Something was missing. His bones were there, but his spirit was somewhere else. Maybe somewhere we had yet to go. We left Atlanta that night, and as we settled into a hillside motel just outside Tuskegee, Alabama, we saw a short news story about a small Georgia church whose leaders wanted to dig up a child's body because one of her parents is black and all of the dead people in the cemetery are white. Tuskegee , following signs from the past.
Highway signs point the way to more historical truths.
But the road to deeper understanding runs through an obstacle course of pop culture and thick ironies.