Dread Nation (Dread Nation #1)(55)
A dark-skinned girl with tight rows of braids looks up and gives me a guarded smile. “Hi. You want to sit here?” she asks, gesturing to the empty chair next to her.
I sink gratefully into the chair, my hands shaking as I set my tray down. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Jane.”
“Likewise. I’m Ida.” Her voice is whispery and low with the deep-throated accent of the Lost States, those places in the Deep South where shamblers outnumber people. Ida keeps casting furtive glances in the vicinity of Bill and his shotgun. “So, I see you met the preacher.”
“I did. Charming fellow.”
“About as charming as the serpent in the garden. Watch yourself around him.”
I nod. Bill is now looking at us a little too intently and I decide to change the subject. “How long have you been here?”
Ida’s expression hardens. “Too long. Most of us came at the same time, shipped up on a train from the Jackson compound.”
“Compound?”
“Yes’m. Ain’t you never heard of the compounds?”
“Once, briefly. It wasn’t exactly an enlightening conversation. Mind telling me more?” Not much is known about life in the Lost States. It’s generally thought of as a place even more desperate than the Western frontier.
Ida talks while I scoop up my food with my fingers, since no one saw fit to give us forks. “Well, at ten you start your initial combat training. We have a test every year. If you fail it, they put you in the fields. But there are a lot of shamblers out there and chances are you’ll get eaten, so that’s no good. At thirteen, you join the patrols. But if you mess up—like if you don’t listen or they think you’re uppity—then they’ll move you to another compound. Or, in our case, they put you on a train.”
“Not in the fields with the others?”
“Only the little ones work in the fields, since they need all the grown folks they can get to keep the dead out. And if they can’t use you, they sell you to someone who can.”
“Slavery is illegal,” I say.
“Not necessarily. They got loopholes in that there Thirteenth Amendment. If you’ve been bitten by a shambler, the amendment says you’re no longer human, even if you haven’t turned yet, which means you don’t have rights as a person anymore. And there’s a reward for capturing bit Negroes, since everyone is convinced we’re immune. I’ve seen folks testify Negroes have been bit and then those Negroes get sold off by the compound. Same if you’re a criminal—and you can guess how that goes, when white folk are the ones who write the laws.” She catches herself, then looks around and lowers her voice. “Lots of different ways to pretty up the same old evils.” Ida looks down at her hands, wringing them something fierce. I can’t tell whether she’s angry or upset. “If I would’ve known they were going to send me here, I would’ve run off a long time ago.”
“Is it worse here?” I ask, not really wanting an answer.
Ida just shrugs, and a girl on the other side of her leans forward. “It ain’t so bad now that they got the whores to take care of the drovers. It was worse before they had something to keep them occupied.”
My stomach turns, unsettling my supper so that I have to swallow hard to keep it down. “Who lives in those houses on the other side of Summerland?” I ask, since she’s being so chatty.
“The good white folks do. They don’t eat with us. Most of the good people in the town are put over there on the southern boundary. It’s safer, and it’s mostly families and such. The only folks here in the town are the Negroes and the trash. The nice white folks don’t even attend church with us, because we might soil their souls.”
I nod. “So I heard.”
There is a loud banging. I look toward the noise to see the preacher standing at a podium that’s been set up next to the serving window. He looks out across the room, smiles his ghastly smile, and says, “Gather round, gather round, children. No need to be shy. There are some new faces in the flock today, and that is a boon. God has blessed us, because a growing flock is a lucky flock. As Summerland grows, as we welcome more souls into our humble town, so does the dream of a new Jerusalem, of our own righteous city on the hill.”
There’s some noise as chairs are moved closer to the podium. No one bothers moving where I sit. The tables full of colored folks are farthest away from the podium, and it feels intentional.
The preacher continues. “Tonight, I want to tell you the story of John, one of the first farmers to settle here in Summerland. John was a flawed man. See, when he came here to our fine town it was the beginning of the war, before the dead walked, and John had strange notions about justice and equality and God’s will. He’d come to us from South Carolina, my own home state, and he came west a man who was missing something, some vital part of the self.
“His father had been an overseer, and rather than follow in that man’s footsteps, he fled. Because John had lost his faith, you see. He couldn’t understand how God could let so many live in suffering and bondage while others profited off that misery. Like the abolitionists who unleashed this Sinner’s Plague of the Dead upon us, John doubted God’s will.”
It takes everything I have to keep my mouth shut, my thoughts to myself.
People in the crowd, mostly the white men at the tables full of roughnecks, are nodding and murmuring in assent. The Negroes just sit there. This ain’t the first time they’ve heard this sort of story.