Walk in Hell (31 page)

“What did you go and do that for?” one of the other Confederates asked. “Bastard deserved to suffer, I reckon.”

“Yeah, but if we went and left him, he might have found a way to do more mischief, even shot up like he was,” Pinkard answered.

“Oh, tactics. That’s all right, then,” said the other soldier, a hulking Tennessean named Finley. “You talk kind of soft on niggers sometimes, so I wondered if you was just doing him a kindness.”

Pinkard bristled. He wasn’t a hardliner, and nobody could make him one—he was a free white man, with a right to his opinion. “Listen,” he said, “there’s ten million of ’em in the CSA, or ten million take away however many got themselves killed in this stupid uprising of theirs. We got to figure out what to do with ’em after this part of the shooting’s done.”

“Put the slave chains back on ’em,” Finley snapped. “Serve ’em right.”

Not many Confederates wanted to go that far, for which Pinkard thanked God. “They done showed they can fight,” he said. “You buy a big buck nigger now, Finley, you think you ever dare turn your back on him?” Finley scowled from under the brim of his helmet. He didn’t say anything, which suited Jeff fine.

They emerged from the woods a few hundred yards outside of Albany. Field pieces were still pounding the town. Answering fire came mostly from the big houses on the north side of the main street: from what had been the white section of the city. Red flags still flew defiantly above several of those houses. “Bastards are doing it on purpose, hurting whites as much as they can,” Finley said. Now Pinkard was the one who didn’t answer.

One of those big houses with a two-story colonnaded porch held a machine gun. It spat death out toward the advancing soldiers in butternut. The fields had been plowed with shell holes. Pinkard jumped into one. Once he was in it, he discovered he shared it with the stinking corpse of a Negro. He stayed where he was, stench or no stench. With bullets whining past overhead, he figured he’d wind up a corpse himself if he moved too soon.

But, however much you might like the notion, you couldn’t huddle in a hole forever. When the machine gun chose a different target, he got up and ran for another hole closer to Albany. He got fired on again, but made it safely.

The Confederates were moving on the city from the west and the north. The Red rebels holed up inside did not have the firepower to keep them out. But instead of fading back into the countryside, the Negroes fought house to house, making the government forces clear them out with grenades and, once or twice, with the bayonet.

At last, the Reds were pushed back to the last couple of houses where they still had machine guns up and firing. A flag still flew from one of them. Inside, the Negroes shouted the defiant cry they’d raised through the whole unpleasant engagement: “The people! Fo’ the people!”

When gunfire eased for a moment, Pinkard shouted back: “Give up, you lying bastards! We
are
the people!”

“Liar your own self!” One of those machine guns lashed the rubble in which he lay. He’d expected that, and stayed very low behind the big pile of red bricks that had been a chimney before a shell knocked it down. But his words seemed to have angered the black rebels so much, they didn’t just want to kill him. The same fellow who’d yelled before shouted out again: “You ain’t the people. You is the dogs o’ the aristocracy, is what you is!” He barked derisively.

“The hell you say!” Pinkard answered, a measure of how good his cover was. “Lot more white men than niggers in the CSA.”

“Not in the Black Belt Socialist Republic,” the Red retorted. “Not in the others, neither.” He laughed. “We havin’ our own War o’ Secession, if’n you want to put it like that.”

Jeff didn’t want to put it like that, even to himself. It would have made the fight the Negroes were raising seem altogether too legitimate to him. And then another Red let out a dark, nasty laugh and added, “Sure as hell ain’t mo’ white folks than niggers in the Black Belt Socialist Republic nowadays. We done took care o’ that.”

From off to the side, a Confederate soldier started pitching grenades into the house where the Red revolutionaries were holed up. Pinkard had no idea whether they wounded any of the Negroes. They did set the house on fire.

That left the Reds a desperate choice. They could stay and burn or flee and get shot down. They fled, disciplined enough to carry the machine gun with them to set up again if they found fresh refuge. They didn’t.

One more house and the fighting was done. Captain Connolly carried a red flag as he strode through the shattered wreckage of what had been a prosperous Georgia farming town. “It’s over,” he said. “Here, it’s over.”

