Jim Baen's Universe

Classic

Pretty Quadroon

Written by Charles Fontenay

General Beauregard Courtney sat in his staff car atop a slight rise and watched the slow, meshing movement of his troops on the plains south of Tullahoma, Tennessee. Clouds of dust drifted westward in the lazy summer air, and the dull boom of enemy artillery sounded from the north.

“You damn black coon,” he said without rancor, “you know you’re costing me a night’s sleep?”

The Negro courier stood beside his motorcycle and his teeth flashed white in his good-natured face. The dust of the road filmed his uniform of Southern grey.

“Miss Piquette told me to bring you the message, suh,” he answered.

“A wife couldn’t be more demanding,” grumbled Beauregard. “Why couldn’t she wait until this push is over?”

“I don’t know, suh,” said the courier.

“Well, get back to headquarters and get some supper,” commanded Beauregard. “You can fly back to Chattanooga with me.”

The man saluted and climbed aboard his motorcycle. It kicked to life with a sputtering roar, and he turned it southward on what was left of the highway.

The sun was low in the west and its reddening beams glinted from the weapons and vehicles of the men who moved through the fields below Beauregard. That would be the 184th, moving into the trenches at the edge of what had been Camp Forrest during the last war.

On the morrow this was to be the frontal attack on what was left of the Northern wind tunnel installations, while the armor moved in like a powerful pincers from Pelham to the east and Lynchburg to the west. If the Union stronghold at Tullahoma could be enveloped, the way lay open to Shelbyville and the north. No natural barrier lay north of Tullahoma until the Duck River was reached.

This was the kind of warfare Beauregard Courtney relished, this wheeling and maneuvering of tanks across country, the artillery barrage followed by infantry assault, the planes used in tactical support. It was more a soldier’s warfare than the cold, calculated, long-range bombardment by guided missiles, the lofty, aloof flight of strategic bombers. He would have been happy to live in the days when wars were fought with sword and spear.

When the Second War for Southern Independence (the Northerners called it “The Second Rebellion”) had broken out, Beauregard had feared it would be a swift holocaust of hydrogen bombs, followed by a cruel scourge of guerrilla fighting. But not one nuclear weapon had exploded, except the atomic artillery of the two opposing forces. A powerful deterrent spelled caution to both North and South.

Sitting afar, watching the divided country with glee, was Soviet Russia. Her armies and navies were mobilized. She waited only for the two halves of the United States to ruin and weaken each other before her troops would crush the flimsy barriers of western Europe and move into a disorganized America.

So the Second Rebellion (Beauregard found himself using the term because it was shorter) remained a classic war of fighting on the ground and bombing of only industrial and military targets. Both sides, by tacit agreement, left the great superhighways intact, both held their H-bombers under leash, ready to reunite if need be against a greater threat.

Just now the war was going well for the South. At the start the new Confederacy had held nothing of Tennessee except Chattanooga south of the mountains and the southwestern plains around Memphis. That had been on Beauregard’s advice, for he was high in the councils of the Southern military. He had felt it too dangerous to hold the lines as far north as Nashville, Knoxville and Paducah until the South mobilized its strength.

He had proved right. The Northern bulge down into Tennessee had been a weak point, and the Southern sympathies of many Tennesseans had hampered their defense. The Army of West Tennessee had driven up along the Mississippi River plains to the Kentucky line and the Army of East Tennessee now stood at the gates of Knoxville. Outflanked by these two threats, the Union forces were pulling back toward Nashville before Beauregard Courtney’s Army of Middle Tennessee, and he did not intend to stop his offensive short of the Ohio River.

“Head back for Winchester, Sergeant,” he commanded his driver. The man started the staff car and swung it around on the highway.

He should not go to Chattanooga, Beauregard thought as the car bumped southward over the rutted road. His executive officer was perfectly capable of taking care of things for the few hours he would be gone, but it ran against his military training to be away from his command so soon before an attack.

Had the summons come from his wife, Beauregard would have sent her a stern refusal, even had she been in Chattanooga instead of New Orleans. She had been a soldier’s wife long enough to know that duty’s demands took precedence over conjugal matters. But there was a weakness in him where Piquette was concerned. Nor was that all. She knew, as well as Lucy did, the stern requirements of military existence; and she was even less likely than Lucy to ask him to come to her unless the matter was of such overwhelming import as to overshadow what he gained by staying.

