Everybody objected at once. Grant stood casually puffing on his corona, oblivious. Armond Scott, a young lawyer, stared at him, captured by his clear blue eyes and the sureness of his manner.

Sitting above the pandemonium of angry voices, Henderson raised his arms for order. When that didn’t work, he took off his shoe and banged it on the arm of the barber chair. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen,” he kept repeating uselessly.

“Go ahead—shout me down!” Ivanhoe Grant said suddenly, with such force that the room quieted. Henderson put his shoe back on. Aware that some of the younger men, including Scott, were listening hard, Grant said more softly, “Do whatever you think is right. In the end, it won’t matter. It will happen.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” He snapped his fingers crisply. “Don’t any of you get it?” He held up his cigar. “You’re not in charge of this. Never were. They’re going to do what they’ve been planning to do all along.”

Norwood smiled and seized upon Grant’s own logic. “So if it doesn’t matter what we do, why not be reasonable? Why not take the moral high ground?”

“Call it that, if you want,” Grant said. “I call it giving in.” He sidled over and stood nose to nose with Norwood. “What I’m telling you is, your only chance is to stand up to them.”

“Why? What kind of chance is that?”

Grant shook his head, as if incredulous that any grown man could be so thick. “Because,” he said with forced patience, “that’s the one thing they won’t expect.”

The meeting lasted another hour and a half. Norwood and Henderson prevailed, as Grant knew they would. He had made his speech for today. He knew why they wouldn’t take the risk. But they were taking the same risk anyway, without any pride. For the last half of the meeting, he looked on with detachment. What will be, will be, he thought. You can’t stop it.

“So we’re agreed,” Henderson said at last. The men murmured assent without enthusiasm. “Mr. Jacobs, if you please,” he said, trying to invest the proceedings with a formality appropriate to the gravity of the moment.

Jacobs, who as coroner was accustomed to filling out meticulous death certificates in a fine cursive hand, acted as secretary. He read the final draft of their reply: “ ‘We the colored citizens to whom was referred the matter of expulsion from this community of the persons and press of Alex Manly, beg most respectfully—’ ”

“Beg,” Tom Miller said, and spat on the floor. “Beg.”

“ ‘—to say that we are in no wise responsible for, nor in any way endorse, the obnoxious article that called forth your activities.’ ”

“That’s right,” Carter Peamon said. “We’re not taking the blame, so we’re not really giving in. All this fuss about a man that’s already gone.”