For a long moment, Alex Manly didn’t reply. He was still brooding. It didn’t make sense. He’d only been gone a few days, leaving young Jeffries, the new assistant editor, in charge. Jeffries was just an eager kid and not much of a writer. His prose tended toward dime-novel clichés and high-blown non sequiturs. Manly had hired him as a favor—an apprentice who would work for practically nothing. Surely, Jeffries hadn’t written the editorial.

“Who was it, Frank?”

“Damned if I know. All I know is, I come back from Greenville and the office is closed, two Red Shirts standing guard with a bottle of save-the-baby. I kept right on going.”

“As of now, Jeffries is fired.”

“That boy’s long gone. Norfolk, his girlie said.”

Alex thought of his own fiancée, Carrie. Thank the Lord she was in London right now, singing on the stage, and not in the middle of this mess. Only last month, she’d been setting type for him. Now, the aristocrats of Europe were gathered at her feet.

“Is everyone safe? Mom and Pop?”

“For now,” Frank said. He kept his eyes on the dark road. Alex was always the reckless one and Frank the tough, steady one. Like their other brothers, Henry and Lewin, they were descended from Charles Manly, an antebellum white governor of North Carolina who had freed all of his offspring by slave girls. Frank knew he himself could never pass for white in daylight—his skin was too dark, his hair too kinky, his nose too broad, and his lips too full. He preferred it that way—he suffered no ambivalence. He never went to sleep wondering who he was or where he belonged.

But Alex had always joked about “passing”—fooling the white man. He had a perfect ear—he could mimic an Irish teamster or a German baker. Frank never saw the humor, only endless confusion, an agony of choice. A man should not have to choose his race.

“How much black blood does it take to make a man black?” they used to argue. One grandparent made you a quadroon, one great-grandparent an octoroon. Named like exotic cigar wrappers, from light to dark.

Even if you had seven white great-grandparents out of eight, even if your skin was fairer than a swarthy Irishman’s, you were not white. You were a mulatto, a high yellow, a colored, a darky, a black, a Negro.

Alex’s fiancée, Carrie, was part Tuscarora Indian. Her people were trying to block their marriage—to them, Alex looked too white.

Among their own race, both brothers knew from long experience, shades of skin color seemed to matter almost more than to whites—light-skinned Negroes seemed to get hired faster by Negro bosses. They were trusted more quickly. Deferred to. Every preacher Frank had ever met was more white than black—like his own family, the progeny of white masters and black slaves.