Whiff Gleason had stood and hung from the back of this great godless industrial monstrosity of a Union Motors pickup for upwards of eight hours he supposed. His strong mind and resilient body, inherited from his famous ancestor Uncle Ben Samson, had finally begun to give out.

“Oh Lord save me.”

“That is not a church hymn negra!” grated the voice of weasel-faced Mack, who was standing in for The Devil on this dark day.

He then felt the cut of Diddle’s butcher knife along his outside thigh and groaned.

Mack then commanded, “A church hymn negra, or another cut. No more prayers to your negra version of God, or another cut. Some church song boy!”

He had no time or energy to wrack his brain, and he had done little enough church hymn singing himself. He did know portions of My Daily Bread by heart though: that tome of serenity employed by drunken and drug-addicted white carneys in his employ to keep on the straight and narrow—and he blurted a passage as song, declaring it so:

“Hymn forty-six,

The Virtue of the Humilities

Christ,

My child,

Humility is a much misunderstood virtue—to be true!”

His impromptu song was interrupted by the cruel voice of Mack, “Cut him on his big ass Diddle. What a shit song that is, made up I bet.”

As he was being cut Whiff looked away, over his left shoulder to the east, where the sun was even now rising above the horizon, poking its shining face through the trees, near and far. Whiff was inspired. “Lord, you have come to me, this sunrise, with song—saved me from the noose I declare, no more to despair!”

Nearly delirious, Whiff smiled down at Weasel Mack, victory in his heart, having outlasted the cruelty of he and his men until the Lord brought the sun. “According to the terms of our bet, I am now to be cut down, having outlasted the night!”

Mack grinned and looked at his men: Boomer picking his nose and Diddle licking Whiff’s own blood from his knife. “Can you believe boys, that this here crab-bait negra thought his word was good enough to bind ours?”

He then looked up at Whiff without a smile, and Whiff fairly bellowed, “But we had a pact!”

Weasel Mack countered, “There can be no pacts, boy, between negras and men!”

He then turned away and nodded to Boomer. “Get in and start her up.”

He then looked to Diddle. “You and Tommy load the cooler. I’m sick of this game. Let’s find us a country girl.”

All of a sudden every man in the clearing, even Tommy, turned away to their tasks, which, for Weasel Mack, consisted merely of berating Diddle—still stone drunk—and Tommy—as weak-kneed as ever—as they barely managed to drag the Iron City cooler toward the back of the cab.

Whiff closed his eyes against the inevitable, not wanting them to see the pain reflected therein.

Whiff took one last look at God’s natural world, the world made by his cold-shouldered creator, seemingly for the living joy of other men. The late summer leaves had a hint of autumn about them, and gave a green-gray sheen to the morning as the same yellow sun that lit the sky above a dull blue sent sparkles of greenish-gray through the riverside woods below, the woods where Whiff Gleason would soon dangle from the readymade rope that had been his prison for the long lonely night behind him.

Mack’s voice then sounded harshly just below him, “Hey boy, some help here!”

The door that Boomer had been opening on the driver’s side now shut, and the voice came again, the harsh, thin, grinding voice of Weasel Mack, “Hey boy, Southern Boy, I said some help here!”

Whiff opened his eyes and looked about. Boomer was coming back around the tailgate, Mack was standing arrogantly beneath him, and Tommy and Diddle straightened up from their ill-fated attempts to move the two hundred pound stainless steel bridge-beam style cooler. As badly as his neck chafed and ached from the rope Whiff turned his head, the raw neck flaming under the rough fibers of the thrift-store rope noose, and regarded the object of Weasel Mack’s ire.

Just inside the clearing, having come up from the river from some hobo camp no doubt, stood a bum, a drifter bum of the hobo type. The man was slightly better than normal height and lean, with nary a waist. His feet were bare. Above the ankle, his cotton slacks were shredded to the pockets, and held up by nothing but a twine cord. The shirt was of threadbare flannel and probably reeked to high heaven if Whiff was any judge of personal grooming. A cheap thrown away straw hat, probably no longer needed by a cotton-picking field negro, with as many holes as weaves, concealed a dark sooty face. Over the man’s lean shoulder—too wide for the lack of flesh on the bony frame—was a hobo stick of the classic type, with a dirty pillow case bundled about all the lowly man’s worldly possessions and tied to the stick.

