“’Nother day done. Praise de lord,” Jonah said when the shift-changing whistle blew. “I see you in de mornin’, Nero.”
“See you then,” Scipio agreed. He was very used to his alias these days, sometimes even thinking of himself by it. He wiped his sweaty forehead on the coarse cotton canvas of his shirt. Another day done indeed, and a long one, too. The white foreman stuck his card in the time clock to punch him out of work. He trudged from the factory onto the streets of Columbia, a free man.
Even after three months or so at the munitions plant, he had trouble getting used to that idea. His time was his own till he had to get back to work in the morning. He’d never known such liberty, not in his entire life. As house servant and later as butler at Marshlands, he’d been at the white folks’ beck and call every hour of the day or night. As a member of the governing council of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he’d been at Cassius’ beck and call no less than at Miss Anne’s before. Now…
Now he could do as he pleased. If he wanted to go to a saloon and get drunk, he could. If he wanted to chase women, he could do that. If he wanted to go to a park and watch the stars come out, he could do that, too-though Columbia still had a ten o’clock curfew for blacks. And if he wanted to go back to his apartment and read a book, he could also do that, and not have to worry about getting called away in the middle of a chapter.
He walked into a restaurant not far from the factory, ordered fried chicken and fried okra and cornbread, washed it down with chicory-laced coffee, and came out full and happy. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody cared who he was. Oh, every now and then he still saw wanted posters for the uncaptured leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and his name-his true name-still appeared among them, but that hardly seemed to matter. It might have happened a lifetime before, to someone else altogether.
Had Cassius understood that desire to escape the revolutionary past, it probably would have been enough for him to want to liquidate Scipio. Out in the swamps by the Congaree, Cassius and his diehards kept up a guerrilla war against Confederate authority even yet. Every so often, the newspapers complained of some outrage or another the rebels-the papers commonly called them bandits-had perpetrated.
But the papers talked much more about the bill to arm Negroes under debate up in Richmond. People talked about it, too, both white and black. The talk had only intensified once it cleared the House and got into the Senate. More than half of the black men Scipio knew were for it. As best he could judge, fewer than half the whites in Columbia were. How much his judgment was worth, he had trouble gauging.
When he got back to his apartment building, he let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. Now that he no longer had to pay half his salary to the white clerk who’d hired him, he could afford something better than the dismal flophouse where he’d endured his first nights in Columbia. The place was shabby but clean, with gas lights and a bathroom at the end of the hall. It had cockroaches, but not too many, and his own astringently neat habits gave them little sustenance.
Coming up the corridor from the bathroom, the mulatto woman who had the apartment across the hall from his smiled. “Evenin’, Nero,” she said.
“Evenin’, Miss Sempronia,” he answered. He thought she was a widow, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t pry into the business of others, not least because he couldn’t afford to have anyone prying into his. That smile, though, and others he’d got from her, made him think he wouldn’t have to run very fast if he decided to chase her.
He went into his own apartment and closed the door after him. It was getting dark early these days; though he’d left the drapes open, he had to fumble to find the matches he’d set on the shelf near the gaslight. He struck one and got the lamp there going. That gave him the light he needed to start the lamp above his favorite chair.
Since the apartment boasted only one chair, that made the choice easier than it would have been otherwise. But it was comfortable, so he didn’t complain. If the upholstery was battered, well, so what? This wasn’t Marshlands. “I am, however, not the tiniest bit dissatisfied with my present circumstances,” he said softly, in the starchy white-folks’ voice he hadn’t used more than a couple of times since the Red uprising broke out. He smiled to hear himself. Now that he wasn’t used to it any more, that accent struck him as ridiculous.
On the rickety pine table beside the chair lay a battered copy of Flaubert’s Salammbo he’d picked up for a nickel. He opened it almost at random and plunged in. He wondered how many times he’d read it. More than he could count on his fingers, he was sure of that. Most literate Negroes in the CSA had read Salammbo a good many times. The story of the revolt of the army of dark-skinned mercenaries against Carthage after the First Punic War struck a chord in the heart of the most peaceable black man.
He grimaced and sighed. That revolt had failed, too. He kept reading anyhow.
When the cheap, loudly ticking alarm clock he’d bought said it was a little past nine, he carried a couple of towels and a bar of soap down to the bathroom. One thing years of being a butler had done: made him more fastidious than most factory hands, white or black, in the CSA. The weather was still warm enough for him to find a cold-water bath invigorating. How he’d feel about that when winter came around, he didn’t want to think.
Next morning, the alarm clock’s clatter got him hopping out of bed, heart pounding as if Confederate soldiers were bombarding the apartment house. He dressed, made himself coffee, breakfasted on bread and jam, and made a sandwich of bread and tinned beef to throw in his dinner pail. Thus fortified, he walked the half a mile to work, the dinner pail brushing his left thigh with every step he took.
A lot of black men in overalls and collarless shirts and heavy shoes were on the street; he might have been invisible among them. Some, like him, went bareheaded; some wore homemade straw hats, as if they still labored in the fields; some wore cloth caps like most white factory hands. Not many white factory hands were left, though: supervisors, youngsters not yet ripe for conscription, wounded veterans no longer fit for the front, and a few others with skills or pull enough to keep them out of butternut.
Here and there, men who worked in his plant waved to him and called out his nom de travaille. “Mornin’, Nero.” “How you is, Nero?” The broader he made his Congaree patois in answer, the happier the other workers seemed. He’d seen that back at Marshlands, too. It saddened him-his fellows were locking themselves away from much that was worthwhile-but he also understood it.
Greetings flew thick and fast as he lined up to punch in. He’d made his own place here, and felt no small pride at having done so. “Mornin’, Solon,” he said with a wave. “How you is, Artaxerxes? A good mornin’ to you, Hadrian.”
The foreman said, “Apollonius already took off, Nero, so I reckon you got yourself a few crates to haul there.”
“I’ll do it,” was all Scipio said, to which the white man nodded. The fellow who worked the night shift slid out of the factory as fast as he possibly could every morning. One day he’d slide out too fast, and have the door slammed in his face when he came back. It wasn’t as if the bosses couldn’t find anyone to replace him.
Sure enough, several crates of empty shell casings waited to be hauled to the belt that would take them to the white women who filled them and installed their fuses and noses. Scipio loaded two onto a dolley and pushed it over to Jonah, who stood waiting to receive it. When he hurried back to do more, Jonah shook his head. “Dat Apollonius, he one lazy nigger,” he observed. “You, Nero, you does yo’ work good.”