Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Need to talk to you for a minute in my office, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said when Scipio walked into the Huntsman’s Lodge.

Scipio was already sweating from the walk to work in formalwear under the hot Augusta sun. When his boss told him something like that, he started sweating all over again. But he said the only thing he could: “Be right theah, suh.” Maybe-he dared hope-this had to do with restaurant business. Even if it didn’t, though, he remained at the white man’s beck and call.

Dover’s office was as crowded and as filled with lists of things to do as ever. The restaurant manager worked hard. Scipio never would have presumed to think otherwise. The ashtray on the desk was full of butts, a couple of them still smoldering.

Dover paused to light yet another cigarette, sucked in smoke, blew it out, and eyed Scipio. “What’s your address, over in the Terry?” he asked.

That wasn’t what Scipio had expected. “Same one you got on all my papers, suh,” he answered. “I ain’t moved or nothin’.”

“For true?” Jerry Dover said. “No bullshit? No getting cute and cagey?”

“Cross my heart an’ hope to die, Mistuh Dover.” Scipio made the gesture. “How come you needs to make sure o’ dat?”

His boss didn’t answer, not right away. He smoked the cigarette down to a little dog-end in quick, savage puffs, then stubbed it out and lit a new one. When he did speak, he went off on a tangent: “I don’t reckon your wife and your young ’uns have ever seen the inside of this place.”

“No, suh, they ain’t never,” Scipio agreed, wondering what the hell Dover was going on about. The restaurant-by which he naturally thought of the part the customers never saw-was crowded enough with the people who had to be there: cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers. Others would have fit in as well as feathers on a frog. The manager had to know that better than he did.

No matter what Jerry Dover knew, he said, “Why don’t you bring ’em by tomorrow night when you come in for your shift? They get bored, they can spend some time here in the office.”

“Suh, my missus, she clean white folks’ houses. She already be at work when I comes in here,” Scipio said.

Dover frowned. “Maybe you tell her to take the day off tomorrow so she can come in with you.”

“People she work fo’ ain’t gwine like dat,” Scipio predicted dolefully. Blacks in the CSA never had been able to risk antagonizing whites. With things the way they were now, even imagining such a thing was suicidal.

The second cigarette disappeared as fast as the first one had. Dover lit a third. He blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Scipio,” he said softly, “this is important.”

Scipio froze, there in the rickety chair across the desk from the restaurant manager. Jerry Dover used that name to remind Scipio who had the power here.

By why he would want to use that power for this purpose baffled the Negro. Sending him down to Savannah made sense. This? This seemed mere whim. A man who expended power on a whim was a fool.

In the tones of an educated white man, Scipio said, “Perhaps you will be good enough to tell me why you require my family’s presence, sir?”

Dover’s eyes widened. He laughed out loud. “Goddamn!” he said. “She told me you could do that, but I plumb forgot. That’s fucking amazing. You ought to go on the wireless instead of some of those muttonheads they’ve got.”

“As may be, sir,” Scipio answered, and Jerry Dover laughed again. The black man added, “You still have not answered my question.” He dared hope Dover would. Skin color was the most important thing in the CSA; no doubt about it. But accent ran color a close second. If he sounded like an educated white man, the presumption that he was what he sounded like ran deep.

But not deep enough, not here. Dover set the live cigarette in the ashtray, steepled his fingertips on the desk, and looked at Scipio over them. “It would be a good idea if you got ’em here,” was all he said. His own way of speaking didn’t come close to matching Scipio’s. By his nervous chuckle, he knew it, too.

Scipio wanted to ask, A good idea how? Why? He wanted to, but he didn’t. He’d pushed the white man as far as Dover was willing to go. Returning to the Congaree dialect that was his natural speech, Scipio said, “Reckon I do it, den.”

“Good,” Dover said. “I knew you were a smart fellow. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have wasted my time banging my gums at you in the first place. Now get your ass out there and go to work.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

When his shift ended, policemen let him through the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding the Terry. They knew him. He had a dispensation to be out after curfew. He made it back to his block of flats without getting knocked over the head.

Then he had his next hurdle: persuading Bathsheba not to do what she usually did. “Why for he want us there?” she demanded.

“Dunno,” Scipio answered. “But he want it bad enough to use my fo’-true name.”

“ Did he?” That made Bathsheba sit up and take notice. Worry in her voice, she asked, “You reckon he do somethin’ nasty if we don’t come?”

“Dunno,” Scipio said again, more unhappily than ever. “But I reckons y’all better do it.”

Bathsheba sighed heavily. “Miz Kent, she ain’t gonna be real happy with me. Miz Bagwell neither. But we come.”

When his children got up the next morning, they were even more bemused than his wife was. “Somethin’ bad liable to happen, Pa,” Cassius said. His hands bunched into fists. “Can we fight back?” He was more like the hunter and guerrilla for whom he’d been named than he had any business being.

“Odds is bad,” was all Scipio said. That gave his son very little to react against.

“Don’t know that I ever wants to go into the ofay part of Augusta no more,” Antoinette said. “They hates us there.”

“They hates we here, too,” Scipio answered. “You should oughta come, though. I don’t reckon Mistuh Dover playin’ games.” That wasn’t quite true. But he didn’t know what kind of game the manager was playing, and he couldn’t afford not to play along.

His wife and children dressed in their Sunday best for the unusual excursion. Since he was in his own formalwear, the family looked as if they were bound for a fancy wedding or a banquet. When they got to the barbed-wire perimeter, the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards stared at them. There seemed to be more whites manning the perimeter than usual. Or is it just my nerves? Scipio wondered-nervously.

The policeman who checked passbooks had sent Scipio through any number of times. He raised an eyebrow to see the black man’s family accompanying him, but didn’t say anything about it. He was, within the limits of his job and his race, a decent fellow. A stalwart came up to talk to him. Scipio wondered if they would yell at him to halt and send Bathsheba and the children back. They didn’t, though.

When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he found that Aurelius also had his wife-a plump, dignified, gray-haired woman named Delilah-with him. Something was going on. He still didn’t know what, and wished he did.

They all got suppers of the sorts the cooks turned out for the waiters. Two or three other waiters and cooks-all of them men who’d worked at the Lodge for a while, and all of them also men who lived not far from Scipio and his family-also had family members with them.

Jerry Dover hovered over the Huntsman’s Lodge’s uncommon customers. He was fox-quick, fox-clever, and also, Scipio judged, fox-wary. “Thank y’all for being here today,” he said. “I’ve worked with your husbands and fathers for years, and I’ve never met y’all before. Hope I do again before too long.”