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Chester considered. Try as he would, he couldn't see a whole lot of bushwah there. What Harry T. Casson said made good, hard sense from a business point of view. Martin said, "Make your offer. We'll vote on it. If it's something we can live with, we'll vote for it. I just wish to God you'd said something like this a long time ago."

The building magnate shrugged. "I had no reason to. I made more money without you people than I would have with you. Now it looks like things are different. I hope I'm not stupid. I can see which way the wind is blowing."

It all came down to dollars and cents for him-his dollars and cents. How his workers got by? If they got by? He didn't care about that. It wasn't his worry, or he didn't see it as such. Capitalist, Chester thought, but then, Now the wind's blowing in our direction.

"I think we can work together," he said. "You're right about one thing: it's high time we tried." He put out his hand now. Harry T. Casson took it.

For a long time, Cinci

Then he'd got out of Kentucky. Escaping what had been the Confederate States was good luck for a black man, too. Negroes didn't have it easy in Des Moines, but they had it a lot easier. His son had graduated from high school-and married a Chinese girl. Achilles and Grace seemed happy enough, so he supposed that was luck… and he loved his grandchildren. Amanda, his daughter, was going to graduate, too. When Cinci

He'd built up a pretty fair trucking business in Des Moines. That wasn't luck. That was hard work, nothing else but. But his father and mother had stayed behind in Covington. His mother began to slip into her second childhood. When Al Smith agreed to the plebiscite in Kentucky, Cinci

And so he'd come back to Covington to help his father bring his mother out of Kentucky and back to Iowa… and his luck had run out. His mother, senile, had wandered away from home, as she was doing more and more often. He and his father went after her. Cinci

Fractured leg. Fractured skull. Everybody said he was lucky to be alive. He wasn't sure he called it luck. He'd been laid up when the plebiscite went off. He'd been laid up during the grace period afterwards, when people who wanted to stay in the USA could cross the Ohio. By the time he could travel at all, the USA had sealed the border. Now he was trapped in the Confederate States with a war on. If this wasn't hell, you could see it from here.

He still limped. A stick helped, but only so much. He got blinding headaches every now and again, or a little more often than every now and again. Worse than any of that were the reflexes he had to learn all over again, the things he'd put aside in almost twenty years in Iowa. There, he was a man among men-oh, not a man at the top of the heap, but a man nonetheless.

Here, he was a nigger.

Whenever he left Covington's colored district near the Licking River for any reason, he had to expect a cop to bear down on him and growl, "Let me see your passbook, boy." It didn't matter if the cop was only half his age. Negro males in the CSA went straight from boy to uncle. They were never misters, never men.

The cop this particular day had a white mustache and a limp almost as bad as Cinci

"Here you are, suh," Cinci

The policeman looked at the photo in the passbook and compared it to Cinci

"Don't want no trouble, suh," Cinci

"I never yet knew a nigger who couldn't get in trouble if he wanted to," the policeman said. But then he walked on by, adding, "You get your ass back into your own part of town pretty damn quick, you hear?"

"Oh, yes, suh," Cinci

Newsboys hawked papers, shouting of Confederate victories all along the border with the USA. By what Cinci

With the cynicism black men learned early, Cinci

Antiaircraft guns poked their snouts up from parks and vacant lots. Some had camouflage netting draped over them in case U.S. airplanes came over in the daytime. Others didn't bother, but just stood there in their bare deadliness. So far, U.S. bombers had paid a couple of brief calls on Covington by night. They'd cost people some sleep, but they hadn't hit anything worth hitting.

Here was the grocery store he needed to visit. He had to wait a while to get noticed. The man behind the counter dealt with white customers till he didn't happen to have any in the store. Then he deigned to pay attention to Cinci

"I need a gallon of ketchup for the barbecue place," Cinci

"Oh, you do, do you?" The white man paid some real attention to him for the first time. "Heinz or Del Monte?"

"Del Monte, suh. It's the best." Cinci

The clerk eyed him for a long moment. Then he said, "Hang on. I have to get it from the back room." He disappeared, returning a moment later with a carton that prominently featured the gold-bordered red Del Monte emblem. He set it on the counter. "Jug's inside. Thirty-six cents." Cinci

Cinci