Liberating Atlantis

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.

She brought up a hand and rubbed first her cheek and then his. "Better shave, too-you're all scratchy. Miz Clotilde, she'll yell at you if she got to tell you that."

Once more, it wasn't as if she were wrong. "I shaved yesterday," Frederick protested feebly. Helen just looked at him. He let out another resigned sigh and scraped his cheeks and chin smooth with a straight razor. He had a heavier beard than most Negro men did, and as for copperskins… That probably came down from his white grandfather. Like the rest of his inheritance from Victor Radcliff, it did him no good at all.

He kissed Helen again after he finished. She smiled and nodded. That was worth a little something, anyway.

Then he put on the white shirt with the tight collar, the cravat, the black wool trousers, the black wool jacket, the black socks, and the tight black shoes that pinched his feet. "Don't you look fine!" Helen said.

Sweat was already ru

An early-rising woodpecker's drumming punctuated the dawn stillness. The cooks already had coffee boiling in the kitchen. Frederick and Helen gulped big, snarling cups only partly tamed by sugar. A cook gave them bowls of cornmeal mush and chopped salt pork. A couple of young colored maids were in there eating, too. Soon they'd be off on one last orgy of sweeping and dusting. Everything today had to be right.

Feathers flew in the kitchen-literally. Black hands plucked chickens, ducks, a Terranovan turkey, and a couple of oil thrushes the master had shot in the woods the day before. The worm-eating Atlantean birds made mighty fine eating. They couldn't fly, and they had no great fear of man. They were so tasty, and so stupid, they grew ever scarcer.

In a way, Frederick pitied them. How could a man who dared not run away not pity a flightless bird? Pity them as he would, though, he ate of them whenever he got the chance.

And if that doesn't suit me to be a slaveowner, may I be damned if I know what would, Frederick thought. He poured himself more coffee.

Outside, another rhythmic thunking noise joined the wood-pecker's percussive syncopation. One of the field hands was chopping firewood. As Frederick poured down the strong, brown brew-darker than he was, if not a great deal-he nodded to himself. No matter how warm the day, the kitchens would go through a great plenty of pine and cypress today.

He'd heard white men newly come from England complain about the lack of hardwoods. Oak and maple and hickory, they said, burned longer and hotter than Atlantean lumber. He hadn't noticed that the lack made them pack up and go back where they came from. All it did was give them something to complain about. He understood that. Everybody needed something of the sort.

A slave, by the nature of things, had plenty to complain about. The only trouble was, complaining didn't do him any good.

Clotilde Barford swept into the kitchen in a rustle of silk. The dress she wore was a pretty good copy of what had been almost the height of fashion in Paris eight or nine years earlier. She wasn't yet attired for receiving company. Before her guests arrived, she would put on a pretty good copy of what had been almost the height of fashion in Paris year before last. That would be plenty to let her keep up with the other women.

Now she was dressed for cracking the whip. "Get moving, you lazy niggers!" she snapped. Almost all the house slaves were Negroes; whites trusted them further than copperskins. That shamed Frederick more than it pleased him. The mistress didn't care one way or the other. "Sitting around lollygagging! The nerve of you people!"

Frederick glanced over at Helen. Helen's eyes had already swung his way. They carefully didn't smile. The mistress was in a state, all right. She got this way every time her friends and neighbors gathered here. The abuse mostly didn't mean anything. Mostly.

She pointed a pale, pudgy forefinger at Frederick, aiming it as Henry Barford must have aimed his shotgun at the oil thrushes. "Everything better be perfect when they get here. Perfect, you hear me?"

"Yes, ma'am." He scooped up his last few spoonfuls of mush double-quick so she could see he was hurrying. Like any sensible slave, he moved no faster than he had to. Why should he, when he was working for someone else's benefit rather than his own?

Sometimes, though, you had no choice. If the mistress or the master stood over you, you had to step lively. And Clotilde was liable to have her beady little blue eyes on him every livelong minute till her gathering proved the triumph she'd known all along it would be-known all along it had better be, anyhow. Frederick took a heroic swallow that drained the coffee mug and almost drowned him. He hurried out of the kitchen. Helen wasn't more than half a step behind him.

He wondered if the mistress would pursue them. Not yet. She stayed in there and laid down the law to the cooks as if she were Moses and they the children of Israel. Most of them had heard the speech before. Frederick certainly had. That didn't stop Clotilde Barford from coming out with it again. Stop her? It didn't even slow her down.

"She does go on," Helen said.

"And on, and on, and on," Frederick agreed, rolling his eyes. They both smiled. But they also both spoke in low voices, and neither one of them laughed. You never could tell who might be listening. You never could tell who might be tattling, either.

The house slaves had been scouring the big house-so called in contrast to the overseer's cottage and the slaves' shacks-for more than a week now. Wood glowed with oily, strong-smelling polish. The good china had been scrubbed and scrubbed again. Even the silver had been polished, and shone dazzlingly in the sun and more than well enough in the shade.

But, of course, everything had to be done one more time on the day itself. The housemaids bustled around, dusting and shining. They slowed down whenever they didn't think Frederick could see them. As he feared they might tell on him for saying unkind things about the mistress, so they worried he would tell on them if he caught them slacking. As coal and wood fed a steam engine, so fear and distrust fed the engine of slavery.

"Careful, there!" one maid warned another, who was swiping crystal goblets with a rag. "You drop one of them, it'll come out of your hide."

"Don't I know it?" the other one replied. "Now why don't you find somethin' for your own self to do, 'stead of standin' there playin' the white man over me?"

Playin' the white man over me. Frederick's mouth twisted. Overseers who were slaves themselves commonly failed, and often ended up hurt or dead. Negroes and copperskins didn't care to follow orders from their own kind. They thought their fellows who tried to give those orders were getting above their station.

They were right about that. What they didn't see was that whites who ordered them around were also above their station. Whites had more than looks on their side, of course. They had the weight of centuries of tradition behind them. And, if that weight turned out not to be enough, they also had whips and dogs and guns.

With such cheerful reflections spi

"Mornin', Fred," Barford replied. He was dressed in a shirt that had seen better days and trousers that had seen better years-they were out at both knees. He hadn't bothered putting on shoes or stockings. He often didn't. He seemed happy enough to let his hairy toes enjoy the fresh air. Maybe his wife would talk him into dressing up for her guests. More than likely, he'd stay comfortable and sit this one out with a jug, the way he did most of the time. He caught Frederick's eye again. "Clotilde's already in the kitchen checkin' up on things, is she?"