It has been a bitter season. Britain lies divided, gripped by an identity crisis, its future uncertain. Sectarian violence flares. Terrorism and freak weather. There are resurgences of deadly disease, famine, portents of worse to come. Life on this planet suddenly seems too fragile to be borne.

It is the year 1606. William Shakespeare turns 42, an old man at a time when life expectancy runs to the mid-40s. His productive days seem behind him; he writes less and less. He has every incentive to retire comfortably in the country. Instead, he produces three of his major works in the span of a year: “Macbeth,” “Antony and Cleopatra” and the bleakest, greatest play in the language, “King Lear,” his colossus, a play that refracts every tension of its time — the return of the plague to London, Guy Fawkes and the plot to blow up Parliament. It is a work that seems calculated to flatter and admonish — to throw support behind King James’s effort to unify Britain but to also caution about the corruption of power.

Four hundred years later in an eerily similar season, another artist is completing a hat trick of her own. After 23 years away, Glenda Jackson, 82, the two-time Oscar winner who spent the last two decades as a member of Parliament, returned to acting. In 2016 she played King Lear at the Old Vic theater in London, won a Tony Award for her turn in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” last year and, this spring, she brings Lear to Broadway in a new production opening in April. The play has never felt more vibrantly responsive to the moment, to a crisis in global leadership —

No, I can hear Jackson now, interrupting me. No. I think it would be remarkably arrogant to try to make Shakespeare a commentary. It has its own life.

Fair enough. Next month, “King Lear” arrives on Broadway, allowing us an opportunity to see our own time reflected in the classic —

You really must be more precise. She thumps the table in irritation. Shakespeare writes about humans, and humans don’t change.

Very well. When Glenda Jackson brings King Lear to Broadway, what a chance it will be to see timeless concerns —

Seems timely to me. Edmund complains old people die before giving their children money, when they are too old to spend it. If that’s not the millennial trope, I don’t know what is.

Last time. This spring, Glenda Jackson returns to the stage in “King Lear.” Her other great vocation — her campaign against imprecision and intellectual slovenliness, obsequiousness and mediocrity in all forms — continues unabated.

A bit strong. You can add “in vain,” if you like.

The London production of “King Lear,” directed by Deborah Warner, was austere, Brechtian and British, with a sly indictment of Blairism. The set was constructed of white, portable panels, and actors carried their chairs on and off the stage. Jackson delivered her opening lines with her back to the audience. The Broadway play as envisioned by the director Sam Gold, however, is lush; the set, a jewel box, with brassy, Trumpian accents. Jackson’s Lear not only faces the audience but plays to us and plays with us. In the opening scene, Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters — “conferring them on younger strengths while we/Unburdened crawl toward death.” Jackson rolls the r’s in “crawl,” stretching the word long and louche, a purring lion, all easy, unstrained dominance that flares into spectacular explosions of rage.

At 82, she does not look whittled, wizened or weathered or any one of those wheezy words we use for old bodies. She does not look diminished — she looks distilled, unwrapped, the long bare branches of her body mesmerizing. “Glenda is so lean, and I don’t just mean that physically,” the actor Elizabeth Marvel, who plays Goneril, told me. “I mean that emotionally, intellectually. All the fat is burned off, and you just have this brilliant diamond core.” Jackson is not the first woman to play Lear, nor does gender enter your mind as you watch her. She herself has spoken of how differences between the sexes fade with age, but her authority has always transcended any notion of gender; it has always felt like law. The first time she played Shakespeare, in 1965, one review was headlined “Ophelia, Prince of Stratford.”

