When Norwood turned back toward Mrs. Jenks, she said, “Isn’t it ever going to end? What else can they possibly want from you people?”

“Hush,” he said, patting her arm. “You go on home.”

When Norwood joined the thirty-two men who had been rounded up for the meeting with Waddell, others who had not been at that meeting were also present. He immediately spotted Ivanhoe Grant.

Jacobs’ Barbershop was on Dock Street, a stone’s throw from the river. It had three barber chairs in a long, narrow space heated by potbelly stoves at either end and lit with electricity. Jacobs was a prominent man, and his clients were all white. Both side walls were hung with mirrors, creating the illusion of a larger space. If a man stared into the mirror, he could see himself multiplied to infinity.

Seated in the middle barber chair, lawyer Henderson was presiding, or trying to, amid the clamor of argument and denunciation. Jacobs sat to his left and Carter Peamon to his right.

“What’s going on?” Norwood asked Armond Scott.

Scott passed him a two-page typewritten carbon with a list of signatures appended. “Read this,” he said.

Tom Miller, the pawnbroker and real-estate man, said, “I warned you! I told you they wouldn’t be satisfied with no damned election.”

“Gentlemen,” Henderson said. “Let’s not bicker among ourselves.”

“Where’s Manly?” Norwood demanded.

Armond Scott snorted. “Long gone. Him and his brother both.”

“About time.”

Tom Miller had the floor. “You want to make peace, that’s your business. But not me. I’m nobody’s boy.”

“Nobody said you were, Tom.”

“I still say we stand up and fight! Get our guns and give the sons of bitches what for!”

Some of the men cheered and hooted.

“We’ve got them outnumbered three to one! Three black guns against every white gun.”

“Just where you planning to get guns, Tom?” Norwood spoke in a loud voice full of a confidence he was not feeling. Things were unraveling fast.

“Out of our closets, our attics.”

“They got all the guns, Tom. You know that.” For months now, it had been impossible for a black man anywhere in the county—anywhere in the state—to buy a gun. They’d scraped up only a handful, enough to show off at Free Love Hall that first time. “You want to turn this city into a shooting gallery? That what you want?” Norwood turned on the crowd now, grabbing men by the lapels, asking them personally.

“Time we did something,” one man said.

“Time the black man stood up for himself ’round here.”

“Time we shoot up this town.”