Beauregard sighed. He would eat a light supper on the plane and be back in Winchester by midnight. The pre-attack artillery barrage was not scheduled to open before four o’clock in the morning.

The plane put down at the Chattanooga airport at dusk and a swift military car took him down Riverside Drive, past the old Confederate cemetery, and downtown. Chattanooga was a military city. Grey-uniformed military police stood at the intersections and soldiers on rest leave from both East and Middle armies trooped in laughing gangs along darkened Market Street. Few civilians were abroad.

The siren and circled stars on Beauregard’s car cleared a path for him through the sparse downtown traffic. The car roared out Broad Street, swung under the viaduct and sped up the curving drives of Lookout Mountain. At a darkened house on the brow of the mountain, overlooking Georgia and Alabama, the car pulled up. Beauregard spoke a word to the driver, got out and went to the front door. Behind him the car’s lights went out, and it crunched quietly into the shadowed driveway.

There was light in the house when Piquette opened the door to him. She held out her hands in welcome, and her smile was as sweet as sunshine on dew-sparkling fields.

Piquette’s skin was golden, like autumn leaves, with an undertone of rich bronze. Her dark eyes were liquid and warm, and her hair tumbled to her shoulders, a jet cascade. She was clad in a simple white dress that, in the daring new fashion, bared the full, firm swell of her breasts.

Beauregard took her in his arms, and as her lips clung to his, he felt a grey old man, as grey as his braid-hung uniform. He held her away from him. In the mirror behind her he saw his face, stern, weatherbeaten, light-mustached, with startling blue eyes.

“Piquette, what on earth is this folly?” he demanded, kicking the door shut behind him. “Don’t you know I’m moving on Tullahoma in the morning?”

“You know I wouldn’t call you unless it was important, ’Gard, as much as I long for you.” When she talked, her delicately moulded face was as mobile as quicksilver. “I’ve found something that may end the war and save my people.”

“Dammit, ’Quette, how many times have I told you, they are not your people? You’re a quadroon. You’re three-fourths white, and a lot whiter in your heart than some white women I’ve seen.”

“But I’m one-fourth Negro, and you wouldn’t have married me, for that, even if you’d known me before you met your Lucy. Isn’t that right, ’Gard?”

“Look, ’Quette, just because things are the way they are. . . .”

She hushed him with a finger on his lips.

“The Negroes are my people, and the white people are my people,” she said. “If the world were right, I’d be a woman instead of a thing in between, scorned by both. Can’t you see that, ’Gard? You’re not like most Southerners.”

“I am a Southerner,” he answered proudly. “That I love you above my own blood makes no difference. No, I don’t hate the black man, as so many Southerners do—and Northerners too, if the truth were known. But, by God, he’s not my equal, and I won’t have him ruling over whites.”

“This is an old argument,” she said wearily, “and it isn’t why I called you here. I’ve found a man—or, rather, a man has found me—who can end this war and give my people the place in the world they deserve.”

Beauregard raised his bushy eyebrows, but he said nothing. Piquette took him by the hand and led him from the hall into the spacious living room.

A Negro man sat there on the sofa, behind the antique coffee table. He was well-dressed in a civilian suit. His woolly hair was grey, and his eyes shone like black diamonds in his wizened face.

“General Courtney, this is Mr. Adjaha,” said Piquette.

“From where?” demanded Beauregard warily. Surely Piquette would not have led him into a trap set by Northern spies?

Adjaha arose and inclined his head gravely. He was a short man, rather squarely built. Neither he nor Beauregard offered to shake hands.

“Originally from the Ivory Coast of Africa, sir,” said Adjaha in a low, mellow voice. “I have lived in the United States . . . in the Confederacy . . . since several years before the unfortunate outbreak of war.”

Beauregard turned to Piquette.

“I don’t see the point of this,” he said. “Is this man some relative of yours? What does his being here have to do with this crazy talk of ending the war?”

“If you will excuse me, General,” said Adjaha, “I overheard your conversation in the hall and, indeed, Piquette already had informed me of the dissension in your heart. You would be fair to my race in the South, yet you fear that if they had equality under the law they would misuse their superiority in numbers.”

Beauregard laughed scornfully.

“See here, old man, if you think I’m ripe to lead a peace and surrender movement in the South, you’re wasting your time,” he said. “The South is committed to this war, and so be it.”

