My grandson Alex asked if he could interview me.
The assignment was to dig up an old person, one who was old enough to remember the struggles in the segregated American South when school integration and voter registration issues came to a head and it was clear there was no turning back.
Perhaps he could find someone who might even have had some firsthand, related experience to share.
"You were alive then, right?" he asked.
His class had read Harper Lee's one-hit-wonder, "To Kill a Mockingbird" (an American classic and one of the top selling books of the 20th century); they then watched the movie staring Gregory Peck.
My qualifications were excellent: I was old. Furthermore, I had gone off to college in l964 to southern Illinois (accepted to Mac Murray College by the grace of geographic distribution) where, having grown up on Cape Ann, I encountered — pretty much for the first time — black people.
While the student body was mainly white and midwestern, there were small contingents of Asian, European, and black American students. I and others of my kind (girls from New England) were our own contingent, with pierced ears and no "r" at the end of any syllable.
But I had started my college experience in Illinois, where there was racial tension aplenty, and I was quite perplexed by it.
Within those first several months at college, I rode a few hours by bus one day with 40 students to participate in a well-publicized demonstration, a march for freedom and equality, in front of the state capitol in Springfield.
I never thought to mention this plan to my parents, only surprised them with my picture printed on the front page of the local paper. That danger lurked never occurred to me.
The following spring, I partnered up with a member of the fast-growing, radical Students for a Democratic Society who, with a dozen other students fired up with enthusiasm and the naiveté of youth, exited our postcard-pretty green campus with red brick buildings, crossing literally to the other side of the railroad tracks to the outskirts of Jacksonville, where its poorest population lived.
Our mission was to seek out citizens who had never voted, didn't know they were eligible to vote, didn't know where or how to register to vote, or were afraid to even try.
I felt uneasiness as we knocked on doors (or on windows when the hinges held no door). We were met with suspicion, distrust, and a kind of fear that we didn't recognize.
Few people welcomed us even on their doorsteps. When one man did invite us in, he closed the door and pulled the curtain. His wife made coffee, and we sat for a brief time at their table explaining our presence.
They listened, and then he said quietly but firmly, "No thanks, not now. Go back to the school; go back where you're safe." He was a father, and now, I suspect he was fathering us.
It was a chilling experience, a glimpse through a cloudy reality, and one that I have never forgotten. I can still smell the strong coffee, still feel the internal conflict between the good we'd hoped to accomplish and the real danger we posed to these people and their families, to ourselves.
My grandson's interview concluded with a question that even after all these years, was too complex to answer: "Why do you think the white people in the South were so against integration?"
At the end of our interview, I gave Alex a copy of the photograph of me marching in Illinois 45 years ago.
I thought how not a single person there that day, nor a single person in all the world that day, would have imagined that, in 45 more years, a black senator from Illinois would become president of the U.S.A.
Susan Emerson is a regular Times columnist.
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