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him, unpierced, unpierceable. It wasn’t the dark of night, nor even the dark of a closed and shuttered room at midnight. No light had ever come here. No light ever would, or could. Not the darkness of a mineshaft. The darkness of ... the tomb?
    Realizing he must be dead made a lot of things fall together. A lot, but not enough. As far back as he could remember ... He couldn’t remember dying , dammit. Absurdly, that made him angry. Something so important in a man’s life, you’d think he would remember it. But he didn’t, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.
    He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn’t expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn’t know how he’d expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?
    I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways . Again, he would have laughed if he could. Why the hell not? I’ve got all the time in the world .
    * * * *
    Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward
Philadelphia.
    A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like ... like a man knows his name, that’s how. That time without light, without self? A dream , he told himself. Must have been a dream .
    Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already done a lifetime’s worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime’s worth, too.
    He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn’t drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.
    They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren’t going to get the chance.
    Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in
Mississippi
. It would stay like this for months.
    He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn’t help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.
    “You all right, Cecil?” That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn’t want the law, or what passed for the law in
Mississippi
in 1964, spotting them. They’d come down from the North to give the oppressed and disenfranchised whites in the state a helping hand, and the powers that be hated them worse than anybody.
    “I’m okay,” Cecil Price answered. I’m okay now , he thought. I know who I am. Hell, I know that I am . He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.
    “We get to
Meridian, everything’ll be fine,” Muhammad Shabazz said.
    “Sure,” Cecil said. “Sure.” The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He’d taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now...
    Now they had to get through
Neshoba
County
. They had to get past
Philadelphia. They had to run the gauntlet of lawmen who hated white people and Black Knights of Voodoo who hated whites even more—and of lawmen who were Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality’s beat-up station wagon. If RACE’s old blue Ford wasn’t the best-known car in eastern
Mississippi
, Price was damned if he knew another one that would be.
    Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who’d come down from
New York
and
Ohio
to give his downtrodden race