Walk in Hell (39 page)

“He’s fine, yes. He wasn’t anywhere near this fight out on the ocean, thank God,” Sylvia said.

“Thank God, yes,” Mrs. Antonelli said. They walked into the plant and punched their time cards together. As Sylvia did whenever she talked about the war with her friend, she felt faintly guilty that George still lived while Mr. Antonelli had met a bullet or a shell somewhere up in Quebec. The black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed every day showed how easily it could have been the other way round.

She welcomed the mesmerizing monotony of the line that sent cans into her labeling machine and then out again. If she concentrated on the work, she didn’t have to think about the war—although she wouldn’t have been here without the war. She would have been at home with George, Jr., and Mary Jane.

Was what she had now better or worse? Having George away—and in harm’s way—tipped the balance, of course. Suppose George were home—or home as often as he was when he went out on his fishing runs. What then? The children sometimes drove her mad. Even so, she missed them fiercely every moment she was away from them.

Mr. Winter came limping down the line to see how things were going. He smiled at her. She nodded back.

“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, smiling to show off his bad teeth. “How are you this morning? Your husband wasn’t in the big battle the papers are talking about, I hope?”

“I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Winter,” she answered. “My husband, too, so far as I know. He’s on the Mississippi, not in the Pacific.”

“That’s right, you told me. I just remembered he was in the Navy, is all.” Winter shook his head in chagrin, whether real or put on she couldn’t tell. Then he went back to business, which relieved her: “Machine behaving all right?”

“It seems to be, yes.” With someone else, Sylvia might have joked that saying it was working well would make it break down. The thought was in her mind, but she kept it there. The less she had to do with Mr. Winter outside of things that were strictly business, the better she liked it.

He nodded to her. “That’s fine, then.” With another nod, he headed over to the machine Isabella Antonelli ran. “Hello, ’Bella. How are you this morning?”

The paste reservoir on Sylvia’s machine ran low just then. She had to bend down, pick up the bucket of thick white paste, and refill the reservoir, all without missing a beat on the three levers she had to pull for every can of mackerel feeding through to be labeled. While she was doing that, she felt like a juggler with too many balls in the air.

It also distracted her from the conversation the foreman and Isabella Antonelli were having. She couldn’t have heard all of it anyhow, not over the unending clatter and rumble of the line that moved the cans ahead and the racket of the machines along the way, but she might have heard some. She wanted to hear some. She’d never noticed Mr. Winter using a shortened version of Isabella’s name before. Did that mean he hadn’t done it before, or that she hadn’t noticed?

Like everyone else at the canning plant, Isabella Antonelli had taken off her hat when she started work. That was all the more necessary for her, what with the veil depending from the hat. Before heading toward the next machine on the line, Mr. Winter chucked her under the chin, said something Sylvia didn’t catch, and made as if to kiss her on the cheek but didn’t. He was laughing when he left her station.

Sylvia concentrated on her own machine with a fury whose intensity startled her and was only made worse because it was so futile. She jerked the levers so hard, she jammed the machine, which shut down the whole line till she could clear it.

Mr. Winter came over at a limping trot. “Thought you said it was going good,” he said. “You shut us down, it costs the owners money. They don’t like that, Mrs. Enos. They don’t like that even a little bit.”

“I’m sorry,” she lied. “It was behaving fine till a minute ago.” She used a screwdriver to lever a tin can out of the works. “Let me just check.” She pulled the lever that had started the trouble. It functioned smoothly now. “You can start things up again.”

“All right.” He gave her a grudging nod. “You fixed it fast enough, I will say that.” Cans started flowing once more.

Restraining the anger she’d taken out on the labeling machine made her stomach hurt. She was glad when the lunch whistle blew. Picking up her dinner pail, she fell into step beside Isabella Antonelli. It was hot and muggy outside the factory building, and the view was only of another canning plant across the street, but that still meant cooler weather and a prettier prospect than inside.

They sat down on a bench. Sylvia had a fish sandwich—leftovers from the night before—and Mrs. Antonelli some sort of funny-shaped noodles in tomato sauce. After they’d eaten for a while, Sylvia asked, “Is he bothering you?”

“Who?” Isabella was intent on her food. They had only half an hour before they went back to work.

“Him. Mr. Winter. The foreman. I saw him, what he did this morning. That’s not right.” Remembering, Sylvia got angry all over again.

To her own mortification, a certain amount of relief accompanied the anger.
He’s not bothering
me,
thank God,
was the nasty little thought somewhere near the bottom of her mind. Recognizing it for what it was only made her more furious, both at the foreman and at herself.

“Mr. Winter?” Isabella’s eyes grew wide for a moment. Then, to Sylvia’s surprise, she laughed. “Oh, that. No, that is nothing much. I do not worry about it. He is a lonely man, Mr. Winter. And I, now I am lonely, too.” She set down her fork and touched the sleeve of the black dress.

“But—” Sylvia began. She stopped, not knowing how to go on. If, God forbid, something had happened to George, she wouldn’t have been able to look at a man for years. She was sure of it. She was so sure of it, she hadn’t imagined anyone else could be different.

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.

“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?”