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like hearing the name Jimmy McCullough—but if I present the situation the right way he just might stand by me. The champ knows what it’s like to be behind the eight ball. He never took any guff from anybody, not even when the mob came down on him to take a dive. He did more than refuse: he knocked the guy out and walked away smelling as clean as freshly laundered towels.
    I don’t have many other choices. Calling my mother isn’t an option; she left after I was born and hasn’t shown up since. I’ve never laid eyes on her, but from what my father tells me, she never had to fight to survive. She was born into money. Big money. And she’s white.

Dorothy Albright trailed her father down the aisle of the Third Regiment Armory, joining the crowd of businessmen surrounding the boxing ring at the front of the arena. Dorothy had pinned her hair up on the crown of her head and refrained from dabbing rouge onto her cheeks, but she was still a rose in a butcher shop.
    She had been to the armory a year earlier to see one of her father’s prizefighters take his lumps from Marvin Hart, the heavyweight champion at the time. The place hadn’t changed—it reeked of sweat, tobacco, liniment, and greed. Beer stands were set up alongside the cheap bench seats in the back, and vendors worked the ringside aisles, hawking Cracker Jack and pretzels. Clusters of older men in sweat-stained work shirts gathered by the rear fire exit. They puffed on cigarettes as they talked in clipped sentences about the odds of the fight—and what they’d do with their winnings.
    It had taken three hours to get to Camden from Hartford, and there were hundreds of more acceptable ways Dorothy could have spent her day, let alone her evening. There was no Bible passage that addressed it directly, but she knew two brutes fighting for public entertainment went against the Lord’s word, somehow.
    To say that she saw the world differently than her father did was an understatement. He’d been talking up this fight ever since the Newark Evening-Star had agreed to back the statewide tournament four months ago. He could barely contain himself when speaking of how his latest investment, Barry Higgins, would soon have the championship belt of New Jersey wrapped around his flat Irish midsection.
    Back in grade school, Dorothy had admired her father, particularly when he spoke of respecting all people, regardless of their skin color. According to him, he’d always fought for the downtrodden. He even told her a story of how, when he was a young boy, he’d taken a few beatings at the hands of neighborhood teenagers for befriending the Negro, Tom Jeffries, who worked at his father’s general store. But now, Dorothy realized that her father’s tolerance wasn’t enough to make him an upstanding citizen. He simply wasn’t the straight arrow he presented himself to be. That’s why she railed against him, hoping a run of bad luck would convince him that his gambling businesses weren’t only illegal but built on temptation and moral weakness. His enterprise was the devil on Earth.
    But Dorothy did have a reason for being at the armory, and she didn’t dare mention it to her father. This would surely test his tolerance: she’d developed a fondness for a doughy knot of muscle named Ernie Leo, who was not only a Negro, but also Higgins’s opponent. She’d been praying for weeks that Ernie would buck the odds and walk away with the prize money—and force the Higgins syndicate, particularly its prime operator, to rue the day it ensnared itself in professional prizefighting.
    The overhead lights snapped off as Dorothy and her father found their seats. The only bulbs that now shone were the black torpedo lamps trained on the ring. Inside the ropes, Ernie shadowboxed in his corner. His skin was as dark as his leather boots, his legs muscular and sturdy. His feet looked heavy, as if