Pinkard looked around. He felt giddy, half stunned, half drunk at being alive. Wearily, he shook his head. The fighting might have ended, but the revolt and its aftermath weren’t over. He wondered how many years would pass before they were. He wondered if they ever would be.

Remembrance Day passed quietly in New York City. Soldiers’ Circle men and military bands paraded, as did newly raised units going off to the front. Enough soldiers with glittering bayonets and full clips in their rifles stood along the parade route to have marched on Richmond and taken it in about ten days—that was Flora Hamburger’s sardonic thought, at any rate. The soldiers had orders—highly publicized orders—to shoot to kill at the first sign of trouble and a look that said they would have enjoyed doing it. They seemed disappointed when the Socialists didn’t give them the chance.

“Now it’s our turn,” Flora said back at the Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party offices after the sun set on a day without incident. “May Day next week, and then we show them what we really think of their government and their war.”

“They still may try to find some way to keep us from holding our parade,” Herman Bruck said nervously.

“There is such a thing as the Constitution of the United States,” Flora said. “We have the right to petition for redress of grievances, unless they put New York under martial law the way they did to Utah, and we’ll make absolutely certain we give them no excuse to do that.”

“We don’t necessarily have to give them any excuses.” Maria Tresca’s brown eyes flashed. “An
agent provocateur—
”

“I wouldn’t put anything past Teddy Roosevelt,” Bruck said darkly.

“As a matter of fact, I doubt TR would authorize anything like that,” Flora said. “He’s a class enemy, but he has the full set of upper-class notions about legitimate and illegitimate ways and means.” As a storm of disagreement washed over her, she held up a warning hand. “That doesn’t mean I don’t think there will be any provocations. His henchmen don’t worry about the niceties. But I don’t think the order for provocations comes straight from the top. Give the devil his due. Better—give him a good kick in the
tukhus
and send him home in November.”

That swung people back to her. Planning went on—the order of march for unions from all the different trades that would be joining up, and, as important, the order of the speakers. Bruck said, “Such a pity Myron won’t be here to tell the people the truth.”

Everyone sighed. For a moment, the mood in the offices went soft and sad. Congressman Zuckerman had been able to rouse a crowd almost the way a
goyishe
preacher could in a tent-show revival. Reverently, Flora said, “If you weren’t a Socialist after you heard Myron Zuckerman, you’d never be a Socialist.” She forced herself back to business, back to practicality: “But he’s not here, and we have to go on without him.”

Herman Bruck appointed himself to the podium. Flora bit down on her lower lip. Herman wouldn’t come close to Zuckerman as an orator if he lived twenty years longer than Methuselah. As far as she was concerned, Zuckerman dead was a better orator than Herman Bruck alive.

She was about to add her own name to the list to counteract Bruck (not that she would have put it so crassly) when he said, “And of course, to keep the ladies happy, we’ll have a woman speaker or two. Flora, why don’t you take care of that for us?”

She’d never had to get out the hatpin to stop him from feeling her up. She felt like pulling it from her hat now, though, and sticking it into him about three inches deep. The way he casually dismissed the importance of half the human race was, in a way, a worse violation than if he’d tried to squeeze her bosom. Maybe worse still was that he hadn’t the slightest idea of what he’d done.

“I’ll speak to the women,” she said through tight lips, “and to the men, too.”

“That’s fine,” Bruck said, nodding genially—no, he hadn’t a clue. She studied him—perfect coif, perfect clothes, perfect confidence. Inside, where it didn’t show, she smiled a hunter’s smile. Perfect target.

When she got home that evening, she found her mother and her younger sister, Esther, in tears. Little Yossel, her nephew, was in tears, too, but only in the ordinary, babyish way of things. “What’s wrong?” Flora exclaimed in alarm.

With trembling finger, her mother pointed to the supper table. There, among the advertising circulars, lay an envelope with a formidable heading:

Government of the United States of America, War Department

The next line, set in slightly smaller type in the same hard-to-read font, said,

Bureau of Selection for Service

The envelope was addressed to David Hamburger.

