I could never have done this back in New York,
she thought as they sat side by side on the sofa—
not with everyone who lives in our apartment.
But even that wasn’t true. When Yossel Reisen was about to go off to war, her sister Sophie had found a way to give him a woman’s ultimate gift—and he’d given her a gift in return, a gift that now bore his name, a gift he’d never lived to see. If you wanted to badly enough, you could always find a way.
She’d never dreamt she might want to so badly. When, in an experimental way, Blackford slipped an arm around her, she pinned him against the back of the sofa. This kiss went on much longer than the one in the hallway had, and left her feeling as if she might explode at any moment.
Blackford kissed her eyes, her cheeks; his mouth slid to the side of her neck, then up to her ear. Every time his lips touched her skin, she discovered something new and astonishing and wonderful. He nibbled at her earlobe, murmuring, “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do this, darling.” She didn’t answer, not with words, but left no doubt about what she wanted.
But going into her bedroom with him a few minutes later was another long step into the unknown. She didn’t turn on any of the lights in there. No matter how much urgency filled her, the idea of undressing in front of a man left her shaking. Even so, she sighed with relief as she slid off her corset. On a hot, muggy late-summer night, bare skin felt good.
Her bare skin soon felt quite a lot better than good. She was amazed at the sensations Hosea Blackford’s hands and lips and tongue evoked from her breasts, and then amazed again when one hand strayed lower. She’d stroked herself now and again, but this was different: every touch, every movement, a startlement. The small, altogether involuntary moan of pleasure she let out took her by surprise.
But that surprise also recalled her partly to herself. She remembered Sophie’s horror and panic out on the balcony of the family flat when her sister told her she was pregnant. “I can’t have a baby!” she exclaimed.
Blackford hesitated, studying her in the half-light. Had she made him angry? If he got up and left now, she would die of humiliation—and frustration. But, to her vast relief, he nodded. “One of the reasons I care for you so much is for your good sense,” he said. “We’ll make sure everything is all right.” He bent so that his mouth went where his hand had gone before.
Flora had literally never imagined such a thing. She hadn’t imagined how good it felt, either. When pleasure burst over her, it made everything she’d done by herself seem…
beside the point
was the best way she found to think of it.
If he’d done that for her, she ought to return the favor, though she didn’t quite know how. Awkwardly, she took him in her hand. As she drew near, she saw he looked strange. From inadvertencies around the family apartment, she knew how a man was made. Hosea Blackford was made a little differently.
He’s not circumcised,
she realized. She’d forgotten that consequence of his being a gentile.
She kissed him and licked him. He needed only a moment to understand she didn’t know what she was doing. “Put it in your mouth,” he said quietly. She did, though she hadn’t imagined that only minutes before, any more than the other. The sound he made was a masculine version of her moan. Encouraged, she kept on.
She didn’t need to keep on very long. He grunted and jerked and spurted. It caught her by surprise, and didn’t taste very good. She coughed and sputtered and gulped before she could help herself. When she could speak again, she asked, “Was that right?”
He put her hand over his heart, which pounded like a drum. “If it were any more right,” he assured her, “I’d be dead.” She laughed and lay beside him, still marveling that such pleasure was possible—and ever so relieved that, unlike Sophie, she would not have to worry about consequences nine months later.
“Atlanta!” the conductor called, stepping into the car in which Jake Featherston rode. “All out for Atlanta!” He strode down the aisle, making sure no one could doubt the upcoming stop.
Featherston grabbed his carpetbag and sprang to his feet. His seat had been in the middle of the car, but he was one of the first people off it. He was one of the first people to a taxicab, too. “The Kendall Hotel,” he told the driver.
“Sure thing,” the fellow answered. The hotel proved to be only a few blocks east of Terminal Station. Brakes squealed as the driver stopped in front of the massive brick building with Moorish-looking turrets and ornaments. “That’ll be twelve.”
“Here you go.” Jake handed him a $1,000 banknote and a $500. “I don’t need any change.” With the taximan’s tip, he would have got back only a hundred dollars, two hundred if he wanted to be a cheapskate. He didn’t. Anyhow, with currency the way it was these days, you had to be crazy to worry about anything as small as a hundred bucks.
