The commencement ceremony came to an end at eleven thirty. Students, parents, and alumni began to drift away through the shadows of the tall elms, heading for the formal lunches at which graduating students would be given their degrees. George looked out for his family but did not at first see them.

However, he did see Joseph Hugo.

Hugo was alone, standing by the bronze statue of John Harvard, lighting one of his long cigarettes. In the black ceremonial robe his white skin looked even more pasty. George clenched his fists. He wanted to beat the crap out of that rat. But his left arm was useless and, anyway, if he and Hugo had a fistfight in the Old Yard, today of all days, there would be hell to pay. They might even lose their degrees. George was already in enough trouble. He would be wise to ignore Hugo and walk on.

Instead he said: “Hugo, you piece of shit.”

Hugo looked scared, despite George’s injured arm. He was the same size as George, and probably as strong, but George had rage on his side, and Joseph knew it. He looked away and tried to walk around George, muttering: “I don’t wish to speak to you.”

“I’m not surprised.” George moved to stand in his way. “You watched while a crazed mob attacked me. Those thugs broke my goddamned arm.”

Hugo took a step back. “You had no business going to Alabama.”

“And you had no business pretending to be a civil rights activist when all the time you were spying for the other side. Who was paying you, the Ku Klux Klan?”

Hugo lifted his chin defensively, and George wanted to punch it. “I volunteered to give information to the FBI,” Hugo said.

“So you did it without pay! I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse.”

“But I won’t be a volunteer much longer. I start work for the Bureau next week.” He said it in the half-embarrassed, half-defiant tone of someone admitting that he belongs to a religious sect.

“You were such a good snitch that they gave you a job.”

“I always wanted to work in law enforcement.”

“That’s not what you were doing in Anniston. You were on the side of the criminals there.”

“You people are Communists. I’ve heard you talking about Karl Marx.”

“And Hegel, and Voltaire, and Gandhi, and Jesus Christ. Come on, Hugo, even you aren’t that stupid.”

“I hate disorder.”

And that was the problem, George reflected bitterly. People hated disorder. Press coverage had blamed the Riders for stirring up trouble, not the segregationists with their baseball bats and their bombs. It drove him mad with frustration: did no one in America think about what was right?

Across the grass he spotted Verena Marquand, waving at him. He abruptly lost interest in Joseph Hugo.

Verena was graduating from the English Department. However, there were so few people of color at Harvard that they all knew one another. And she was so gorgeous that he would have noticed her if she had been one of a thousand colored girls at Harvard. She had green eyes and skin the color of toffee ice cream. Under her robe she was wearing a green dress with a short skirt that showed off long smooth legs. The mortarboard was perched on her head at a cute angle. She was dynamite.