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"I would," Potter said, "but I don't think she's likely to pay any attention to me."
"What have you got to lose?" Donovan asked. "If you haven't got the price of a long-distance telephone call, I can pay for it." He reached for his hip pocket.
"I've got it, I've got it." Potter waved for him to stop, and he did. What have you got to lose? It was a good question. How would he be worse off if A
"Heaven forbid such a thought from ever crossing my mind." Donovan sounded pious as a preacher. Such fine phrases meant exactly nothing, as Potter knew perfectly well. Maybe Donovan would remember them, maybe he wouldn't. Potter also knew which way he would guess.
Being in the line of work he was, he had a telephone back at his flat. As he took the mouthpiece off the hook, a black excitement filled him. "Operator, I'd like to make a long-distance call, please," he said, and gave the telephone number he'd never scratched out of his address book.
"One moment, sir, while I place the call," the operator replied. "And whom shall I say is the calling party?" Potter gave her his name. The call took longer than the promised moment to complete. He listened to clicks and pops on the line and a couple of faint, almost unintelligible, conversations between operators.
Then a telephone rang. He heard that quite plainly. "Hello?" There was A
"I'm fine," he answered. "How have you been? Haven't talked to you in a while."
"No-you chose your party, and I chose mine," A
Clarence knew then his call was hopeless. He went ahead anyway: "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. You've met Jake Featherston. You must know as well as I do, he's got a few screws loose up there. Lord knows we're si
A
"Wherever you want to go, there are lots of ways to get there," Potter said stubbornly. As long as they were talking, he'd give it his best try even if he was sure it wasn't good enough. "Featherston's going over the rocks and through the swamp. You ask me, he's more likely to put us on our backs than on our feet."
"I didn't ask you, Clarence," A
"I'm trying to tell you the man's dangerous."
"I know he is-to everybody who wants to keep us down."
"No, to us," Potter insisted. "Is he going to pay the niggers back or scare them into another uprising? Wasn't one bad enough?"
"If they try it twice, they'll never try it three times." A
Even so, Potter went on, "If he cleans out the War Department, who goes in instead? His drinking buddies? Will they be any better?"
"How could they be any worse?" A
"I don't know. I don't want to find out, either. And do you really want us to fight the United States again and lose?"
"No. I want us to fight those goddamn sons of bitches again and win," A
"How?" Potter demanded. "Think straight, A
"We haven't got any chance if we don't try," A
L ike most Confederate veterans, Jefferson Pinkard belonged to the Tin Hats. They weren't nearly so important in his life as the Freedom Party. He paid his dues every year, and that was about it. Still, when Amos Mizell, the longtime head of the Tin Hats, came to Birmingham to make a speech on a bright spring Sunday, Jeff went over to Avondale Park to hear what he had to say.
Taking the trolley to the east side of town, just past the Sloss Works, made him mutter to himself. He hadn't gone that way very often since losing his job at the steel mill. Even the air here tasted different: full of sulfur and iron. The first good lungful made him cough. The second one made him smile. He'd lived with that taste, that smell, for most of his adult life. He hadn't even known he missed it till he found it again.
He wore a clean white shirt and butternut trousers, the not-quite-uniform of the Freedom Party. Most of the people on the trolley car were men about his age, and many of them had on the same kind of outfit he did. He didn't see anybody with a bludgeon. This wasn't supposed to be that kind of meeting. You could belong to the Tin Hats without being a Freedom Party man, and some people did.
When the trolley stopped at the Sloss Works, half a dozen more men got on. He recognized two or three of them. They nodded to one another. "Good to see you," one of them said. "How are you doing?"
"Not too bad, Tony," Pinkard answered. "No, not too bad. Party found me a job after I got ca
"Sure do," Tony said. "About time, too."
The trolley stopped, brakes screeching. The motorman clanged his bell. "Avondale Park!" he said loudly. By the time men finished getting off the car, it was almost empty.
Under that warm, hopeful sun, Jeff walked toward the rostrum from which Amos Mizell would speak. Confederate flags and Tin Hat ba
Or were they? Up there on the rostrum, chatting with Mizell, stood Caleb Briggs, the head of the Freedom Party in Birmingham. The leader of the Tin Hats leaned closer to hear what Briggs had to say. Even nowadays, Briggs couldn't talk above a rasping whisper; the damnyankees had gassed him during the Great War.
Somebody yelled, "Freedom!" In an instant, the cry was deafening. Jefferson Pinkard shouted it out at the top of his lungs. The Freedom Party was the most important thing in his life these days. If it weren't for the Party, he hardly would have had a life.
Caleb Briggs gri
Amos Mizell gri