"You come up here now, after all this time, and you tell me there are people with prison records on the board of directors of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center. You inform me of that fact."

"I'm not telling you, Reverend Bacon," said Fiske. "That's what the Human Resources Administration is telling us both."

"I want to tell you something. I want to remind you of something you told me. Who do we want to run the Little Shepherd Day Care Center? Do you remember? Do we want your Wellesley girls and your Vassar girls coming up here to take care of the children of Harlem? Do we want your social benefactors? Do we want your licensed civil-service bureaucrats? Your lifers from City Hall? Is that what we want? Is that what we want?"

Fiske felt compelled to answer. Obediently as a first-grader, he said, "No."

"No," said Reverend Bacon approvingly, "that is not what we want. What do we want? We want the people of Harlem looking after the children of Harlem. We're going to draw our strength . . . our strength . . . from our people and our own streets. I told you that a long time ago, in the earliest days. Do you remember? Do you remember that?"

"Yes," said Fiske, feeling more juvenile by the minute, and more helpless in the face of that steady gaze.

"Yes. Our own streets. Now, a young man grows up on the streets of Harlem, the chances are the police have a sheet on that young man. You understand? They have a sheet on that young man. I'm talking about a police record. So if you're saying to everybody who's ever been in jail and everybody coming out of jail and everybody on parole, if you're saying, 'You can't participate in the rebirth of Harlem, because we gave up on you soon as you got a record' ... see ... then you are not talking about the rebirth of Harlem. You're talking about some make-believe place, some magic kingdom. You're fooling yourself. You're not looking for a radical solution. You're wanting to play the same old game, you're wanting to see the same old faces. You're wanting to practice the same old colonialism. You understand? You understand what I'm saying?"