This was the very picture of the Lowly Whiteman that Whiff had been raised to despise. His like could not even find employ at Whiff Gleason’s Candy Cane Carnival, no siree! Such lowdown reeking failures of their race were not welcome, once cast off by their own, among respectable negro folk, or what Whiff secretly referred to as ‘decent colored kind’.

Weasel Mack said again, as his men—even Tommy—stood from their tasks and regarded the man with eyes of castigating judgment, “I said Southern Boy, some help here. Bend your back to this cooler and we will give you a lift to your destination.”

The hobo did not even spare a glance at Whiff, just briefly glared at Weasel Mack, without having turned, just having paused mid-stride, and made to continue. Diddle snorted, “That is one dumbass excuse for a Whiteman there Mack!”

The man was already stepping off, headed past them at a distance of perhaps 20 feet toward the woods on the other side of the clearing, not even headed for the road.

In simmering anger Whiff bellowed, “You damned white trash, I curse you I do!”

The man stopped and turned slowly, fixing Whiff with a spectral glare of colorless steel eyes from beneath his work-beaten and weather-poor straw hat. Mack drawled artificially as the man came on toward the knot of them clutching his pathetic hobo stick in a sullen manner, “Come on boy, help Diddle and Tommy heft the cooler up and we’ll treat you to a whiskey iced tea over on the dockside lounge.”

The man came to a stop just before the man-weight beer cooler, handed his stick and pitiful pillowcase-full of belongings to Tommy, hefted the stainless steel bench-cooler, and stepped over out of sight, behind Whiff, where he could hear the cruel slide of steel on iron as the Yankee beer cooler was stowed on the back of the brutal machine that was Whiff Gleason’s hanging stand.

“That’s a good Southern Boy!” said Diddle, “Whoever said Dixie was dead didn’t factor the industry of their bums. Boy, you ride north with us and we’ll get you a job.”

The man’s face could barely be seen from beneath the hat. His voice had a deep cavernous tone without a note of Southern heritage about it, “A lift straight-away. Forget the tea and head over the line this morning and I’m your man.”

Mack sneered gleefully, “A man in trouble, a man after our own heart. You got yourself a deal Southern Boy. What is your name?”

Whiff, his ears ringing to a pitch of anger, could not contain himself, “‘Traitor’ is his lowly name! Mange-dog of The South, running home to his Yankee master it looks—and a coward at that!”

The man raised his dirty face and looked through Whiff with something beyond anger, something more terrible, “Coward?” came the voice with a steely ring of accusation.

Whiff swallowed hard but maintained his composure, locking eyes with the evil road-bum. Then Boomer broke the silence with a laugh and a pat on the man’s shoulder, “It’s not cowardly to go along with those that you could not hope to fight. Three big Union Men go over one scrawny Dixie Boy once, with nothing left over. My friend he—”

Boomer then fell to his knees spewing beer-soured vomit onto the earth, after taking a vicious punch to the belly; an uppercut punch if Whiff, a manager of boxers for some years, was any judge.

Diddle then snarled, swiping at the man’s neck with his butcher knife—but the man had ducked already, taking his stick back from Tommy and snapping it in two as he did so. Diddle came back at the man’s belly with a vicious backhand. All Whiff could ascertain was that the man had dodged the cut somehow. For Diddle immediately staggered on his heels with a broken length of stick protruding from his throat, and another lodged deep in his belly.

Tommy was scrambling up onto the truck bed.

Weasel Mack roared and pulled a wicked switch-blade knife of his own and stepped toward the hobo, who had somehow acquired Diddle’s butcher knife. Diddle was in the way, in between them, gurgling on his knees and pulling ineffectively at both ends of the stick.

Boomer was crawling to his feet, making bovine-type noise, and Tommy—good boy Tommy—was untying Whiff’s hands!

The hand of Weasel Mack, the knife still in it, seemed to fly in a lazy arc across the clearing. The evil man looked to his hand and knife longingly, even as his head slipped from his shoulders, cut away as if with a saber by that terrible butcher knife that had moments ago been cutting on Whiff.

Boomer was on his feet now, reeling in anger, a rock in his hand!

Tommy had released Whiff’s hands, numb as they were, and they both struggled with the noose, causing Whiff to slip from the gate of the truck and swing at the end of the rope. Thankfully Whiff already had his hands within the noose, and was able to take most of the mighty yank caused by the falling of his fat body, on his small numb hands. He swung twice, the world spinning in lurid blood-splashed shadows. At last he thudded into the back of the truck, caught his feet on the bumper, and pushed with his strong stiff legs while he tore off the noose!

