Liberating Atlantis Read online

  “You’ll find plenty of people who disagree with you,” Stafford said.

  “Damned few who’ve ever been slaves,” Lorenzo told him.

  “This is what we’re here to talk about,” Newton said. “What we have now plainly isn’t working.” He waited for the other Consul to quarrel with him, but Stafford didn’t. Thus encouraged, if that was the word, he went on, “We want to see what we can work out that will leave almost everyone not too unhappy.”

  This time, Jeremiah Stafford looked like nothing so much as a stray dog vomiting in the middle of the street. But Frederick Radcliff slowly nodded. If that wasn’t a politician’s nod, Consul Newton had never seen one. And if that was a politician’s nod . . . In that case, the Negro leader was—or at least might be—a man with whom it would be possible to deal.

  Newton dared hope so.

  “Almost everybody not too unhappy!” Lorenzo not only mocked the sentiment, he did a rotten job of imitating Leland Newton’s accent. To Frederick’s ear, the copperskin sounded like a man trying to talk around a mouthful of rocks.

  “Have you got a better idea?” Frederick asked. “What are we supposed to do if we can’t find a bargain the white folks will live with?”

  “What we ought to do is kill the Consuls and that damned foreign colonel,” Lorenzo said. “After that, they’d all thrash like a pullet that just met the chopper.” With the flat of his hand, he mimed a hatchet coming down on a skinny neck. Then he did an alarmingly accurate impression of a chicken that had just lost its head.

  But Frederick held up both hands in horror. “They would act like that—for a little while. Then they’d decide they could never trust us again, even a tiny bit, and they’d hunt us down no matter how long it took or what it cost.”

  “Let ’em try, and good luck to ’em,” Lorenzo said.

  “Do you want to live like a hunted animal the rest of your days?” Frederick asked. “If you do, you found the fastest way to get what you want.”

  “Me? I want to live like the fancy masters wish they could,” Lorenzo said. “I want to have servants fan me with those big old feathers—”

  “Ostrich plumes,” Frederick put in. Sure enough, such fans were in great demand among the richer plantation owners. Or they had been, till the people who would have done the fanning decided they didn’t care for the work.

  “Yeah. Them,” Lorenzo agreed. “And I want pretty girls to drop grapes in my mouth whenever I get hungry, or maybe thirsty.”

  Frederick didn’t know whether to laugh or to be appalled. “How do you propose to get that without turning into a master yourself?”

  “Maybe we could make the Consuls slaves instead of killing ’em.” Lorenzo was full of ideas today. Not necessarily good ideas, but ideas all the same.

  “And where would you get the pretty girls?” Frederick asked, with the air of a man humoring a lunatic.

  “Oh, what pretty girl wouldn’t want to come to Slug Hollow?” Lorenzo said, and if that wasn’t the most lunatic thing Frederick Radcliff had ever heard, he didn’t know what would be. No one in his—or her—right mind would want to come to Slug Hollow. No one would have wanted to come here if the place were named Silver Nugget. Slug Hollow by any other name would have been a place people tried to get away from, not one they flocked to.

  “They could drop cucumber slugs into your mouth when you got hungry,” Frederick said.

  “Ain’t like I never ate ’em before,” Lorenzo answered. “Don’t know many field hands who haven’t. Maybe it’s different with house slaves.”

  “I know what they taste like,” Frederick said, which was true enough. If the copperskin wanted to claim field hands ate such delicacies more often than house slaves did, Frederick couldn’t argue with him.

  But Lorenzo chose to change the subject instead: “Reckon we’ll get what we’re after here?”

  “Don’t know,” Frederick answered uneasily. “We don’t want to keep fighting forever, though, we gotta try.”

  “Fighting forever’d be better’n going back to where we were. Damned if I’ll ever pick any more cotton for a white man,” Lorenzo said.

  “That, I know,” Frederick said. He felt the same way, and he’d done it for days, not for years. All the Negroes and copperskins who followed him felt the same way. If the whites camped on the far side of Slug Hollow didn’t understand that, these talks would fail. And if they failed . . . fighting forever was what would come next.

