Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“They did, Pa,” Cincinnatus answered, and his father’s eyes got bigger yet. He went on, “An’ then they let me go.” He told what had happened at the station.

“You believe this here po liceman?” His father didn’t sound as if he did.

But Cincinnatus nodded. “Uh-huh. I believe him, on account of he didn’t have no reason to lie to me. I was there. He had me. He coulda done whatever he pleased. Who’s gonna say boo if a cop roughs up a nigger? Who’s gonna say boo if a cop kills a nigger, even? Nobody, an’ you know it as well as I do.”

The older man thought it over. He screwed up his face in what was almost a parody of cogitation. “He don’t mean nothin’ good by it,” he said at last. He wouldn’t believe a Confederate cop could be decent, and Cincinnatus had a hard time blaming him.

Cincinnatus had a trump card, though. “I’m here,” he said, and his father couldn’t very well quarrel with that.

Congresswoman Flora Blackford clicked on the wireless set in her Philadelphia office. She usually left it off, turning it on at the hour and half hour to get what news she could. She had little-no, she had no-use for the music and advertising drivel that came out of the speaker most of the time.

Some people were saying television-wireless with moving pictures-was the next big thing. The war had put it on hold, and might have derailed it altogether. Flora wasn’t sure she was sorry. The idea of having to watch advertisements as well as listen to them turned her stomach.

She wasn’t listening to news now, though, or not directly. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to five. What were they waiting for? The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, live from New York City and newly escaped from the Confederate States of America, we are proud to present… Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces!”

Out of the wireless poured music the likes of which was almost unknown in the United States. Negroes in the Confederate States had been oppressed for hundreds of years, and had no hope of anything else, anything better. They poured their wish for a different life-and a jaunty defiance of the life they were forced to live-into their music. Those sly rhythms and strange syncopations had no parallel in the USA. Satchmo might almost have been playing his trumpet in Portuguese rather than English.

And yet, a great singer could make an audience feel what he felt even in a foreign language-would opera have been so popular if that weren’t true? Satchmo had the same gift. Nobody in the United States played his kind of music. But joy and despair and anger came through just the same.

When the Rhythm Aces finished their number, the announcer said, “You know folks will hear this program in the CSA as well as the USA. What do you have to say to the people of the country you chose to leave?”

“Ain’t got nothin’ much to say to the white folks there,” Satchmo answered, sounding like a gravelly bullfrog. “White folks down there don’t listen to the niggers anyways. If you is colored an’ you is in the Confederate States, I gots one thing to tell you-git out if you can. You stays dere, you gwine end up dead. I hates to say it, but it’s de Lawd’s truth.”

His English was almost as foreign to Flora’s ear as his music. White Confederates had their own accent, or group of accents; she was used to those. People from the USA, though, seldom got to hear how uneducated Confederate Negroes spoke.

“How did you get out of the CSA?” the announcer asked.

Flora already knew that story; she’d met Satchmo after he and his fellow musicians came to Philadelphia. Knowing what he was going to say helped her follow his account: “We was up in Ohio, playin’ fo’ de sojers dere. We done decided we better run, on account of we never gits no better chance. So we steals a command car-you know, one o’ dem wid a machine gun on it.” His accent got even thicker as excitement filled his voice. “We drives till we comes to de front. It’s de nighttime, so de Confederate pickets, dey reckons we’s ossifers-”

“Till we commences to shootin’ an’ drives on by,” one of the other Rhythm Aces broke in. They all laughed at the memory.

“Good for you. Good for you,” the announcer said. Flora didn’t like his fulsome tones; she thought he was laying it on with a trowel. The idea wasn’t to patronize the Negroes. It was to show the world they were human beings, too, human beings abused by their white Confederate masters. She couldn’t think of a better word than that, even though the Confederates had formally manumitted their slaves in the 1880s. Neither side’s propaganda was subtle these days. The announcer asked, “What will you play for us next?”

As usual, Satchmo spoke for the band: “This here is a song dat show we is glad to be where we’s at.”

They broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was not the National Anthem as Francis Scott Key had written it. It was not the National Anthem as Flora had ever imagined it, either. They did things with and to the rhythm for which she had no names. But what they did worked. It made the staid old tune seem new and fresh to her again. Most of the time, she listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with half an ear, if that. She knew it too well to pay much attention to it. Not here, not now. She had to listen closely, because she couldn’t be sure just what was coming next. She didn’t think even the Rhythm Aces knew before the notes flowed from their instruments.

After the last proud wail of Satchmo’s trumpet, even the bland announcer seemed moved when he murmured, “Thank you very much.”

“You is mighty welcome, suh,” Satchmo said. “You is mighty welcome, an’ we is mighty glad to be in ‘de land o’ de free an’ de home o’ de brave.’ If we was still in de CSA, maybe they fixin’ to kill us.”

The announcer still didn’t seem to know what to make of that. Getting people in the USA to believe that whites in the CSA were systematically killing blacks wasn’t easy. Getting people in the USA to care even if they did believe was harder yet. People in this country wanted as little to do with blacks as they could, and wanted as few blacks here as possible.

Flora wondered if Satchmo and his fellow musicians had bumped up against that yet. They weren’t valued for themselves; they were valued because their escape gave the Confederates a black eye.

“What will you do now that you’re in our great country?” the wireless man asked at last.

“Play music.” By the way Satchmo said it, he could conceive of no other life. “Wherever folks wants us to play music, we do dat.”

How many people would want them to play music as alien to the U.S. tradition as that National Anthem had been? Flora couldn’t know. One way or another, Satchmo and his band would find out. They wouldn’t starve; the government wouldn’t let them. And they wouldn’t have to worry about pogroms and worse. People might not like them, but their lives weren’t in danger anymore.

After farewells and commercials, the news did come on. It wasn’t good. The big U.S. push in Virginia remained bogged down. U.S. counterattacks in Ohio hadn’t come to much. The fight to grind down the Mormon uprising remained stalled in Provo. If the United States could have thrown their full might at Utah, the revolt would have been crushed in short order. The Mormons, of course, had the sense not to rebel when the USA could do that. Flora hoped Yossel stayed safe.

Other fronts were sideshows. Confederate-sponsored Indian uprisings in Sequoyah kept the occupied territory in an uproar. That wouldn’t have mattered much if Sequoyah didn’t have more oil than you could shake a stick at. As things were, the United States had trouble using what they could get, and sabotage ensured that they didn’t get much.