“Alabama made me think. A reporter sticks to the facts of that one day, he sees things in dollops, this day, and that day, this fact and that. He writes it up in dollops. I keep thinking there’s a book in this, in what I experienced down there. Because the facts themselves don’t answer, don’t tell the whole story. You gotta look beyond the facts. When you write a book, you gotta ask what things mean, make sense of the whole. What I experienced in Montgomery, it was biblical, Roxanne, biblical. I thought I was going down to Montgomery to report. I didn’t know I was going to watch a whole city play Moses. In Montgomery they weren’t just staying off the bus, they’re leading ourselves out of bondage.”

“Turn it into a novel.”

“Oh no. In August Branch’s world, you make stuff up, you going to hell.”

“All right. Not a novel. Write about Moses Shaw. You made him into a powerful figure. Heroic.”

“Well, he was heroic, baby, but that’s just it. He went about being heroic just as if he was plowing a furrow. Up one side, down the other. He never protested his arrests, never fought back when they lit into him. He seemed unchanged. Like Job. How does a man live like that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully.