His English was almost as foreign to Flora’s ear as his music. White Confederates had their own accent, or group of accents; she was used to those. People from the USA, though, seldom got to hear how uneducated Confederate Negroes spoke.

“How did you get out of the CSA?” the announcer asked.

Flora already knew that story; she’d met Satchmo after he and his fellow musicians came to Philadelphia. Knowing what he was going to say helped her follow his account: “We was up in Ohio, playin’ fo’ de sojers dere. We done decided we better run, on account of we never gits no better chance. So we steals a command car-you know, one o’ dem wid a machine gun on it.” His accent got even thicker as excitement filled his voice. “We drives till we comes to de front. It’s de nighttime, so de Confederate pickets, dey reckons we’s ossifers-”

“Till we commences to shootin’ an’ drives on by,” one of the other Rhythm Aces broke in. They all laughed at the memory.

“Good for you. Good for you,” the announcer said. Flora didn’t like his fulsome tones; she thought he was laying it on with a trowel. The idea wasn’t to patronize the Negroes. It was to show the world they were human beings, too, human beings abused by their white Confederate masters. She couldn’t think of a better word than that, even though the Confederates had formally manumitted their slaves in the 1880s. Neither side’s propaganda was subtle these days. The announcer asked, “What will you play for us next?”

As usual, Satchmo spoke for the band: “This here is a song dat show we is glad to be where we’s at.”

They broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was not the National Anthem as Francis Scott Key had written it. It was not the National Anthem as Flora had ever imagined it, either. They did things with and to the rhythm for which she had no names. But what they did worked. It made the staid old tune seem new and fresh to her again. Most of the time, she listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with half an ear, if that. She knew it too well to pay much attention to it. Not here, not now. She had to listen closely, because she couldn’t be sure just what was coming next. She didn’t think even the Rhythm Aces knew before the notes flowed from their instruments.

After the last proud wail of Satchmo’s trumpet, even the bland announcer seemed moved when he murmured, “Thank you very much.”

“You is mighty welcome, suh,” Satchmo said. “You is mighty welcome, an’ we is mighty glad to be in ‘de land o’ de free an’ de home o’ de brave.’ If we was still in de CSA, maybe they fixin’ to kill us.”

The announcer still didn’t seem to know what to make of that. Getting people in the USA to believe that whites in the CSA were systematically killing blacks wasn’t easy. Getting people in the USA to care even if they did believe was harder yet. People in this country wanted as little to do with blacks as they could, and wanted as few blacks here as possible.

Flora wondered if Satchmo and his fellow musicians had bumped up against that yet. They weren’t valued for themselves; they were valued because their escape gave the Confederates a black eye.

“What will you do now that you’re in our great country?” the wireless man asked at last.

“Play music.” By the way Satchmo said it, he could conceive of no other life. “Wherever folks wants us to play music, we do dat.”

How many people would want them to play music as alien to the U.S. tradition as that National Anthem had been? Flora couldn’t know. One way or another, Satchmo and his band would find out. They wouldn’t starve; the government wouldn’t let them. And they wouldn’t have to worry about pogroms and worse. People might not like them, but their lives weren’t in danger anymore.

After farewells and commercials, the news did come on. It wasn’t good. The big U.S. push in Virginia remained bogged down. U.S. counterattacks in Ohio hadn’t come to much. The fight to grind down the Mormon uprising remained stalled in Provo. If the United States could have thrown their full might at Utah, the revolt would have been crushed in short order. The Mormons, of course, had the sense not to rebel when the USA could do that. Flora hoped Yossel stayed safe.

Other fronts were sideshows. Confederate-sponsored Indian uprisings in Sequoyah kept the occupied territory in an uproar. That wouldn’t have mattered much if Sequoyah didn’t have more oil than you could shake a stick at. As things were, the United States had trouble using what they could get, and sabotage ensured that they didn’t get much.

Sequoyah was one more piece of trouble left over from the Great War and the harsh peace that followed. If the peace had been milder, maybe someone like Jake Featherston never would have arisen in the Confederate States. The smoldering resentments and hatreds that fueled the Freedom Party’s growth wouldn’t have existed. On the other hand, if the peace had been more draconian-more on the order of what the United States had visited on Canada-any sign of trouble would have been ruthlessly suppressed before it could turn dangerous.

Which would have been better? Flora didn’t know. All she knew for sure, all anyone in the battered USA knew for sure, was that what they’d tried hadn’t worked. That was particularly bitter to her because so much of what they’d tried had been under Socialist administrations, including her own late husband’s.

The Democrats had ruled the USA almost continuously between the disaster of the War of Secession and the bigger disaster of the Great War. Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t seen the Great War as a disaster; he’d seen it as a vindication, a revenge toward which the country had worked for two generations. Maybe he’d even been right. But the voters thought otherwise. They’d elected Socialists ever since, except for one four-year stretch.

And what had that got them? The economic collapse while Hosea Blackford was in the White House, and the rebirth of Confederate military power while Al Smith was. If only he hadn’t agreed to the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah… But he had, and he’d won reelection on the strength of it, and none of Jake Featherston’s solemn promises turned out to be worth the paper it was written on.

We aren’t immune from mistakes, either, Flora thought, and laughed bitterly. There were times when the Socialists seemed to go out of their way-a long way out of their way-to prove that.

The telephone rang, dropping a bomb on her train of thought. Not sorry to see it go, she picked up the handset and said, “Yes? What is it, Bertha?”

“Mr. Roosevelt is on the line, Congresswoman,” her secretary answered.

“Is he?” Flora could hear the pleasure in her voice. “Put him through, of course.”

“Hello, Flora! How are you today?” the Assistant Secretary of War said. Franklin Roosevelt always sounded jaunty, even though poliomyelitis left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was only a distant cousin to Theodore, and had always been a solid Socialist.

“I’m fine, Franklin. How are you? What can I do for you today?” Flora said.

“I’m about as well as can be expected,” he replied. “I’d be better if the war were better, but I expect that’s true of the whole country. Reason I called is, I wondered whether you’d listened to Satchmo and his pals on the wireless just now.”

“I certainly did,” Flora told him. “I don’t think I ever heard the National Anthem sound like that before.”

Roosevelt had a big, booming laugh, a laugh that invited everyone who heard it to share the joke. “Neither did I, by God!” he said. “But it didn’t sound bad, you know-just different.”

Had he been a Democrat like his late cousin, the two words would have meant the same thing to him. Flora said, “I liked the way he and the Rhythm Aces talked between numbers. They’ll make some people think-here and in the CSA.”