“I ask only that you listen for a brief time to words that may be more fruitful than a few hours in a quadroon’s bedroom,” said Adjaha patiently. “As I said, I am from the Ivory Coast. When the white man set foot in that part of Africa, he found a great but savage kingdom called Dahomey: the ancestral home of most of the slaves who were brought to the South.

“Before Dahomey there was a civilization whose roots struck back to the age when the Sahara bloomed and was fertile. Before the great civilizations of Egypt, of Sumer and of Crete was the greater civilization of the African black man. That civilization had a science that was greater than anything that has arisen since. It was not a science of steel and steam and atoms, but a science of men’s minds and men’s motives. Its decadent recollections would have been called witchcraft in mediæval Europe; they have been known in the West as voodoo and superstition.”

“I think you’re crazy,” said Beauregard candidly. “’Quette, have you hired a voodoo man to hex me?”

“Be tolerant, General,” admonished Adjaha in his mellow voice. “Many of you in the West are not aware of it, but Africa has been struggling back to civilization in the Twentieth Century. And, while most of its people have been content to strive toward the young ways of the West, a few of us have sought in our ancestral traditions a path to the old knowledge. Not entirely in vain. Look.”

Like a conjuror, he produced from somewhere in his clothing a small carved figure. About six inches high, it was cut from some gleaming black stone in the attenuated form so common to African sculpture. It dangled from Adjaha’s fingers on a string and turned slowly, then more swiftly. As it spun, the light from the chandelier flashed from its planes and curves in a silvery, bewildering pattern. Beauregard felt his eyes drawn to it, into it, his very brain drawn into it.

Beauregard stood there, staring at the twirling image. His eyes were wide open and slightly glazed. Piquette gave a little, frightened cry.

“It’s all right, my dear,” said Adjaha. “He’s just under hypnosis. Your General Beauregard is the key that can unlock the past and the future for us.”

****

There was an insistent command beating against Beauregard’s brain: “Go back . . . go back . . . go back . . .”

It was a sunny summer morning in Memphis. Beauregard Courtney, Nashville attorney and adjutant general of Tennessee, stepped out of the elevator at the Peabody Hotel and walked across the wide, columned lobby to the newsstand. He did not go by the desk; Beauregard preferred to keep his room key in his pocket when he stayed in a hotel.

He bought a copy of The Commercial Appeal and dropped onto one of the sofas nearby to read the headlines. As he had suspected, the story in which he was involved took top play.

SOUTHERN GOVERNORS GATHER TODAY TO DISCUSS “REVOLT”

It was a three-column head at the right of the page. The Commercial Appeal wasn’t as conservative as it had been when he was a boy, but it still didn’t go in for the bold black streamers, he thought approvingly.

He glanced at the other front page headlines: MERIDIAN QUIET UNDER FEDERAL REGIME . . . NEHRU BLASTS RACE UNREST IN MISSISSIPPI . . . PRESIDENT URGES SOUTH: “ABIDE BY LAW”. . . .

Beauregard sighed. He was caught up in the vortex of great events.

He arose, folding his paper, and walked toward the stairs leading down to the grill. The governors’ meeting was not until eleven o’clock. After breakfast he would talk with some of the Memphis political leaders and telephone Governor Gentry. He was in a delicate position here, representing a state that did not think exactly as he did.

As he reached the steps, a dark-haired woman, dressed in misty blue for the morning, approached from the elevators. He stepped aside to let her precede him. Then they recognized each other.

“Piquette!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were in Memphis.”

The quadroon flashed a smile and a sparkle of black eyes at him.

“I knew you were here,” she said, gesturing at the newspaper.

He hesitated, uncertain whether she was just countering his own remark or telling him that he was her reason for being here.

“Will you have breakfast with me?” he invited.

“Yes,” she answered, and gave him a sidelong glance, “if it’s in my room.”

He laughed, rich and full-throated. She took his arm and they went back to the elevator together. His heart was lighter now that Piquette was in Memphis with him. . . .

There were eleven Southern governors at the meeting. Governor LeBlanc of Louisiana, like Governor Gentry of Tennessee, had sent a representative in his stead. As representative of the host state, Beauregard opened the meeting, welcomed the visitors and turned over the chairmanship to Governor Dortch of Georgia.

