American Front

The livery stable man walked off. If looks could have killed, the lieutenant would have been the one in the Ohio, floating face down. Cinci

"My mama say the same thing," the other Negro answered, also in a low voice. "That buckra there, though, I bet he don't have no mama." He dropped his voice even further. "An' he sure don't know who his papa was."

Cinci

When sunset came, the men on the docks lined up to get their pay. Armed guards stood around the paymaster to make sure nobody tried redistributing the wealth on his own. "Name," said the paymaster, a middle-aged white man with sergeant's stripes on his sleeves.

"Agamemnon," said the Negro in front of Cinci

The paymaster handed him a green-gray U.S. dollar bill. Covington was a border town, so some of those bills, along with U.S. coins, circulated here all the time. Now, though, the brown Confederate banknotes were no longer legal tender in areas the United States controlled. Till that moment, Cinci

"Name?" the paymaster asked him.

"Cinci

"No." Shaking his head, the paymaster pointed across the Ohio River. " Cinci

"He does?" Cinci

"Believe it or else, buddy," the paymaster said with an eyebrow raised in amusement-maybe he knew about Lieutenant Ke

"Yes, sir, go ahead," Cinci

"All right." The sergeant leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. "What I want to know is, how come all you niggers down here carry such highfalutin names?"

"Never hardly studied it," Cinci

"Makes as much sense as any other guess I've heard," the paymaster allowed. Now he did wave Cinci

"Rehoboam," the stevedore answered. The paymaster chuckled and gave him his money.

With an extra four bits in his pocket, Cinci

The trolley rolled past the city hall. The Stars and Stripes flew in front of it and on top of its dome. To Cinci

Plump, prosperous-looking white gentlemen wearing homburgs and somber suits, carrying fancy leather briefcases, and smoking cigars strode in and out of the city hall, as they had before the United States occupied Coving-ton. Some were U.S. administrators, some Covington politicians licking the Yankees' boots.

And some, maybe, really did want to work with the USA. Kentucky was the only Confederate state that hadn't left the Union at the start of the War of Secession; Braxton Bragg had conquered it for Richmond when Lincoln pulled soldiers eastward to try to repair the disaster at Camp Hill. Up till the time of the Second Mexican War, when U.S. forces wrecked Louisville, a lot of Kentuckians had had sympathy for the United States, and, sympathy or not, Kentucky had always done a hell of a lot of business with the USA.

Along with the prosperous gentlemen, a good many U.S. soldiers held positions around the Covington city hall. Machine guns protected by sandbags stood at either side of the entrance. Not everybody in Covington sympathized with the damnyankees, not by a long shot.

Cinci

Motion by the Licking River caught his eye. A bunch of Yankee sailors in dark blue were swarming over the grounded, burned-out hulk of the river monitor he'd seen on the water that day just before the war broke out. The monitor had taken a licking, all right; Yankee shells had set it ablaze before it could do much damage. Now whatever bits of it that could be salvaged would be used against the Confederacy.

The smell of fried chicken floating out through the windows made Cinci

"Be five, ten minutes," his wife Elizabeth answered. She waved to him from the kitchen. Then, to his surprise, his mother did, too. A heavyset woman of about fifty, she beamed at him and Elizabeth both. "My boy Cinci

"That he does, Mother Livia," Elizabeth said. "You were right-he could tell. Must be the spices."

"What are you doin' here, Mama?" Cinci

"I came to help my daughter-in-law," his mother said.

Cinci

"Took the trolley," he answered. She frowned at the extravagance till he showed her not only the day's usual greenback but the forty-five cents he had left from his bonus. "That damnyankee strawboss lieutenant, he sure hates niggers, but he knows work when he sees it."

"All right," Elizabeth said, more grudgingly than he'd expect. "I wish you'd saved every pe

"What's the matter?" he asked. "We ain't broke." One reason he loved Elizabeth was that she was as dedicated to getting ahead-or as far ahead as Negroes in the Confederate States could get-as he was. Even so, worrying about a nickel's worth of bonus seemed excessive.

Then she set both hands on her belly, about where the shirtwaist tucked into the skirt. "Reckon we go