One thing that happens when you wander out
on the road reading from a book that you wrote in order,
and I organized it for years in a particular order,
and now I'm just reading it at random for you,
is you discover new connections between poems.
And I realized at one point that I
had this grandfather who tried to save me by helping
me fix my clothes and things.
And then I have another grandfather
who's a Baptist preacher.
So I'm cool.
I'm all saved.
All up and down.
The man whose reference in this poem I'm about to read
is a preacher named Vernon Johns,
and he actually preceded my grandfather at a church
in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I now happen to live.
And he-- not in the church, just in the town.
Vernon Johnson left Court Street Baptist in Lynchburg,
and went on to Ebenezer Baptist Church
in Atlanta, which you might know through MLK.
"The Preachers Eat Out."
"There were maybe four of them, perhaps five.
They were headed, where?
It does not matter, only, they were not
home yet, were not near anyone who could have cared.
So hungry, they stopped there anyway.
And when they heard, 'we don't serve your kind."
One among them laughed.
'That's OK.
We're not hungry for our kind.
We've come for food.'
And when the one waitress who would serve them--
she had children at home and these were tips--
finished breaking their plates behind the building,
he called her over to the table.
'Lady, my one regret is that we don't have appetite enough
to make you break every damned plate inside this room.'