Hipolito Rodriguez

Hipolito "Hip" Rodriguez is a farmer from Baroyeca, Sonora, Confederate States. He was conscripted into the Confederate army during the Great War. His first combat action was against Negro rebels in South Carolina in 1915, after which Rodriguez served with Jefferson Pinkard on the West Texas front of the Great War. Upon demobilization, he returned to his farm in the far western CSA.

In the 1920s, upon meeting Robert Quinn, a Freedom Party organizer, Rodriguez joined the Freedom Party and became a strong supporter, including taking part in actions against Radical Liberal landowners who discouraged voting for Jake Featherston. He was among those who rallied in support of Featherston's continued presidency in 1939 (supporting the overtuning of the law that a Confederate president could only serve one six-year term), and inducted his sons, Jorge, Miguel, and Pedro into the Freedom Youth Corps.

An accident with electric current weakened Rodriguez to the point of near death, but Quinn convinced Rodriguez, whose two sons had by this time joined the Army, to join the Confederate Veterans' Brigades, a Freedom Party paramilitary organization. After training, Rodriguez was sent to Camp Determination, where he was rejoined with Pinkard. He was eventually promoted to Troop Leader (sergeant in Army ranking).

A former Great War friend of Camp Commandant Pinkard, Rodriguez was looked down upon by some of the white guards because of his race and his personal connection to the commandant. But a chance remark by Rodriguez concerning the use of poison to remove pests from the guards' quarters led Pinkard to think up the idea of gas chambers to kill the camp's prisoners en masse.

However, after becoming a messenger for Bathsheba to her husband Scipio (in the process keeping his death from her), Rodriguez came to see the Negroes as humans. Eventually, overcome with remorse, he committed suicide.