“Gentlemen, there is no point in delaying our principal discussion,” said Dortch. “Within the past week, federal troops have moved into a Mississippi city to enforce the Supreme Court’s infamous integration decree. For the first time since Reconstruction Days, hostile soldiers are on the soil of a sovereign Southern state. The question before us is, shall we bow to this invasion of states’ rights and continue our hopeless fight in the courts, or shall we join hands in resisting force with force?”

Chubby Governor Marsh of Alabama rose to his feet.

“There wouldn’t have been any federal troops if it hadn’t been for this extremist segregation organization, the Konfederate Klan,” he said heavily. “I belong to a segregationist organization myself: I suppose most of you do, because you got elected. But lynching and rioting and burning homes and schools is no way to resist integration. Mississippi’s National Guard should have been in Meridian.”

“If I’d mobilized the Guard, I’d have had a revolt on my hands,” said Governor Ahlgren of Mississippi mildly. “Two-third of the guardsmen belong to the Klan.”

“I’ll go along with the majority, of course,” said Marsh, “but I think this proposed Pact of Resistance can lead only to full-fledged military occupation of the South.”

Almost without willing it, Beauregard arose. Governor Gentry had counseled caution, listening instead of talking, but a fire burned deep in Beauregard. Somehow the laughing face of Piquette as he had seen her last misted his eyes. A powerful urging was on him to beat his breast and cry: “The white man must rule . . . !”

****

Beauregard opened his eyes and looked around him dazedly. He was sitting in the parlour of Piquette’s house on Lookout Mountain. Piquette leaned against his shoulder, patting his hand, and Adjaha stood before him with hands clasped behind his back. Adjaha looked like a worried dwarf.

“You remember that you relived your participation in the governors’ conference in Memphis?” asked Adjaha.

“Yes,” said Beauregard, rubbing his forehead. “You black scoundrel! You hypnotized me with that pagan doll!”

“Yes, sir,” admitted Adjaha. “It took me a long time to trace the key to this war, and when I found you were that key I knew I could reach you only through Piquette. It was your impassioned speech before the governors that turned the South to war instead of peace.”

“Nonsense!” said Beauregard, sitting up straighter. “I just expressed what the majority was thinking. They’d have agreed on the Pact of Resistance even if I had objected.”

“The man of destiny sometimes doesn’t realize his own influence,” said Adjaha drily. “Many factors were concentrated in you that day besides your own native persuasiveness. No, General, your stand swung the governors to the Pact of Resistance. Announcement of that pact spurred the Konfederate Klan to massacre the federal troops at Meridian. That brought the federal proclamation placing Mississippi under martial law and the subsequent mobilization and revolt of the South.”

“Perhaps so,” conceded Beauregard wearily. “Perhaps I did wrong in not following Governor Gentry’s instructions and keeping my mouth shut. But I spoke my convictions, and it’s too late now.”

“That is not necessarily true, General,” said Adjaha. “Time is a dimension, and it is as easy to move east as it is west. A better simile: one can move upward as well as downward, but the presence of gravitation makes special skills necessary.”

Beauregard shook his head.

“A good theory, but good only as a theory,” he said. “If it were more than that, the law of cause and effect would be abrogated.”

“No, it works both ways. The present can influence the past as much as it influences the future, or as much as the past influenced it. Thus, through the past, the present can influence itself. In my native land, the Ivory Coast of Africa, we believe in fan-shaped destiny, General. At every instant where a choice is made, a man may take one of many paths. And those who had the old knowledge of my people could retrace their steps when the wrong path was taken, and choose another path.”

“But I can’t,” said Beauregard. “If I could, I don’t know anything that could have changed what I said and did that day in Memphis.”

“Tell me, General, how long had Piquette been your mistress before the Memphis Conference?” asked Adjaha.

“About three years,” answered Beauregard, too puzzled at this change of tack to be offended.

“Even if you were a psychologist instead of a general, it would be difficult for you to probe the motivation of your own heart,” said the Negro. “Piquette was your reason for voting for war, instead of peace!”

Beauregard sprang to his feet angrily.

“Look, damn you, don’t feed me your voodoo doubletalk!” he thundered. “If it were Piquette alone I had to consider, don’t you think I’d have advocated equality for the black race?”

It was Piquette’s voice that sobered him, like a dash of cold water.

