“But a person can always wake up, and that’s what’s happened to me,” Shipman went on. “I’ve waked up. And now I’m ready to fight to save my town.” He warmed rapidly to his subject, began pacing the room. “If we all pitch in now,” he said, “we can have this licked inside of a month. Maybe less. And those knotheads in the Supreme Court, they’ll see that their little plan wouldn’t work—and that’ll be the end of it. By God, it makes my blood boil to think that right now, at this minute, there’s niggers sitting next to white girls in our school!”

Shipman took Tom’s glass, sloshed a quantity of gin into it. “It’s going to be a hell of a battle,” he said.

“Almost as much fun as hunting!” He hadn’t meant to say it. But it was too late to stop now. “That’s it, isn’t it, Verne? You’ve been bored of everything for years, now there’s some excitement and you’re raring to go.”

“No,” Shipman said slowly, “that isn’t it at all, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say.”

“Yes.” Shipman relit his pipe and walked to the desk. “Whatever you think, Tom, it happens that I’m convinced. Maybe you don’t like the boy. That’s all right. But he’s opened my eyes, wide; and he’s shown me that he’s a leader. People listen to him.” He rummaged in the top drawer. “Have you seen this?”

Tom took the photograph of the Negro kissing the white girl. He glanced at it and tossed it back. “I saw it ten years ago,” he said. “That thing’s been floating around since 1946. It was taken in Paris. The Negro is a G.I.”

Shipman flushed. “Well, that doesn’t make any difference. The same sort of thing is going on in America, right now. It could just as easy go on in Caxton.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Tom said. “What makes you so damn certain that the minute we have integration all the Negroes are going to start sleeping with the white women? Do you think these women are standing around, waiting for it to happen?”

“That isn’t the point,” Shipman said.

“Well, I don’t care what the point is. I just know this. We’ve done everything that can be done to keep integration out of Caxton, but the law says we’ve got to have it, and I believe in obeying the law. Cramer apparently doesn’t. I don’t like him; I don’t trust him and I am certainly not going to run his stinking ad. You can tell him that.” Tom got his hat and opened the door. “He seems to have forgotten that I’m the editor of the Messenger.”