Henry’s tires thumped as his Explorer rolled off the bridge, and he prepared to turn left, into the old downtown. It was during the fifties, he reflected, that a nasty streak of racism had taken root in Natchez. The seeds of that sentiment had come from outside the town proper. Though Natchez had been the slaveholding capital of the South, its leaders were Anglophiles who sympathized with the Union cause. Even those who didn’t were wealthy aristocrats who’d educated their sons in the Ivy League and sent their daughters to the royal courts of Europe. Their descendants had a far more enlightened view of race relations than most Mississippians. But by the 1950s, large numbers of poor whites had been brought in to work in the town’s new manufacturing plants, and with them came the extreme and sometimes violent prejudice of the working class. Hailing from places like Liberty, Mississippi, and Monroe, Louisiana—hard-shell Baptist country—these descendants of the archetypal Confederate foot soldier were the disaffected ranks that Klan recruiters found ready for action when the Negro started trying to achieve equal rights in the workplace. Men like Frank and Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and Glenn Morehouse—guys who weren’t afraid to get their hands bloody while carrying out the will of the White Citizens’ Council members who preferred the status quo but wouldn’t risk their liberty or good name to maintain it.

Thankfully, things had changed since those days. Two years ago, the citizens of Natchez had elected Penn Cage mayor, and the former lawyer and author had worked hard to heal the wounds that remained in the city’s body politic. Cage’s election victory had surprised some, but not Henry. The author had a half a century of goodwill to cash in on—not his own, but that of his father, a beloved physician who’d always treated blacks just as he had whites. That goodwill bought the son more than a third of the black vote on election day, even with Penn running against a black candidate—Shadrach Johnson, the very man Henry was now headed to see.

Henry parked his Explorer in the shadow of the incongruously modern sheriff’s department building, retrieved his briefcase from the trunk, and walked across the street toward the DA’s office. Adjacent to City Hall and the courthouse, the DA’s building seemed to crouch under the slit windows of the sheriff’s department and the county jail. As Henry trotted up the stairs, his sense of dread intensified. Shad Johnson was a politician with his eye on the main chance. He would undoubtedly ask Henry some pointed questions, and Henry didn’t want to say any more than the law required. It would be good practice for dealing with the FBI later in the day, as he would almost surely be required to do.