'As fer yer, ya nigger-lover, yore nuttin' but a dirty traitor,’ was the only repeatable statement of this kind that he made. He spat at me, then turned on the mild-faced lieutenant (I think he was called Azuma) who had been questioning him. 'We knew you niggers wuz comin' - we bin hearin’
‘bout it fer months now - an' dey're gettin' ready fer yer. Dey got plans -dey got a way o' stoppin' yer real good!' He sniggered. 'Yer got der artillery - but yer ain't got der brains, see? Yer'll soon be t'rowin' in der sponge. It'll take more'n what you got ter lick real white men!'
His threats, however, were all vague, and it soon became obvious to Lieutenant Azuma that there was little point in continuing with his questions.
I had not taken kindly to being called a traitor by this riffraff, yet there was, I suppose, some truth in what he had said. I had not lifted my voice, let alone a finger, to try to stop Hood so far.
Now I said: 'I must ask you, General Hood, to spare these men's lives. They are prisoners-of-war, after all.'
Hood exchanged a look of cruel amusement with Lieutenant Azuma. 'But surely they are hardly worth sparing, Mr Bastable,' he said. 'What use would such as these be in any kind of society?'
'They have a right to their lives,' I said.
'They would scarcely agree with you if you were speaking up for me,' said Cicero Hood coldly now. 'You heard Hoover's remark about "niggers". If our situation were reversed, do you think your pleas would be heard?'
'No,' I said. 'But if you are to prove yourself better than such as Hoover, then you must set an example.'
'That is your Western morality, again,' said Hood. Then he laughed, without much humour. 'But we had no intention of killing them. They will be left behind in the charge of our friends. They will help in the rebuilding of New Benin, as the city is to be called henceforth.'
With that, he strode from the cellar, still laughing that peculiar, blood-chilling laugh.
And so Hood's land-fleet rolled away from New York, and now I was a passenger in one of the smaller fighting machines. Our next objective was Philadelphia, where again Hood was, in his terms, going to the relief of the blacks there. The situation for the Negro in the America of this day was, I was forced to admit, a poor one. The whites, in seeking a scapegoat for their plight, had fixed, once again, upon the blacks. The other superstitious reason that so many of them wore those strange hoods was because they had conceived the idea that the Negroes were somehow 'dirtier' than the whites and that they had been responsible for spreading the plagues which had followed the War, as they had followed it in England. In many parts of the United States, members of the Negro race were being hunted like animals and burned alive when they were caught - the rationale for this disgusting behaviour being that it was the only way to be sure that the plague did not spread. For some reason Negroes had not been so vulnerable to the various germs contained in the bombs and it had been an easy step in the insane logic of the whites to see the black people, therefore, as 'carriers'. For two years or more, black groups had been organizing themselves, under instructions from Hood's agents, awaiting the day when the Ashanti invaded. Hood's claim that he was 'liberating' the blacks was, admittedly, not entirely unfounded in truth. None the less I did not feel that any of this was sufficient to vindicate Hood.
Headed by the Land Leviathan, the conquering army looted and burned its way through the states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and wherever it paused it set up its bkck-and-scarlet banners, leaving local bands of Negroes behind to administer the conquered territories.
It was during the battle in which Philadelphia was completely destroyed, and every white man, woman and child slain by the pounding guns of the Land Leviathan, that I found my opportunity to 'desert' the Black Horde, first falling back from the convoy of which my armoured carriage was part, and then having the luck to capture a stray horse.
My intention was' to head for Washington and warn the defenders there of what they might expect. Also, if possible, I wished to discuss methods of crippling the Land Leviathan. My only plan was that the monster should somehow be lured close to a cliff-top and fall over, smashing itself to pieces. How this could be achieved, I had not the slightest ideal
My ride from Philadelphia to the city of Wilmington probably set something of a record. Across the countryside groups of black 'soldiers' were in conflict with whites. In my Ashanti uniform, I was prey to both sides and would doubtless have fared worst at the hands of the whites who regarded me as a traitor than at the hands of the blacks, if I had been caught. But, by good fortune, I avoided capture until I rode into Wilmington, which had not suffered much bombing and merely had the deserted, overgrown look of so many of America's 'ghost cities'. On the outskirts, I stripped off my black tunic and threw it away - though the weather was still very cold - and dressed only in my singlet and britches -dismounted from my horse and searched for the local white leader.
They found me first. I was moving cautiously along one of the main thoroughfares when they suddenly appeared on all sides, wearing the sinister white hoods so reminiscent of those old Knights of the South, the Ku-Klux-Klan, whose fictional adventures had thrilled me as a boy. They asked me who and what I was and what I wanted in Wilmington. I told them that it was urgent that I should meet their leader, that I had crucial news of the Black Attila.
Shortly I found myself in a large civic building which a man named 'Bomber' Joe Kennedy was using as his headquarters. He had got his nick-name, I learned later, from his skill in manufacturing explosive devices from a wide variety of materials. Kennedy had heard about me and it was only with the greatest self-restraint that he did not shoot me on the spot there and then - but he listened and he listened attentively and eventually he seemed satisfied that I was telling the truth. He informed me that he had already planned to take his small 'army' to Washington, to add it to the growing strength of the defenders. It would do no harm, he said, if I came with them, but he warned me that if at any time it seemed that I was actually spying for Hood I would be killed in the same way that Negroes were killed in those parts. I never found out what he meant and my only clue, when I inquired, was in the phrase which a grinning member of Kennedy's army quoted with relish. 'Ever heard of "burn or cut" in England, boy?' he asked me.
The whites had managed to build up the old railroad system, for most of the lines had survived the War and the locomotives were still functional, burning wood rather than coal these days. It was Kennedy's plan to transport himself and his army by rail to Washington (for there was a direct line), and the next day we climbed aboard the big, old-fashioned train, with myself and Kennedy joining the driver and fireman on the footplate, for, as Kennedy told me, 'I don't wanna risk not keepin' you under my sight.'
The train soon had a good head of steam and was rolling away from Wilmington in no time, its first stop being Baltimore, where Kennedy hoped to pick up a larger force of men. As we rushed through the devastated countryside, Kennedy confided in me something of his life. He claimed that he had once been a very rich man, a millionaire, before the collapse. His family had come from Ireland originally and he had no liking for the English, whom he was inclined to rate second only to 'coons' as being responsible for the world's ills. It struck me as ironic that Kennedy should have a romantic attachment to one oppressed minority (as he saw it), but feel nothing but loathing for another.