Throughout the sixties and early seventies, Maynard had grown more fearful, morbid, and conspiratorial; he was sleeping less and less. The problem was, so were many Black people at the time. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated three years earlier. The city of Detroit had burned in the long, hot summer of 1967. Police were targeting men like Cousin Maynard here and back in his hometown of Mobile. Fear was nothing out of the ordinary.
