Lucien set a hand on his chest and mimed complete exhaustion. "I don't think I could like it better than this," he said. Йloise laughed again. They laughed a lot when they were alone together. Neither one of them had done much laughing for a long time before. And that, to Lucien, mattered almost as much as the other.
Cincinnatus Driver wasn't an old man. No one-except his son, of course- could have accused him of being an old man. He was strong. His hair was- mostly-dark. He remained three years on the good side of fifty. None of that, though, had kept him from turning into a grandfather.
Karen Driver wiggled in his arms. He was getting used to holding a baby all over again. Karen weighed no more than a big cat, which is to say, nothing to speak of. He was getting used to the way she looked, too. Her skin was lighter than his, but not quite the coffee-with-cream color of Negroes with a fair amount of white blood. She had her mother's narrow eyes with the folds of skin at the inner corners, too.
"She's going to be beautiful," Cincinnatus said. "She's already beautiful."
"Thank you," Grace Driver said softly. Cincinnatus and Elizabeth had accepted her more readily than her folks accepted Achilles. The child helped and hurt at the same time. The Changs did love the baby, but Grace's mother blamed her for not having a boy… among other things.
Karen stopped wiggling, screwed up her little face, and grunted. Cincinnatus laughed. He had no trouble remembering what that meant. He handed her to her mother. "She done made a mess in her drawers," he said. He was just Karen's granddad. He didn't have to clean her up himself.
"I'll take care of her," Grace said, and changed the baby's diaper.
Cincinnatus turned to his son. "How you doin'?" he asked.
"I'm all right," Achilles answered, more of Iowa than of Kentucky in his accent. Cincinnatus knew his son would have said the same thing if he were living on the street and eating what he could fish out of garbage cans. Achilles had his own full measure of the family's stubbornness. But he wasn't on the street; he continued, "That clerking job of mine isn't what you'd call exciting, but I can pay my bills. I won't get rich, but I'm doing fine."
"Good. That's good." Cincinnatus had been on his own when he was younger than Achilles was now, but he hadn't had to worry about a family then. And a young black in Confederate Kentucky hadn't had the hopes and dreams of one in U.S. Iowa. Cincinnatus had been brutally sure he wouldn't, couldn't, get very far ahead of the game. Achilles could aspire to more. He might not get it, but if he didn't he'd have to blame himself as well as the system under which he lived. Down in the CSA, the system gave any Negro an easy excuse for failure.
"Let me have my grandbaby," Elizabeth said, and reached for Karen. Elizabeth took to being a grandmother with none of the doubts about age and the like that troubled Cincinnatus. And Karen fascinated Amanda, who at fourteen was plenty old enough to help take care of her niece.
"How you doin' with your folks these days?" Cincinnatus asked Grace.
Before she could answer, Achilles said, "Well, her daddy hasn't called me a nigger, but he sure has come close."
"I didn't ask how you was doin' with Mr. Chang," Cincinnatus said sharply. "I asked how Grace was."
"It is still hard," she answered. "It is still very hard, like Achilles said. My father and especially my mother are not modern people. They think of China all the time. They don't think we are all Americans. They don't think we are all the same."
Achilles stirred at that. "Pa doesn't think we're all the same, either. He thinks colored people are down at the bottom of the pile."
"That ain't so," Cincinnatus said.
"The… heck it isn't," Achilles retorted.
"No." Cincinnatus shook his head. "I never said that, and I don't believe it. What I say is, white folks reckon black folks is on the bottom o' the pile. An' that's the Lord's truth. If you was old enough to recollect what it was like livin' in Kentucky when it belonged to the Confederate States, you'd know it, too."
"But we aren't in the Confederate States any more," Achilles pointed out.
"But white folks is still white folks." That wasn't Cincinnatus; it was Elizabeth. The two older people thought as one on this question. If anything, Elizabeth was more cautious about rocking the boat than her husband.
Grace's smile was sad. She held up a hand to stop Achilles when he would have come back with a hot answer. That hand did stop him, too, as Cincinnatus noted with surprise and more than a little respect. She said, "My parents sound the same about this. But times have changed. If times hadn't changed, would Achilles and I be together?"
"Times has changed-some," Cincinnatus said. "They ain't changed enough. You look at the black folks runnin' away from the Confederate States. You look at how the USA don't let 'em cross the border. President Hoover, President Smith, that don't matter-it don't change. The USA don't want nothin' to do with us, an' that's how come I say things ain't changed enough."
He waited to see how Grace would respond to that. She shrugged and said, "Maybe." He wondered what that was supposed to mean. Probably that he hadn't convinced her, but she was too polite to say so. She didn't always come out and say what she thought. Cincinnatus had already noticed that.
He asked, "You going to visit your folks while you're here? Only one flight up."
Grace shook her head. "Not much point. They don't want to see us."
"Don't they want to see their grandbaby?" Cincinnatus pointed to Karen.
His son answered: "I'm not Chinese. I'm just a spook." His voice was harsh and cold.
"That's not quite fair," Grace said. "They wouldn't like it if you were white, either."
"Well, maybe not," Achilles admitted. "They don't quite hate me, the way I've seen some white men do. They can make themselves be polite. I even used to think they were pretty nice, till the two of us started getting serious. But they sure don't want you to be married to me, and the baby hasn't made 'em change their minds about that."
His wife sighed. "I know. It's sad. They came to America to find a better life than they could have had in China. They got one, too. But they're still Chinese first and American afterwards."
"We came here to Iowa to get a better life, too," Cincinnatus said. "I'm glad I'm livin' in the United States and not in the Confederate States no more- 'specially nowadays. God help the poor niggers in the CSA nowadays."
Achilles and Grace left a little later. Cincinnatus walked to the stairway with them, hoping they would change their mind and go upstairs to visit the Changs after all. But they didn't. They went down to the street, carrying the baby with them. He sighed and went back to the apartment. Elizabeth's raised eyebrows asked a question. Cincinnatus shook his head.
His wife sighed. "That's so sad, they cut off from half their family. Don't seem right. Don't seem right at all. You ain't got family, you ain't got nothin'."
"And the baby's so cute," Amanda said. "How can you not love a little baby?"
Cincinnatus smiled. "You love everybody, honey." That was true. Amanda was a sweet-natured child. Because she liked almost everyone, she thought everybody should like everybody else. And if all the people in the world had been like her, everybody would have. Sooner or later, though, she would have to realize not everyone worked the way she did. Cincinnatus hoped she wouldn't get hurt too badly finding that out.