“I don’t know if we should do this. We’re going to get back so late.” I sank down into the backseat. I was getting scared. Going to see a woman who went to jail for helping Negroes sit up front on buses.

“You want some of these cookies?” Irise turned around in the seat and handed a basket of cookies to me. “Eula made them for us. They’re pecan and chocolate chip. Try one.”

We stopped in Birmingham to go to a liquor store and get some wine. “I want to go to the bookstore too,” I said. “If it’s still open. Let’s go and see if it’s open.”

“The liquor store closes early. We better do that first.”

“Drop me off at the bookstore. Then you can go get the wine.” Charles William drove down the main avenue, then turned onto a side street and stopped the car beside a small hidden bookstore with dirty windows and a door with peeling green paint.

“We’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll grab something and come back out and meet you here.” I ran inside and hurried back to the poetry section. I read the titles, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, E. E. Cummings, Wordsworth, Edna Millay, Shakespeare’s sonnets. I already had all of them.

“Can I help you?” The owner had come to stand beside me.

“I want some poetry that I haven’t read. Do you have anything new? I was in here a couple of months ago. Charles William Waters brought me.”

“Oh, I know Charles William. Where is he? Is he with you?”

“He’s at the liquor store. I only have a minute. We’re on our way to Montgomery.” I lowered my voice and looked around. “We’re going to meet a civil rights worker. His cousin is married to a civil rights worker. We’re going to meet her.”

“Oh, Derry Maitland that married Dr. Waters. I know her. She orders books from me. Look, I didn’t get your name.”

“Rhoda Manning, well, it’s Martin now but I’m divorced, I think. I guess it’s final. Do you have anything new in poetry? Anything I haven’t read?”

“And what have you read?”

“Well, everything that’s up there I guess. Millay is my favorite and Wordsworth and Elinor Wylie but I only have five poems by her. Do you know ‘Wild Peaches’? I love ‘Wild Peaches.’ And that one that goes, ‘I can not give you heaven; nor the nine Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum; nor happiness, even.’ God, I love that poem.”

“Have you read the Greeks? Do you know this?” He reached up and took a small brown book from the shelf, The Oresteian Trilogy. “This is poetry,” he said. “It’s a play. This is a new translation.”