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I was just completely shocked. I had never seen anything like this in my entire life. We got back in the car and I didn't know what to say. Finally, I said, "What did you do that for, Ray? He was just an old man."

He said, "You don't understand a damn thing" and launched into a tirade about how if you give them an inch, they take a mile, blah blah blah. And I just had an anger that started right then and has animated my entire life, an anger and an abhorrence of the misuse of power.

It just so happened that my girlfriend's brother was married to this beautiful, sexy redhead who worked as a secretary in Wilson. This secretary began having an affair with Ray. Her husband's brothers found out about it and warned him to stay the hell away from her and he didn't.

And then one night, they cornered him out on the edge of town and put a gun on him and led him out to a corn patch and worked him over with an ice pick -- where it counted.

I was repelled by Ray, but I felt sorry for him too. I felt, in some way, that he was an outcast, just like I felt I was. He was an outsider and lonely. I was not able to articulate it at that time, but he had been wounded in some way.

I also thought, this guy tells it like it is. He has guts to really say what was going on. In other words, he was not a hypocrite. With all of his anger and racism, he was who-the-hell-he-was and unembarrassed about it.

I learned a lot about life from him. He showed me what life was really about, not what it appeared on the surface. It wasn't until I was just so shocked by his brazen cruelty that I really knew that I had to get away from him.

I believe that Wilson was just a microcosm of everything I saw later in the larger life of presidential politics and the civil rights movement. Pride and chicanery, bravery and cowardice, cynicism and idealism, compassion and cruelty -- everything I saw later was merely an enlargement of the things I had seen and learned in that little town of Wilson."

(Historian David Cecelski can be reached at dcecelski@yahoo.com.)

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