Adam Cramer did not greet her; he simply pulled away, and they drove in the direction of the highway, toward the forest, and did not speak at all.

Then the car stopped under a quilt of green sunlight.

Adam Cramer shifted in his seat. “You said you didn’t want to talk to me,” he said, “so I won’t ask you to. I will ask you to listen, however. And listen carefully.” He lit a cigarette, and Ella could see that he was nervous also, for his movements were short and jerky and his eyes would not stay still.

“First I want to tell you that I’m sorry about what happened to your father. I don’t know what made him do such a foolish thing, and it might even be said that he was asking for trouble, but—now understand this, Ella—I had nothing to do with it. Nothing whatsoever, in any way. Whoever it was, they acted completely on their own. In fact, at the time it happened, I was in my room at the hotel. You can verify that if you want to. Also, I had no part in the church dynamiting. And that can be verified too. Are you listening?”

Ella nodded. She was listening, but she heard with only half of her mind.

“All right. Now I’m going to have to say some things to you that I don’t want to say. You’ll end up hating me, if you don’t already. And that makes me very unhappy, because for a while I thought we were pretty close. I thought there were wonderful things in store for us, and I was looking forward to them. So were you. But I’ve got to give all of that up now, because something far more important is at stake.

“I don’t know how well you understand the situation. Maybe you do, more than I suspect; maybe you don’t at all. Anyway, I have to explain a little of it before . . .”

Ella saw the fire in his eyes and knew that these eyes were not seeing her, were not traveling over her, but were full of an unseeing hot fire that frightened her.

“My organization,” Adam Cramer said, “was going well and we were taking big steps forward in licking this integration law, until some people—their names aren’t important—started to get ideas. They weren’t willing to go along with SNAP. They got impatient. They made some mistakes, and it was enough to weaken the whole movement. We’ve begun to lose the support of the people. They’re getting scared. Scared enough to pull out and just let things sit. But we can’t let that happen, because the niggers are still in school. You see?