Walk in Hell

"Come on," said the woman with the watch-her name was Melissa. "Let's sing 'Auld Lang Syne.'"

Some of the women did begin to sing: softly, so as not to disturb those who had gone to sleep instead of staying up to see in the new year. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled, throwing shells at the territory still proclaimed to be the Congaree Socialist Republic, the territory that, shrunken though it was in the fighting of late, still included Marshlands.

Before the Red revolt, A

Melissa looked across the tent at her. "You're not singing, Miss Colleton," she said, her voice full of shrill complaint. She was plump and homely, and her hair must have stolen its golden sheen from a bottle, because the part of it closest to her head had grown out mouse-brown.

"That's right. I'm not singing," A

The pale, pudgy woman with the two-tone hair certainly seemed to be trying to promote her own untimely demise. Glaring at A

"Some people," A

She heard the sharp intakes of breath from all around the tent. "Here we go," one woman said in a low voice to another. So they'd been expecting a fight, had they? They'd been looking forward to one? A

Melissa's mouth opened and closed several times, as if she were a fish out of water. "Weren't for you damn rich folks, the niggers never would have riz up," she said at last.

Two or three women nodded at that. A

"It's the truth," Melissa insisted.

"In a pig's eye," A

"Liar!" Melissa squealed, her voice shrill. "If you'd have been born on a little farm like me, nobody would've ever heard of you."

"Maybe," A

Melissa needed longer than most of the women around her to understand she'd been punctured. When she did, she sent A

But Melissa did not back away from the argument. "Go ahead, make all the smart cracks you want," she said, "but you rich folks, you-"

"Stop that," A

That calculation proved accurate. Melissa looked around the tent for support. When she saw she wasn't getting any-no one there, for good and sufficient reasons, wanted anything to do with either Reds or even ideas possibly Red-she resumed her attack, though she had only one string on her fiddle: "Weren't for you rich folks, niggers'd just stay in their place and-"

"What a pile of horseshit," A

Melissa surged to her feet. "Po' buckra? Who are you calling white trash?"

"You," A

She rose, too, as she spoke, and just as well, for Melissa rushed over to her, aiming a roundhouse slap at her face. As her brothers had taught her in long-ago rough-and-tumble, A

The other woman staggered back and sat down hard. She'd almost stumbled into one of the stoves, which would have given her even worse hurt than A

"Before they sent me to this camp," A

Nobody argued with her, not now. She'd not only flayed Melissa with words but also thrashed her. The plump woman slowly stood up and went back to her own cot, one hand clutched to her jaw. She sat down on the canvas and blankets and didn't say a thing.

A

Convinced the trouble in the tent was over for the time being, A

A few miles to the north, though, the agitators of the Congaree Socialist Republic were using similar arguments to spur their followers to fresh effort against their white foes. Did that mean the Negroes had been right to rebel?

She shook her head. That wasn't what she'd had in mind at all. They weren't building anything up there, just tearing down. She wondered if anything would be left of Marshlands by the time she was finally able to return to it. One way or another, though, she figured she would get along. She wasn't Melissa, to fall into obscurity. No. Melissa hadn't fallen into obscurity. She'd never been anything but obscure. Many fates might yet befall A