e chased history out of Georgia down Interstate 85 in a green Toyota loaded with all the things necessary for such a noble journey: a "snak pak" with the crunchy Cheetos and ranch-style Doritos and an ice chest filled with fruit juice and enough Mountain Dew to keep me awake until the end of time.
I'd also brought books about the civil rights movement, about Martin Luther King Jr., about the untaught side of American history, hoping my children would use them as resources while we drove through the Civil Rights south; hoping they would fill in the historical blanks between museums and landmarks.
I'd imagined them quietly relishing the dream King unveiled from the Lincoln Memorial, "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation," he called it. I imagined them telling me in gushing breaths that they'd just read a passage about the courage of school children in Little Rock and Birmingham.
They'd ask me questions. They'd learn more with every stretch of highway.
Instead, Nikki put on the headphones of her portable CD player and listened to reggae. Keith read Goosebumps horror stories and kept updating me on the book's body count. Our conversations drove me to distraction.
Me: "So what did you learn about George Washington Carver?"
Nikki: "Did you say something?"
Keith: "Somebody else died, dad."
That would change.
The past first called to me in 1989 from the road signs of I-85 as I drove with my wife from New Orleans to Atlanta to see a football game. The nearness of my roots came as news to me. If as a younger man I was inattentive in history class, I was surely unconscious in geography, so the signs rattled me like a succession of alarms during that trip, each siren brought on by the next green and white highway sign:
Montgomery.
(Your past....)
Tuskegee.
(...is just...)
Birmingham.
(...up the road.)
I knew then that I would come back one day and follow those signs, even if I couldn't remember -- or never knew -- the historic details that made them so compelling. Seven years later, divorced and living in St. Petersburg, I was back. With Atlanta in the rear-view, I hit the turn signal at the Tuskegee exit and we rolled gently back in time.
Back to the Tuskegee Institute and its founder, Booker T. Washington, and its 150 red-brick buildings in whose cornerstones lay the foundations of black intellectualism and self-determination.
Back to the George Washington Carver museum, where the children, usually so impatient in such sterile places, stopped and read and photographed.
Tuskegee men and women building the campus under Washington's watchful eye ... standing in the mud in black suits and long cotton dresses learning to lay brick ... Carver's flower portraits, painted with colors he created from the rich Alabama soil ... jars of colors he created from the rich Alabama soil ... jars of preserved plants that once yielded colors, fragrances and delicacies under his microscope.
At almost every exhibit, Nikki would say, "I never knew that."
They, like I, knew little of this history. What we learned in school, mostly, was that Carver invented peanut butter and Washington started a college.
A Tuskegee student escort took us through the hall memorializing the climb of black World War II airmen of the 99th fighter squadron; men trained at Tuskegee.
I asked our escort why there was no exhibit, no pamphlet, no marker commemorating the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the U.S. government's shameful project that for 40 years allowed a group of black men to suffer and die painful deaths for the sake of dubious science.
The question, she suggested, contained the answer.
We moved on.

NEXT STOP:
Montgomery, "until justice rolls down like water."
A billboard, a church, memorial, a marker: they are the clustered pieces of Montgomery's complex civil rights past.