“And yet you try to tell me I’m not a Negro, ’Gard,” she said quietly.

The anger drained from him. He slumped back to the sofa.

“Ah yes, the perversity of a man whose mind and heart are at odds!” exclaimed Adjaha softly. “You love Piquette, yet your pride tells you that you should not love a woman with Negro blood in her veins. For that you must be aggressive, you must prove that the moral code taught you as a child was not wrong. You went to the Memphis Conference with Piquette’s kisses still sweet on your lips, and because of that your conscience demanded that you stand forth as a champion of the white man’s superiority.”

“So be it, then, you black Freudian,” retorted Beauregard cynically, an angry gleam in his blue eyes. “The die was cast two years ago.”

“The die shall be recast,” said Adjaha firmly. “Piquette must not have gone to Memphis. She must not have been your mistress before you went to Memphis.”

With this, he walked swiftly from the room. Beauregard looked at Piquette, his eyes half amused, half doubtful. She smiled at him.

“What he does is out of our hands,” she said. “It’s still early, ’Gard.”

He took her in his arms.

****

Governor Beauregard Courtney of Tennessee sat in the tall chair behind the governor’s desk and twiddled a paperweight given him, if his recollection was accurate, by the Nashville Rotary Club. His wife, Lucy, a handsome woman whose dark brown hair was just beginning to grey, stood by the door with an armload of packages.

“Beauregard, the people moving into that vacant house down on Franklin Road are Negroes,” she said indignantly. “I want you to do something about it. The very idea! That close to the mansion!”

“They aren’t Negroes,” he said patiently. “They’re my secretary and her mother. My secretary is a quadroon, and her mother’s a mulatto. It’s convenient to have them live so close, in case I need to do some weekend work at home.”

“A quadroon!” Lucy’s eyes widened. “Which of your secretaries is a quadroon?”

“Piquette. And don’t tell me I shouldn’t have employed her. The Negro vote is important in this state, and if I’d hired a full-blooded Negro a lot of the white vote would turn against me.”

“Well, I never! You’ve become more and more of an integrationist ever since you got into politics, Beauregard.”

“Maybe I’ve gained some wisdom and understanding,” he replied. “That is not to say I’m an ‘integrationist.’ I’m still doing my best to get it done slowly and cautiously. But the only way the South could have resisted it was by open revolt, which would have been suicide. And I must say the Southern fears have not been realized, so far.”

Lucy sniffed.

“I have to speak at a woman’s club meeting tonight,” she said, opening the door. “Are you going home now?”

“No, Sergeant Parker will drive you home and come back for me. I’m going to eat downtown and clean up some work in the office tonight.”

She left, and Beauregard leaned back in his chair thoughtfully, having just told his wife a lie.

They had no children to be affected by it, but Lucy never would become reconciled to integration. She blamed him for his part in turning the Memphis Governors Conference away from the proposed Pact of Resistance five years ago.

Beauregard had had his doubts about speaking out against resisting the federal government with the threat of force. Now he thought he had done right: war would have been terrible, and the South could not have won such a war. And it was his statesmanship at that conference, and Governor Gentry’s lavish praise of it, that had set him up to succeed Gentry as governor.

Beauregard sighed peacefully. He had done right, and the world was better for it.

The door opened, and Piquette’s golden, black-eyed face peeked around it.

“It’s four-thirty, Governor,” she said. “Will you want me for anything else?”

“Not just now,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back.

“Room 832,” she said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. Then she was gone.

Beauregard’s blood quickened, but he was disturbed. This that he was going to do was not right. But what other course would a normal man take, when his wife was so estranged that she had become nothing more than a front for the married happiness the people demanded of their governor, a figurehead who lived in another wing of the mansion?

He had met Piquette eight years before, briefly, when he was a staid, climbing Nashville lawyer. Not knowing she was of mixed blood then, he had been drawn to her strongly. He had thought her drawn also to him, but for some reason their paths parted, and he had not seen her again until after his election to the governorship.

She had been among a group of applicants for state jobs, and Beauregard had happened to be in the personnel office the day she came in. He employed her in the governor’s office at once. She was a good secretary.

Nothing untoward had passed between them in that year she had worked as his secretary. In nothing either of them said or did could any members of his staff have detected an incorrect attitude. But there were invitations of the eyes, caresses of the voice . . . and a week ago their hands had touched, and clung, and he