When he got home that evening, Achilles was still bubbling over with pride. "Louie Henderson and Joey Nichols both said that was the swellest truck they ever saw," he reported.

"That's good," Cincinnatus said. He paused and listened again in his mind to what his son had just told him. When he'd been Achilles' age, back before the turn of the century, he would surely have said they ever seen. He still said things like that every now and then, or maybe more often than every now and then. Achilles had said them, too, till he started going to school: he'd listened to his mother and father and, while they were still down in Covington, to his grandmother as well. Now he listened to his teacher and to the boys and girls in class with him.

"Yeah, he's learnin' to talk like a Yankee, all right," Elizabeth said when Cincinnatus remarked on it over supper. "I seen that myself." She didn't notice her own slip. To her, it wasn't a slip: it was just the way she talked. It had been the same for Cincinnatus, too, but it wasn't any more. The more like a white he talked, the less likely people here-even other Negroes here, he'd seen- were to reckon him a dumb nigger. Not being thought of that way usually worked to his advantage.

After supper, Achilles read aloud from his primer and Cincinnatus read to him from an abridgement of Robinson Crusoe he'd picked up for a dime in a secondhand store. The sentences in the primer and the story of the castaway both used white folks' grammar-they used it rather better than a lot of the white folks with whom Cincinnatus did business. The more of those kinds of sentences Achilles read and had read to him, the more natural they would seem, and the more he would likely end up sounding like a white man himself. Up here, that couldn't help but be useful.

After Achilles had gone to bed, Cincinnatus sat on the sofa and read ahead in Robinson Crusoe; he was enjoying the tale himself. Elizabeth mended clothes on a chair under the other electric lamp. She'd sew a few stitches along a seam, yawn, and then sew a few more stitches.

Cincinnatus set down his book. "You know," he said, "we've done a lot better for ourselves up here than I figured we would 'fore we left Covington. Things keep going good a little while longer, maybe we can think about buyin' us a house here." He spoke hesitantly; he wasn't used to getting even a little ahead of the game.

Elizabeth yawned again. "You reckon Achilles asleep yet?" she asked.

Despite the yawn, Cincinnatus thought he knew why she asked that question. "Hope so," he answered, a large, male grin on his face. "Sure do hope so."

His wife would usually make a face of her own in response to that grin. Tonight, she ignored it. "Didn't want to say nothin' where he can hear it," she told Cincinnatus, "not yet-too soon. But I reckon I'm in the family way again."

"For true?" he said, and Elizabeth nodded. He thought about that, then started to laugh.

His wife's eyes flashed. "What's funny? Don't you want another baby?"

"Don't have much choice, do I?" Cincinnatus said, but that wasn't close to the right answer. He tried to improve it: "Just when you think you get up on things, life goes and hands you another surprise. This one, though, it sure enough is a nice surprise." He waited anxiously, then thought of something better to do: he walked over and kissed Elizabeth. Even without words, that did turn out to be the right answer.

Jefferson Pinkard put on his white shirt and butternut trousers. Both were freshly laundered and pressed. Ever since throwing Emily out of his cottage, he'd grown careless about the shirts and overalls and dungarees he wore to work. When he donned the white and butternut, though, he wasn't just himself: he was part of the Freedom Party. If he didn't look sharp, he let the Party down.

He went into the bathroom, examined himself in the streaky mirror there, and frowned. He rubbed some Pinaud's brilliantine into his hair, washed the greasy stuff off his hands, and combed out a nice, straight part. "That's more like it," he said. He grabbed his club off the sofa in the front room and headed out the door.

Bedford Cunningham sat on his front porch, enjoying the warm June Sunday afternoon. By the glass at his side and by the way he sprawled, he'd been enjoying it for quite a while. Pinkard raised the club as he walked by. His neighbor, his former friend, cringed. That was what he'd wanted to accomplish. He kept walking.

He wasn't the only man in Party regalia who'd come to the trolley stop by the Sloss Works company housing. Three or four of his comrades greeted him as he came up: "Freedom!'

"Freedom!" he answered, and grinned a fierce grin. "Reckon we're going to teach Wade Hampton V a thing or two about sticking his nose in where it's not welcome, ain't we, boys?"

"That's right. That's just right," the other Freedom Party men said, almost in chorus. Jeff was glad to have the reassurance, though he didn't really need it. Hampton might have won the election, but he had a lot of damn nerve to go barnstorming around the country making speeches and trying to pump up the Whigs. Who did he think he was, Jake Featherston or somebody?

Nobody sat near the men in white and butternut as the trolley rattled through the streets of Birmingham all the way out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds at the west edge of town, where Hampton would speak. When Negroes got on or off, they edged past the Freedom Party men and made their way to or from the back of the trolley car as if afraid they would be set upon at any moment. They had reason to fear; such things had happened before.

"State Fairgrounds! End of the line!'" the trolley driver announced, and loudly clanged his bell.

"End of the line for Wade Hampton, all right," Pinkard said, and the other Freedom Party men laughed wolfishly.

Caleb Briggs, the dentist who headed the Freedom Party in Birmingham, was marshaling his forces at the edge of the fairgrounds. "Won't be easy this time, boys," he rasped in his gas-ruined voice. "Goddamn governor got wind of what we had in mind and called out the goddamn militia. Anything we want, we're going to have to take."

Pinkard looked west across the rolling, grassy countryside to the platform from which President Hampton would speak. Sure enough, there were men in butternut and old-fashioned gray uniforms along with those in shirtsleeves or black civilian coats. The sun glinted off bayonets. He'd seen that too many times in Texas to mistake it for anything else.

Suddenly, the club in his hand didn't seem such a wonderful weapon at all. He asked, "We move on those sons of bitches, they going to open up on us?"

"I don't know," Briggs answered. "Only one way to find out, though, and that's what we're going to do." He raised his voice: "Anybody who hasn't got the balls to go forward, run along home to mama. The rest of us, we'll see if those summer soldiers mean it or if they'll fold when we come at 'em. Nobody's stopped us yet. My bet is, nobody can. Let's go."

Everybody advanced. Pinkard's mouth was dry, as it had been when he came up out of the trenches, but he kept going. It wasn't that he lacked fear: far more that he feared letting his comrades know he was afraid. If they didn't feel the same way, he'd have been astonished. On they came, through the ankle-high grass, past the little groves of shade trees planted here and there on the fairgrounds. The muggy heat accounted for only some of the sweat on Jeff's face.

The militiamen deployed to meet the Freedom Party stalwarts. They were outnumbered, but they had the rifles and the bayonets and the helmets. Pinkard didn't like the way they moved. Their manner said they were not about to give way for anything or anybody.

To applause from the smallish crowd in front of him, President Hampton began to speak. Pinkard paid scant heed to his amplified words. Why bother? They'd be full of lies anyhow. The major moving out ahead of the militiamen was more important. The fellow held up a hand. "You men halt right there," he said. "This is your first, last, and only warning."