WEBVTT

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One thing that happens
when you wander out

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on the road reading from a
book that you wrote in order,

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and I organized it for
years in a particular order,

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and now I'm just reading
it at random for you,

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is you discover new
connections between poems.

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And I realized at
one point that I

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had this grandfather who
tried to save me by helping

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me fix my clothes and things.

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And then I have
another grandfather

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who's a Baptist preacher.

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So I'm cool.

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I'm all saved.

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All up and down.

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The man whose reference in
this poem I'm about to read

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is a preacher
named Vernon Johns,

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and he actually preceded
my grandfather at a church

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in Lynchburg, Virginia,
where I now happen to live.

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And he-- not in the
church, just in the town.

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Vernon Johnson left Court
Street Baptist in Lynchburg,

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and went on to
Ebenezer Baptist Church

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in Atlanta, which you
might know through MLK.

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"The Preachers Eat Out."

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"There were maybe four
of them, perhaps five.

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They were headed, where?

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It does not matter,
only, they were not

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home yet, were not near
anyone who could have cared.

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So hungry, they
stopped there anyway.

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And when they heard, 'we
don't serve your kind."

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One among them laughed.

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'That's OK.

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We're not hungry for our kind.

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We've come for food.'

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And when the one waitress
who would serve them--

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she had children at home
and these were tips--

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finished breaking their
plates behind the building,

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he called her over to the table.

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'Lady, my one regret is that
we don't have appetite enough

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to make you break every damned
plate inside this room.'

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