Beneath Gray Skies Read Online Free PDF Page B

entered.
     
    A few minutes later, brandy snifter in hand, “Gentlemen, I give you confusion to our enemies.” The table responded. “Now, how do we stop our friend Jeff Davis from using Herr Hitler to further his foul ends?”
     

Chapter 4: Cordele, Georgia, Confederate States of America
    “ I don’t blame him, considering how awful we’ve treated you colored folks. If you hated us all, I wouldn’t blame you.”
     
    I t seemed a long way from the kitchen to the gazebo in the Georgia August heat. Christopher Pole, property of Miss Henrietta Justin since his birth some twenty-seven years previously, carried the tray of drinks to where Miss Justin and her nephew Mr. Lamar Fitchman were sitting under a shade tree, looking out over the watermelon fields towards the Flint River, just visible in the distance.
    As he put the tray on the table and handed the glasses to Miss Justin and Mr. Fitchman, he heard her murmured thanks to him, and he smiled to himself. He was lucky with Miss Justin, a lot luckier than he would have been with that Mr. Fitchman, he reckoned.
     
    He bowed and walked away from the table, but before he was out of earshot, he heard Fitchman say, “You’re wasting that boy. Big buck like him should be workin’ in the watermelon patches. You’re not getting your money’s worth out of him, givin’ him sissy’s work like that.”
     
    “Lamar, Christopher’s the finest butler I’m ever going to be able to afford. It would be a waste to let him do field work. Someone with his gifts of sympathy and his intelligence.”
     
    “He’s not a ‘someone’, Aunt Henry. He’s a Nigra, and he’s just waitin’ for a chance to cut our throats one night. All of them are.” He drained his whiskey angrily. “Here, boy! Another one.” He held the empty glass out, and as Christopher moved to take it, deliberately let it fall on the stone beside his chair. “You clumsy Nigra! Aunt Henry, will you allow me to beat the useless animal for you?” Christopher, on his knees picking up the shattered fragments, stole a glance at the young man’s excited face, and was frightened by the look of almost sexual excitement that he saw.
     
    “Certainly not, Lamar. I saw exactly what happened, and I’m ashamed of you. Christopher, please don’t use your hands to pick up that broken glass. Go back and get a brush and pan.”
     
    Fitchman sneered. “Boy! Get me another whiskey while you’re there.”
     
    “Mr. Fitchman has had a sufficiency, Christopher. You may bring him an iced tea if he is still thirsty.”
     
    Christopher looked from one calm face to the other angry countenance. “Very good, Miss Justin.”
     
    He walked back to the kitchen, hearing fragments of the conversation, in which he caught the phrases “inheritance”, “when I die” and “set them all free” from Miss Justin, and “you wouldn’t dare” from Mr. Fitchman. He poured a glass of iced tea into a glass, and collected a brush and pan, which he stuck under his arm. When he reached the chairs under the shade tree, Miss Justin was sitting there alone.
     
    “Put the glass on the table, please, Christopher, and sweep up Mr. Fitchman’s mess.”
     
    As he bent to sweep the glass shards into the pan, she continued talking to him. “I am sorry, Christopher, about Mr. Fitchman. You probably realize that that wasn’t his first drink of the day, poor man. You needn’t worry about him any more today. He took himself home by way of the back gate.”
     
    Poor man? thought Christopher to himself. But he carried on sweeping.
     
    As if reading his thoughts, Miss Justin went on, “I say ‘poor man’, because I mean it. All of us here in this Confederacy. I don’t need to spell out to you why I call you ‘poor man’. Of course I could set you free, but where would you go in this town? What would you do?” She didn’t seem to be expecting an answer, so Christopher didn’t give one, but he thought about the freed slaves who hung