  He tried to picture what Atlantis would look like after ten years of skirmishing, or twenty, or thirty. Like a restive horse, his mind shied away from what that called up. Would anyone, white or colored, care to live here after something like that? Frederick flinched at all the unpleasant possibilities he could see. And they weren’t just possibilities—they struck him as being likelihoods.

  Lorenzo said, “Ain’t many women here gonna let white men do what they want with ’em no more, neither.”

  “Uh-huh,” Frederick said. That shot hit much too close to the center of the target—much too close to the heart of who he was. What had things been like between his grandmother and Victor Radcliff? Her owner lent her to the other white Atlantean for his pleasure; Frederick knew that. Had she taken any of her own? Had they even liked each other? As far as Frederick knew, his grandmother had never said anything to his father about his father’s father beyond letting him know who that famous father was.

  Had the insurrection come two generations earlier, would Frederick’s grandmother have picked up a musket and tried to blow out Victor Radcliff’s brains for using her the way he did? Again, Frederick had no idea.

  Lorenzo pressed ahead: “So we’ve got to get free, or else we’ve got to keep fighting. No other way we can go.” He looked at Frederick. Frederick understood exactly what that look meant, too: no matter what he said about it, if the talks failed the fight would go on with him or without him.

  But he didn’t disagree with Lorenzo, not here. “Nope. No other way,” he said. The copperskin seemed satisfied. The white men camped on the far side of Slug Hollow wouldn’t be so easy to placate. Well, if we go back to shooting at each other, how are we worse off? Frederick wondered. He saw no way. And if that wasn’t a judgment on the United States of Atlantis, what would be?

  Jeremiah Stafford scowled across the table at Frederick Radcliff and Lorenzo. Pretending even for a moment that a Negro and a copperskin had any business treating with him as equals was galling enough. Remembering that they could have killed him but hadn’t didn’t make him feel any more kindly toward them—not now, when he no longer lay in their grasp.

  The table also reminded him what a travesty this was. Back in New Hastings, he’d dickered with Senators across tables ornamented with marquetry so fine and intricate, it must have left the woodworkers shortsighted for life. This one was of roughly planed boards hacked from the local pine. It stood in the taproom of a tavern abandoned when the insurrection flooded over Slug Hollow. Since that day, spider webs had grown thick up near the ceiling and in the corners of the room—or maybe they’d been there all along. In a miserable place like this, who could tell?

  “You seem to think turning all the slaves south of the Stour loose will be easy,” Stafford said to the leaders of the insurrection. “Wave our hands—abracadabra!—and it’s done. I have to tell you, it won’t be like that.”

  “Oh, we know,” Frederick Radcliff answered. “You better believe we know.”

  “If it was gonna be easy, we wouldn’t’ve had to start killing people,” Lorenzo added.

  Bloodthirsty savage, Stafford thought. “You had no business doing that any which way,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, we did,” Frederick Radcliff said. “It was the only way we could make you notice we were there. White folks don’t notice slaves, except to make money off of ’em or to lay the women.” Bitterness edged his voice. Considering who his grandfather was, that was understandable enough.

  As far as Stafford knew, he’d sired no colored babies h
imself. Not for lack of effort, though. Admitting as much probably wasn’t the smartest thing he could do. Instead, he said, “If we turn you loose, it will break a lot of white families. You said it yourself—people do make money from slaves. That’s one of the big reasons they won’t want to give them up.”

  “Good luck making money off of slaves now,” Frederick Radcliff said. “The devil’s come out. You can’t put him down again so easy.”

  “That is an unfortunate fact, but a fact we must face,” Leland Newton said. Stafford sent his fellow Consul a sour look. Much as he wished he could, though, he didn’t contradict him. This rebellion had succeeded all too well. It warned that others could succeed, too. Slaves might be ignorant, but they weren’t too stupid to see that. If only they were!

  “One reason you don’t want to turn slaves loose is money,” Lorenzo said. “What are the others, Mr. Consul, sir?” He turned the titles of respect into sneers.

