Walk in Hell (40 page)

“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.”

“Anyone who thinks different can
geh in drerd
,” Maria Tresca said. Flora laughed again. Maria had acquired an excellent, often scurrilous command of Yiddish.

“Mr. Chairman,” somebody called, “I move that, when we pick, we pick by secret ballot.”

“Second!” Herman Bruck shouted.

“You keep quiet,” Masliansky barked at him. “Candidates aren’t members of the caucus. You can’t second. You talk to us, and that’s all. Do I hear a
proper
second?” He did, a moment later. The motion passed on a voice vote.

Member or not, Flora shouted against it. “If you can’t stand up and be counted at a caucus, when can you?” she demanded.

“You’re right—and you’re wrong,” Maria said. “Herman thinks secrecy will work for him, but I think he’s wrong. More people will go against the bigwigs if they aren’t looking over their shoulders.”

“Maybe,” Flora said.

Saul Masliansky plied his gavel once more. “Will the contenders please come forward?” he said.

“There he goes, selling his paper again,” some wit shouted, and got a laugh.

Flora made her way up to the platform. So did Herman Bruck, in a dark gray suit that shouted
respectability
at the world. Had Flora been respectable in the same sort of way, she wouldn’t have presumed to seek the Congressional nomination in the first place.

Herman nodded to her. He took her more seriously than he had before her Remembrance Day speech, but not so seriously as he would have taken, say, Saul Masliansky. Masliansky, after all, was a man, not someone he’d pestered to go to the cinema with him.

The chairman said, “We tossed a coin to see who would talk to you when. Our esteemed comrade, Mr. Herman Bruck here, won the toss. He chose to speak first. Herman Bruck!”

“Friends, Myron Zuckerman gave our district the best years of his life,” Bruck said, and won sympathetic applause from everyone who revered Zuckerman’s memory—which meant from everyone in the hall. “I aim to go to Philadelphia to do my best to fill his shoes, to keep the Fourteenth Ward as it has been, at the forefront in the fight against the trusts, and, I hope—
alevai
—to work with the next president of the United States of America, Senator Eugene V. Debs of Indiana!”

The Socialists’ national convention wouldn’t come until next month, but Debs’ nomination to face TR was a forgone conclusion. Again, Herman Bruck got loud cheers. Flora did her best not to let that worry her. He’d been applauded for invoking Zuckerman’s name, and again for invoking that of Debs. She wondered when he’d say anything about himself that deserved cheers.

As far as she was concerned, he never did. That didn’t mean he didn’t get applause, only that he was breathtakingly conventional in every position he took. He might as well have said,
I agree with what all the other Socialists think,
half a dozen times and then sat down.

After a while—after what seemed to Flora a very long while—he did sit down. Saul Masliansky said, “And now, Miss Flora Hamburger will tell you why she thinks Herman Bruck has been talking nonsense for the past twenty minutes.” He grinned at her.

It wasn’t quite the introduction she’d expected, but it would serve. She could make it serve, though that meant junking the opening she’d worked out in advance. She decided to take the chance: “Herman Bruck doesn’t talk nonsense. He’s a good Socialist. If you choose him, I will support him—that’s what the caucus is all about. But—”

She took a deep breath. “Herman Bruck is
safe
. Is being
safe
what the Socialist Party, the party of revolution, stands for? I don’t think so. He tells you what we’ve done in the past. He tells you what he’ll do in the future if you choose him as your candidate. The one is just the same as the other. If we elect people who will go on doing the same things, are we radicals or are we reactionaries?” The talk with Maria before she’d come up here was paying dividends—an alarmingly capitalistic thought for a would-be Socialist candidate.

“If you want life to go on as it always has, if you don’t want to work for radical change in this country, if you don’t want peace between us and our neighbors, you might as well vote for a Democrat. If you want to let Teddy Roosevelt know we don’t intend to let war mean unending oppression of the proletariat, you’ll choose me.”

She embroidered on that theme for a while, then returned to the other: “As I say, Herman Bruck is a sound man. He is a safe man. I think he’s sound and safe enough to lose this November. If you want someone to run hard and do everything she can to get this seat out of TR’s clutches, you’ll vote for me today and you’ll vote for me again in the fall.”

She stepped back. She thought she got as much applause as Herman Bruck had. More? She couldn’t tell. Saul Masliansky said, “Now we fight it out. We have a waiting room for the two of you. We have two waiting rooms, in fact, if you’d rather—?”

“It’s all right,” Flora said. “We aren’t enemies.” Herman Bruck nodded.

They didn’t say much to each other in the waiting room. Flora sat in a hard chair under one of the electric lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bruck smoked a cigarette, and another, and another. Through the closed door, Flora listened to the shouts from the caucus. She wished she were out there. She and Bruck weren’t members, so she couldn’t be.

After what seemed like forever, the door opened. She and Herman Bruck both sprang to their feet, facing Masliansky with the same eager anxiety fathers in a hospital maternity-ward waiting room showed when the doctor came in. But only one of them would get to keep this baby; like the one in the biblical story of Solomon, it was indivisible.

“
Mazeltov,
Flora,” the caucus chairman said.

Bruck stubbed out his last cigarette under the heel of his gleaming shoe.
“Mazeltov,”
he echoed. “Anything I can do, you know I will.” He managed a joke, something rare for him: “That’s true, even though you won’t go out with me.”

“Thank you.” Flora felt light-headed. “Talk like that more often, and I might. But now”—she could hardly believe it—“let’s put this seat back where it belongs.”

“I am godalmighty sick of troop trains,” Jefferson Pinkard announced to anybody who would listen as the one on which he was riding rumbled west through Texas toward the front line, which lay somewhere east of Lubbock.

Nobody said anything. As best Jeff could tell, nobody had the energy to say anything. It was hot and muggy outside. That meant it was hotter and muggier on the train. Every window that would open was open. The breeze that came in was like the breath of hell, the occasional cinder or tiny bit of coal blowing in with the breeze only adding to the resemblance.

Pinkard looked outside. Texas, as far as he could see, was nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. It had been green and lush when the troop train pounded out of Arkansas. Some of the men who sounded as if they knew what they were talking about said parts of it were as swampy and wet as Louisiana, full of alligators and who could say what all else.

This part of Texas wasn’t like that. If God had taken an iron about the size of South Carolina and pressed everything here down flat, that might have given the countryside its look. It was as hot as if it had just been ironed, too. They called it prairie, but wasn’t the prairie supposed to be green with grass? This was yellow at best, more often brown.