“There aren’t a lot of actors in the world that you can cast in a part like this, who can just enter the room and bring so much power with them,” Gold told me. “They don’t have to work or earn it, they just have it.” What is the source of that power? Jackson is the smallest person on stage, but you won’t notice it — she arrives cascading over the language, dominating it. In this way Jackson gives us the only truly contemporary interpretation of Lear I’ve ever seen, a king whose command relies not on brute might but in the ability to manipulate words. The actor playing Lear must not only embody authority but also slough it off in front of us, almost presenting the aging process brutally sped up. The ritual aspect of this transformation is of particular interest to Gold, who has directed stripped-down interpretations of Shakespeare, including “Othello” in 2016. “Glenda is going to do something very intense, very special, very big,” he said. “She is going to go through something most people don’t go through. You’re all invited. Glenda Jackson is going to endure this, and you’re going to witness it.”

For most of its history, this ritual has been considered too traumatizing for the stage. Shakespeare himself worried the conclusion was too bleak; he appears to have softened it slightly a few years after the play was first put on. Still, for 150 years an adapted version, with a happy ending, was performed. In the kingdom of Lear, there is no consolation. Characters learn to see the truth only after their eyes are gouged out; they learn to love their children only as they mourn them. Lear dies of heartbreak, annihilated, his last line a howl. It is a play of such immensities — of sorrow and language — that it has been described as too big for the stage, a literary achievement and not a dramatic one, or even a natural phenomenon in its own right: a volcano to the essayist Charles Lamb, a hurricane to the poet Samuel Coleridge and to the critic William Hazlitt, the sea: “swelling, chafing, raging, without bound, without hope, without beacon, or anchor.” This is not to mention the deep, dislocating strangeness of the play itself. The improbabilities in the plot alone have kept scholars busy for close to 400 years. It is set in 800 B.C. yet all signs point to the Middle Ages. Lear and the villain, Edmund, never interact. There is an odd lack of stage directions and that superfluous subplot, the story of Gloucester, which just echoes the main action (a father betrayed by his child).

The deepest strangeness of all: None of this matters. Critics have argued that the play is greater for these inconsistencies — more vast, as capricious and real as the world itself.

Lear remains the crowning role of the most powerful actors of their generations. “When you’re younger, Lear doesn’t feel real,” Laurence Olivier once said. “When you get to my age, you are Lear in every nerve of your body.” Most performances follow in the footsteps of Paul Scofield, who played the king as a grizzled military man in the 1962 Peter Brook production, later a film. Ian McKellen put his slant on the role, making Lear a priestly figure; Christopher Plummer played him as a dementia patient.

Jackson’s approach owes to none of these. In previews this month, she looked slim as a match, dapper in a tuxedo and gleaming shoes. This is not Lear as I’ve known him, burly and braying. This is Lear as tactician, Lear as brain as well as body, who suffers not only the betrayals of his daughters and the mortifications of age but the limitations of living with his own mind. It is a role known for volume; the originality of Jackson’s performance is its inwardness. We see how power works not just on the world but on the self — how it distorts perception. I saw it one night in a small gesture. Lear has banished Cordelia, his favorite daughter, for her failure to flatter him. He coiled up in his throne and shook his head angrily, in disbelief, and repeated that gesture throughout the act, shading its motion and meaning subtly each time, from disgust to denial, as if tossing away a rogue thought, the suspicion that he has made a terrible mistake. Jackson shows us the effort that power has to expend to not know, to stay blind.

She steers clear of academic interpretations of “King Lear.” It’s all in the text, she says, and she builds her characters from the smallest reaction. “It’s trying to find always the reality of being a human being as opposed to being a character in a play,” she told me. “They don’t know they’re in a play. They’re living their lives. It’s that; it’s trying to find that reality.” You could make a study of the movement of Jackson’s right hand alone: how it floats up and clutches at the heart in the second act, as the knowledge that Lear can’t shake off — of his elder daughters’ cruelty and his own folly — begins to lodge in the body; how it jabs at his daughters as he fires maledictions upon them; how it opens and closes as he succumbs to madness, grasping at air. And in the final scene, Lear reaches for Cordelia’s lifeless hand and runs it over his face — she is finally as real to him as he is to himself.

