us then. “Meet Malcolm X,” she told me proudly.

“How do you do, Mr. X,” I said.

“No,” he corrected me. “It’s Malcolm.” He had stopped smiling, and behind his dark-framed glasses his deep eyes were somber and distant, only grazing my face as he looked past me beyond my shoulder.

On the way back to town, I sat in the back seat of the taxi with Malcolm X. Azizah sat in front with the driver, but she had twisted herself so that she faced backward toward us. “We expect a very big turnout for your speech tonight, Malcolm,” she said. “Everybody’s excited you’re here. People want to know about the Black Muslims, about the movement in America, and about your hajj .” I had been away from my country all told less than three years, but it had been too long. What Azizah talked about and the man she talked to were foreign to me.

The taxi stopped on a street of tall apartment buildings near the campus. Azizah turned a charming smile on us. “We’re invited to lunch at Mrs. Brown’s,” she said.

Mrs. Brown was a black American expatriate in her middle years. Sara, a fellow student from the university, was there, too, another young white American like me, but, unlike me, a political science major fresh from an exclusive New England college who knew what was what. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Malcolm,” she said. “A rare privilege.” He shook her hand and nodded, at the same time lifting his camera from his shoulder by its strap and handing it to Azizah.

Mrs. Brown’s Beirut apartment was one of those light, airy, marble-floored places well-to-do Americans lived in without fear in those days. Azizah, Sara, and Mrs. Brown sat on blue-cushioned chairs in front of the windows, while I sat on the matching couch with Malcolm X. His camera and a flash attachment lay on the empty cushion between us.

For a few minutes, we sipped iced juice from silver glasses and spoke of ordinary small things—the weather, good restaurants in Beirut, reliable cameras. Then Sara asked Malcolm X a question, and suddenly they were talking about white people and black people, and Sara was saying that she and I, because we were white, were responsible for most of the sins of the world, specifically the problems of black people. “I think you were absolutely right, Malcolm,” she said, “when you accused the white man of having the devil in him.”

And leaning forward to look in his face she apologized, not just for herself and her own particular ancestors, but for me and mine, too, while Malcolm X nodded and smiled.

Uncomfortable and awkward, I had wanted only to listen. But with Sara’s

general apology, I began to feel words rising in my throat. Perhaps it had something to do with my Cherokee great-grandmother—her grandparents survivors of the Trail of Tears—or with my own parents’ struggle to get out of the cotton field of Oklahoma—it’s hard to say now, but when Sara finished, I said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Mr. X, but Sara doesn’t speak for me. I really do not think I’m any more responsible for your troubles as a black man than you’re at fault for mine as a white woman.” And pointing at my freckled arm I said quietly, “I didn’t choose this skin, but it’s the only one I have and I’m afraid we’ll both have to make do with it.”

Malcolm X looked steadily back at me for a long moment while I wished I were any place else on earth. And then I saw his mouth twitch, a quick pulling at the corners, less than a smile, but more—much more—than a smirk, and his eyes softened before they turned away.

Then the moment was gone. Azizah poured words like oil onto the awkwardness in the room, and soon the conversation was about Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca and his upcoming appearance at the university that night.

Later, I said good-bye and walked slowly and alone back to Bustani Hall through the campus, past the library and the chapel and the School of Pharmacy with the huge Chinese rose bushes in front.

Rowda was out; she had left a note on my desk telling me she would be out the rest of the day. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but I changed from my street clothes and boiled tea on the hot plate, and turned the radio on to the BBC in time to hear Big Ben’s deep chimes. After I listened to the news from London, I moved the dials until I heard Arabic music, and I stood with my glass of tea at the large window at the end of the room and watched the quiet sky over Beirut turn dusky to the tune of minor notes, wondering exactly what that oddly likeable man who did not like the color of my skin was all about.