Dover lit a cigarette, then held the pack out to Scipio, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a white man do even such a simple favor for a black. “I thanks you kindly,” Scipio said. He had matches of his own. He didn’t need to lean close to Dover to get a light from his cigarette; his boss might have taken that as an undue familiarity.

“Everything’s gonna be…” Dover stopped and shook his head. “Shit, I don’t know whether everything’s gonna be all right. You got to do the best you can, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” Scipio smoked with short, savage puffs. “Don’t mean no offense, suh, but you got an easier time sayin’ dat than I does doin’ it.”

“Maybe. But maybe I don’t, too,” Dover said. Scipio felt a rush of scorn the likes of which he’d never known. What kind of trouble could the restaurant manager have that came within miles of a Negro’s? But then Dover went on, “Looks like they may pull me into the Army after all. More and more people are putting on the uniform these days.”

“Oh.” Scipio didn’t find anything to say to that. Horrible things happened to Negroes in the CSA, yes. But horrible things could happen to anybody in the Army, too. The one difference Scipio could see was that Dover’s family wasn’t in danger if he went into the service. Then a fresh worry surfaced: “You puts on de uniform, suh, who take over here?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know.” Dover didn’t sound comfortable with the answer.

“Whoever he be, he give a damn about colored folks?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know that, either.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio stubbed out the butt in the pressed-glass ashtray on the manager’s desk. The deceased cigarette had plenty of company. “He one o’ dat kind o’ buckra, we is all dead soon.”

“I do know that,” Dover said. “Other thing I know is, I can’t do thing one about it. If they call me up…” He shrugged. “I can talk to my own bosses till I’m blue in the face, but they don’t have to listento me.”

Scipio sometimes had trouble remembering that Jerry Dover had bosses. But he didn’t own the Huntsman’s Lodge; he just ran the place. He was good at what he did; if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have kept his job for as long as he had. As long as he stayed in Augusta, he had no place to move up from the Huntsman’s Lodge. He would have to go to Atlanta, or maybe even to New Orleans, to do better.

Now he said, “Go on. Go to work. Get your ass in gear.”

Not having anything else he could do, Scipio obeyed. Despite his worries, he got through the shift. When he went back to the Terry, he had no trouble passing through the barriers around the colored part of town. Cops and stalwarts knew who he was.

Getting back to work the next day, he found his boss in a terrible temper-not because he’d been called up but because two dishwashers weren’t there when they were supposed to be. That was a normal sort of restaurant crisis, and Dover handled it in the normal way: he hired the first two warm bodies off the street that he could.

Neither of them spoke much English. They were Mexicans-not Confederate citizens from Chihuahua or Sonora, but men out of the Empire of Mexico up in the CSA looking for work. Now they’d found some, and they went at it harder than anyone Scipio had seen in a long time. They wanted to keep it.

At first, thinking of the restaurant and nothing more, Scipio was pleased to see their eagerness. He didn’t blame Jerry Dover for telling the black men they’d replaced not to bother coming back to work. The look on the Negroes’ faces was something to see, but the color of those faces didn’t win the men much extra sympathy from Scipio. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, show up, you were asking for whatever happened to you. Showing up on time all the damn time counted for more than just about anything else in the restaurant business.

That was at first. Then, coming up to the Huntsman’s Lodge a couple of days later, Scipio walked past a barbershop. All the barbers in there had been Negroes; he couldn’t imagine a white Confederate demeaning himself by cutting another man’s hair. But now the barber at the fourth chair, though he wore a white shirt and black bow tie like the other three-a uniform not far removed from a bartender’s-did not look like them. He had straight black hair, red-brown skin, and prominent cheekbones. He was, in short, as Mexican as the two new dishwashers.

Ice ran through Scipio, not when he noticed the new barber but when he realized what the fellow meant, which didn’t happen for another half a block. “Do Jesus!” he said, and stopped so abruptly, the white man behind him almost walked up his back.

“Watch what you’re doing, Uncle,” the ofay said irritably.

“I is powerful sorry, suh,” Scipio replied. The white man walked around him. Scipio stayed right where he was, trying to tell himself he was wrong and having no luck at all. He wasn’t sorry. He was afraid, and the longer he stood there the more frightened he got.

For twenty years and more, Jake Featherston had been screaming his head off about getting rid of the Negroes in the Confederate States. Scipio had had trouble taking the Freedom Party seriously, not because he didn’t think it hated blacks-oh, no, not because of that! — but because he didn’t see how the CSA could get along without them. Who would cut hair? Who would wash dishes? Who would do the field labor that still needed doing despite the swarm of new tractors and harvesters and combines that had poured out of Confederate factories?

Whites? Not likely! Being a white in the Confederacy meant being above such labor, and above the people who did it.

But whites felt themselves superior to Mexicans: not to the same degree as they did toward Negroes, but enough. And the work blacks did in the CSA couldn’t have looked too bad to people who had no work of their own. Which meant…

If workers from the Empire of Mexico came north to do the jobs Negroes had been doing in the CSA, the Freedom Party and Jake Featherston might be able to have their cake and eat it, too.

Scipio wasn’t at his best at work that day. He was far enough from his best to make Jerry Dover snap, “What the hell’s the matter with you, Xerxes?”

“Jus’ thinkin’ ’bout Jose an’ Manuel, Mistuh Dover,” he answered.

“They aren’t your worry. They’re mine. If they keep on like they’ve started, they’re no worry at all, and you can take that to the bank. You just keep your mind on what you’re supposed to be doing, that’s all. Everything will be fine if you do.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. But yes, suh wasn’t what he meant. Jose and Manuel-and that barber in the fourth chair-were the thin end of the wedge. If Jake Featherston banged the other end, what would happen? Nothing good.

The restaurant manager eyed him. “You wondering if we can find some damn greaser to do your job? Tell you one thing: the worse you do it, the better the chances are.”

That came unpleasantly close to what Scipio was thinking. Say what you would about Dover, he was nobody’s fool. “Ain’t jus’ me I is worried about,” Scipio muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dover asked.

“More Mexicans they is, mo’ trouble fo’ niggers,” Scipio answered.

“Oh.” Dover thought about it for a little while, then shrugged. “I can’t do anything about that, you know. The only thing I care about is keeping this place going, and I’ll handle that till they stick a uniform on me and drag me out of here.”

He’d done everything a decent man could-more than most decent men would have. Scipio had to remind himself of that. “Yes, suh,” the black man said dully.

“Hang in there,” Dover said. “That’s all you can do right this minute. That’s all anybody can do right this minute.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again, even more dully than before. But then, in spite of himself, his fear and rage overflowed. He let them all out in one sarcastic word: “Freedom!”