“She does it differently every night,” Ruth Wilson, who plays Cordelia and the Fool, told me. “It never goes stale. Sometimes in the storm scene, she’s pushing the Fool off, sometimes holding him close. That’s what Lear would be doing. You have to constantly move around this person who’s volatile, and you don’t know which way the wind is blowing with them, and you have to kind of negotiate with them. That’s what she’s like on the stage.”

Who’s afraid of Glenda Jackson? Most people, and with some cause. She became famous for her electrifying portrayals of history and literature’s most unconventional women: Queen Elizabeth in the British TV series “Elizabeth R,” Hedda Gabler, Gudrun in Ken Russell’s film of the D.H. Lawrence novel “Women in Love,” released in Britain in 1969. In life she has proved no less formidable; the stories are legion, dark and thrilling, assuming you’re not on your way to interview her yourself. There is the journalist she famously called “a patronizing git.” There is an interview from last year in which she turned so gladiatorial toward a Los Angeles Times critic even she was taken aback. “I’ve frightened you,” she told him, chastened, and suggested he “get some rest.” A 1999 biography of the actor by Chris Bryant, a fellow Labor politician, reads rather like a group-therapy session of colleagues and directors processing their unsettling encounters with her.

I first met Jackson in January, at a restaurant near her hotel in New York. Rehearsals for the play had just begun. She arrived, brisk and bundled in a black puffy coat over a checked dress, and immediately ordered a glass of white wine. “Pour it out,” she said, waving away the offer to taste it first. “I smoke so I have no — what do they call it these days?” She glanced at the menu, ordered “the salmon thingie thingie” and looked at me expectantly. “Fire away.”

“A-ma-zing,” she said, when the food arrived: slabs of lox fanned out and enormous, like a fleshy, quivering petticoat. There are words she says so distinctly that they are hers: the emphatic “ab-solutely,” the caress of “a-ma-zing,” her witheringly indifferent “quite” and, all variants of “no,” “not” and “never.” Her voice — called one of the theater’s great instruments — remains unchanged; it is still warm, deep and honeyed, like wood cracking apart in a fire. Her large, expressive hands sliced and framed each argument.

We met through the winter on Sundays, her day off, her day for laundry and ironing and calling home to London. Jackson shares a home with her son, the political columnist Dan Hodges. Of his conservative leanings she has said, “I think you have done quite well as a parent if your kid holds positions totally opposite to your own.” She lives in the basement apartment, and when she’s not working, she’s on grandmother duty, caring for her 11-year-old grandson. “We have fierce fights about what he watches on the bloody computer,” she said. Every time we met, she arrived punctually and apologized for being late, wearing more often than not a soft lavender sweatshirt with a silhouette of Tintin and eating exactly half of what was on her plate.

“Shakespeare is the most contemporary writer there is,” Jackson told me. “He only ever really asks three questions: Who are we? Why are we? What are we? And no one has ever come up with the comprehensive answer to any of those questions.” “King Lear” is “entirely about human beings — their interactions and their failure to interact, to understand each other. Which we all know. We presume we know people by virtue of having known them for a long time. Of course we never really do.”

Has anyone presumed to know Jackson? Her biographer found her privacy impossible to breach. During their interview sessions, she sat with her back to him. “The mystery is what makes her so compelling onstage and on film,” Bryant has said. “You can sense the sharp intelligence, the grit, but you don’t know what is going on.” Her inwardness is key to her appeal, that nervy detachment. “Staccato, wrenchingly modern,” Pauline Kael once called her. It’s why she is so enjoyable to watch in her worst movies. Take the 1973 film “A Touch of Class,” which won her an Oscar, a romantic comedy in the Hepburn-Tracy mode, in which Jackson plays a castrating career woman who must be brought to heel. Her lines are ridiculous (so is that broomlike wig), but her acting is full of integrity and private amusement, delivered over the shoulder of the hero, to the camera — to us. It isn’t the cross-gender casting of Lear that feels so striking about Jackson’s performance; it is seeing an actor who specializes in control and self-knowledge take on the unraveling patriarch who has “ever but slenderly known himself.”