  Before either Stafford or Newton could answer, Frederick Radcliff said, “C’mon, friend—you know why. White folks reckon they’re better’n niggers and mudfaces. Gives ’em somebody to look down their noses at.”

  “I knew they had those long, pointy ones for some kind of reason,” Lorenzo said, even if his was almost as long and sharp as the average white man’s. Frederick Radcliff’s was lower and flatter. He didn’t take after his grandfather there, anyway.

  But the Negro hit a nerve with Jeremiah Stafford, all right. “We think so because it’s true,” Stafford growled. “Everything says so, from the Bible to the most modern scholars. It must be so.”

  To his amazement—and fury—the Negro and copperskin both burst out laughing. “It’s your Bible,” Frederick Radcliff said. “They’re your scholars. What are they gonna say? ‘No, we’re just a bunch of stupid cows next to these other folks’? I don’t think so!”

  That had never occurred to Stafford. It disconcerted him, but only for a moment. “The Bible is the word of God,” he said sternly. “God would not lie, and you face hellfire if you say He would.”

  Lorenzo went right on laughing. “Devil’d have you on the fire right now if we didn’t turn you loose.”

  No, Jeremiah Stafford didn’t care to be reminded of that, not even slightly. This time, Frederick Radcliff spoke before Stafford could say anything: “That’s about the size of it. Bible doesn’t matter, not for this. I don’t care if white folks reckon they’re better’n we are. That doesn’t matter, either. What matters is, you aren’t strong enough to hold us down any more, and now we know it.”

  “Realpolitik,” Colonel Sinapis murmured. It sounded almost as if it ought to be an English word, but not quite.

  Consul Newton’s thoughtful grunt said he understood it. Stafford believed he did, too, which didn’t mean he liked it. But then Newton spoke to the insurrectionists: “You can’t leave what white men think out of the way you think. If your horses rose up against you—”

  That was precisely how Stafford saw things. It was also precisely calculated to enrage the Negro and the copperskin. “You call me an animal, you can kiss my ass,” Frederick Radcliff said.

  “I didn’t. I don’t.” Newton held up a hand, as if to deny everything. “But most white men south of the Stour are liable to. More than a few from north of the river, too, I have to tell you, but maybe not so many. If you forget that, or if you try to pretend it isn’t there, you’re missing something important.”

  Stafford stared at his colleague in amazement. “He said it—I didn’t,” Stafford said. “I agree with every word of it, though.”

  “Well, I’ve got two words for those damnfool white folks,” Lorenzo said: “Tough shit.”

  “Realpolitik,” Colonel Sinapis repeated, louder this time. He looked across the table at the rebels. “The Consuls are right. White men in Atlantis do feel this way. You cannot ignore it because you do not care for it.”

  “Maybe us winning this fight here has gone a ways toward changing their minds,” Frederick Radcliff said.

  Balthasar Sinapis politely dipped his head. “Maybe,” he said. “I would not bet on this anything I was not ready to lose.”

  “Most white men will go to their graves sure they are better than any copperskin or Negro ever born,” Stafford added.

  “If that’s what it takes, we’ll send ’em there,” Lorenzo said. He started to get up from the table.

  “Wait.” Frederick Radcliff and Consul Newton said the same thing at the same time. They both blinked, then smiled almost identical sheepish smiles. Lorenzo blinked, too, and did sit down again. Newton went on, “We need to bring back something like peace. We can’t go on the way we have been. The country will fall to pieces if we do, and that won’t help anyone.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Frederick Radcliff said. “We keep fighting the rest of our lives, we’ve got nothin’ worth havin’.”

  “Slaves don’t get set free, we’ve got nothin’ worth havin’, either,” Lorenzo said.

  “What have you got if you make the white men south of the Stour want to fight you to the death?” Stafford asked. “The way you’re going, that’s just what you’re doing.”

  “We have to be free. Have to be,” Frederick Radcliff said. Lorenzo nodded.

  “Freeing you will break hundreds of thousands of white men, maybe millions,” Stafford said. “They won’t put up with it. Neither would you, not in their shoes.”

