How does a budding professor turn into a blooming revolutionary? In late summer 1963, as a bedraggled thirty-something who had just lost his marriage and stepped out of his job, I moved from a town in upstate New York, Geneva, to the big city, or a big city, anyway: Philadelphia. The following summer, I played a small part in one of the most influential projects the civil rights movement carried out, Mississippi Summer. This chapter concerns the beginnings of my conversion from academic to activist. Conversions don’t generally resemble the apostle Paul’s, struck by the hand of God on the road to Damascus. Rather, they happen slowly, provoked by small revelations, fresh insights, and friendly guidance; inspired by new pleasures, some of the body, some of the eyes and ears, others of the heart and mind. Or so I found it to be.

One evening that fall of 1963, I maneuvered my car into its alleyway garage and returned to my tiny Center City, Philadelphia, apartment from a late date. I knew I’d find a few people from Students for a Democratic Society camped out in my apartment. I’d been in the front row at the Academy of Music with a new friend, Helen Vendler, who was teaching at Swarthmore, to hear Eugene Ormandy conduct Brahms’s smiling Second Symphony. Helen and I would both begin teaching at Smith College the following fall, and someone there had suggested that we might want to meet. An inspired proposal. One of the cleverest people I’d ever met, Helen loved conversation, better even than I had come to love Bassetts ice cream. Divorced from her former husband, Zeno, a philosopher, she lived with her child in suburban Philadelphia. She was certainly lonesome and welcomed talk and play. She had had an intense but, I thought, narrow education at Emmanuel, a Catholic women’s college in Boston. Poetry was the food of her intellect; music existed only at the fringes. I recall some time later when I took her to a concert in Amherst being surprised that she had never heard my favorite, Mendelssohn’s Octet. I’m sure I amused her with my fragmentary pacifism. She doubtless found it peculiar when I appeared for a date one evening announcing that, for some forgotten purpose, I was fasting that day.