American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold Read Free Page A

Jake Featherston had done the job.
      That just gave her more reason to harden her voice and say, “I’ll take my chances.” Edward C.L. Wiggins chuckled. “He told me you were near as stubborn as he is himself, and I see he’s right. One more thing, and then I’m through, and I won’t trouble you any more.”
      “Go ahead,” Anne said. “Make it short.” I’ve already wasted more than enough time on you.
      “Yes, ma’am. Here’s what I’ve got to say: there’s only one party in the CSA that’s got any notion at all about what the devil to do about the nigger problem in this country, and that’s the Freedom Party. And now I’m done. Good-bye.” He surprised her by hanging up.
      Slowly, she put the mouthpiece back on its hook and set down the telephone. She said a word she was unlikely to use in public, one that would have made strong men gasp and women of delicate sensibilities blush and faint. Wiggins had known how to get through to her, after all. No one was likely to forget the Red Negro uprising that had tied the Confederacy in knots late in 1915 and early in 1916. No one knew how much it had helped the USA win the war, but it couldn’t have hurt. The Freedom Party stood foursquare for vengeance, and so did Anne Colleton.
        And why not?  she thought. One brother dead, my plantation wrecked, me almost murdered . . . Oh, yes, I owe those black bastards just a little. The whole country owes them just a little, whether the Whigs and the Radical Liberals want to admit it or not.
      She repeated that word, louder this time. Behind her, her surviving brother burst out laughing. She whirled around. “Confound it, Tom,” she said angrily, “I didn’t know you were there.” Tom Colleton laughed harder than ever. “I’ll bet you didn’t,” he answered. “If you had, you would have said something like, ‘Confound it,’ instead.” He was a couple of years younger than Anne, and a little darker, with hair light brown rather than gold. He’d gone into the war an irresponsible boy and come out of it a lieutenant-colonel and a man, something of which Anne still had to remind herself now and again.
      She shrugged now. “I probably would have. But I meant what I did say.”
      “Who was on the telephone?” he asked.
      “A man named Edward C.L. Wiggins,” Anne replied. “He wanted money from us for the Freedom Party.”
      Tom frowned. “Those people don’t take no for an answer, do they?”
      “They never have,” Anne said. “It’s their greatest strength—and their greatest weakness.”
      “Did you find out why he travels with a herd of initials?” her brother asked. She shook her head. Tom went on, “What did you tell him?”
      “No, of course,” Anne answered. “The way things are now, I’d sooner cozy up to a cottonmouth than to Jake Featherston.”
      “Don’t blame you a bit,” Tom Colleton said. “He’s an impressive man in a lot of ways, but. . . .” He shook his head. “He puts me in mind of a time bomb, wound up and waiting to go off. And when he does, I don’t think it’ll be pretty.”
      “There were times when I thought he had all the answers,” Anne said. “And there were times when I thought he was a little bit crazy. And there were times when I thought both those things at once. Those were the ones that scared me.”
      “Scared me, too,” Tom agreed, “and we don’t scare easy.”
      “No. We’d be dead by now if we did,” Anne said, and Tom nodded. She eyed him. “And speaking of looking pretty, you’re fancier than you need to be for staying around here. Is that a necktie?” She thought its gaudy stripes of crimson and gold excessive, but declined to criticize.
      Her brother nodded again. “Sure is. Bought it from what’s-his-name, the Jew tailor. And I’m going to pay a call on Bertha Talmadge in a little while.”
      Before the war, Anne would have discouraged such a call—with a bludgeon, if necessary. The