“That’s the idea,” Roosevelt said. “We made sure this broadcast went out over a big web. Featherston’s boys could try till they were blue in the face, but they couldn’t jam all our stations. People on the other side of the border will have got the message.”

“Good. Excellent, in fact,” Flora said. “Featherston says he tells the truth. His people-white and black-need to know better.” She knew white Confederates wouldn’t pay much attention to anything Negroes said. But plenty of blacks in the Confederate States had wireless sets, too.

“They sure do.” Franklin Roosevelt paused. It seemed very casual. Then he went on, “President La Follette wanted me to pass on to you that, as far as he’s concerned, the bargain you had with Al Smith still holds. He’ll meet his end of it. He wants me to check and see that you will, too.”

“If he does, I will.” Flora hoped she hid her bemusement. Two presidents, now, had agreed to speak out against Confederate atrocities on Negroes if she didn’t speak out on a strange budget item she’d found. Stranger still, she didn’t even know what the item was for.

When Scipio was Anne Colleton’s butler, back in the days before and at the start of the Great War, he’d got an education less formal but more thorough than he would have had at most colleges. He knew the name for a group of people forced to live in a walled-off part of a town. They formed a ghetto.

The Terry had been Augusta, Georgia’s colored district for God only knew how long. Blacks lived there and nowhere else. Whites didn’t live there, no matter what. But it hadn’t been a ghetto. Negroes had worked all over Augusta, waiting tables, cleaning houses, cutting hair, and doing all sorts of backbreaking, low-paying jobs that were beneath whites’ dignity.

But the Terry was a ghetto now. Barbed wire surrounded it. Armed guards-police and Freedom Party stalwarts-patrolled the perimeter. The only people who got out were the ones who showed their passbooks at the gates and were approved. Reentering was controlled just as rigidly.

Even before the barbed wire went up, the authorities swept out-emptied-one big chunk of the Terry. Word was that the people removed had been resettled somewhere else. Scipio didn’t know of anybody who’d heard from any of them, though. His guess was that they’d gone to a camp. Negroes went into camps. He didn’t know of anybody who’d come out of one, either.

All he could do was live his life one day at a time, try to get through, try to get by. Every afternoon, he put on the tuxedo he wore to his job at the Huntsman’s Lodge and headed for the nearest gate.

He’d been waiting tables there for a long time. The cops and the stalwarts knew him. They’d known him long enough that most of them had even stopped teasing him about the penguin suit he wore-and for a white man, or even a black, to abandon that particular joke required a forbearance not far from the superhuman. Better still, they’d even known him long enough to let him back into the Terry when he got off work after the usual curfew hour for Negroes.

That he worked at the Huntsman’s Lodge in particular undoubtedly helped him and his fellow waiters and cooks and busboys acquire their immunity from the curfew. The place was the finest and fanciest restaurant in Augusta. It was where the town’s most important whites gathered-and of course they had to be well served. Of course.

As usual, Scipio arrived for his shift about twenty minutes early. Showing up early and showing up all the time no matter what were two of a restaurant worker’s chief virtues. Reliability counted for more than anything else he could think of.

He ducked into the staff entrance-customers had a much fancier one-and hung his ratty overcoat on a hook. He didn’t think he’d need it much longer. Spring came early to Augusta, and summer followed hard on its heels. In the subtropical heat and humidity of a Georgia summer, his wing collar and tailcoat became a torture and a torment.

“Hello, Xerxes.” That was Jerry Dover, the manager at the Huntsman’s Lodge. The sharp-faced white man made a pretty good boss.

“Good day to you, suh.” Scipio responded to his alias more readily than he would have to his own name. As Scipio, he was still a wanted man in South Carolina. He hadn’t thought the Red uprising during the Great War had a prayer of success, which hadn’t kept him from becoming a prominent and visible part of the short-lived Congaree Socialist Republic. As far as he knew, the others who could say that were long dead; his son Cassius was named for one of them.

He expected Jerry Dover to go on his way after the greeting. The manager ran himself ragged making sure the Huntsman’s Lodge stayed the best place in town. However much Dover’s bosses paid him, it wasn’t enough.

Instead, though, Dover said, “Grab yourself some grub and then come see me in my office. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

“I do dat, suh. What you need?”

“It’ll keep till then.” Jerry Dover did hurry off after that. Scipio scratched his head. Something was on Dover’s mind. The manager hadn’t seemed anxious or upset, so it probably wasn’t anything too dreadful.

You couldn’t get rich waiting tables. (If you were a Negro in the CSA, you were most unlikely to get rich any which way, but you sure wouldn’t by waiting tables.) The job had its perquisites, though. The meals the cooks fixed for themselves and the rest of the help weren’t so fancy as the ones they made for the paying customers, but they weren’t bad, and they were free. Scipio ate fried chicken and string beans and buttery mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, and washed them down with coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.

Thus fortified, he went to Jerry Dover’s office, tapped on the open door, and said, “What kin I do fo’ you, suh?”

“Come on in,” Dover told him. “Close that thing, will you?”

“Yes, suh.” As Scipio did, he began-oh, not to worry, but to wonder. What didn’t Jerry Dover want anybody else hearing? The restaurant business had few secrets-fewer, most of the time, than the people who believed they were keeping them imagined.

Jerry Dover pointed to the battered chair in front of his battered desk. “Sit down, sit down,” he said impatiently. “You don’t need to stand there looking down at my bald spot. I’ve got something I want you to take care of for me.”

“I do dat,” Scipio said, assuming it was something that had to do with the restaurant. “Ask you one mo’ time-what you need?”

“Something a little special,” Dover answered. Scipio still didn’t worry. Later, he realized he should have started right then. But he just sat there politely and waited. His mama had raised him to be polite, going on seventy years ago now, and Anne Colleton’s relentless training reinforced those early lessons. Dover went on, “I need you to take something to somebody down in Savannah for me.”

“Savannah, suh?” Automatic deference tempered even the horror Scipio felt. “Do Jesus, suh! How I gonna git to Savannah, things like they is now? I is lucky I kin git outa de Terry.”

“I’ll get you authorized to leave town. Don’t you fret about that,” Jerry Dover said, which only made Scipio more alarmed than ever.

“What is this thing?” he demanded. “You can’t go your ownself? You can’t put it in de mail, let de postman bring it?”

“No and no,” the manager answered. “If I go out of town, people will notice. Right now, I can’t afford to have anybody notice me leaving town. And the mail’s not as safe as it used to be. A lot of people are mighty snoopy these days.” He doubtless meant people who worked for the Freedom Party. He doubtless meant that, but he didn’t say it.

“You reckon nobody care about some raggedy-ass nigger?” Scipio said. Quite calmly, Jerry Dover nodded. His very coolness infuriated the black man. “Suh, this here ass o’ mine may be raggedy, but it be the onliest one I got.”