Like all well-defended people, however, Jackson seems privately moved, even impressed by vulnerability, as if it were a luxury she can’t yet afford. When she met Stevie Smith, the English poet she would later portray in the 1978 film “Stevie,” she was stirred: “There wasn’t a single protective curve anywhere in her body.” In my own haplessness, I, too, become the object of her gruff gallantry and concern. Who was minding my small daughter when we were off together? Is her father good with her? Do I need a ride? Money for lunch? When is my deadline? So soon? Under no circumstances, however, would she accept such solicitude from me; she would hand it right back, like an armful of rotting fish. She once mentioned that it was sometimes difficult to get her family on the phone on Sundays. I made consoling noises. “That’s hard,” I said. “It’s not hard,” she snapped. “They’re out a lot.”

Thorns are, of course, aborted branches. Jackson bloomed when we shifted off the topic of her and her work. She was keen to talk about children, Emily Dickinson, the enormousness of American serving portions, the “glorious” television show “Parks and Recreation” and, with much frustrated thumping of the table, Brexit (“What is Jeremy Corbyn doing? I wonder he can sit down, he’s been on the fence so long”).

“For me, the two most important words in the English language are ‘Only connect,’ ” she told me, quoting E.M. Forster. But with Jackson, you feel that injunction has as much to do with a desire to forge connection with other people as with maintaining, and protecting, a connection with the self and with reality, hence that almost phobic refusal of sympathy and any kind of special dispensation. When she spoke of artists she admired — Emily Dickinson and Stevie Smith — it was for how they combined the wild “landscape” in their minds with the simplicity of their lives and the unfussy way they met their social obligations. “I don’t like the starry sort of life,” she told her biographer. “The more remote you become from people, the more difficult it is to act, I think. Most lives are not comprised of enormous tragedies or enormous joys, but they are comprised of tiny little pin pricks, of having to queue at the butchers or it’s raining when you’re waiting for a bus.”

Jackson was born in 1936 in the Cheshire region of Northern England, the eldest of four daughters. Her father hauled bricks at construction sites, and her mother cleaned houses and pulled pints at the pub. When the war broke out, Jackson’s father joined the minesweepers, and the women took over — her mother, aunts and grandmother. These women, as she described them, were her first, most decisive piece of good luck. “Their lives hadn’t dealt them a particularly good hand by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. “But they had no small sense of humor. They had grace. All those cliché things like it’s no use crying over spilt milk or all that were very real. Life had to be lived. You had to get on and do it. It was very valuable to me.”

This is the very lesson of Lear, delivered in rhyming cadences. When Gloucester, blinded and betrayed, collapses in anguish, his son Edgar urges him on: “Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all.” It kept happening as I spoke to Jackson. She would begin by telling me about herself, and we would veer into Lear. The text is never out of her hands, she told me; I felt as if she were merging with it.

She was always a ravenous reader, if an indifferent student; she tried to read every book in her local public library. She loved the Brontës, and her political awakening was stirred by Sinclair Lewis. At 16, she failed her exams, left school and took a job working at Boots the Chemists. She had been raised to have no expectations, she told me, but something had begun to nag at her. “There had to be more to life than what I was experiencing, and I had more to give than what was being asked of me.” She started doing amateur theater and was told she was promising. She wrote to the only drama school she’d ever heard of, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and wangled herself a scholarship.

One of her first acting jobs was in Crewe, in the north of England, “half acting, half stage-managing and full-time sweeping the floor.” She met and married Roy Hodges, a part-time actor. (They divorced almost 20 years later.) They occasionally slept on the stage of the theater, in a four-poster bed sourced for a production. Lean years followed. Jackson worked odd jobs, waitressed and even stole food. For two years she didn’t get any theater work. Her break came when she auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s experimental Theater of Cruelty, directed by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz. They wanted to launch an attack on staid English theater, to make it more visceral and less literary. “In came a very curious figure, a hidden, shy and yet aggressive, badly dressed girl who seemed resentful of everything,” Brook recalled of Jackson’s audition. She did a reading from Shakespeare and a Dorothy Parker short story, which she was asked to play as a woman incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital by her husband, trying to persuade others of her sanity. “There was,” she said, “a fair amount of rolling around and shouting.”