He knew he was free when he hit the ground, hit the ground with a gout of blood spraying across his face; warm blood just sprayed from?

Whiff scrambled to his knees and found himself kneeling beside Boomer. Boomer was not altogether alive. His hands were missing, blood gushing from the stumps. The sight of the rich Union Boy’s intestines spilled on the ground before him convinced Whiff, then and there, that if he ever picnicked again it would not be on chitterlings!

Whiff stood next to a man that was in the last stages of butchery. The evil hobo was just then slitting Boomer’s throat and pulling his tongue down through it to make a kind of gruesome necktie!

Whiff made to protest the mutilation, but too late, Tommy was already screaming in horror, “That is inhuman! What kind of butcher are you?”

The man planted the knife with a sickening thud into the top of Boomer’s prodigious skull and turned on the Southern Boy, who had been so timid until now. “You lynch-coward! You put me here, up to my ankles in this pig’s shit!”

The man then struck like a cobra, belting Tommy with a wicked left hook that sent him…sent him crashing head first into the stainless steel trailer hitch of the noxious Union Motors truck. “No!” Whiff yelled as he dove to Tommy’s aid, bowling over the butchered body of Boomer.

He cradled Tommy’s blonde head and found that a big soft hole had been knocked in the base of the skull. Tommy was dead!

Whiff rose in a fury. “The boy was innocent, a prisoner like me! He’s from a good Southern family!”

The man then snarled at him, “And I’m just lowdown accursed white trash; lower even than you?”

Whiff straightened up, suddenly fearless, despite looking now into a more potent though less degraded version of evil than that which he had faced through the longest night of his life. “I said it true and meant it: trash!”

The man laughed softly in his throat, not creasing his mouth. And the hat that he had not even lost in this brutal butchery he now lifted from his head. Just above his forehead, branded above his hairline was the mark of The Devil himself, a mark that Whiff had known about from tales told by Big Daddy Gleason, to any negro boy who fancied fleeing to The Colonies to escape The Man.

On the man’s head was branded a set of crossed pistols, the sign of Nathan Bedford Forest, the man who took Kentucky and West Virginia in the Second War of Secession. Above the pistols was the brand of the CSAMC: the Confederate States of America Marine Corp, the most famous body of fighting men in all the world. A mere two divisions of these killers had held the colonies of Cuba, Mexico, Columbia, Haiti and Puerto Rico for a century; had even held the British Canal in Panama against the Japanese in the pre-Atomic War. It was said that these men were not allowed to return to the CSA—shorn of their humanity and civility by cruel acts uncounted—but were employed as mercenaries around the world. In any case, such men as this had terrorized millions for many a year, and were the sworn enemy of any CSA negro who might flee to Haiti, Cuba or the like.

The man set his jaw and intoned kindly, “You have balls darkie.”

The man seemed to be giving Whiff a second to prepare, but made no move for the knife. So Whiff clenched his own jaw and raised his fists, like he had seen Jordy do so many times in his carnival ring, before he brained some soft-headed fool white-boy who was trying to win a stuffed bear for his sweetheart. The man dipped to hook Whiff in his fat body and Whiff brought his elbow down to meet it—he was a manager of boxers after all…

“’Colored’, in a legal sense may only rightfully be used as a term designating non-white citizens of the British Commonwealth, and otherwise as a literary reference in learned discourse concerning anthropology and other such matters. A negro ward of the Confederacy using such a term is judged guilty by statute [not common law] and may be fined or mobilized for labor, by the municipality in which he uttered the uncivil term.

‘Negra’ is a vile uncivil attribution, which shall be uttered by no one, the whites doing so suffering common censure for indecency, and blacks being subject to the penalties enumerated above.

‘Black’ is a militant term that my only be used in descriptive anthropological and eugenic literature and in common conversation by whites. No person is to designate a negro as black, this being a militant inflammatory term, associated with the Voodoo politics of Haiti. Whites breaking civility in this matter are subject to the above penalties. Negros using the term are considered to be making an appeal to pre-Christian racial solidarity, will be regarded as guilty of voodoo by statute, and committed to the nearest CSA Eugenics Association reformatory plantation.

Let it be forever known that ‘negro’ is the only civil term by which a ward of the CSA descended from slaves or of more recent African origin, may be known, sports broadcasts intended for cross-line Union consumption not excepted.”

-The Negro Incivility Act, 1971