“The autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi.” George felt he ought to know more about Gandhi, whose philosophy had inspired the civil rights movement’s nonviolent protest tactics.

She took a book from on top of the refrigerator. “You might find this a little more entertaining. It’s a bestseller.”

They had always shared books. Her father had been a literature professor at a Negro college, and she had been a reader from childhood. When George was a boy he and his mother had read the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys together, even though all the heroes were white. Now they regularly passed each other books they had enjoyed. He looked at the volume in his hand. Its transparent plastic cover told him it was borrowed from the local public library. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” he read. “This just won a Pulitzer Prize, didn’t it?”

“And it’s set in Alabama, where you’re going.”

“Thanks.”

A few minutes later he kissed his mother good-bye, left the house with a small suitcase in his hand, and caught a bus to Washington. He got off at the downtown Greyhound station. A small group of civil rights activists had gathered in the coffee shop. George knew some of them from the training sessions. They were a mixture of black and white, male and female, old and young. As well as a dozen or so Riders, there were some organizers from the Congress of Racial Equality, a couple of journalists from the Negro press, and a few supporters. CORE had decided to split the group in two, and half would leave from the Trailways bus station across the street. There were no placards and no television cameras: it was all reassuringly low-key.

George greeted Joseph Hugo, a fellow law student, a white guy with prominent blue eyes. Together they had organized a boycott of the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Woolworth’s was integrated in most states but segregated in the South, like the bus service. But Joe had a way of disappearing just before a confrontation, and George had him pegged as a well-meaning coward. “Are you coming with us, Joe?” he asked, trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

Joe shook his head. “I just came by to say good luck.” He smoked long mentholated cigarettes with white filter tips, and he was twitchily tapping one on the edge of a tin ashtray.

“Pity. You’re from the South, aren’t you?”

“Birmingham, Alabama.”

“They’re going to call us outside agitators. It would have been useful to have a Southerner on the bus to prove them wrong.”

“I can’t, I have stuff to do.”

George did not press Joe. He was scared enough himself. If he started to discuss the dangers he might talk himself out of going. He looked around the group. He was pleased to see John Lewis, a quietly impressive theology student who was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the civil rights groups.

Their leader called for attention and began a short statement to the press. While he was speaking George saw, slipping into the coffee shop, a tall white man of forty in a crumpled linen suit. He was handsome though heavy, his face showing the flush of a drinker. He looked like a bus passenger, and no one paid him any attention. He sat next to George and, putting one arm around his shoulders, gave him a brief hug.