  This time, both Lorenzo and Frederick Radcliff got up. Newton started to say something. Then he stopped—he seemed to have no idea what would call them back. They walked out of the tavern together.

  Newton and Colonel Sinapis both turned on Stafford. “A bad peace is worse than none at all,” Stafford insisted. Neither of the other two men said a word. He didn’t think that was because he’d convinced them.

  Leland Newton held on to his temper with both hands. “It’s either free them or fight forever,” he said.

  “Suppose I asked you to bankrupt yourself. Suppose I asked every fifth man in the state of Croydon to do the same,” Stafford returned. “How eager would you be?”

  “It won’t be so bad as that,” Newton said.

  “Like hell it won’t,” the other Consul replied. “We won’t do it. I know my people. Why won’t you listen to me?”

  “Negroes and copperskins were ‘your people,’ too,” Newton said. “Why wouldn’t you listen to them?”

  He took a certain malicious pleasure in watching the other Consul’s mouth fall open. “They don’t vote!” Stafford sputtered. He needed a moment to gather himself. Then, his voice strengthening, he added, “And they’ve got no business voting, either!”

  “It doesn’t seem to do any harm in Croydon,” Newton said. “No great pestilences—we don’t even have the yellow jack up there, the way you do in Cosquer. God hasn’t chosen to drop the city into the sea.”

  “I don’t know why not,” Stafford said. In the south, people thought Croydon and Hanover were dens of iniquity, full of sin and degradation. What Stafford didn’t understand—one of the many things he didn’t understand—was that people in Hanover and Croydon felt the same way about the states south of the Stour, and all because of slavery.

  “You need to ask God about that,” Newton said. “But you can’t really believe you’ll be able to put all the insurrectionists back in bondage . . . can you?” The question said he didn’t want to believe Stafford could believe any such thing.

  His colleague’s mutinous countenance declared that Stafford wanted to believe it—wanted to with all his heart and all his soul and all his might. It also said Stafford wanted to kill as many men and women as he needed to in order to bring the rest back to submission. But then, slowly, the other Consul’s features crumpled. “No,” he said. “I can’t.” No bombastic tragedian playing Hamlet could have packed more anguish into three words.

  Hearing them made Newton want to jump for joy. He didn’t—nor did he show that he wanted to. Showing Stafford any such thing would only have further
stiffened his colleague’s already stiff back. So Newton spoke as if it were nothing but a matter of practical politics: “Well, then, how do we do what wants doing?”

  “Good question,” the other Consul said. “I warned you before—the whites south of the Stour won’t put up with nigger freedom, let alone nigger equality.”

  “The way it looks to me, their only other choice is going on with this war, and that hasn’t worked so well, either,” Newton said.

  “A lot of them won’t care,” Stafford said bleakly.

  “Well, the militiamen we had with us can help spread the word,” Newton said. “And they can help spread the word that the copperskins and Negroes could have killed every last one of us, but didn’t.”

  “Good God!” The Consul from Cosquer looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “Do you think those people will do anything on account of gratitude? You know what that’s worth.”

  So Newton did, much too well. Anyone who counted on gratitude in politics wouldn’t stay in politics long. “No,” Newton insisted. “But people all over the south need to know the insurrectionists aren’t devils with horns and barbed tails.”

  “Are you so sure? What about the ones who slaughtered their masters and violated their mistresses when the uprising started?” Stafford said. “Shouldn’t they hang for murder?”

  “It was a war. Bad things happen in wars—that’s what makes them what they are,” Newton replied. “I think we will have to declare an amnesty. Otherwise the fighting starts again, doesn’t it?”

  “Amnesty.” Stafford spat the word back at him. “So they get away with all their crimes? Makes me wish I were a nigger myself.”

  “Don’t be silly, Jeremiah. Nothing could make you wish you were a nigger,” Newton said with great assurance. His colleague couldn’t deny it, either. Newton went on, “And can you see any way around it? As far as the slaves are concerned, everything their masters ever did to them was a crime.”

  “Oh, piffle,” Stafford said. He owns slaves, too, Newton reminded himself. “What about masters who keep slaves on when they’re old and useless?”