But they didn’t call the sheriff. In spite of an Augusta passbook, Cassius hadn’t had any trouble going where he pleased. If he stole, that might have been a different story. Except for trifles-a few eggs here, some matches there-he didn’t. His parents had raised him the right way. He wouldn’t have put it like that, not after the way he knocked heads with his father, but that was what it amounted to.
He stayed in the pine woods after getting run off a farm west of Milledgeville. With summer coming soon, nights were mild. Mosquitoes tormented him, but they would have done that anywhere except behind screens. He didn’t worry about animals; bears and cougars were hunted into rarity. People, on the other hand…
He’d already seen Mexican soldiers on the march. He made sure they didn’t see him, ducking into a stand of trees once and hiding behind a haystack another time. Those yellowish khaki uniforms made him angry-what were they doing in his country? He wouldn’t have got nearly so upset about butternut or gray.
That was his gut reaction, anyhow. When he thought about it, he laughed at himself. As if the Confederate States were his country, or any Negro’s country! The idea was ridiculous. And native whites would have been rougher on him or anyone else his color than these foreigners were.
He chopped wood for a farmer later that day. The blisters he’d got the first time he did it were starting to turn to calluses. The farmer gave him ham and grits and a big mug of homebrew. Making your own beer was against the law in Georgia, but plenty of people both white and black turned criminal on that score.
“You work good,” the farmer said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice.
“Thank you, suh,” Cassius answered.
As others had before him, the white man asked, “Want to stick around?” He gave Cassius a shrewd look. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna run into trouble wandering around the countryside-or else trouble’s gonna run into you.”
Cassius only shrugged. Whatever happened to him out here couldn’t be worse than what had happened to his father and mother and sister in Augusta. “Sorry, suh, but I got to be movin’ on,” he said.
“Whatever you want.” The farmer shrugged, too, but Cassius didn’t like the glint in his eye. He left a little earlier than he would have otherwise, and headed south where he had been going west. As soon as he got out of sight of the farmhouse, he took the first westward track he found. Luck was with him, because he came up to another farm just as the sun was going down. He scouted the place from the edge of the woods, and didn’t see or hear any dogs. When it got really dark, he sneaked into the haystack, which gave him a much better bed than bare ground would have.
He hadn’t fallen asleep yet when gunfire split the night: several bursts from submachine guns, with single shots from a pistol in between them. He wondered what that was all about. No, actually he didn’t wonder-he feared he knew. Had that farmer called the local sheriff or militia commander or whoever was in charge of the people with guns and said, “There’s an uppity nigger southbound from my place. Reckon you ought to take care of him”?
Deputies or Mexicans must have picked on the first Negro they saw heading south on that road. That black wasn’t Cassius, but they didn’t know or care-especially after he started shooting back at them. Cassius felt bad about snaring the other colored man in his troubles, and hoped the fellow got away.
If they were after me, they would’ve snagged me, he thought, shivering as he burrowed deeper into the sweet-smelling hay. If I didn’t notice that damn ofay looking all sly…
He woke up before sunrise, and got out of there before the farmer could come outside and discover him. Once he was back in the woods, he took off his clothes and made sure he brushed all the hay off of them. He didn’t want to look like somebody who had to sleep in a haystack, even if that was what he was-especially if that was what he was.
He heard gunfire again that afternoon: not just a little, the way he had the night before, but lots. Both sides had plenty of firepower and weren’t shy about using it. Now I know what war sounds like, Cassius thought, which only proved he’d never come anywhere near a real battlefield.
But this would do. He walked toward it, thinking-foolishly thinking-he would watch what was going on from a safe distance, as he might have watched a football game back in Augusta. Even the first bullet that came close enough for him to hear the crack! as it zipped past wasn’t enough to deter him. He got behind a pine tree and imagined he was safe.
Negro guerrillas held what had been a sharecropper village. Mexican soldiers were trying to push them out of it or kill them if they stayed inside. Hardly even noticing that he was doing it, Cassius leaned forward. This was more exciting than any football game he’d ever watched.
It stayed an exciting game till a Mexican took a bullet to the temple. The other side of his head exploded into red mush. His rifle fell from his hands as he crumpled to the ground. Even with that surely mortal wound, he didn’t die right away. He jerked and flopped and twitched, like a chicken that had just met the chopper.
Cassius gulped. He almost wished someone would shoot the Mexican again to make him hold still. No, this wasn’t a game, no matter what it looked like. People were really dying out there. When another bullet snapped past Cassius, he didn’t just flinch. He felt as if somebody’d jabbed an icy dagger into each kidney. This is what fear feels like, he thought.
And fear had an odor, too. He could smell it coming off of himself. He could probably smell it drifting over from the Mexican soldiers and their Negro foes. And smelling it only made him more afraid, at some level far below conscious thought.
He heard footfalls coming through the woods toward him. They made him afraid, too. They were all too likely to come from Francisco Jose’s men. And if the greasers spotted him, what would they do? They’d shoot him, that was what. He was a young Negro man. Of course they would think him an enemy.
And he was, even if he didn’t carry a Tredegar. His heart was with the embattled blacks in the little hamlet. Not only his heart, either. Before he knew what he was doing, he ran for those shacks as fast as he could go.
Bullets chewed up the ground under his feet. They cracked and whirred past his head. He didn’t know if the Mexicans or the Negroes were shooting at him. Both, probably. If the two sides weren’t so busy blazing away at each other, they might have paid him even more attention than they did, not that it was attention he was likely to live through.
He dove behind a crate, hoping everybody would forget about him. “Who the hell’re you?” one of the Negroes shouted at him.
“Name’s Cassius,” he answered, not that that told them much. “There’s soldiers in them trees I run out of.”
“Oh, yeah?” said the voice from behind him. “We can shift them fuckers, I reckon.”
They did, too. They had a couple of machine guns, and they didn’t seem short of ammunition for them. Shrieks from the woods said they’d scored at least a couple of hits. Nobody used the trees to outflank the hamlet, which the Mexicans had probably wanted to do.
Cassius lay very still behind the crate. The Mexicans seemed to forget he was there, which suited him fine. He didn’t want to remind them. After another half hour or so, the firing on both sides tapered off. “They’s goin’!” someone behind him shouted.
“Reckon you can come out now, whatever the hell your name was,” someone else added.
Wearily, Cassius got to his feet. A couple of Negro men with rifles in their hands showed themselves. One of them gestured to him. “Looks like you jus’ joined us,” the man said. He was short and wiry, with a knife scar pulling the left side of his mouth up into a permanent sneer. “Coulda had some trouble if them Mexicans got where they was goin’.”