“Oh, no,” Flora whispered. The older of her younger brothers had turned eighteen a few months before, and had dutifully enrolled himself at the local Selection for Service Bureau offices. The penalties for failing to enroll—and the rewards for informants—were too high to make any other course possible. Ever since then, the family had known this day might and probably would come. That made it no easier to bear on its arrival.

Benjamin Hamburger came in next. He spotted the envelope without prompting. He said nothing, but walked into the kitchen, filled a shot glass with whiskey, and knocked it back. He breathed heavily. After a moment, he filled the glass again and drained it as quickly as before. He often took one drink. Flora could not remember the last time he’d taken two.

The apartment was eerily silent when David walked in. As Flora had, he asked, “What’s wrong?” No one spoke, just as no one ever mentioned the Angel of Death. But the angel was there, mentioned or not. So was the envelope. No one had opened it; the Hamburgers never opened one another’s mail, and when it was likely to be a letter like this…David did the job himself. “They want me to report for my physical examination next Tuesday—the second,” he said.

Sophie had come in while he was opening the envelope. She still wore mourning for her husband. She began to wail as she had when she’d learned Yossel was dead. Nothing could console her. Her dismay set little Yossel, who had calmed down, to wailing again. That was the scene on which Isaac Hamburger walked in.

“It’ll be all right,” David said, over and over, perhaps trying to convince himself as well as his kin. “It can’t be helped, anyhow.” Where the other might well have been wrong, that, at least, was true.

Flora never remembered what she had for supper that night. While she was making final preparations for the May Day parade, her brother would be looking forward to getting poked and prodded by coldhearted men in white coats, intent on seeing how he would suit as cannon fodder. She found herself wishing he were pale and consumptive, not strong and ruddy and bursting with life. Life could burst, all right, so easily. The family had seen that.

She went into the office the next morning full of grim determination to keep countless other young men from having to face the danger her brother was all too likely to confront. That meant throwing all her energy into working with the groups taking part in the parade, and into working with the authorities to make sure it went off with as little interference as possible.

“We
will
be peaceable,” she promised over and over again. “We won’t provoke anything. Don’t provoke us in return, and don’t let the Soldiers’ Circle goons provoke us. The United States still have a Constitution, don’t they?” The authorities needed to be reminded of that even more than Herman Bruck did.

Some of the answers she got from police captains and city bureaucrats were conciliatory, some ambiguous at best, and more than a few downright hostile. She did what she could to defuse those. Sighing late in the afternoon on the Saturday before the parade, she said, “I’ve made more compromises the past week than in all the time I worked here up till then.”

“It’s good training for Congress,” Maria Tresca answered. The look she sent toward Flora was speculative, to say the least. Flora didn’t answer, not in words, but her smile was jauntier than she would have thought possible, considering how tired she was.

Herman Bruck never noticed the byplay. He was busy, too—impressively, ostentatiously busy—drafting his speech.

May Day dawned warm and muggy, a day right out of July. More than a few men in the crowds lining Broadway sported straw hats instead of homburgs or caps, as if it truly were summer. The band at the head of the parade—not so fancy as the military bands that strutted down the avenue on Remembrance Day—struck up the “Internationale,” then the “Marseillaise,” and last the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone cheered the national anthem; the other two brought mingled cheers and boos.

“The hell with the frogs, and the hell with their song!” somebody shouted.

“It’s a song of revolution,” Flora shouted back as she marched along. “It’s a song against tyranny and oppression, and for freedom. Don’t you think we need that?”

“They’re the enemy!” the heckler yelled to her.

“They’ve forgotten freedom,” she returned. Defiantly, she added, “And so have we.”

A few eggs flew out of the crowd toward the parade. The cops didn’t do anything about that. When somebody threw a bottle instead, though, they waded in, nightsticks swinging. Flora gave a judicious nod. Throwing eggs wasn’t that far from heckling, and the Constitution protected heckling no matter who did it. A bottle, now, a bottle was liable to be lethal.

One of the red banners the Socialists carried showed a bare-chested Negro carrying a rifle.
REVOLUTION OF THE CSA
—1915.
REVOLUTION IN THE USA
—19??.