“Them’s Baldwins!” Isom cried. “I know that bastard there.”

“Shut up!” the leader said. He was a tall thin man with fleshy lips and a high, thin voice. “You’re under arrest for seditious activities.” He smashed a whiskey bottle with his rifle butt. “And for selling whiskey on Sunday.”

“I aint sellin it,” Ermel said. “I’m treatin my friends here. And you got no right—”

The man walked up to him and pointed the gun barrel at his temple.

“What you say?”

They tied our hands behind our backs and marched us to the train station. Annadel ran up just as we was boarding.

“Go git Roscoe,” Ermel called. She nodded mutely.

We was scared and quiet when they checked us into the county jail at Justice. All except Isom, that is.

“What is this?” he kept saying. “You cant do this.”

They hit him once and Ermel told him to pipe down. But he started up again when Doc, Sam and the other Negroes was set aside for separate cells in the back of the jail.

“That’s right!” Isom yelled. “Git them socialist niggers away from us good white men. Aint nothin worse than a red black man!”

Doc snickered and a guard pushed him.

“Son, you aint in Annadel,” Ermel said.

We was four to a cell, and only two cots. You couldn’t call them cots really because they was no mattresses, just the wire frames that grilled our hides if we stayed in the same position more than five minutes. And burlap sacks for cover. And the electric lights on all through the night. And hard-boiled eggs with cold fried baloney for every meal.

I slept until my neck ached and my head felt like the metal frame of the mattress had grown into my skull. Then I heard singing from the colored section. I sat up.

“What’s that?” Isom snickered. “‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’?”

“No. Listen.”

It was the “Star Spangled Banner.” They sung it through and started it again. By the third time, a guard stalked past our cell, muttering to himself.

Isom laughed his high cackling laugh. “Jesus God! That’s the worst song in the world!” He kicked Everett Day, who slept on the floor. “Wake up, Everett. Let’s help em.”

We waited until they reached the beginning and started in. “Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light!”

A guard ran up, banged on the door. “Shut that up!”

“O-oer the la-a-and of the freeee!”

We took shifts, sung it over and over again. Isom rocked back and forth on his heels, waved his arms in time to the music.

“Aint it fun bein seditious?” he said.

“—and the ho-ome of the bra-a-ave!”

After seven or eight hours, it weren’t so much fun. We tapered off a bit, but we managed to keep it going. Finally they let us out, cussing all the time. Annadel waited in the hallway along with Roscoe Titlow, one of Ermel’s Democrat cronies. Roscoe was a short man with close-cropped gray hair and a face that looked like it had been gnawed on.