"Well, this here is what I've got to say about that." The lean man let loose with a rich, ripe raspberry. "I know for a fact that people tried to warn the government the niggers were going to rise, on account of I was one of those people. Did anybody listen? Hell, no!" Contempt dripped from his voice like water from a leaky roof. "Some of those niggers were servants to rich men's sons, important men's sons. And the rich men in the Capitol and the important men in the War Department shoveled everything under the rug. If that doesn't make 'em traitors, what the devil does?"

"He has got something," Bill Foster said in an awed voice.

"He's got a big mouth," Bartlett said. "You throw charges like that around, you'd better be able to name names."

Instead of naming names, the newcomer on the stump charged ahead: "And after that-after that, mind you, after the niggers rose up-what did the government go and do? Come on. You remember. You're white men. You're smart men. What did they go and do?" The lean man's voice sank to a dramatic whisper: "They went and put rifles in those same niggers 'hands, that's what they did!' He whispered no more, but shouted furiously: "If that doesn't make 'em traitors, what the devil does?"

Reggie remembered Rehoboam, the Negro prisoner of war who'd shared his U.S. hospital ward after losing a foot in Arkansas-and after being a Red rebel in Mississippi. Things weren't so straightforward as this new Freedom Party speaker made them out to be. The older Reggie got, the more complicated the world looked. The lean man was older than he, but still saw things in harsh shades of black and white.

And he contrived to make his audience see them the same way. "You want to put Tony Dresser into Congress to give the real people of the Confederate States a voice," he shouted, "the working men, the men who get their hands dirty, the men who went out and fought the war the fools and the traitors and the nigger-lovers got us into. Oh, you can throw your vote away for somebody with a diamond on his pinky"-with alarming effectiveness, he mimed a capitalist-"but who's the fool if you do?"