Isabella Antonelli said, "I do not think anything will come of it. If anything does come of it, that would not be so bad." For a moment, she looked altogether pragmatic. "He is a Catholic. I have found out."
"Is he? Have you?" Sylvia didn't scratch her head, but she felt like it. The more you looked at the world, the more complicated it got.
The white man in the munitions plant hiring office scribbled something on the form in front of him, then looked across the table at Scipio. "Well, boy, you sound like you'll do," he said in the sharp accent typical of Columbia, South Carolina. "Why don't you let me have your passbook so we can get this here all settled right and proper?"
Scipio's heart leaped up into his throat. He'd expected the demand. No Negro in the CSA could have failed to expect the demand. Since the start of the war, things were supposed to have loosened up. That was how it had looked when he was the butler back at Marshlands, anyhow. God only knew what the aftermath of the rebellion had done toward tightening things again, though.
God knew, and he was about to find out. Donning what he hoped was an ingratiating smile, he said, "Ain't got none, suh. I used to, yes suh, but I plumb lost it in the ruction."
"I bet you did," the clerk said with a thin smile. "You talk like a nigger from further down on the Congaree-that right, Nero?"
"Yes, suh," Scipio said. Nero was one of the commonest names Negro men bore. He wondered what the white man-whose desk bore a little placard proclaiming him to be Mr. Staunton-would have thought had he suddenly started his other way of speaking. He didn't intend doing anything so foolish. Talking like an educated white might give him away and would surely get him tagged as uppity. He couldn't afford that, not if he wanted work.
"Let's see your hands," Staunton said suddenly. Trying not to show any reluctance, Scipio displayed them. That unpleasant smile flashed across the clerk's face again. "Not a field nigger-a house nigger, I reckon. And you don't have a passbook? My, my. What were you doing, these past few months?"
That hit too close to the center of the target. Scipio said, "A minute ago, suh, you says you wants to hire me. Now you talkin' like I was one o' dey bad niggers raise all de ruction." He wanted to flee. Only a well-founded suspicion that he wouldn't make it outside the door kept him standing where he was.
"Oh, I'll hire you," Staunton said. He lowered his voice. "For niggers without passbooks, though, we got a special arrangement. Have to get you a new book, right? Lots of patrollers around these days, that's a fact."
"Yes, suh," Scipio said again. Now he stood at ease once more. Staunton wasn't going to betray him, just shake him down. "How much I gots to pay you, git de new book?" He also spoke quietly.
"Ain't you a smart nigger?" By the way the clerk's pale eyes sparked, that was more warning than compliment. "Half your pay the first month," Staunton said, greed evidently overcoming suspicion. "End of the month, you be a good boy, you get yourself a book. Understand?"
"Yes, suh." The repetition was getting monotonous. Scipio let out a mournful sigh. "Not much left fo' me." At the start of the war, a dollar and a quarter a day would have been good money for a Negro, and half that survivable for a month. Wages and prices had gone up a good deal the past two years, though.
"Nigger without a passbook ain't gonna get a better deal no place else," Staunton said, and that, odds on, was true.
Scipio sighed again. He'd be drinking water and eating cornmeal mush for the next month, no two ways about it-and that with sleeping in the cheapest flophouse he could find. After Marshlands, even after the hectic life as part of the ruling council of the Congaree Socialist Republic, it had all the earmarks of a thoroughly joyless existence.
"God damn the Reds," he muttered. Nobody had bothered to listen to him, though he'd warned again and again that the uprising would lead only to disaster. Having acquired a fair smattering of a classical education at Marshlands, he found himself wishing Cassandra were a masculine name. He would have used it for an alias instead of Nero.
Mr. Staunton heard what he said, and interpreted it his own way. "God damn the Reds is right, Nero," he said. "Weren't for them, wouldn't hardly have to worry about passbooks at all, not the way things were going. We wanted bodies so bad, we didn't care. But now it's gonna cost you money to get fixed up right, on account of what they did. Too bad, boy." He spoke with the soppy condescension that seemed to be as close as a Confederate white could come to showing sympathy for a black.
"When do I start?" Scipio asked.
"Tomorrow morning, seven o'clock," the clerk answered. He shoved the form across the desk at Scipio and handed him a pen. "Put your mark right on the line here. We'll get you a time card made. Foreman'll punch it for you-you don't need to worry about pickin'it out. Just so you know to tell him, you're Nero number three."
Scipio placed an X on the line the clerk indicated. By what he saw of the form, his spelling and handwriting were considerably better than Staunton's. He didn't aim to show that. The less the white man knew about him, the better he liked it.
But, even though he'd written an X, the way he'd taken the pen, as if his hand was accustomed to it, made the clerk's eyes narrow. "House nigger," Staunton said, half to himself. "You read and write some, don't you, boy?"
"Some, yes, suh," Scipio answered cautiously. Damn it, why couldn't he have dealt with a dull, bored white clerk rather than an alert, grasping one?
But Staunton visibly decided not to make an issue of it. "Go on, get out of here," he said. "You ain't here at seven sharp tomorrow, don't ever come round again, neither." He pushed his chair back from his desk and swiveled so he could put Scipio's paperwork in a file cabinet. That was the first time the Negro had the chance to see his right leg was missing from halfway down the thigh.
After that, Scipio got out of there in a hurry. He had a couple of dollars in his pocket, from odd jobs he'd done on farms and in little towns before he decided the big city was safer. As he walked along Columbia's busy streets, he wondered if he'd made a mistake.
Probably not, he decided. Negroes were on the streets, and a lot of them looked as ragged as he did. Soldiers tramped along the streets, too, some of them regulars in butternut, some recalled militia in old-fashioned gray that made them look like policemen. They didn't seem to be checking blacks' papers, just showing themselves to keep trouble from breaking out.
Columbia had seen trouble during the Red insurrections. It was a city of fine and stately homes and shops, many of them dating from before the War of Secession. Here and there, a block would have a house missing, like a man with a missing front tooth. A couple of places in town, whole blocks were missing, even the rubble cleared away. The Negroes might have lost, but they'd put up a fight.
Much good it did them, Scipio thought gloomily. He ducked into a store whose sign forthrightly proclaimed CHEAP CLOTHES and bought a pair of dungarees and a couple of collarless cotton shirts. He wouldn't be able to afford any new clothes for the next month, not on sixty-two and a half cents a day he wouldn't.
A bowl of thin stew cost him another fifteen cents, and a mattress in a tiny, airless cubicle a quarter on top of that. He was left with the munificent sum of half a dollar with which to face the world. It was Wednesday night. Payday would be Friday. He had enough for a bed tomorrow night, and for some bread or mush to keep the hole in his belly from getting any worse. Sighing, he tried to sleep.
On that uncomfortable bed, in that uncomfortable roomlet, waking up in time to be at the munitions plant was not the problem. Sleeping at all before then was. When dawn began showing through the small, rectangular window that wouldn't open, he gave up, put on the dungarees and one of the shirts he'd bought the evening before, and then discovered he had to pay the flophouse proprietor a dime to watch the clothes he had left so they'd be there when he got back. Day-old bread, he thought, and sighed again.