Grant looked Peamon in the eye. “You with us?”

Peamon glared back, straightened up, shrugged off the men who were holding his elbows. He brushed off his sleeves with his hand. The gesture was so dignified that they let him alone. “So you’re going to give them a reason?” Peamon said.

Tom Miller said, “It’s time to decide, Carter. Declare yourself.”

“They’ll burn you down,” Peamon said softly. “They’ll burn you all down. Brooklyn will be a smoking hole in the ground. Don’t you see it? Look yonder at that machine gun.”

Miller and the others took a long look. A few of them had seen the gun in action on the river.

“They’re shooting our people down in the street,” Grant said in his sermonizing voice. “How long, O Lord?”

“Our people? Since when did you belong to us?”

“ ‘And lo the prophet came into their midst, and they knew him not.’ ”

To Miller and the others, Peamon said, “This man is putting you in danger.” He pointed toward the Gatling gun. “He’s putting your families in harm’s way. For the love of God, get gone from here! Go to your homes! Stay with your families. If you provoke these people—”

“Why not fight back?” someone said. “We can’t make it any worse.”

Peamon swore. “It can always get worse.”

A man behind Grant agreed: “Machine gun sure make it worse.”

Ivanhoe Grant turned to the crowd of men and boys, now numbering in the hundreds. “ ‘Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?’ ”

Peamon answered him from the psalm: “ ‘He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness.’ ” He paused for effect, raised a hand, pointed directly at Grant. “ ‘Yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off’ Not you, Reverend—the Lord our God!”

The crowd of blacks began arguing among themselves. Down the street, they could see the infantry moving into position, flanking the Gatling gun. They knew what was bound to come next.

Tom Miller said, “If we let them go, maybe they’ll fire on us anyway.”

Grant widened his eyes triumphantly. “Are you willing to trust that they will not?”

Carter Peamon said, “I give you my word. Break this up, and I’ll keep them off you. They don’t want a war.”

“Funny time to decide that,” Grant said.

“More killing is not the answer.”

Grant persisted. “I’m telling you, brothers—the white hostages protect us. They won’t fire on their own.”

“Just what do you plan to do with these men?” Peamon said. “Have you thought of that?”

Grant just smiled, then put a fist on his neck and crooked his head, as if he’d been hoisted up in a noose. Some of the men laughed nervously.