A uniformed Negro porter came up to carry his bag. He gave the black man a hundred dollars. That was what such nearly worthless banknotes were good for. It was also, he thought, what nearly worthless black men were good for.
When Jake gave his name at the front desk, the clerk handed him his key and then said, “I have a message here for you, Mr. Featherston.” He plucked an envelope from a pigeonhole and presented it with a flourish.
“Thanks.” Featherston pulled out the envelope and unfolded the sheet of paper inside. It read,
Knight got in this morning. If you see this in time, have supper with us at seven tonight in the hotel restaurant. Amos Mizell.
He stuck the note in his pocket. “How do I find the restaurant?” he asked the desk clerk.
“Down that corridor—second doorway on your left—first is the bar,” the young man answered. Shyly, he went on, “It’s an honor to have you in the Kendall, Mr. Featherston. Freedom!”
“Freedom, yeah.” Jake was still getting used to people recognizing his name. It was, he found, very easy to get used to.
Another colored porter carried the bag up to his room, and earned another hundred dollars. Jake snorted, imagining a hundred-dollar tip before the war. He unpacked his clothes, then pulled a watch from his pocket and checked the time. It was half past five.
He didn’t feel like sitting in the room for an hour and a half like a cabbage, so he went down to the bar and peeled off a $500 banknote for a beer. He nursed the one glass till it was time for supper. The last thing he wanted was to go to this meeting drunk, or even tipsy.
When he left the bar and headed over to the restaurant, a professionally obsequious waiter led him to a table in a quiet corner: not the best seating in the place for anyone who wanted to show off, but a fine place to sit and eat and talk. Two other men were already sitting and talking. Featherston would have pegged them both for veterans even had he not known they were.
They got to their feet as he approached. “Featherston?” the taller one asked. Jake nodded. In a twanging Texas accent, the fellow went on, “I’m Willy Knight of the Redemption League, and this here is Amos Mizell, who heads up the Tin Hats.”
“Pleased to meet you gents,” Jake said, shaking hands with both of them. He wasn’t sure how pleased he was to meet Knight; the Freedom Party was growing only slowly west of the Mississippi, not least because the Redemption League spouted similar ideas there. Supper with Amos Mizell was a feather in his cap, though. The Tin Hats were far and away the largest ex-soldiers’ organization in the CSA.
Mizell sipped from a whiskey glass in front of him. He was about forty, and missing the little finger on his left hand. He said, “I think all three of us are going in the same direction. I think all three of us want to see the country going in the same direction, too. What we want to do is make sure nobody sidetracks anybody else.”
“That’s right.” Knight nodded. He was blond and handsome and wore an expensive suit, all of which made Jake jealous. “That’s just right,” he went on. “If we bang heads, the only ones who win are the damnyankees.”
“Fair enough.” Jake smiled, as he might have smiled over a bad poker hand. Knight reminded him of an officer, which in his book was another black mark against the Redemption League man. “We might have been smarter not to talk till after the Congressional elections, though. Then we’d have a better notion of who’s strong and who isn’t.”
Almost imperceptibly, Willy Knight winced. Featherston grinned at him, the fierce grin of defiance he threw at everyone who got in his way. The Freedom Party was stronger than the Redemption League, at least for now. It had its base in the more populous eastern part of the Confederate States and was reaching west, where only a relative handful of people on this side of the Mississippi belonged to the Redemption League.
Again, Mizell played peacemaker: “One thing certain is, we’re stronger together than we are apart.” The Tin Hats weren’t a political party, so he wasn’t a direct rival to either of the men at the table with him. But if he tipped to one or the other of them, his influence would not be small.
They paused when the waiter came up. Knight ordered a beefsteak, Mizell fried chicken, and Jake a ham steak. “I’m shooting for ten Congressmen next session,” he said, though he expected perhaps half that many would win seats. “How about you, Knight?”
“We’ll win Dallas—I’m pretty sure of that,” the leader of the Redemption League said. “They can see the Yankees up in Sequoyah and over in that damned new state of Houston from there. We may take a couple of other seats, too. I’ll tell you what we will do, though, by God: we’ll scare the Radical Liberals clean out of their shoes.”
