Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

But Frederick answered, "I'll take the chance, your Excellency. Honest to God, sir, I will. Let the Senate see that a Negro can be a civilized fella, or pretty close. Let the Senate see that a Negro and his woman can love each other just like a white man and his wife. Ain't no proper reason our folks can't get married, same as yours."

"Copperskins, too," Lorenzo added.

"Copperskins, too," Frederick agreed. "An' let the Senate see one more thing. Let the Senate see a Negro can be named Radcliff. That's what happens when white men get to go tomcatting around with the slave women. And I'm here to tell you it ain't right."

"God bless my soul," Leland Newton murmured. For a moment, Consul Stafford looked as if someone had hit him in the face with a wet fish. For an even briefer moment, Colonel Sinapis looked amused again. Then, as before, he donned the mask of impassivity.

"You gonna tell me I can't come? What's this piece of paper worth if you say somethin' like that?" Frederick tapped the agreement Lorenzo had just signed.

"Come ahead. By all means, come ahead," Stafford said. "It will be something out of the ordinary, at any rate. But you must understand: there is no guarantee the Conscript Fathers, even the ones from the north, will love you."

"Like I said, chance I take." Frederick hoped he sounded calmer than he felt. "And why shouldn't they love me, or at least like me some? I bet I'm kin to half of 'em, maybe more."

For some reason, neither Stafford nor Newton seemed to want to answer that. Colonel Sinapis, by contrast, laughed out loud. If looks could have killed, the ones both Consuls sent him would have left the USA looking for a new army commander. But nobody tried any more to tell Frederick he shouldn't accompany the Consuls back to New Hastings.

Jeremiah Stafford had shared railway cars with Negroes before. Porters fetched food and drink and pipeweed to passengers who needed them. He'd always taken those porters as much for granted as seats or windows: they were part of the railroad's accouterments. It wasn't as if he had to treat them like human beings.

Sharing a railway car with Negro passengers was something else again. During the course of the fighting and the talks, he'd come to respect Frederick Radcliff. Maybe that respect grew not least because of Frederick's famous white grandfather. Regardless of the reason, it was real.

But Frederick's woman-Stafford didn't care to think of her as his wife-was nothing but a dumpy, rather frumpy, middle-aged nigger. Frederick might have reasons for loving her. Whatever they were, Stafford couldn't see them.

She didn't put on airs, anyhow. That was the one good thing he could find to say about her. But, as the train rattled and jounced east toward the Green Ridge Mountains, he became more and more certain he could smell her-and Frederick. What white man didn't know that niggers stank?

He wanted to say something. Had more southerners sat in the car with him, he would have. If either Leland Newton or Balthasar Sinapis had two working nostrils, though, neither man gave any sign of it. Sinapis smoked cigar after cigar, and the pipeweed he favored smelled worse than any Negro ever born. Stafford wanted to open a window, but didn't want wood smoke and soot flying in.

And so he stayed where he was and stayed quiet, sizzling inside. Neither Frederick Radcliff nor Helen-Stafford supposed he ought to think of her as Helen Radcliff, but the idea of real slave marriages was as repugnant to him as the idea of slaves with surnames-gave him any open cause to complain. All they did was look out the window and exclaim at the scenery every so often. A white couple on their first journey by train might have acted the same way.

"What kind of reception do you think we'll get when we come into settled country?" Newton asked as the train started into a pass that would take it through the mountains.

"The terms we made will have gone before us, eh?" Stafford said.

"Well, of course. We wired them to New Hastings, after all," the other Consul replied. "Wherever the wires reach, people will have heard about them."

Stafford nodded. He knew as much-who didn't? But he was trying to pretend ignorance. And he had his reasons: "In that case, your Excellency, we should count ourselves lucky if they don't drag us off the train and lynch us."

By Newton's gulp, he hadn't expected Stafford to be so blunt. "You are joking, I hope," he said.

"I only wish I were," Stafford said.

He hadn't intended that Frederick Radcliff should hear him, but the Negro did. "Welcome to the club, your Excellency," Radcliff said.

"Huh? What club?" Stafford asked.

"Any time a black goes out amongst whites, he knows he's a dead man if he gets out of line," said the leader of the insurrection. "Same goes for copperskins, too. Now you know how it feels."

"He's got you there," Newton said with a sly chuckle.

"Huzzah," Stafford answered sourly. He feared he'd feel like a hunted animal till the train got north of the Stour-if he lived that long. He didn't care whether slaves felt that way all the time-or had felt that way all the time-till his own signature on that damned sheet of paper acknowledged that they were slaves no more. You needed to keep such people in line. Keeping them afraid went a long way toward doing just that. But white men had always been the lords of creation in Atlantis. Stafford hated feeling any other way.

He tensed when the train stopped in a hamlet called West Duxbury for wood and water. No ravening mob appeared. West Duxbury didn't have enough people to make a ravening mob. But someone flung a rock through a window as the train pulled out of the station.

Frederick Radcliff and Helen sat there with the air of people who'd been through worse in their time. Consul Stafford counted himself lucky to have got off so lightly. Leland Newton was the one who let out a startled yip. He almost jumped out of his seat. All in all, he reminded Stafford of a cat that had just made the sudden and unwelcome acquaintance of a rocking chair.

Sure enough, smoke did pour into the car. It masked whatever odor the Negroes in there might have had. It also made Stafford's eyes water and made him cough. He felt as if he'd been puffing on a pipe without letup for a week, the only difference being that he didn't get the little lift pipeweed brought with it. All things considered, he would rather have kept the window intact… he supposed.

More towns, bigger towns, and more stops lay ahead. How long would it be before somebody decided a rock wasn't good enough? How long before somebody pulled out an eight-shooter, or maybe a rifle musket? No, Stafford hadn't been joking about any of that. He knew how white people down here would feel about setting slaves free.

Life was a miserable bastard, all right. But what other choice did you have? At the moment, Stafford knew exactly what other choice he had. Outraged southern men could pull him from the train and hang him or burn him or simply tear him to pieces. Living seemed better… if he could get away with it.

A conductor whose wool jacket was resplendent with polished brass buttons strode into the car and bawled, "New Hastings! Coming into New Hastings!"

"Thank God!" Leland Newton said. No one in the battered railway carriage seemed angry that he came close to taking the name of the Lord in vain. He knew why not, too: the others were just as glad to make it to the capital in one piece as he was.

Stafford had warned that it would be bad. Newton had thought his colleague was exaggerating to make liberating Negroes and copperskins seem a worse idea than it really was. But the Consul from Cosquer turned out to know what he was talking about. White men south of the Stour really were up in arms at the idea of turning their bondsmen loose.