus said, looking from one of them to the other. “I seen the first part o’ dat, on account of it happen to me an’ mine. But the other half…Didn’t worry ’bout dat none.”
“Yeah, well, those Freedom Party fuckers wouldn’t be half so dangerous if the guys running the show for ’em were dumb,” Cantarella said. “Featherston’s a maniac, but he’s a goddamn smart maniac, you know what I mean?”
Jonathan Moss did, and wished he didn’t. Fighting the war against the Confederates hadn’t proved anything to him one way or the other. Soldiers were soldiers, and sometimes where they came from hardly mattered. Military life had rhythms of its own. But his time since escaping from Andersonville told a different story.
He’d wondered how the Confederates could hold down the countryside with so many whites of military age off fighting the USA. Now he knew. If Negroes in the countryside lost their jobs, a lot of them had to go to the CSA’s cities and towns, where they were easier to keep track of and get hold of. No, the people at the top of the Freedom Party weren’t dumb at all. Too damn bad.
Meanwhile, some of the blacks still in the countryside did their best to make the Confederates unhappy. Spartacus said, “Reckon we kin spend the night heah. Ain’t nobody round seen us go in. Better’n sleepin’ on bare ground.”