Sam waited for the discussion, the argument, the heated debate. For a change, nearly everybody who mattered was assembled in one room together across a table. Surely, now was the time to talk things out, negotiate, come to some kind of understanding everybody could live with.

He understood Waddell’s tactic: start with an unequivocal, impossible demand. He had seen union negotiations, political haggling, railroad commission budget hearings, congressional debates. Always, they started from a fixed point. Always, they declared irreconcilable differences, then proceeded—over the course of hours of tedious, wearing talk—to reconcile them.

But nobody on either side of the table said anything. The Negroes sat, polite as kids in Sunday school, waiting to be dismissed. Come on, Sam thought—say something! Now’s your chance! Prove you can’t be pushed around.

But nobody objected or protested or even cursed. Then get what you deserve, Sam thought.

The whites sat tense and upright.

At that precise moment, in the unbearable silence of a room full of fifty-eight grown men who all tacitly agreed they had nothing to say to one another, Sam understood the South.

Waddell sat rigid, enforcing the silence. When even he couldn’t stand it any longer, he abruptly presented a typewritten copy of the declaration to lawyer Henderson and stood up, a signal to the others. The white men exited first, collecting down the corridor at the bar. Sam stood at the doorway next to an armed guard. The Negroes filed past him with their heads down, except for Tom Miller, who paused, looked him in the eye, and shot him with his index finger. Sam remembered him from the tugboat. Now, he was part of this, too.

Sam joined the other white men at the bar. Hand trembling, he drank a tall glass of mineral water to soothe his dry throat. George Rountree appeared across the room, talking heatedly with Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor. As Sam watched them wag their fists and shake their heads in the filtered, golden light of late afternoon, as he tried to comprehend the shifting alliances of this affair, Harry Calabash stole up on him.

“I take it events have escalated to a new level.”

“Jesus, Harry—I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“Seen what? Bartender!”

“Somebody who really won’t give in. I mean, everybody always says they won’t give in, but sooner or later everybody gives in on something.”

“Maybe there’s still some hope for your soul.”

“They won the election,” Sam said. “What more do they want?”

Harry sighed. “You haven’t been listening, Samuel. They’ve never been subtle about it. What do you think all that white supremacy talk was about?”

“Talk, that’s what. I thought it was just talk. People don’t actually believe that crap, do they?”