've never been to Selma. Never traveled the meandering State Highway 80. Never seen the sun set over the sprawling pastures of rural Alabama.
But as my children and I rounded the curvaceous highway with Montgomery behind us, I was filled with a deep dread.
"We're close," I told Nikki.
"How can you tell?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I recognize this place."
I didn't need the maps or mile markers. I knew the roadside. Something about the curve up ahead had been seared into my memory. Here, I knew, was one of the magnets pulling my children and me through this weeklong pilgrimage to the past. Through Atlanta, Tuskegee, Montgomery, now to the mile-long city whose pulse I suddenly felt.
When the Edmund Pettus Bridge rose before us around the next bend, the flood of memories -- of tear gas and police batons and screaming people -- made my knees shake.
None of these memories are truly mine. I was 6 years old on March 7, 1965 -- Bloody Sunday -- when Sheriff Jim Clark and his horse-borne posse joined state police in attacking the audacious group of 600 people trying to march to Montgomery.
But somewhere I read about it. Somewhere I saw the pictures. And somehow this piece of the past had disguised itself as one of the legitimate occupants of my memory.
We spent the night at a tattered Traveler's Inn where the night desk clerk gave me the keys to all the empty downstairs rooms so I could find one that wasn't peeling or gurgling or reeking of mildew. Her trust surprised me.
She was white, older. Just like the white-haired woman who drew the lines that helped me find Rosa Parks' marker in Montgomery. Like the man who told us where to get breakfast in Tuskegee. Like the elderly man who'd given us tips this night on Selma sites to see when we stopped at the visitors' center. Like the waitress the next morning who prompted Nikki to say, "Everybody's so nice!"
We preserve more than just buildings and monuments. Our expectations die slowly, too.
In the morning we visited the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute that sits a few doors away from the Pettus bridge. This modest, pieced-together-with-tape-
and-thumbtacks museum was among the richest stops on our tour.
There we met Joanne Bland, a motherly volunteer who offered us fresh bananas and a living testament to the courage of men and women whose names don't appear in the museum chronologies. She was a year younger than Nikki on Bloody Sunday, 32 years ago, and she made it to the top of the bridge that day before all hell broke loose.
"First I heard the shouts, then the shots," she told my children and me. "I had never heard a gun fire before, so I thought they were shooting the people. Then we saw the tear gas and the horses trampling people. And we ran."
She walked with us through the halls and side room displays of this old house that backs up to the Alabama River, explaining that marchers crossed the bridge two-by-two as subterfuge after Dallas County outlawed gatherings of more than three people. She told us about Marie Foster, mother of the voting rights movement in Selma, and Marion County's Lucy Foster, who proposed the Selma-to-Montgomery march in the angry hours after Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered for defending his mother against the clubs of white policemen.
Bland's recollections are on the mirror-lined "I Was There" wall at the front of the museum, a wall papered with common "stickies" bearing the handwritten stories of those who crossed the bridge during that history-altering month.
Here is what marcher Charles W. DuBose wrote:
"On Bloody Sunday, I marched with Ben "Jay Bird" Jackson. We were teargassed. I met Dr. King and Malcolm X at Brown Chapel Church. I am providing my vest and American flag I carried to Montgomery ... On the way back to Selma on the back of a truck I saw Mrs. Viola Liuzzo after being shot, still in her car in the woods."
Viola Liuzzo's picture hangs in the museum's Women's Suffrage Room, her familiar white face standing out among the many black women whose names I did not know. Klansmen murdered her as she ferried people back from the successful march to Montgomery. Her death, the picture's caption explained, prompted President Lyndon Johnson to order an investigation into Klan activity.
"Why didn't the President investigate the Klan when the black people were getting killed?" Nikki asked me.
I couldn't muster an answer, too afraid of the poison lurking in the truth, suddenly robbed of the confidence that would have me say it is no longer true that white life has greater value than black life.
I answered with silence and a shrug.
Before we left Selma, Joanne Bland took us to the back room of the Voting Rights Museum, and we sat quietly as Charles DuBose's words came to life on a big-screen TV. It was the Selma segment of the Civil Rights documentary "Eyes on the Prize."
As the police batons rose from the clouds of tear gas, then fell on the heads and backs of men and women, I realized how much this old black-and-white video resembled the dramatic footage we had seen on the news the night before of police clubbing illegal immigrants on the roadside in Riverside, California.

NEXT STOP:
Birmingham, a place where the past heals and hurts.
At the corner of 16th Street and 6th Avenue in Birmingham, a silent debate rages: How great is the danger that immersing yourself in a hateful history will only leave you awash in bitterness?