On the flight from Boston to Atlanta I sat next to a black woman. I found her demeanor strange — she was both chatty and distant. She was, it turned out, the ex-wife of a genuine celebrity (at least in the world of academia), Harvard philosophy professor Cornell West. Her son was at Harvard, too, and she was returning from a visit with him.

Conversations with strangers are a strange pas-de-deux. Each person tries to steer the talk to subjects they find interesting, while keeping the other person interested enough to continue the talk. She was about my age, and my fascination with place and history had me guide the conversation to how it felt growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights movement. She didn’t go with my tack, but grabbed the rudder and steered things over to where she could discuss what it was like being a child in the middle to upper middle class Atlanta community where she was raised. Her father was a home builder, and she seemed a little defensive about these humble beginnings, explaining that black people a generation ago couldn’t get decent jobs in white-owned businesses, and that the most ambitious and talented ones went into business for themselves.

She seemed to place a lot of importance on class differences among people of color, something I hadn’t thought about much. The great rift in America had always seemed to me to be to be along racial lines. She really surprised me by saying that an unexpected consequence of the civil rights movement was a loss of business for many independent black business people. Apparently, once blacks were free to do business with white establishments the fortunes of many black professionals declined. It made me wonder what Martin Luther King might have had to overcome to organize the movement that transformed our nation in the 1960s. He didn’t just have to get over his own class prejudices, but he had to organize people in the black community who didn’t have a lot to gain and something to lose.

She did remember growing up near in a neighborhood where members of Martin Luther King’s family lived. More poignantly, she remembered viewing King’s body at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Telling this story she somehow managed to make it clear that a) she wasn’t Baptist, and b) this was one of the only times she had visited “Sweet Auburn,” Atlanta’s traditional black community.

Like all parents, she fretted about her son. He was, she said, brilliant (she stated his IQ number) but not willing to work hard. She contrasted this with his father who had an incredible drive and determination. The son was very interested in theater, and doing a lot of acting at Harvard. She seemed upset that he was unwilling to use his fathers connections and influence to get ahead in his chosen career.

Like Cornell West, she had studied philosophy, but, left on her own to raise his child, she became a broadcast technician of some sort. She needed to make ends meet, and there wasn’t money to be made in philosophy. I answered with a joke that “..Yes, there haven’t been a lot of new philosophy factories hiring in the last few decades.” She obviously missed the joke and answered that she would never work in a factory.

Our talk danced over to the subject of absent fathers. It’s hard to judge how good or bad the famed Mr. West was as a parent. The testimony of ex-spouses, like that of ex-employees, is not an unbiased source, and she did mention the son having travelled a lot with dad. Without making any judgments, I brought up the issue of people with very successful public lives who were not particularly great parents — I mentioned Mahatma Gandhi’s less than stellar performance as a father. She had heard the story, too.

She great a bit more animated when I mentioned a high-school friend of mine (Dave Weinberg) who worked with director Spike Lee. In the 1970s and 1980s when Dave wasn’t teaching at the high-school we had both attended, he picked up some extra money playing minor roles in “blaxploitation” movies like “Son of Superfly.” David specialized in playing a mean white cop. This led to an opportunity to work with Spike Lee. You may recall him as one of the two officers who killed Radio Raheem in “Do the Right Thing.”

Her interest picked up when I talked about my mother. Mom was never able to make a career out of acting, but she attended the New School in New York city and worked with the famous method-acting instructor Lee Strassberg. One of her classmates had been Marlon Brando. My seatmate idolized Brando, so I didn’t mention that I’d hardly ever seen any of his movies.

I’m traveling to Atlanta with a business colleague, and he’s adventurous enough to try and track down a great soul-food place that wasn’t open last time I was in Atlanta. Details in my next missive.