"Yes, suh," Scipio answered. He'd decided he didn't need to lie about that. It wasn't against the law, and wasn't even that uncommon.
"Cipher, too?" the clerk asked. He yawned again, and scratched his cheek, just below the edge of the patch covering his left eye socket, a patch that explained why a white man in his twenties wasn't at the front.
"Yes, suh," Scipio said again, and cautiously added, "Some, I do."
But the clerk just nodded and wrote something down on the form he was completing. For a moment, he almost approached briskness: "You got a passbook you can show me, Jeroboam?"
"No, suh," Scipio said resignedly.
"Too bad," the clerk said. "That's gonna cost you." Scipio had been sure it was going to cost him; now he wanted to find out just how much. He had more money now than when he'd come to Columbia; he figured he could get by till this petty crook was through shaking him down. But, to his amazement, the clerk went on, "These last couple weeks, we've been paying twenty-dollar hiring bonuses to bucks with their papers all in order, on account of they stay with us longer and we want to keep 'em in the plant."
"Ain't got no papers," Scipio repeated, doing his best to hide how surprised he was. "Been a busy time, dese pas' couple years."
"Nigger, you don't know the half of it," the clerk said. Considering what all Scipio had been through, the clerk didn't know what he was talking about. But then he scratched by the eye patch again, so he knew some things Scipio didn't, too. He asked, "How old are you?"
"I'se fo'ty-fo'-I think," Scipio answered.
"All right." The clerk wrote that down, too. "Even if you took your black ass down to the recruiting station, they wouldn't stick you in butternut, so we ain't real likely to lose you anyhow, ain't that right?"
"I reckon not," Scipio said. All of a sudden, things made more sense. "You losin' a lot o' de hands to de war, suh?"
"Too damn many," the clerk said. "Always knew niggers was crazy. You got to be crazy if you want the chance of gettin' shot and next to no money while you're doin' it." He scratched by the patch yet again. "I been through all that, and I purely don't see the point to it."
"Me neither, suh," Scipio said. But he did, though he wouldn't say so to a white man. The clerk had gone to war along with his peers, masters of what they surveyed. If Negroes put on butternut, they hoped to gain some measure of the equality the clerk took for granted.
"Well, that's as may be," the one-eyed white man said. "Pay is two dollars an' fifty cents a day. You start tomorrow mornin', half past seven. You make sure you're here on time."
"Yes, suh. I do dat, suh." Scipio had expected warnings far more dire. That this one was so mild told him how badly the mill needed workers. So did their attitude toward his papers, or lack of same. The clerk called him nigger in every other sentence, but the clerk had undoubtedly called every black he saw a nigger from the day he learned how to talk. He did it more to identify than to demean.
Scipio went looking for a room at a boardinghouse, and found one not far from the cotton mill. The manager of the building, a skinny, wizened Negro who called himself Aurelius, said, "We's right glad to have you, Jeroboam, and that's a fac'. Lots o' folks is leavin' here fo' to join the Army. Up from the Congaree country, is you?"
"Dat right," Scipio said. Aurelius' accent was different from his, closer to the way the white folks of Greenville spoke than to the Low Country dialect Scipio had learned on the Marshlands plantation.
Aurelius scratched his head. His hair had more gray in it than Scipio's. "You know somethin', Jeroboam?" he said. "If I thought they'd let me tote a rifle, I'd join the Army my own self. Reckon I wouldn't mind votin' an' all them other things the white folks is givin' to niggers who goes to war for 'em."
"Maybe," was all Scipio said. Having fought against the Confederate government, having the blood of a Confederate officer on his hands, he didn't think he wanted to put on butternut himself, even had he been young enough for recruiters to want him.
His room was bigger and cleaner and cost less than the one in Columbia. Being just a mill town rather than the state capital, Greenville didn't have to put on airs. The work Scipio got was marginally easier than what he'd been doing before. Instead of hauling crates of shell casings from one place to another, he loaded bolts of coarse butternut-dyed cloth onto pallets so someone else could haul them off to the cutting rooms.
Two days after he got the job, the young Negro who had been hauling those pallets quit. Another young black took his place. This one lasted a week. A third Negro held the position two days. All three of them resigned to put on that butternut cloth once it had been made into uniforms.
Scipio saw his first black man in Confederate uniform a little more than a week after he came to Greenville. Three big, tough-looking Negroes in butternut came down Park Avenue side by side. They swaggered along as if they owned the sidewalk. Blacks of all ages and both sexes stared at them as if they'd fallen from the moon. Scipio was one of those who stared. He wondered if any of the brand-new soldiers had worn the red armband of the Congaree Socialist Republic the winter before.
As the uniformed Negroes strode along the avenue, sighs rose up from every woman around. If the men in butternut were out for a good time, their problem would be picking and choosing, not finding.
That much, though, Scipio could have guessed beforehand. He found watching whites far more interesting. They stared at the Negroes in uniform, too. Their attitude was more nearly astonishment and uncertainty than delight. Their legislators had passed the bill authorizing Negro soldiers. Now that they were confronted with the reality, they didn't know what to make of it.
A white captain, perhaps home on leave, came out of a shop on Park Avenue. The three Negroes snapped to attention and gave him salutes so precise, they might have been machined. The captain stopped and looked the black men over. Damnfool buckra, Scipio thought. If a white officer doesn't treat them like soldiers, who will?
But the captain, though half a beat late, did return the salutes. Then he did something better, something smarter: he nodded to the three Negroes before he went on his way. They nodded back; one of them saluted again. The captain gravely returned that salute, too. He hadn't acknowledged them as his equals, but they weren't his equals in the Army. He had acknowledged them as belonging to the same team he did. In the Confederacy, that was epochal in and of itself.
A sigh ran through blacks and whites alike. Everyone recognized what had happened. Not everyone, Scipio saw, was happy with it. That didn't surprise him. What did surprise him was that none of the whites on Park Avenue raised a fuss. The three Negro soldiers found a saloon and went into it one after another.
More and more blacks in butternut began appearing as time went by. A couple of weeks after Scipio saw his first colored recruits, he was going home from the mill when a white corporal stopped a black man in Confederate uniform. The white man had his right arm in a sling. In a voice more curious than anything else, he asked, "Nigger, why the hell you want to take the chance of getting a present like this one here?" He wiggled the fingers sticking out of his cast.
The Negro came to attention before he spoke. "Co'p'ral, suh," he said, "my big brother, he was in one o' they labor battalions, an' a damnyankee shell done kilt him. He didn't have no gun. He couldn't do nothin' about it. Them damnyankees ain't gwine shoot at me without I shoots back."
"All right. That's an answer, by Jesus," the corporal said. "Kill a couple o' them bastards for your brother, then kill a couple for your own self."