Outside the window, the river vanished and houses appeared—shotgun shacks and clapboard two-stories, some of them clean and tidy, others run-down, their paint peeling, pigs rooting among trash in the yards. Men loitered in the dirt streets—black men in a knot outside a drugstore, white men smoking on the stoop of a tavern. Sam had seen the ragged unemployed in other cities.

Waddell said, “Brooklyn. The darkies live here. And white laborers. Most of the Irish are in Dry Pond, over in that direction.” He pointed out his own window. “Don’t be alarmed—the train comes into the better part of town.”

“Why do they call it Brooklyn?” Gray Ellen asked.

Waddell smiled. “Who knows? They do have a Manhattan Club there—sort of a bal musette. They go there to dance and carouse. The darkies do love their music.”

“I see.”

The conductor walked through the car announcing, “Wilmington, change for the Seaboard Airline, the Short Line, Charleston, and points west.”

The train pulled under the long awnings of the Atlantic Coastline platform, thronged with women in sun hats and men in seersucker suits meeting the arrival. Redcaps scurried about retrieving bags.

“Come see me, hear?” Waddell said, handing Sam his card: A. M. Waddell, Lt. Col., C.S.A., Attorney-at-Law. “You lose it, I’m in the city directory,” he said. “Mrs. Jenks.” He bowed in the old, grand manner and left the train. On his seat, he left behind a copy of the latest Raleigh News & Observer, opened to an editorial cartoon of a giant black boot—labeled The Negro—crushing a tiny white man’s back. The caption read, A Serious Question—How Long Will This Last?

The preacher quietly walked out the back of the car. Through the window, Gray Ellen watched him pause, hatless, on the platform, before he pushed through the crowd and past the swinging iron gate into the city.

Chapter Two

One of the editors and owners of a paper was an associated press reporter and he let loose all that a credulous people would believe. They had most of the innocent people, women and children, with the feminine men believing everything that was printed, as well as the news that was circulated and peddled on the streets.

Benjamin F. Keith, wholesale merchant

C H A P T E R   T W O

Monday, August 15

WHEN SAM ARRIVED at the newsroom of the Messenger on Monday morning, the place was in an uproar. Men were gathered in a knot around a wooden desk piled high with books, papers, and a typewriter—talking loudly, disagreeing. Inside a glassed cubicle, a short man in rolled shirtsleeves marched back and forth in front of two other men, gesticulating wildly. He grabbed a newspaper from his desk, stabbed it with his finger, then flung it aside. The paper fluttered to the floor like a falling dove. None of the men bothered to pick it up.