I got better at answering that one, as I strummed and picked and rolled through those echoing classrooms. I stopped saying that slavery had been universal not long ago and the Russians had had their serfs, that several hundred thousand white men from the North had died so that slaves could be free, that a hundred years later civil-rights laws had been passed and lynching had become a rarity. I could tell, as I stood there listening to myself being translated, that I was losing them, it was too much like what they heard from their own teachers, too much pie in the sky. I changed to saying simply yes, it was a problem, a disgraceful problem, but that I honestly believed that America was working at it, and music was one of the foremost ways it was working at it. Listening to myself talk, I’d sometimes think the State Department knew what it was doing, bringing a natural patriotic optimist like me over here. Ever since JFK had got shot, my breed was harder to find. They must have had a pretty fat file on me somewhere: the thought made me uneasy.

It felt best when I played, played as if for a country-fair crowd back home, and those young Russian faces would light up as if I were telling jokes. They had all heard jazz, and even some Twist and early rock on tapes that were smuggled through, but rarely anything so jaunty and tinny and jolly, so irrepressible, as banjo music going full steam, when your fingers do the thinking and you listen in amazement yourself. Sometimes they would pair me with a balalaika player, and one little Azerbaijani, I think he had some Gypsy blood, tried my instrument, and I his. We made an act of it for a few days, touring the Caucasus, hill towns where old men with beards would gather outside the auditorium windows as if sipping moonshine. When they had advertised ahead for a formal concert, the crowds were so big the Soviet controllers cut down on the schedule.