Read Online The Victorious Opposition by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online Page A

would have to go before Mary Jane came home. Scandalizing her daughter wouldn’t do. But for now . . . For now, everything was just fine.
    S cipio wasn’t a young man. He’d been a little boy when the Confederate States manumitted their slaves in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. He’d lived in Augusta, Georgia, since not long after the end of the Great War. Everyone here, even Bathsheba, his wife, knew him as Xerxes. For a Negro who’d played a role, however unenthusiastic, in the running of one of the Red republics during the wartime revolt, a new name was a better investment than any he could have made on the bourse.
    He’d seen a lot in those mad, hectic weeks before the Congareee Socialist Republic went down in blood and fire. In all the years since, he’d hoped he would never see anything like that again. And, up till now, he never had.
    Up till now.
    White rioters roared through the Terry, the colored district in Augusta. Some of them shouted, “Freedom!” Some were too drunk to shout anything that made sense. But they weren’t too drunk to burn anything that would burn, to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, and to smash any Negroes who tried to stop them.
    In the early stages of the riot, what passed for Augusta’s black leaders—a double handful of preachers and merchants—had rushed to the police to get help against the hurricane overwhelming their community. Scipio had happened to be looking out the window of his flat when they came back into the Terry. Most of them, by their expressions, might have just scrambled out of a derailed train. A couple looked grim but unsurprised. Scipio would have guessed those men had seen some action of their own in 1915 and 1916.
    “What’ll they do for us?” somebody shouted from another window.
    “Won’t do nothin’,” one of the leaders answered. “
Nothin’.
Said we deserves every bit of it, an’ mo’ besides.”
    After that, a few Negroes had tried to fight back against the rampaging mob. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Dark bodies hung from lamp posts, silhouetted against the roaring, leaping flames.
    From behind Scipio, Bathsheba said, “Maybe we ought to run.”
    He shook his head. “Where we run
to
?” he asked bluntly. “The buckra catch we, we hangs on de lamp posts, too. Dis buildin’ don’ burn, we don’ go nowhere.”
    He sounded altogether sure of himself. He had that gift, even using the slurred dialect of a Negro from the swamps of the Congaree. Back in the days when he’d been Anne Colleton’s butler, she’d also made him learn to talk like an educated white man:
like an educated white man with a poker up his ass,
he thought. He’d seemed even more authoritative then. He hadn’t always been right. He knew that, as any man must. But he’d always
sounded
right. That also counted.
    Raucous, baying laughter floated up from the street. Along with those never-ending shouts of, “Freedom!” somebody yelled, “Kill the niggers!” In an instant, as if the words crystallized what they’d come into the Terry to do, the rioters took up the cry: “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!
Kill the niggers!
”
    Scipio turned to his wife. “You still wants to run?”
    Biting her lip, she got out the word, “No.” She was a mulatto, her skin several shades lighter than his. She was light enough to go paler still; at the moment, she was almost pale enough to pass for white.
    “Why they hate us like that, Pa?” Antoinette, their daughter, was nine: a good age for asking awkward questions.
    In the Confederate States, few questions were more awkward than that one. And the brute fact was so much taken for granted, few people above the age of nine ever bothered asking why. Scipio answered, “Dey is white an’ we is black. Dey don’ need no mo’n dat.”
    With the relentless logic of childhood, his son, Cassius, who was six, turned the response on its head: “If we is black an’ they is white, shouldn’t we ought to hate