She made her name with uninhibited performances: a star-making turn as the narcoleptic assassin Charlotte Corday in “Marat/Sade” and as a composite of Christine Keeler and Jackie Kennedy in an infamous collage piece in which she was supposedly the first actor to appear naked on the London stage.

Jackson won two best-actress Oscars in four years, for “Women in Love” and “A Touch of Class.” Presenting her with the New York Film Critics Circle Award for “Women in Love,” Bette Davis said she felt like Margo Channing, the star of “All About Eve,” being supplanted by a younger rival. Jackson chafed at celebrity, however. She gloated about wearing a £2 dress from Marks & Spencer to meet Jackie Kennedy (“with the rest of them dripping diamonds down to their navels”) and didn’t attend either of the Academy Awards ceremonies at which she won. She passed along her Oscars to her mother, who displayed them in her front room and polished them so religiously that the gold disappeared and the base metal beneath was revealed. “A very good analogy,” Jackson likes to say.

A revulsion for Hollywood and its fraudulence still lingers. She told me about a friend who had been invited to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s parties for the A-list. Everything he served was blue. The potatoes were blue. The cauliflower was blue. The sauce was blue — “and nobody, nobody said a word. I bet he and Mrs. Hitchcock roared with laughter going to bed at all these sanctimonious sods who were afraid to say, ‘Why have you given me blue cauliflower?’ ” (Seen this way, Jackson’s famous bluntness feels like a way of staying primed for a blue-cauliflower situation.)

“He was bizarre,” she said of Hitchcock. “And his treatment of that one in ‘The Birds’ —”

“Tippi Hedren,” I said. “Wasn’t she institutionalized?”

“He kept her out of work,” she said, making me feel as if I’d missed the real indignity. Hedren accused Hitchcock of sexually assaulting her and having her blacklisted for years.

I asked if she felt vulnerable as a young actress. “You’re entirely dependent on what may come through the door,” she said. “I always say — when someone tells me, ‘I’m thinking of being an actor, what do you think?’ — ‘If you’re thinking about it, don’t go anywhere near it. If it’s not life or death, don’t touch it.’ ”

It came as a surprise when Jackson left acting in 1992 to become a Labor M.P. from Hampstead and Highgate in North London, but she had been approached before. (“They must be bloody hard up,” she had said to her agent.) She had long been outspoken about her opposition to Thatcherism and also her disappointment in the roles offered to women. “If women are ever shown to have problems in a film, they are always emotional problems,” she said. “What about the other problems, the other issues that women face every day of their lives? I haven’t seen a woman take a stand on a moral issue in a film for about 20 years, not since Bette Davis played that librarian in ‘Storm Center.’ ”

Entering politics allowed her to write that very role. She committed herself utterly; in her 23 years in Parliament, she told me that she didn’t see a single play. She was an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and Tony Blair; she said he “suffered from the insolence of office” (a quote from Hamlet). She gave passionate speeches in support of the welfare state and condemned Margaret Thatcher’s legacy in the House of Commons days after her death in 2013. It might be one of her most indelible performances. She stood alone, in a red cardigan, facing a bank of dark-suited men. “My honorable friend from Hackney referred to the fact that although she had differed with Lady Thatcher in her policies, she felt dutybound to come to pay tribute to the first woman prime minister this country had produced. I am of a generation who was raised by women; the men had all gone to war to defend our freedoms — they didn’t just run a government; they ran a country.” The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art diction was clear, and her voice rose effortlessly over the braying. She spoke with relish, tasting each word: “To pay tribute to the first prime minister deputed by female gender? O.K. But a woman?” She raised her chin. “Not on my terms.”

