Blood and iron

Scipio wanted to duck back into Susa

"Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!'" The shout was as loud and, in Scipio's ears, as hateful as it had been during the presidential campaign two years before.

But more white men shouted back from the sidewalks and from their automobiles: "Murderers!" "Shut up, you bastards!'" "Get out of the road before I run you over!" "Liars!" "Sons of bitches!" Scipio had never heard shouts like that during Jake Featherston's run for the Confederate presidency.

And, as if from nowhere, a phalanx of policemen, some with pistols, some carrying rifles, came off a side street to block the marchers' path. "Disperse or face the consequences," one of them growled. Nobody had ever spoken like that to a Freedom Party column during the 1921 campaign, either.

"We have the right to-" one of the men in white and butternut began.

"You haven't got the right to block traffic, and if you don't get the hell out of the way, you can see how you like the city jail," the cop said. He and his men looked ready-more than ready-to arrest any Freedom Party stalwart who started to give them a hard time, and to shoot him if he kept it up.

The Freedom Party men saw that, too. By ones and twos, they began melting out of the column and heading back to whatever they'd been doing before they started marching. A couple of the men up front kept arguing with the police. They didn't seem to notice they had fewer and fewer followers. Then one of them looked around. He did a double take that would have drawn applause on the vaudeville stage. The argument stopped. So did the march.

Scipio's feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to the Terry. When he told Erasmus what he'd seen, his boss said," 'Bout time them bastards gits what's coming to 'em. Way past time, anybody wants to know. But better late than never, like they say."

"Didn't never reckon I live to see the day when the police clamps down on the buckra marchin' 'long the street," Scipio said.

"You never lose your shirt bettin' on white folks to hate niggers," Erasmus said. "You bet on white folks to be stupid all the time, you one broke nigger. They knows they needs us-the smart ones knows, anyways. An' the Freedom Party done come close enough to wi

"Here's hopin' you is right," Scipio said. "Do Jesus, here's hopin' you is right."

When he got home, Bathsheba examined the buttons with a critical eye, then nodded. "Them's right nice," she said.

"You's right nice," Scipio said, which made his wife smile. He went on, "I gots somethin' else right nice to tell you," and again described the ignominious end to the Freedom Party march.

That made Bathsheba jump out of her chair and kiss him. "Them white-and-butternut fellers used to scare me to death," she said. "Tell the truth, them white-and-butternut fellers still scare me. But maybe, if you is right, maybe one fine day even us niggers can spit in their eye."

"Mebbe so," Scipio said dreamily. He'd already spit in the white man's eye as a not altogether willing member of the ruling council of the Congaree Socialist Republic. This would be different. Echoing Erasmus, he said, "Even some o' the buckra like to see we spit in the Freedom Party's eye."

"I got somethin' else we can do about the Freedom Party," Bathsheba said. Scipio raised a questioning eyebrow. His wife condescended to explain: "Forget there ever was such a thing as that there party."

Now Scipio kissed her. "Amen!" he said. "Best thing is they disappears like a stretch o' bad weather. After the bad weather gone, you comes out in the sunshine an' you forgets about the rain. We done have more rain than we needs. Mebbe now, though, the sun come out to stay." And, in the hope the good weather would last, he kissed Bathsheba again.

Tom Colleton dumped afternoon papers from Charleston and Columbia down on the kitchen table in front of A

"Got to give you credit, Sis," Tom said. "Looks like you got out of the Freedom Party just in time."

"If you think the bottom is going to fall out of a stock, you sell it right then," A

Her brother had been content to look at the headlines. She studied the stories line by line, knowing headline writers often turned news in the direction their editors said they should. That hadn't happened here; the Whigs would own a larger majority in both the House and Senate of the Thirty-second Confederate Congress than they had in the Thirty-first.

And the Freedom Party had lost enough seats to make A

"Yes, I think he is finished," A

"By God, I hope so," Tom said. "Do you know what he reminded me of?" He waited for A

A

"Thanks a heap, Sis." Tom's grin made him look for a moment like the irresponsible young man who'd gone gaily off to war in 1914 rather than the quenched and tempered veteran who'd returned. "He wasn't a wizard, of course, only a man too damn good at making everyone else angry when he was."

"He was angry all the time. He still is. He always will be, I think." A

Her brother said, "He sure had you going for a while."

Past tense again, and another jolt with it. But A

Had President Hampton not been assassinated, A

Would I have gone to bed with him, if he d wanted that? A