A black policeman on the opposite corner smiled and nodded. She felt ogled, felt the burn of a blush—silly, but she couldn’t help it. She moved quickly up the street, not paying attention to where she was walking. Two white boys whipped past her chasing a colored boy. Black workmen and delivery boys crowded the alleys.

She smelled the river, the fish market, the sharp odor of the guano factory. Two mule-drawn freight wagons rumbled by, the hostlers whistling at her. She turned to see if they were white or Negro, then realized, all at once, that for the first time in her life, she was seeing the world in black and white.

She found herself back at Market Street. Up the block, across from the Messenger offices where Sam worked, there was a commotion in the street. She had no other pressing business, so she walked that way. A crowd of white men was gathered around the entrance to a saloon. Then she saw that the focus of attention wasn’t the saloon but the rooms above it. Two black men were leaning out of the open windows on the second story dismantling a large, artfully lettered sign: The Record Publishing Company.

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.”