Gray Ellen sips her champagne. The bubbles tickle her nose. The revelers have passed. She cannot see them beyond the roofs of the houses, but they cast their dancing lights into the snowy sky, a modest aurora borealis. She sets her glass on the window sill.

There descends a great silence, like the silence of held breath. She trembles, feels her spine tingle. She imagines him out there in the silence, and his image sticks in her eye like a ghost: Ivanhoe Grant. She hears his strident voice, thinned by distance. He is a kind of devil made by men. A thing created out of suffering. There will be no easy rest for anybody while he is loose on the land. She does not approve of him, but she believes in him.

Somehow, knowing he is still out there—believing it—reassures her. “Can you hear it?” she says.

But Sam hears nothing beyond the silence.

“Listen,” she says. Ivanhoe Grant—he’s still out there somewhere, chasing away sin, gathering his anger, seething with the white man’s poison. He will call them back. He is a sinner, too wicked for this world, but he will call them all back. He will outlast them all.

She stares into the snowy night and wills his image into focus: a hobo jungle at the edge of a swamp. A black man in a pearl-gray suit headed south. In his hand, he carries a Bible he knows by heart. He walks alone beside the tracks, head up, back straight, a man burning at the core. Behind him, a train is approaching around a long curve, whistle moaning. He turns. In the beam of the locomotive, his skin is the color of wheat dust, and his eyes shine with ferocious anger.

Yet, in the thundering darkness, he smiles.

Sam says, “But I don’t hear—”

“Shh.” She takes his face firmly in her hands, touches his ears with her fingertips. “Shh,” she whispers again. “Don’t talk. Don’t answer. Don’t say anything. Listen—just listen.”

Any second now, the gong will strike the hour.

Gray Ellen stares across the street at the black hands of the clock, frozen against the luminescent, pearly face at one minute until midnight. One minute until the twentieth century.

Armond Scott, the young lawyer who failed to deliver the Committee of Colored Citizens’ reply to the white ultimatum, became a judge of the Twelfth Municipal Court in Washington, D.C. George Rountree and Walker Taylor engineered the appointment, leading to speculation that Scott had been bought off by the white supremacy movement.

Father Christopher Dennen disappeared from Wilmington in 1898, leaving behind a tradition of social activism among the Catholic parishes of Wilmington.