In a melodic tone, he said, “Teacher, there are more prosperous colored families in this city than you would ever believe. I’m talking about lawyers and moneylenders and businessmen. Oriental carpets and a grand piano in the parlor. Men and women who have been to school, some of them to college. Who hire out their laundry and eat fresh meat in the middle of the week, who read books and ponder the sacred. But they’re poor, teacher—poor as the dumbest plantation nigger. And do you know why? Because they don’t aspire. Aspire, teacher. Like in breath. Like in spirit. They live on the surface. They believe that what they have is enough.”

“Maybe it is.”

“What they have is everything there is, teacher,” he said. He was right up in her face now. “Everything except freedom.”

“Speak for yourself.”

He drew back and made himself bigger. “I am a preacher of the Lord. My life must be large enough to encompass all the lives of my people.”

“Just who are your people? Where is your church?”

“Look around you. This is my church.” He stamped his foot in the sandy street. “Here is my pulpit.”

Any minute now, Gray Ellen expected him to grab a passerby and start casting out devils. She wanted to get out of here, go home. Sam would be there by now. She should never have come out here with this wild man in a gray suit that never wrinkled.

“They cling to the surface,” Grant said. He scuffed his shoe across the sand, raking out a large comma. “But the surface can be wiped away, just like that.”

She waited for more, but apparently the sermon was finished. “As I said, what do you expect of me? I’m just a schoolteacher.”

“I expect you to stop, look, and listen,” he said. “Or the Glory Train gonna run you over. I expect you to open your eyes and ears and heart. I expect you to remember what you see here when your Mr. Jenks writes his little tales of Negro domination.”

So that was it. A Chicago alderman had once tried to intimidate her to stop Sam from writing the truth. “Sam doesn’t write that trash.”

“You don’t sound too sure, teacher. You do your homework?”

“My husband is a man of principles.”

“They’re all men of principles, teacher—that’s what makes them dangerous.” He had her walking again. The street was so deep in sand that she had trouble stepping.

He stopped her in front of a two-story frame house that rose out of the row of shotgun shacks like a rickety tower guarding the corner.

“Just what do you mean?” she said. “Who?”

He backed her against the house. The boards were sharp and warm against her spine. Across the street, a gang of idle men and boys watched. She could feel their eyes, hear their giggling laughter. For the first time, she feared for her physical safety—this man might do anything, and she was in the one place in the whole city where she could count on no help from anybody.