While they shouted their anger, Ivanhoe Grant climbed down from the bench, threw off his coat, and approached the pulpit. The Reverend Kirk stared at him, trembling. I will not surrender my pulpit, Kirk thought, but he was already stepping down the three short steps, mesmerized.

He leaped into the pulpit—Ivanhoe Grant in his boiled white shirtsleeves, his arms raised in a stiff V, but his hands bent and loose at the ends of his cuffs, so that now he seemed to have wings. He appeared as an avenging angel poised over the congregation.

They quieted. Their eyes stared like birds’ eyes, glassy and expectant. He said softly, “Let me tell you a story.”

“Amen,” they said. “Tell the story, brother.”

“A stranger comes to town.”

“Tell about the stranger.”

“This was years ago. Before the War of Emancipation. Before Father Abraham. Before Reconstruction. Before this place was anyplace.”

“In olden times,” the bent crone in the front row said, “when prophets walked the land.”

“Amen, sister.”

He paused, watched their eyes, nodded. “A stranger comes to town. He is not alone. Six brothers, traveling together.”

They knew this story. They whispered this story to their children when they misbehaved. They told it as a ghost story on windy nights camping by the river, as owls streaked through the swampy darkness and old, slimy bottom dwellers splashed out of the water to steal a hooded glance at the moon.

“They were no criminals,” he said. “They were good men.”

“Good men.”

“Good men and godly.”

“Godly men.”

“Men who had cast off the yoke of slavery. Freedmen under the law.”

“Free by law.”

“Family men, looking for a job of work.”

“Looking for a job.”

“They were hauled to the marketplace like common criminals.” His voice quavered. “The way Jesus was hauled before Pilate. And the Pharisees of this city judged them not by the laws of God but by the laws of hatred and fear.”

“Pharisees, umh, umh!”

Ivanhoe Grant stood rigid, head bowed, eyes downcast, his voice silken, seamless. “And what was the sentence for being a black man in this town on that night?” He swept his eyes over them and breathed a single word: “Death.”

Nobody spoke. He closed his eyes in a rapture of pain.

“The Pharisees put them to death. One by one. On the banks of the brown river that flows through this city and empties its sorrow into the sea. The river of fear.”