"Nero number three, eh? All right, you're on time, boy," the foreman said when he got to the factory: grudging approval, but approval. The white man punched his card into the clock, then took him back into the factory. "They stack the crates of empty shells here, at the end of this line," the fellow said, pointing. "You haul 'em over there, where they pick 'em up to be filled. You got that?"
"Yes, suh," Scipio said. Several crates already stood there. "I do 'em one at a time by hand, suh?"
"'Less you got a servant to do 'em for you, that's what you do, by Jesus," the foreman said. "I wanted me a butler, I'd've hired a nigger wearin' different clothes." He laughed at his own joke.
Scipio, luckily, managed to keep his face straight. "Don't mind workin', suh," he said. "Ain't what I mean. Jus' thinkin' that, you give me a hand truck, I could do mo' work in de same time."
The foreman laughed again. "First time I ever heard of a nigger wanting to do more work, 'stead of less." He rubbed his chin. "It ain't the worst idea I ever heard, though. Tell you what-you do it this way for today. We'll see what happens tomorrow. I got to talk with a couple people first."
"Yes, suh," Scipio said again. If they think it's a good idea, I'm going to take the credit for it, was what the white man meant. Scipio couldn't do anything about that. He strode over to the crates, picked one up, and carried it to where the foreman had told him to put it.
It was heavy. The rough wood bit into his hands. The edge of the crate struck his thighs halfway between knee and hip. He'd be bruised there by evening-hell, he'd be bruised there by noon. He walked back and got another crate. The foreman nodded, satisfied, and went back to supervising check-in.
A Negro in good, well-made work clothes picked up the crate Scipio had set down. The two black man stared at each other. Scipio spoke first. He had to speak first, before the other man used his true name. "How you is, Jonah?" he said. "You 'member ol' Nero, eh?"
Jonah had been a field hand at Marshlands. He and his woman had gone into Columbia looking for factory work not long after the war started, and not even Anne Colleton had been able to get them back. "Nero," he said now, after a brief, thoughtful pause. "Yeah, I 'member you good, Nero. So now we is workin' together again, is we?"
"Dis world a small place," Scipio said solemnly. He wished it hadn't been quite so small. If Jonah felt like betraying him, he could. They'd got on well enough at the plantation, but there was always the distinction between house nigger and field nigger. And Jonah might well have heard of the role he'd played in the Congaree Socialist Republic. If, like a good many Negroes, he disapproved of the uprising…
Then Jonah smiled and said, "You come home fo' supper wid me tonight, Nero. Letitia, she glad to see an ol' friend."
"T'ank you," Scipio said. "I do dat." It would get him fed and let him save what little money he had left. And it meant-Lord, how he hoped it meant!-Jonah wasn't going to turn him in to the Confederate authorities. He picked up another clanking crate of shell casings. It hardly seemed to weigh a thing.
The hall was packed. The hot, muggy air would have been thick enough to slice even had it been empty. A small, forlorn electric fan did overmatched battle against the heat of too many bodies, against the fact that a lot of those bodies hadn't bathed quite so recently as they might have, and against enough cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke to make Flora Hamburger think of poison gas.
Coughing a little, she turned to Maria Tresca. "They've come out, no two ways about it," she said.
Maria nodded. "That works for you, not against you," she said. "The regulars would sooner see Herman Bruck with the nomination, even after Remembrance Day." She sniffed; the smoky air turned the sniff into a cough louder than Flora's. "They're reactionaries, that's what they are. How can they be reactionaries and Socialists at the same time? My sister Angelina never was."
"When they think of it, they're progressive," Flora said with a shrug. "You have to think about your ideology; if you don't think about it, you haven't got one. But if you don't think about your social attitudes, it's not that you don't have any, it's just that yours are the same as your neighbor's." She sighed. "And if your neighbors are petty bourgeoisie and proletarians who aspire to the petty bourgeoisie-"
Maria Tresca's face darkened into a frown. "In that case, they might as well be Democrats."
"No." Flora shook her head. "That's not the problem. The problem is making them think about social issues. When they do think instead of feeling, they're sound enough. They have to stop taking those concerns for granted, that's all."
"Or else the revolution, when it comes, will sweep them away with it," Maria said. "Sometimes I think you're too gentle, Flora. My sister was the same way, and look what it got her." Angelina Tresca had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. "If they cannot adapt, they deserve to be swept away." Maria was as full of revolutionary consciousness as anyone Flora knew: frighteningly full sometimes.
"Sometimes the uprising comes too soon," Flora said. "Look at the Confederacy. The proletariat failed there-nothing but banditry left now."
"Race mystified the white proletarians, splitting the laboring class," Maria returned. "That won't happen here in the United States. When the workers rise up against the trusts and the capitalists, they'll all rise together and overthrow the rotten system." She sounded messianically certain.
Up on the platform at the front of the hall, the chairman rapped loudly for order. Slowly, Saul Masliansky got some small semblance of it. When it didn't come fast enough to suit him, he rapped again, this time as if firing a gun. "Be quiet, there!" he shouted, first in Yiddish, then in English. "Do you want to caucus, or do you just want to talk?"
"With this crowd, that's about even money," Flora said with a smile.
"You should have accepted somebody besides Masliansky," Maria Tresca said, not smiling back. "He favors Herman."
"I know. Everyone who could chair this caucus favors Herman, as far as I can tell," Flora answered. "But Saul is honest. When he sees what the people want, he won't thwart them."
"Ha!" Maria said darkly. "He's assistant editor for the Daily Forward. He's going to go right on favoring Bruck, because Herman got everything he knows about Socialism straight out of the newspaper."
That was so unfair, and at the same time so delicious, that Flora couldn't help giggling. She'd expected to be too nervous here to see straight, let alone to speak well, and now she wasn't any more. She hoped the delightful, flighty feeling would last. "He's honest," she said again. "I've seen him admit he's wrong. How many others who might have done the job can you say that about?"
"We're not going to have a caucus if you people can't keep quiet," Saul Masliansky said, like a schoolteacher confronting a classroom full of hooligans. He didn't look like a teacher, or like an editor, either. With an embroidered vest and a high, pale forehead, what he looked like was a professional gambler. He played his trump card with the air of a gambler pulling an ace out of his sleeve, too: "Do you want to hear the candidates? We've agreed we're all going to support whichever one we choose, so picking the better one strikes me as a pretty good idea. Anybody who thinks different can go outside to talk."