"I'se fo'ty-fo'-I think," Scipio answered.

"All right." The clerk wrote that down, too. "Even if you took your black ass down to the recruiting station, they wouldn't stick you in butternut, so we ain't real likely to lose you anyhow, ain't that right?"

"I reckon not," Scipio said. All of a sudden, things made more sense. "You losin' a lot o' de hands to de war, suh?"

"Too damn many," the clerk said. "Always knew niggers was crazy. You got to be crazy if you want the chance of gettin' shot and next to no money while you're doin' it." He scratched by the patch yet again. "I been through all that, and I purely don't see the point to it."

"Me neither, suh," Scipio said. But he did, though he wouldn't say so to a white man. The clerk had gone to war along with his peers, masters of what they surveyed. If Negroes put on butternut, they hoped to gain some measure of the equality the clerk took for granted.

"Well, that's as may be," the one-eyed white man said. "Pay is two dollars an' fifty cents a day. You start tomorrow mornin', half past seven. You make sure you're here on time."

"Yes, suh. I do dat, suh." Scipio had expected warnings far more dire. That this one was so mild told him how badly the mill needed workers. So did their attitude toward his papers, or lack of same. The clerk called him nigger in every other sentence, but the clerk had undoubtedly called every black he saw a nigger from the day he learned how to talk. He did it more to identify than to demean.

Scipio went looking for a room at a boardinghouse, and found one not far from the cotton mill. The manager of the building, a skinny, wizened Negro who called himself Aurelius, said, "We's right glad to have you, Jeroboam, and that's a fac'. Lots o' folks is leavin' here fo' to join the Army. Up from the Congaree country, is you?"

"Dat right," Scipio said. Aurelius' accent was different from his, closer to the way the white folks of Greenville spoke than to the Low Country dialect Scipio had learned on the Marshlands plantation.

Aurelius scratched his head. His hair had more gray in it than Scipio's. "You know somethin', Jeroboam?" he said. "If I thought they'd let me tote a rifle, I'd join the Army my own self. Reckon I wouldn't mind votin' an' all them other things the white folks is givin' to niggers who goes to war for 'em."

"Maybe," was all Scipio said. Having fought against the Confederate government, having the blood of a Confederate officer on his hands, he didn't think he wanted to put on butternut himself, even had he been young enough for recruiters to want him.

His room was bigger and cleaner and cost less than the one in Columbia. Being just a mill town rather than the state capital, Greenville didn't have to put on airs. The work Scipio got was marginally easier than what he'd been doing before. Instead of hauling crates of shell casings from one place to another, he loaded bolts of coarse butternut-dyed cloth onto pallets so someone else could haul them off to the cutting rooms.

Two days after he got the job, the young Negro who had been hauling those pallets quit. Another young black took his place. This one lasted a week. A third Negro held the position two days. All three of them resigned to put on that butternut cloth once it had been made into uniforms.

Scipio saw his first black man in Confederate uniform a little more than a week after he came to Greenville. Three big, tough-looking Negroes in butternut came down Park Avenue side by side. They swaggered along as if they owned the sidewalk. Blacks of all ages and both sexes stared at them as if they'd fallen from the moon. Scipio was one of those who stared. He wondered if any of the brand-new soldiers had worn the red armband of the Congaree Socialist Republic the winter before.

As the uniformed Negroes strode along the avenue, sighs rose up from every woman around. If the men in butternut were out for a good time, their problem would be picking and choosing, not finding.

That much, though, Scipio could have guessed beforehand. He found watching whites far more interesting. They stared at the Negroes in uniform, too. Their attitude was more nearly astonishment and uncertainty than delight. Their legislators had passed the bill authorizing Negro soldiers. Now that they were confronted with the reality, they didn't know what to make of it.

A white captain, perhaps home on leave, came out of a shop on Park Avenue. The three Negroes snapped to attention and gave him salutes so precise, they might have been machined. The captain stopped and looked the black men over. Damnfool buckra, Scipio thought. If a white officer doesn't treat them like soldiers, who will?

But the captain, though half a beat late, did return the salutes. Then he did something better, something smarter: he nodded to the three Negroes before he went on his way. They nodded back; one of them saluted again. The captain gravely returned that salute, too. He hadn't acknowledged them as his equals, but they weren't his equals in the Army. He had acknowledged them as belonging to the same team he did. In the Confederacy, that was epochal in and of itself.

A sigh ran through blacks and whites alike. Everyone recognized what had happened. Not everyone, Scipio saw, was happy with it. That didn't surprise him. What did surprise him was that none of the whites on Park Avenue raised a fuss. The three Negro soldiers found a saloon and went into it one after another.

More and more blacks in butternut began appearing as time went by. A couple of weeks after Scipio saw his first colored recruits, he was going home from the mill when a white corporal stopped a black man in Confederate uniform. The white man had his right arm in a sling. In a voice more curious than anything else, he asked, "Nigger, why the hell you want to take the chance of getting a present like this one here?" He wiggled the fingers sticking out of his cast.

The Negro came to attention before he spoke. "Co'p'ral, suh," he said, "my big brother, he was in one o' they labor battalions, an' a damnyankee shell done kilt him. He didn't have no gun. He couldn't do nothin' about it. Them damnyankees ain't gwine shoot at me without I shoots back."

"All right. That's an answer, by Jesus," the corporal said. "Kill a couple o' them bastards for your brother, then kill a couple for your own self."

"That's what I aims to do," the Negro said.

Scipio was very thoughtful all the way back to his boardinghouse. After the CSA pounded the Congaree Socialist Republic into the ground, he'd been convinced everything Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Marxist revolutionaries had tried to achieve had died with the Republic. He wasn't so sure, not any more. Maybe Negroes were getting a taste of greater freedom after all, even if not in the way the Reds had aimed to give it to them. And maybe, just maybe, the struggles of the Congaree Socialist Republic hadn't been in vain.

When the field hands lined up in the morning, two more men were missing. "Where did Hephaestion and Orestes disappear to?" Anne Colleton asked. "Are they off somewhere getting drunk?" Instead of sounding furious, she hoped that was what the two stalwart hands were doing.

But the field foreman, a grizzled buck named Maximus, shook his head. "No, ma'am," he said. "Dey is on de way to St. Matthews-dey leave befo' de fust light o' dawn." Maximus had an unconsciously poetic way of speaking. "Dey say dey gwine be sojers."

"Did they?" Anne bit down on the inside of her lower lip. She had helped get the bill allowing Negro soldiers passed, and now she was paying the price for it. In front of the hands, she had to keep up a bold facade. "Well, we'll make do one way or another. Let's get to work."

Out to the fields and to their garden plots trooped the Negroes. The young men among them had found a loophole in the silent agreement they'd made with her after the Congaree Socialist Republic collapsed. If they joined the Confederate Army, they didn't need her to shield them from authority-and they didn't need to do as she said.