Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

He expected Jerry Dover to go on his way after the greeting. The manager ran himself ragged making sure the Huntsman’s Lodge stayed the best place in town. However much Dover’s bosses paid him, it wasn’t enough.

Instead, though, Dover said, “Grab yourself some grub and then come see me in my office. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

“I do dat, suh. What you need?”

“It’ll keep till then.” Jerry Dover did hurry off after that. Scipio scratched his head. Something was on Dover’s mind. The manager hadn’t seemed anxious or upset, so it probably wasn’t anything too dreadful.

You couldn’t get rich waiting tables. (If you were a Negro in the CSA, you were most unlikely to get rich any which way, but you sure wouldn’t by waiting tables.) The job had its perquisites, though. The meals the cooks fixed for themselves and the rest of the help weren’t so fancy as the ones they made for the paying customers, but they weren’t bad, and they were free. Scipio ate fried chicken and string beans and buttery mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, and washed them down with coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.

Thus fortified, he went to Jerry Dover’s office, tapped on the open door, and said, “What kin I do fo’ you, suh?”

“Come on in,” Dover told him. “Close that thing, will you?”

“Yes, suh.” As Scipio did, he began-oh, not to worry, but to wonder. What didn’t Jerry Dover want anybody else hearing? The restaurant business had few secrets-fewer, most of the time, than the people who believed they were keeping them imagined.

Jerry Dover pointed to the battered chair in front of his battered desk. “Sit down, sit down,” he said impatiently. “You don’t need to stand there looking down at my bald spot. I’ve got something I want you to take care of for me.”

“I do dat,” Scipio said, assuming it was something that had to do with the restaurant. “Ask you one mo’ time-what you need?”

“Something a little special,” Dover answered. Scipio still didn’t worry. Later, he realized he should have started right then. But he just sat there politely and waited. His mama had raised him to be polite, going on seventy years ago now, and Anne Colleton’s relentless training reinforced those early lessons. Dover went on, “I need you to take something to somebody down in Savannah for me.”

“Savannah, suh?” Automatic deference tempered even the horror Scipio felt. “Do Jesus, suh! How I gonna git to Savannah, things like they is now? I is lucky I kin git outa de Terry.”

“I’ll get you authorized to leave town. Don’t you fret about that,” Jerry Dover said, which only made Scipio more alarmed than ever.

“What is this thing?” he demanded. “You can’t go your ownself? You can’t put it in de mail, let de postman bring it?”

“No and no,” the manager answered. “If I go out of town, people will notice. Right now, I can’t afford to have anybody notice me leaving town. And the mail’s not as safe as it used to be. A lot of people are mighty snoopy these days.” He doubtless meant people who worked for the Freedom Party. He doubtless meant that, but he didn’t say it.

“You reckon nobody care about some raggedy-ass nigger?” Scipio said. Quite calmly, Jerry Dover nodded. His very coolness infuriated the black man. “Suh, this here ass o’ mine may be raggedy, but it be the onliest one I got.”

“Then you’ll be careful of it, won’t you… Scipio?”

There it was. He’d feared it was coming. Anne Colleton had known who he was, had known what his right name was. She’d eaten at the Huntsman’s Lodge-was it really less than a year earlier? — and recognized him. Naturally, she’d wanted him arrested, brought back to South Carolina, and shot. Jerry Dover had forestalled her. He’d shown her that a colored waiter named Xerxes had worked at the Lodge before the Great War. It was, of course, a different Xerxes, but she couldn’t prove that. Anne Colleton had always been a woman who got her own way. She couldn’t have liked being thwarted here.

Maybe she would have done something about it had she lived. Thanks to the U.S. raid on Charleston, she hadn’t. Scipio was free of her forever. But… She’d told Jerry Dover his right name. It was a gun in Dover’s hands no less than it had been in hers.

Dover opened a desk drawer and reached inside. What did he have in there? A pistol? Probably. What had Scipio’s face shown? What he was really thinking? A Negro in the CSA could do nothing more dangerous. Dover said, “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“I know what you talkin’ ’bout, yes, suh,” Scipio said. Then he let the accent he’d used only once or twice since the downfall of the Congaree Socialist Republic, the educated white man’s accent Anne Colleton had made him learn, come out: “I know exactly what you are talking about, and I wish to heaven that I didn’t.”

Jerry Dover’s eyes widened. “You are a sandbagging son of a bitch. How many times did you tell me you could only talk like a swamp nigger?”

“As many times as I needed to, to keep myself safe,” Scipio answered. Bitterly, he added, “But I see there is no safety anywhere. Now-suppose you eliminate the nonsense. What must I deliver, and to whom, and why?”

Accent was almost as important in the CSA as color. Scipio remained black. He couldn’t do anything about that. But his skin said he was one thing. Now, suddenly, his voice said he was something else. His voice proclaimed that he was not just a white man, but someone to be reckoned with: a lawyer, a judge, a Senator. Jerry Dover shook his head, trying to drive out the illusion. Plainly, he wasn’t having an easy time of it.

He had to gather himself before he answered, “You don’t need to know that. You don’t need to know why. The less you know, the better for everybody.”

“So you say,” Scipio replied.

“Yeah. I do. And I say something else, too: you don’t want to mess with me. Anything happens to me, I got stuff written down. You’ll wish you was dead by the time they get through with you-and with your family, too.”

Bathsheba, whom he’d loved since they met at a boarding house in the Terry. Cassius, who had reached the age when every boy-almost a man-was as much a rebel as the Red he’d been named for. Cassius’s older sister, Antoinette, old enough for a husband now-but in these mad times, how much sense did marrying make?

Scipio wasn’t the only one whose life Jerry Dover held in the hollow of his hand. Everything in the world that mattered to him-and if Dover made a fist…

“All right, Mr. Dover,” he said, still with those white men’s tones. They helped him mask his feelings, and his feelings needed masking just then. “I shall do what you require of me.”

“Figured you would,” the restaurant manager said complacently. “Talkin’ fancy like that may help you, too.”

But Scipio held up a hand. “I had not finished. I shall do what you require-but you will pay my wife my usual wages and tips while I am away, and-”

“Wait a minute,” Dover broke in. “You think you can dicker with me?”

“Yes,” Scipio answered. “I can bargain with you because I can read and write, too. You have a way to protect yourself against me. That knife cuts both ways, Mr. Dover. I shall do what you require, and I shall carefully note everything I have done, and I shall leave my notes in a safe place. I have those, and they have nothing to do with this restaurant.”

Dover glared at him. “I ought to turn you in now.”

“That is your privilege.” Scipio masked terror with a butler’s impenetrable calm. “But if you do, you will have to find someone else to do your service, someone on whom you do not have such a strong hold.” He waited. Jerry Dover went on scowling, scowling fearsomely. But Dover nodded in the end. He hadn’t intended to end up with a bargain-he’d intended just to impose his will, as whites usually intended and usually did with blacks-but he’d ended up with one after all.