With a rope braced somewhere inside the building, they lowered the sign to street level, where other black men—not laborers, but men wearing clean shirts and snappy pinstriped vests, cravats undone—guided it into the bed of a two-mule dray.

The dray was already lying flat on its springs under the weight of a massive object behind the teamsters’ seat—a shapeless hulk covered by an old green tarpaulin.

The white men were waving their fists and yelling so many things at once that Gray Ellen couldn’t make out any of it. Some of them wore red shirts, like the rowdies on the train. A small knot of Negroes watched from the other corner.

A man in wire-rimmed glasses and leather printer’s sleeves emerged from a stairwell door next to the saloon, and she realized what the tarpaulin must be hiding: a printing press.

The jeers grew louder, and for an instant, Gray Ellen expected violence.

But suddenly, a stocky, red-haired priest in a cassock and collar shoved himself between the crowd and the black man, and the Red Shirts at the front hesitated. The priest stood them off, crouching, fists balled.

Gray Ellen had drifted into the fringes of the crowd now. “Excuse me,” she said to a pretty, petite woman. “What’s going on here?”

“Don’t you know, dearie?” the woman said. “They’re clearing out that rat’s nest.”

“Excuse me?”

“The nigger paper, honey—that Manly devil. Throwing him out on his ear. About time, too, after what he wrote.” The woman handed Gray Ellen a limp copy of the Record and snapped her index finger down on the editorial. “It’s a slander to Southern womanhood, is what it is.”

A fat woman in a faded print dress laid a damp hand on Gray Ellen’s wrist. “Don’t listen to that mess, honey. There’s more to this than meets the eye.” The petite woman walked away in a huff.

Gray Ellen cocked her head to listen amid the growing din of jeers and catcalls. “What do you mean?”

“Ain’t from around here, are you? That nigrah paper wa’nt doing nobody no harm. Got carried away, is all.”

“Who’s the fellow in the sleeves?”

The fat woman squinted, then shook her head so her pink chins fluttered. “Can’t say—but it’s not Manly. Don’t see Manly anywheres. You’ll know Manly—pencil moustache, a real rooster. Smooth and cool—ice wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Could be his new assistant.”

“Who’s the priest?” Gray Ellen had not yet visited her new church, St. Thomas’s. This priest looked more like a prizefighter than a man of the cloth.

The fat woman chuckled in admiration. “That’s Father Dennen, works with the coloreds over to St. Thomas’s. A real hellion, that father.”

“You’re Catholic?”

The woman looked at her, horrified. “Honey, I’m a Christian woman, but I draw the line. I don’t go in for all that wine guzzling first thing on a Sunday morning.”

“Well, it’s not exactly—”

“Just you take a look at what that Manly wrote—that’s what’s causing all the fuss, honey. Poor man wa’nt thinking clear, that’s a fact.”