It felt like reverence. As we walked into the Baptist Church on the plantation grounds, we imagined the haunting voices of enslaved people on a bright Sunday morning lost in expressive worship, many of those plaintive spirituals coded with messages: hopes of escape and freedom and a life beyond the confines of the plantation. “I’ll fly away!”

The sanctuary was filled with children, realistic sculptures, kids like our own, full of energy and mischief and hope, but traumatized, too - by hunger. Separation. Witness to brutish beatings. Detachment. A cloud of despair.

Today we were joined by a tour guide. When I boarded the bus early this morning, there he sat on the front row, dressed in a breezy New Orleans white shirt and pants, red sneakers with long dreads and a yellow baseball cap with the address of a Jazz web-site logo. He didn’t really fit the part, or did he? We called him Mr. Koné.

Turns out, he was a gift.

It didn’t take long for me to think of him as a walking encyclopedia.

The Freedom Riders began their now celebrated work when I was in Junior High and High School, the first as early as 1961. I don’t remember knowing anything about it at the time - if it came up in my government or history classes, I have no real recollection of it.

In 1966, I started my post-high school education in Chicago. There was no evading the subject then.