I thanked him, hung up. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. But when I picked up, it wasn’t Terrence, but Mr. Branch again, who said that Terrence couldn’t talk right now, but he wanted to know if I would like to come to the Challenger tomorrow around noon, and he would take me out to lunch.

•   •   •

By day Central Avenue looked entirely different—no neon, no jostling crowds. More just an ordinary street, only everyone was colored. I left the Silver Bullet in a parking lot between a dry cleaner and the offices of the Challenger, a two-story brick building. Emblazoned across the windows and the door were two stylized figures, one large and overbearing with a club, one small but strong, arm upraised, rock in hand. Inside I saw orderly rows of desks, but very little else orderly: stacks of paper, books falling over, files lying atop cabinets, an arsenal of phone books, and an array of lamps. I didn’t see Terrence anywhere.

“If you’ll just have a seat,” said the receptionist, a matronly woman who didn’t seem to pay my shiner the least mind, “he’ll be back soon.”

The Challenger itself was spread out on the coffee table in front of an aged leather couch. Leafing through a few issues, I got the impression that, like a small-town chronicle, it covered local high school heroics of both sporting and musical varieties, the meetings of social and service and church clubs, the awards collected by church choirs, the travels of pastors, the closing of a pawnshop, and the arrest of three inept men who tried to rob a shoe store. However, the Challenger also lived up to its name. Its pages described questionable police activities, including bribery, extortion, and cruelty. Its editorials called for the immediate universal implementation of last year’s Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (which I had never heard of). Terrence Dexter’s column talked about the integration of the black musicians’ union #767 with the whites’ #47 two years before, not just the advantages, but the clubhouse camaraderie that black musicians forfeited with the merger.

Terrence came in the front door and said my name. He had stitches over his eye that looked raw and painful. He wore a jaunty fedora, and he bristled with energy or indignation, I couldn’t tell which, but not that cold anger I had sensed at the police station. He commented ironically on my shiner.

“All the girls are wearing them this spring.” I pointed to the newspaper and asked why there was no mention of the Comet Club raid in the Challenger.

“Next issue. We only come out three times a week. Used to be six days a week before the War. Ben Tupper’s writing the article. I’m writing the column. I have more leeway with the column. Come with me; I know Mr. Branch would like to meet you.”