"Not just preserving it," Anne said. "Helping it grow."

"Of course." He accepted the correction with good grace, accepted it and took it as his own. But then the creases in his long, thin face got deeper. "The price, though, the price is dreadfully high. You have a brother in the service, don't you?"

"Two brothers," she answered proudly. The worry she couldn't help feeling she kept to herself.

"I hope, I pray, they will come through safely," Wilson said. "I do the same for every man in the Army and Navy. Too often-far too often already- my prayers have gone unanswered."

Before Anne could decide how to answer that, Scipio came back with his silver tray. "Would you like a glass of champagne, Your Excellency?" she asked the president.

"Thank you," Wilson said, and took one. So did Anne. He lifted his crystal flute to her. "To civilization, to victory, and to the safe return of your brothers."

"I'll gladly drink to that," Anne said, and did. She turned to Scipio. "You may go."

"Yes, madam." He bowed and went on his way, back straight, wide shoulders braced almost as if he were on parade.

"A fine-looking fellow," Wilson remarked. "Well-mannered, too."

"Yes, I'm lucky to have him here." Anne watched Scipio go. He did make an impressive servant, no two ways about it.

As butler, Scipio was of course a house servant, with quarters within Marsh lands for himself. But, not least because he'd been chief cook before becoming butler, he kept up a closer relation with the outside Negroes than most servants of similar station would have done. He knew how much the larder depended on their ingenuity and goodwill: if they said hunting and fishing weren't going well, how could he prove they were lying? But the outside food bill would go up, and he'd catch the devil for that from the mistress.

Lightning bugs flashed on and off as he made his way out to the rows of Negro cottages behind Marshlands. He had every right to make the trip, but glanced back over his shoulder anyhow. It wasn't the mistress he thought was staring at him: it was Marshlands itself. The three-story Georgian mansion had been sitting here for more than a hundred years, and seemed to have a life of its own, an awareness of what went on inside and around it. The mistress would have called that superstitious nonsense. Scipio didn't care what she called it. He knew what he knew.

Perhaps, today, he also still felt the presence of Woodrow Wilson, though the president had gone back to St. Matthews to reboard his train and continue on down to Charleston. His mistress associated with any number of prominent people-which meant he did, too, not that they paid him much attention. He was, after all, only a Negro.

A groom coming out of the barn stared at him through deepening twilight. "Evenin'," he said, nodding. "Almos' didn't rec'nize you-gettin' dark earlier nowadays."

"I is still me," Scipio answered. Wherever white folks could hear him, he talked like an educated white man. That was what the mistress wanted, and what she wanted, she got. Among his own people, he spoke as he had since the day he first began forming words. He hadn't made a mistake switching back and forth between his two dialects in more than ten years.

Candles and kerosene lamps lighted the Negro cottages. Marshlands had had electric lights for a long time now. The mistress had plenty of money for paintings, but for wires for the help? Scipio shook his head. If he held his breath waiting, he'd be blue under his black.

Some of the little brick cottages were already dark. If you worked in the fields sunup to sundown, you needed all the rest you could get sundown to sunup. But you needed a little time to live, too. From out of open windows and doors flung wide against the muggy heat came snatches of song, cries of joy or dismay as dice went one way or the other, and the racket of children. More children made more racket outside, running after one another and pretending to be soldiers. None of them ever admitted he'd been killed. Scipio shook his head again. Too bad the real war didn't work out that way.

Here and there, a mother or a father taught children to read, mostly from books and magazines and newspapers the white folks had thrown away. Scipio, who'd been in his teens when manumission came, remembered the days when teaching a Negro to read had been against the law. He'd managed to pick up the knowledge anyway, as had a good many of his friends-too many things were being printed to keep them all out of Negroes' hands. Black literacy was legal now, but South Carolina still had no school for Negroes.

Scipio walked past Jonah's cottage, and was surprised to find no light burning in there. Jonah and his woman Letitia were always ones for singing and playing and dancing and carrying on. When he got to Cassius' cabin, though, the door was open and light streamed out into the night.

"Is you in there?" he called: good manners, by the standards of the field hands. The mistress' standards were something else again. Scipio moved between two sets of etiquette as readily as he did between dialects. If he ever thought about how he did what he did, he probably wouldn't be able to do it any more.

"No, ain't nobody to home here," Cassius answered. That drew raucous laughter from whoever else wasn't in there with him.

Snorting, Scipio went inside. If you took Cassius seriously, you were in trouble. He'd pull your leg till it came off in his hands, then walk off and leave you to hop home without it. But he was also the best hunter on the plantation, and that had been so for a long time. If you wanted something special for the larder, as Scipio did tonight, he was the man to talk to, even if you had to take your chances on everything else.

Now Cassius threw a hand up before his eyes. "Lord, Kip, you gwine blind we, the light shinin' off them brass buttons that way." Again, his crew of rascals and easy women laughed with him. The only thing that surprised Scipio about the inside of the cottage was that he didn't see any quart whiskey bottles on the mantel or sitting atop one of the rickety tables-or clamped in somebody's fist.

Cassius and the rest of the male field hands wore unbleached cotton shirts and trousers with no shape to them, nothing like Scipio's fancy suit of clothes-though better suited to this breathless heat. A couple of them had bright bandannas on their heads or wrapped around their necks to give themselves a spot of color. The women, by contrast, were in eye-searing calicoes and plaids and paisleys, with no shade of red too hot, no green too vibrant.

"You done been talking wid de president," Cassius said. "You don' reckon you too good to talk wid de likes of we now?"

"I talks wid de president," Scipio agreed with a weary sigh. "De president, he don't talk wid me. You hear what I say?"

Cassius nodded. That was how things worked for blacks in a white man's world. "So-what kin I do fo' you this day, Kip?" he asked. "You come here, you always want somethin'." It could have been an accusation, but it came out like a good-natured joke, which relieved Scipio, for it happened to be true.

In spite of that invitation, coming straight out with what you wanted was rude. "Where Jonah?" Scipio asked. "I see he cabin dark, an' he usually carry on damn near much as you do."

"Jonah?" Cassius shook his head. "He ain't here no more, not he. He leff this afternoon. Gone fo' good, I reckon."

"He leff. What you mean, Cass, he leff? That nigger pick cotton here since he big enough to do it, an' Letty, too."

"Not no mo'," Cassius said. "He say he light out fo' Columbia, he work in one o' them factories makin' shells and things."

Scipio stared. "They don' let no niggers work in they factories. Those is jobs fo' white folks, nobody else."