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Mississippi Delta.
    It is tempting to imagine him then, tooling along the arrow-straight back roads, through towns named Panther Burn, Money, and Midnight, passing in the dust, unaware, another car bearing a traveling businessman, a veteran, a black man whose path would someday cross with his own.

4
Brave New World
    America needed soldiers, and it didn’t care what color they were. For the first time black men were actively recruited for combat. But the services were still segregated in World War II and Medgar Evers was assigned to the 325th Port Company, where only the officers were white. The 325th followed the Normandy invasion into France and moved inland and south with the Allied troops.
    The names of the cities were like strange music to a seventeen-year-old from Mississippi: Le Havre, Cherbourg, Antwerp. Europe was exotic and exciting, and the white folks didn’t seem to have the same attitudes as those back home. There was no Jim Crow, not once you got away from your unit. Even there it was different. There was a white lieutenant who took an interest in him, encouraged him to work on his vocabulary and take pride in himself. Medgar was befriended by one family of French farmers, and he even started courting their daughter. He felt comfortable with whites for the first time in his life. For the first time, he learned that the whole world wasn’t like Mississippi.
    Charles was learning his own lessons on the other side of the world. In basic training he ran crap games and sold bootleg to the soldiers, always on the hustle. That was nothing new. Then he was shipped to the Pacific theater — Australia, then New Guinea. He served with a battalion of combat engineers. He hurt his leg jumping into a foxhole and got reassigned to administrative duty. It increased his business opportunities.
    After the Philippine invasion, Charles Evers found a new line of work. He opened his first brothel in Quezon City. He had ten girls working for him, turning tricks for five dollars each — twice that for officers. It was an integrated establishment and, Charles insists, a clean one. Money was money, and Evers was going to make it by providing services to those in need.
    Meanwhile Charles took some classes in English at the University of Manila business school. That was where he met a good Filipino girl named Felicia. Charles loved Felicia like he never loved anybody before or since. He never even slept with her. He wanted to marry her, but there was no way to do it. He couldn’t stay in the Philippines, and he couldn’t take Felicia back to Mississippi because she was part French and her skin was white. He knew they wouldn’t survive five minutes back home. When he shipped out, it just tore him up. He knew he would never see her again.
    Medgar also left his French girlfriend behind. He even had to stop writing to her once he got back to Decatur. If certain people found out that he had a white girl in Europe, then Medgar and his family would be in terrible danger.
    The war changed the Evers boys, but it didn’t change Mississippi. Medgar and Charles Evers went overseas to fight fascism and now they had to live under it in their own country. It wasn’t right, and there wasn’t anything to do but change it.
    So in the summer of 1946, Medgar, Charles, and a handful of other young veterans from Decatur took the first step toward resistance. They registered to vote.
    At first they made a big show of walking into the registrar’s office, and they were turned away. Later they quietly slipped onto the rolls. Of the nine hundred or so registered voters in Decatur, they were the only blacks.
    As the primary approached, somebody noticed what had happened, and the nightly visits began. At first it was concerned white people who would knock on Jim and Jessie Evers’s door, warning them that their sons were making a mistake. Then black proxies would show up with the same message and the same vague threats.
    The night before the election,