In the portico of the Country Inn, he put the car in park. “I’ve never seen race, in a certain way—I’ve tried to be nice to everyone,” he said. He seemed to think that too few of his white contemporaries had the same open-mindedness, even as they fêted him for it. When it came time to sell and promote the book, Prince wanted to deal only with people who accepted that he had his own business practices. “There’s a lot of people who say you gotta learn to walk before you learn to run,” he said. “That’s slave talk to me. That’s something slaves would say.” He offered me a firm handshake and left me at the hotel’s automatic doors.
