His brother Frank urged him to pack up the newspaper and go north. “Time is running out,” Frank insisted, but, as usual, nobody listened.

“We’ll wait it out,” Alex said. “This will pass.”

“It’s the calm before the storm,” Frank said. “They’re getting ready.” He had heard the rhythm of the town quicken, like a machine ratcheted up a gear. The pitch of ordinary talk grew more shrill. Vibrations shuddered along the downtown streets. The foundation of things was shifting—he could practically feel it under his feet. In random conversations, dangerous resonances made the air sing with threat. Loaded words ricocheted over their heads.

“When the election is over, we can get on with regular business,” Alex said.

“That’s a long time away,” Frank said, tired of arguing. “Anything can happen.” The cool days of November seemed like a country he would never visit again. He couldn’t imagine the heat ever breaking.

“But it won’t.”

“Then why you skulking around like a fugitive from a chain gang?”

Alex was embarrassed by his fear. But he was not a man for guns. He was a thinker, a planner—not a street fighter. “Because just when you don’t expect anything to happen, that’s when it happens.”

On September 27, the Messenger broke a story handed to it by the state purchasing agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which had taken an order from a cadre of local Negro businessmen for two hundred carbines. The Wilmington Negroes Are Trying To Buy Guns! announced the headline. Sam wrote the article. He had heard a persistent rumor that a Negro preacher was mixed up in the business, but he could never get a name or a confirmation, so he ran the names on the purchase order. The carbines were never delivered.

The Messenger continued to run an abridged version of the infamous “Manly editorial,” and next to it each day was featured a new, lurid, sensationalized account of Negro rampage: Black Beasts Attempt to Outrage the Young Daughter of a Respectable Farmer! Often, the stories were wired out of Charlotte or Raleigh, and Sam began to suspect that the newswire was being used as a trick to make it impossible to verify such accounts. For all he knew, they were concocted in the back room of his own paper, then traded around the state with changing datelines.

Circulation tripled.

Except for the Winchester piece, his own stories were mild reports of street improvements, sermons, the comings and goings of socialites. He compiled the national news off the wire and retyped illegible letters from citizens so the compositors could make sense out of them. There was news happening all around him, but he could not pin down specifics. It made him cross and jumpy.

But he did not take a drink. Which was not easy.