The chairman of the Birmingham chapter was a beefy, red-faced fellow named Barney Stevens. He'd been a sergeant during the war; Pinkard would have bet he'd been a mean one. At eight o'clock on the dot, he said, "Come on, boys-let's get this show on the road."

Together, they sang "Dixie." The singing wasn't of the best, nor anywhere close. That didn't matter. Roaring out the words to the Confederacy's national hymn reminded Jeff-and everyone else-why they'd banded together. The good times the song talked about could come again. The Freedom Party would make them come again.

After the last notes died, Stevens said, "Boys, the force that will conquer in the end is the fire of our young Confederate manhood. Today new people who claim power are arising in the Confederacy, men who've shed their blood for the Confederate States and know their blood flowed in vain, through the fault of the men who ran the government."

Jeff clapped till his hard-palmed hands were sore. He looked around the stable. A handful of the men there were of solid middle years. Most, though, were like him: men in their twenties and early thirties who'd been through the crucible of war and were ready to be poured into some new shape.

"There are too damned many of us for the government to put down by force," Barney Stevens declared, and his audience applauded again. "We have to wreck what needs wrecking, and by God there's plenty of it. We have to be hard and tough. The abscess on the body of the country needs cutting out and squeezing till the clear red blood flows. And the blood needs to flow for a good long time before the body is pure again."

"Freedom!" Jeff and the others shouted. The stable, the heavy air inside smelling of hay and horses, echoed to the cry.

"Come this fall," Stevens went on, "you'll need a new chairman here, on account of the Ninth District is going to send me to Congress." More cheers. Through them, he said, "And when I get to Richmond, I'm going to have me a few things to say about-"

"Freedom!" Pinkard shouted again, along with his comrades. He had a hard-on. It made him laugh. Emily had been unfaithful to him with a man. He was being unfaithful to her with the Party.

Stevens said, "Between now and election day, we're going to make people notice us. This Saturday afternoon, I hear tell, the niggers our damnfool government gave the vote to are gonna hold a rally-like they was really citizens, like they deserve to be citizens " Scorn dripped from his words. He wasn't quite so good as the national chairman, but he wasn't bad, either. He grinned out at the crowd. "How many of you boys want to put on white shirts and butternut pants and pay 'em a call?"

Almost every hand shot into the air. One of the men Stevens picked was Jefferson Pinkard. The chairman of the Birmingham chapter said, "Meet me at the corner of Cotton and Forestdale two o'clock Saturday afternoon. We'll have ourselves a good old time, damned if we won't."

"What about the cops?" somebody called from the back of the stable.

"What about 'em?" Barney Stevens said contemptuously. "They ain't gonna do nothin' to hold us off a bunch of uppity niggers." He grinned again. "And besides, a lot of them is us."

Most of the men at the meeting whom Pinkard knew were steelworkers at the Sloss foundries. But there were plenty he didn't know well enough to have learned what they did. He wouldn't have been surprised had some been policemen. Cops needed freedom like everybody else.

On the way out of the meeting, he threw a $500 banknote into the tin hat one of Barney Stevens' friends was holding. Weekly dues would probably go to $1,000 before long. Money didn't seem real any more. It was dying, along with so much of what he held dear. I'll make it better, he thought. I will.

Emily was still up when he got home. He'd thought she would have gone to bed. "It's late, Jeff," she said. "You're gonna be walkin' around like you was drunk tomorrow, you'll be so tired."

"Don't start in on me," he growled.

"Somebody needs to start in on you," his wife answered. "Dangerous enough out on the foundry floor when you're awake." Her voice rose, shrill and angry and worried, too. "You go out there half asleep, and-"

"Don't start in on me, I said!" He slapped her. She stared at him, her eyes enormous with shock. He'd never raised a hand to her, not even when he'd walked in on her and Bedford Cunningham. Why the hell not? he wondered, and found no answer.

He shoved her down the hall toward the bedroom, then picked her up, threw her down, and took her by force. They'd played lots of rough games over the years. This was no game, and they both knew it. Emily fought back as hard as she could. Pinkard was bigger and stronger and, tonight, meaner. After he spent himself and pulled out, she rolled away from him and cried, her face toward the wall. He fell asleep, sated and happy, with her sobs in his ears.

She didn't speak to him the next morning, except to answer things he said to her. But she made him his breakfast and handed him his dinner pail and generally took care not to get him angry. He pecked her on the cheek and walked off to work whistling.

"Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian said when he came onto the manmade hell that was the foundry floor. "Just got here my ownself"

"Good morning, Vespasian," Jeff said cheerfully. Vespasian was the best kind of nigger, sure enough: one who knew his place. Pinkard could hardly wait for Saturday afternoon. He and his buddies would take care of some niggers who didn't know theirs. They'd learn, by God!

He glanced toward Vespasian. In a really proper world, even the best kind of nigger wouldn't be doing any sort of white man's work. He'd be shoveling coal into the furnaces or out in the cotton fields where blacks belonged. Jeff wondered what the Freedom Party would do about that when it got the chance. Something worth doing. He was sure of that.

After he finished his Saturday half-day, he hurried home and changed into a white shirt and trousers the color of the Confederate uniform. When he started toward the door, Emily asked, ever so cautiously, "Where are you going?"

"Out," he answered, and did.

He got to the meeting place in good time. Barney Stevens shook his hand. "Good man," Stevens said, and gave him a two-foot length of thick doweling-as formidable a club as any policeman carried. "We'll teach the niggers they can't get away with putting on airs like they was as good as white folks."

Some of the Freedom Party men brought their own lead pipes or bottles or other chosen instruments of mayhem. With seventy or eighty of them all together, all dressed pretty much alike, they made a formidable force. Jeff's spirit soared at being part of something so magnificent. It soared again when a gray-clad policeman on horseback waved and tipped his cap to the Freedom Party force.

"Let's go," Barney Stevens said, as if they were about to head out of their trenches and over the top. And so, in a way, they were. "Remember, this is war. Hurt the enemy, help your pals, stay together, obey my orders. If I go down and out, Bill McLana-han's next in line. Now-form column of fours." The veterans obeyed without fuss. They'd done it before, countless times. "For'ard-haarch!" Stevens barked.

Magnolia Park, where the Negroes were holding their rally, was only a few blocks away. Their speaker stood on a platform on which Confederate flags fluttered. That made Jeff's blood boil, even more than Birmingham summer did. A dozen or so cops sufficed to keep a couple of dozen white hecklers away from the rally. Those white men weren't organized. The company from the Freedom Party was.

Cries of alarm rose from black throats when the Freedom Party men came into sight. "Double line of battle to the left and right," Barney Stevens shouted, and the men performed the evolution with practiced ease. Stevens pointed with his club as if it were a British field marshal's baton. "Charge!"