“Naw,” said Doc Booker. “The real reason they fightin this war is over all them colonies in Africa. The German imperialists wants what the British imperialists has got.”

“Oh, hell,” said Isom. “What do them Croatians and Serbians know about Africa? They started it.”

“And we’ll finish it,” Ermel declared. “Wait and see. They’ll be American boys over there before this is all over.”

“Your man Woodrow says not,” I teased him.

“He aint my man just because he’s a Democrat. He’d need ten sets of balls before he could stand alongside William Jennings Bryan.”

Sam Gore went to the bar to fetch some liquor.

“What would ole Abe say to this?” Isom asked.

“He’d say, ‘America, the enemy is within.’” Sam raised a glass.

Behind him the door exploded and a score of men with drawn pistols poured into the room.

“Hands up! You’re under arrest!”

“What the hell?” Ermel stood up.

“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.”