But he would continue: “Now I’m not talking this grassroots, fundamentalist crap either—which is okay by me compared to these conformist, suburban, going-through-the-motions, fair-Sunday Christ-claimers—but please don’t get me wrong—it’s something individual, what I’m talking about, and it’s something pure, and it’s something powerful, and in some people—and I’ve seen it happen too—it can even be something dangerous. You see, it’s a gift, like any gift. Know what I mean?”

No, I thought, I have no idea what you mean. For this was no straightforward, textbook theology. I could not simply apply Hegelian logic. And I was not prepared for a mystical, mumbo-jumbo assault so like the superstitious Call for which I had been groomed—not from this representative of the “rational” theological establishment. It took me by surprise. I would smile, graciously, as good Southern colored boys who want to grow up to be preachers do, while he lit another cigarette. He was a chain smoker, or the closest thing in my experience at that point to a chain smoker.

“What I’m saying is that you’ve got to get out of here. Southeastern is fine for a year. Maybe. But really. Why don’t you try to get into Union or Princeton or even Duke, for chrissakes . . .”

But then he would say, No. I should “get the fuck” out of the South (though he was not a minister, it still made me uncomfortable to hear “cuss words” float from the mouth of a respected theologian, mixed in with any subject from Jesus to Jezebel). New York. Boston. Chicago. San Francisco. Philadelphia. Washington. (Though he confessed Washington was not northern enough for his tastes.) Go North, young man. Go North.

This, on the other hand, I understood. It was neither mystical nor superstitious. My brother, Franklin, who had just completed Howard Law and had been taken on as a junior associate in Washington, and my sister, Isador, who was working on her doctorate in architecture at Berkeley, had both been singing the same old song to me. Leave North Carolina. Get out. As if it were on fire. As if, like Sodom or Gomorrah, the Almighty would at any moment rain down fire to punish the wicked for all the evil done on Southern soil.

But with me it was just the opposite. And I summed it up in one simple question: “If we all ‘get out,’ who will stay?”