Harry Turtledove: Liberating Atlantis

If not for the floorboard that came up at one end, it might all have happened differently. Or it might never have happened at all. How do you measure might-have-beens? Frederick Radcliff never found an answer to that, and the question was in his mind much of the time. He'd never known a slave in whose mind that question had not taken root and flourished.

Frederick Radcliff was a slave himself: a house slave on Henry and Clotilde Barford's plantation, thirty miles outside of New Marseille. He was of middle height, but uncommonly broad through the shoulders. By his complexion, he was somewhere between griffe and mulatto-he had more than a quarter white blood in him, but less than half.

He never used his surname where the master and mistress could hear him do it. Legally, the surname didn't belong to him. Legally, nothing belonged to any black or copperskinned slave in the United States of Atlantis. Legally, the whites (and the occasional free blacks and copperskins) who owned them also owned everything that was theirs.

Regardless of what might be legally true, plenty of slaves claimed descent from Radcliffs or Radcliffes. The great white clan, descendants of the English fisherman who'd founded the first settlement in Atlantis, had flourished mightily in the four hundred years since. Henry Barford claimed a Radcliffe connection on his mother's side. (Clotilde, nee Delvoie, claimed a Kersauzon connection on her mother's side. The descendants of the Breton fisherman who'd led Edward Radcliffe to Atlantis, but who'd settled here after him, had also done well for themselves.) The Radcliffs and Radcliffes (and, indeed, the Kersauzons) had been fruitful and multiplied. And they hadn't been shy about lying down with slave women to do it.

After four centuries in Atlantis, some of Edward Radcliffe's descendants had flourished more mightily than others, of course. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe drunkards in the gutters of towns all over the USA. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe butchers and bakers and candlestick makers-and farmers, always farmers. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe doctors and lawyers and preachers. And there were Radcliff and Radcliffe leaders, as there had always been in Atlantis. More than a quarter of the Consuls who'd headed the United States of Atlantis since the War for Freedom were Radcliffs or Radcliffes, and quite a few others had the blood without the name.

Victor Radcliff had commanded the Atlantean Assembly's army in the war against England. After the war was won, he became one of the two First Consuls. (Isaac Fenner, the other, was descended from a crewman on Edward Radcliffe's fishing boat.) Every Atlantean schoolboy knew the First Consuls' names as well as he knew his own. So did Frederick Radcliff, although slaves, to put it mildly, were not encouraged to acquire an education.

And Frederick Radcliff had a stronger reason to remember the First Consuls' names, or at least one of them, than a schoolboy's fear of the master's switch.

Victor Radcliff was his grandfather.

So his mother had told him, over and over again. The story was that Victor Radcliff had come down into southern Atlantis to join up with the Marquis de la Fayette's French army, and that Frederick's grandmother's owner lent her to the general so he wouldn't have to sleep in a cold bed. Nine months later, his father was born.

Frederick didn't remember his father. Nicholas Radcliff had died when he was three years old. He'd stepped on a rusty nail outside, and lockjaw set in-so Frederick's mother said. She'd been a house slave, too, and taught Frederick what he needed to know so he wouldn't have to go out to the fields and work under the hot sun and the overseer's lash.

He knew he lived pretty soft… for a slave. He was friends with the cooks-also slaves-so he got plenty to eat. Maybe he didn't dine quite so well as the master and mistress and their children (now married and out on their own), but he knew how the field hands envied his rations. He slept in a bed one of the master's sons had used before him. His bedclothes were ones the white folks had almost but not quite worn out. All that use only made the linen softer. No, not bad at all… for a slave.

But if his grandmother had been white…

No wheedling cooks then. No hand-me-downs-no stuff other people didn't want any more, or didn't need. No swallowing his pride to keep from angering people who could do anything they wanted with him, including putting him up for sale like a horse or an anvil. If he were the white grandson of one of the First Consuls of the United States of Atlantis, he would be a rich man. He would be an educated man. People would respect him, admire him, because of who his grandfather was. He might be getting ready to stand for Consul himself. He might already have served a two-year term. Instead…

Instead, he had a meeting with that floorboard. He was never the same afterwards. Neither were the United States of Atlantis.

Henry Barford didn't have many friends. He would hunt with his sons or other neighboring planters every now and then. He would drink with them every now and then, too. Frederick had learned just how much brandy to pour into his coffee the morning after one of those drinking parties. A shot and a half was about right to take the edge off the pain in the master's hair.

Clotilde, now, was social butterfly, not social caterpillar. She was always clattering off in the carriage to visit the neighbor ladies. They gathered to sew or read books together, to stuff themselves with fried chicken or starberry pie, to pour down barrel-tree-rum punch (they didn't drink as hard as their husbands, but there weren't many teetotalers among them), and, always, to gossip.

And, when Clotilde wasn't clattering off to visit the neighbor ladies, they were clattering in to visit her. Frederick supposed she made a good guest. He knew she made a good hostess. She was as plump as a pillow and as friendly as a puppy-to her equals, anyhow. She wasn't especially hard on the house slaves… not so long as everything went well.

Sometimes only a few neighbor ladies visited the plantation. Three or four times a year, though, Clotilde would invite everybody from miles around. If you were doing well for yourself, you were expected to show off a bit, or more than a bit.

Whenever one of those grand convocations came along, Henry Barford would take a jug and either secrete himself away in an upstairs bedroom or go pay a call on the overseer. The next morning, Frederick would make a point of correcting his coffee.

It was a sultry, sticky summer's day. People who knew said the weather in the southeast, on the other side of the Green Ridge Mountains, was even worse. But this was bad enough for all ordinary use.

Frederick woke with the bedclothes sticking to him. In weather like this, he slept bare but for drawers. Helen, his woman, had on only a thin cotton shift. A slave preacher had made a marriage ceremony for the two of them-more than half a lifetime ago now-but it had no force of law. The Barfords could sell or give away either one of them any time they chose.

With a sigh, Frederick said, "Hate to climb into the monkey suit today. Gonna roast my bones for the sake of swank."

Helen looked at him. "You sooner go out and weed amongst the cotton plants? How'd you like to swing a hoe all day?"

"Oh, I'll wear the monkey suit," Frederick said, resignation in his voice. "But I don't have to like it."

"If the other choice is worse, you better like the one you got," Helen said. She was in no way an educated woman-she could barely read, and could not even sign her name-but she had her share of common sense and then some.

Frederick, stubborn and more hot-tempered, had just enough sense to realize Helen had more. He sighed again. "Reckon you're right," he said, and leaned over to give her a kiss.