“Just add it up, Mr. Shipman. The vote will get easier for them, won’t it, with desegregation? Washington is working on that. And remember, there might be only three hundred niggers here, but there are fifteen million of them in the United States. Did you know that?”

“I knew the figure was something close to that, yes.”

“All right now, here’s something perhaps you don’t know. By actual statistics, Negroes represent only nine point nine per cent of the total U. S. population. The total population, see. But what per cent do you think they represent in the South? In Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, let’s put it this way. Out of the fifteen million in America, over seventy-five per cent of them are right here in the South. Over seventy-five per cent.” The young man rose. “With desegregation, the next thing you know, they’ll all be here. And the vote will be right in their back pocket! And then we are really going to see some changes. . . .”

A hot redness was creeping into Shipman’s face; a long-­forgotten tension growing slowly inside him. “I never thought about it exactly that way,” he admitted.

“I know,” the young man said, “most folks don’t. They don’t realize.­ That’s the trouble with the South—the people are too open and honest and trusting. They just can’t believe that the government would betray them. But that’s what’s happening.”

“Well,” Shipman said angrily, “we tried to stop it. We did every­thing we could. It’s a damn law now.”

“Is it?” the visitor asked.

“What do you mean, ‘is it’? Of course it is. Hell, the Attorney-General—”

“I thought this was a Democracy,” Adam Cramer said softly, almost innocently. “And I thought a Democracy was a government based on the collective will of the people.”

“Of course, of course.”

“And is it the collective will of the people of Caxton that niggers are to be allowed to mix with whites right under the same roof? Study with them, eat with them, maybe even sleep with them? No. Mr. Shipman, laws can be changed; decisions can be altered—it’s happened in the past. Labor unions have shown us that.”

Shipman knocked the dottle out of his pipe. “You’re gonna have a hard time selling me on labor unions, fella. I’ll tell you that.”

“I was only using them as an example,” the young man said quickly. “I mean that group action, group will, can have a positive effect. It created the law in the first place, didn’t it?”

“I don’t follow you.”