t takes just over four hours to drive from Birmingham to Memphis, if you push it a little. To get there you've got to go through several small towns, navigate a series of breathtaking peaks and thrilling plummets, then endure one of the most monotonous stretches of road in America.
We had six hours to get to a memorial service commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It was scheduled for 7 p.m., Thursday, April 4, 1996, 28 years to the hour that King was assassinated at Memphis's Lorraine Motel.
It was the last and biggest day of our five-day trip. As I drove, eyes open, mind asleep, Keith read Taylor Branch's history of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and Nikki read excerpts from King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."
The books, once buried under bags of potato chips and cookies, had come out of the trunk at breakfast in Selma the day before to satisfy a hunger that seemed to grow in my two children as we moved from Atlanta to Tuskegee to Montgomery to Selma and, earlier in the day, Birmingham.
We were only a few miles from the northern Mississippi border, traveling what was surely the most mind-numbing stretch of Highway 78, when I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the police lights.
I changed lanes. The lights changed lanes.
I pulled over, unbuckled my seat belt, and reached for the door handle.
"Don't get out!" Nikki said in a whispered shout.
"Why not?"
"Dad, don't get out of the car!"
Of course, I knew what this was about. We'd seen the same news footage and knew the same stories of out-of-control white police officers who brutalize and sometimes kill black men, especially in the South.
Nikki didn't know it, but we were reacting in opposite ways to the same fear. I'll never give a police officer the chance to hurt me just because the sight of a black man sitting in a car panicked him. I always get out.
Like every black man I've ever met, I have a strategy for dealing with white police officers. I rehearse it. Replay it. I think about the dialogue. Where my hands are. How my legs move.
In rehearsals, I say, "What's the problem, officer?" and I calmly challenge his claim that I was changing lanes illegally or behaving erratically. I am braced for his racism. I note his badge number. I memorize his face.
In rehearsals I am strong, bold, unbending, looking the officer in the eyes, unafraid to stand straight. On the street this day, my heart raced, my hands trembled. I would not pull out my wallet or a make a move for the papers in the glove compartment. Behind me was an Alabama State Trooper, looking for all the world like the ones in the grainy video clips we'd just seen in Selma and Birmingham.
I got out, closed the door, kept my hands where he could see them. And waited.

I was suddenly conscious of the books in the car -- King's face staring up from the front console, that picture of the Selma-to-Montgomery march on the cover of Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters, James Jones's book Bad Blood about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; all transformed in the moment into a heap of seditious propaganda awaiting discovery.
What was happening in my head could not be stopped. The children of prejudice, racism's offspring, were out of control, feeding hungrily on the past, nurtured by the bigotry of the present.
They whispered warnings as the State Trooper walked toward me.
"Remember that time they stopped you in front of the house you'd just bought, demanded your driver's license, talked to you like you were dirt?
"Remember when the white New Orleans cop called you boy when you were almost 17 and coming home from an after-school job and he snatched your books from your cold hands, flipped through your notebook, thrust it back at you, and left you shivering, feeling more afraid of them than of the neighborhood hoodlums?
"Remember all the news stories about dead young men who 'went for the officer's gun' or 'turned in a menacing way' or 'produced an object that appeared to be a weapon.' Remember the stories, the remarkably repetitive stories, that every black man you've ever known has told you about getting stopped for no reason?"
"Sir," the young, white trooper said from behind mirrored sunglasses.
I stiffened. The chatter in my head stopped.
"I just wanted to inform you that the speed limit here in Alabama is still sixty-five."
I was speeding. I was. I was almost relieved to be guilty. No need to challenge him. No need to risk sounding insolent. Now if only I could get through the rest of the conversation without being called nigger or boy or treated like trash in front of my children.
The officer took the papers he needed, asked where I was going, suggested that I wait in my car.
When he came back, he asked me to please slow down. No ticket. He told me to have a nice vacation.
As we drove away, the children in my car started talking about Memphis. The children in my head were very quiet.

LAST STOP:
Memphis, "and then (we) got into Memphis."
Waiting at the Lorraine Motel, in its parking lot, its museum, its infamous upstairs balcony, are the lessons, profound and subtle, that propelled a family on a 2,000-mile pilgrimage.