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Allen slides into a booth, leans back on the old-fashioned, black-vinyl-covered seats, asks Earlene for a rum-and-coke, and starts talking strategy with her boothmates, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Mary Cuthbert and community activist Helyn Boone. He eases his stocky frame into the adjacent booth, also crowded with Allen supporters.

When Sandy Allen came up one vote short in the May council race, she could have turned tail; she could have jumped off a bridge; she could have gone to church and prayed. Every time the door opens, the bargoers pause in conversation and turn to see if the new arrival is a player. William Lockridge, O. Johnson, and Raheem Jenkins, three more defeated council candidates, mosey in and greet Allen.

Robert Yeldell, a Ward 8 political activist, crouches at the bar, nursing a beer and reading the newspaper. After a few minutes of schmoozing, the politicos—now numbering more than a dozen—carry their drinks to the back room, where the real business begins. For the next hour, Allen, her legal advisers, and her supporters swarm together, plotting their assault.

And if the legal challenge fails, promises community activist Sandra Seegars, a group of Ward 8 residents will mount a campaign to recall Whittington. The four women are playing their regular game of bid whist.

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They keep slapping cards on the table, joking, and drinking their beer and vodka. Georgene buries her head deeper in her cards. The building at Martin Luther King Jr. A glossy-red-painted metal door offers no clue about what lies on the other side. It smells and sounds like a South Carolina or Mississippi juke joint.

King groans on the turntable to the right. Farther inside, patrons sit on vinyl-covered stools pulled up to the formica-topped bar. They watch the early news on a color television—the only visible sign of technological advancement—above the cash register. Behind the bar, an upright freezer of the kind found in convenience stores cools the wines, beers, and liquor.

Strategically placed mirrors line the walls, offering the vain quick reflection. Today it advertises baked chicken, pan-fried fish, smothered pork chops, cabbage, ribs, greens, and cornbread. In the back, across a tile floor riven with cracks and bumps, is the war room where Allen and the other pols conspire.

This is a smaller, dressier affair. Plastic roses adorn cloth-covered tables. The bathrooms are also in the back. This Friday afternoon, Georgene Thompson, half of the husband-and-wife team that owns the club, stands behind the bar taking orders. Her husband, Stephen Thompson, works the kitchen.

He and Gerri are frying fish and wilting the collard greens.