A Gathering Of Old Men

A sheriff is summoned to a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, where he finds one white woman, about eighteen old black men, and one dead Cajun farmer. The sheriff is sure he knows who killed the Cajun - although each of the men is toting a shotgun, only one of them could hit a barn door - but threats and slaps fail to change their stories. Each one claims guilt, and all but one promise to provoke a riot at the courthouse if the sheriff tries to make an arrest. In the meantime, they wait for a lynch mob that the dead man's father - like his son, a notorious brute - is sure to launch. Before it's over, everyone involved has been surprised by something: the old black men least of all, by their first taste of power and pride.