“No arguments there,” Amos Mizell said. He raised the drink to his lips again. “I wish more of the new leaders who think along our lines would have joined us here tonight. The Tennessee Volunteers, the Knights of the Gray, and the Red-Fighters all have ideas we might find worthwhile, and they aren’t the only ones.”
“There’s plenty of people angry with the way things are going now,” Jake allowed. “A couple of years ago, the Freedom Party wasn’t anything more than a few people sitting around in a saloon grousing.” He drew himself up straight with pride. “We’ve come a long ways since then.”
“That you have,” Mizell said. Knight nodded once more. Now he looked jealous. The Freedom Party had come further and faster than the Redemption League. Mizell continued, “I know for a fact that a lot of Tin Hats are Freedom Party men, too.”
“I never thought we could get away with breaking up the soft parties’ rallies,” Will Knight said, and looked jealous again. “But you’ve gone and done it, and you’ve gone and gotten away with it, too.”
“You bet we have,” Jake said. “If you reckon the cops love the Whigs and the Radical Liberals and the niggers, you can damn well think again. And”—he lowered his voice a little—“if you reckon the soldiers love the traitors in the War Department, you can damn well think again about that, too.”
“Some of the things you’ve said about the War Department have been of concern to me,” Amos Mizell said. “I don’t care to bring disrepute down on men who served so bravely against the foe.
Traitor
is a hard word.”
Featherston fixed him with that savage grin. “Jeb Stuart III was my commanding officer,” he said. “Pompey, his nigger servant, was ass-deep in the rebellion. He shielded that nigger from Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence. His old man, Jeb, Jr., shielded him when it turned out he’d been wrong all the time. If that doesn’t make him a traitor to his country, what the hell does it do?”
Before either Mizell or Knight could answer, the waiter returned with their suppers. They ate in silence for a while. Knight was the first to break it. “Suppose what you say is true. If you say it too loud and too often, don’t you figure the Army is going to land on your back?”
“I reckon the generals’d love to,” Jake answered with his mouth full. “But I don’t reckon they’d have an easy time of it, even now, on account of the soldiers who got the orders wouldn’t be happy about following ’em. And the longer they wait, the harder it’ll be.”
“You may be right about the second part of that,” Mizell said. “I’ve got my doubts about the first, I have to tell you. You might be smarter to take a step back every now and then so you can take two forward later on.”
“The Freedom Party doesn’t back up.” Featherston eyed Mizell, but was really speaking more to Knight. “You talk about people who want to straighten out the mess we’re in and you talk about us first. Everybody else comes behind us.”
“You go on like that, why’d you bother coming down here at all?” Knight asked. “What have we got to talk about?”
That was a good question. Jake did not want to negotiate with the Redemption League. Negotiating implied he reckoned Knight his equal, which he did not care to do. But he did not dare risk antagonizing the Tin Hats. If Amos Mizell started saying harsh things about him and about the Freedom Party, it would hurt. But he was not about to admit that, either.
Picking his words with more care than usual, he replied, “We’re on the way up. You want to come with us, Knight, you want to help us climb, that’s fine. You want to fight, you’ll slow us down. I don’t say anything different. But you won’t stop us, and I’ll break you in the end.” That wasn’t party against party. It was man against man. The only thing Featherston knew how to do when threatened was push back harder than ever. Knight was a man of similar sort. He glared across the table at Jake.
“We’re here to stop these brawls before they hurt all of us,” Amos Mizell said. “If we work things out now, we don’t have to air our dirty linen in public and waste force we could aim at our enemies. That’s how I see it.”
“That’s how I see it, too,” Jake said. “If the Redemption League was bigger than the Freedom Party, I’d ease back. Since it’s the other way round—”
“You’re the one who gets to talk that way,” Willy Knight said. Jake only smiled. He knew he was lying—he would have done anything to get ahead of a rival—but nobody could prove it.
“It appears to me, things being as they are, that our best course is to use the Freedom Party as the spearhead of our movement and the Redemption League and other organizations as the shaft that helps give the head its striking power,” Mizell said. “How does it appear to you, Mr. Knight?”