She started seeing the seeds of Brexit 10 years ago, perhaps longer. “What backbench M.P.s like me were getting on the street were complaints from our constituents: no affordable housing, couldn’t get their kids into school, the National Health Service was being overworked, wages were going down in jobs and it was all the fault of immigrants,” she said. “People who wouldn’t know, in my country, an immigrant if one came up and hit them in the face were the first to say, ‘Get these people out.’ ”

She was reluctant, however, when I asked what specifically she worked on, what her proudest achievements were. The people she helped knew what they were, she said. I tried to ask again in different ways; every time, my questions pinged off her hull. Jackson can remind you of Cordelia in the way she hoards her deepest feelings and her refusal to appease.

She stepped down before the 2015 election. It was “time to let someone else have a go,” she said. Casting around for a role, she was inspired by her friend the Spanish actress Núria Espert’s playing Lear in Barcelona and approached the Old Vic. The reviews were glowing. “Could it be that a seasoning in the daily parry and thrust of the House of Commons has kept Ms. Jackson’s wit and acumen, not to mention her capacity for language, razor sharp?” Matt Wolf, a theater critic for The New York Times, wrote.

Jackson’s standard line was that theater would never tolerate the kind of egos she encountered in Parliament. But there are links between acting and politics, and on this topic, she is at her most fluent. Each require stripping down to the essence of who we are and what we need. In the case of acting, that process can be mysterious; it is a process, she has said, that no one can even define. She told me the famous, possibly apocryphal story about Laurence Olivier performing Othello at the Old Vic, performing as he never had before. The cast watched him, rapt from the wings. The crowd went wild. And he went straight to his dressing room and began smashing it up. “In typical theater courage,” Jackson said, the youngest member of the crew was sent to investigate: “ ‘Sir Laurence, we don’t understand. You were absolutely wonderful.’ ‘I know,’ he responded. ‘But I don’t know why.’ ”

In those moments, she told me, even if you don’t know why, an energy is produced and sent into the dark. The audience responds and sends the light back, forming a perfect, unbound, unbroken circle. “It is the model of an ideal society,” incumbent on everyone working together. “It doesn’t always happen, but it has happened enough to know that it’s possible.”

Weeks later, watching a preview, I saw that light come streaming off the stage. It was the storm scene, the furious heart of the play. Lear stalks the heath with his loyal friend Kent and the Fool. The theater was slashed with bright lightning, and the characters hurled themselves against a metal wall to simulate thunder. Jackson was chalk-white under the lights, stripped down to a singlet and lit up like the Parthenon, a fabulous ruin. Her hair was wet and matted, and she bit off each word, spittle popping off her lips, her hands cutting the air, eyes rolling around in her head — a figure of terrifying aloneness and confrontation. She gazed into the audience, pitilessly, an emissary from our collective futures: “Poor naked wretches.” The scene built and built without cresting, Lear flinging off Kent and the Fool who tried to cover and protect him. Finally the action of the play turned elsewhere. The three retreated to one side of the stage. Jackson sat down and closed her eyes; she looked emptied. The Fool curled up next to her, grimaced and whispered something. She did not open her eyes. She did not respond.

Jackson was asked in an interview when she returned to Broadway last year, to star in “Three Tall Women,” if acting was depleting. “No,” she said emphatically. But then her voice softened, and it sounded as if she were seeing something for the first time. “In a strange kind of way you should have nothing to take home. You should have put everything that has to be put on that stage,” she said. “Shame on you if you have something to take home.”

On the stage, after a minute, Jackson opened her eyes, focused. She charged the stage again; the storm strengthened. She raised her arms and caught a bit of the lightning.

“The age thing was potent last night,” Jackson said to me.

It was our final meeting, and she had stopped letting her P.R. people make our reservations. No more fancy restaurants. She had chosen a place herself; a warm, shabby diner. I met her outside, already defeated by the day: a sleepless child, a lost wallet and the encroaching light paranoia induced by the morning’s string of bad luck. I hadn’t smoked in years, but I bummed a cigarette off Jackson and smoked quickly, worried she was getting cold while she waited. “Don’t rush,” she said grandly. “You’re just killing yourself.” We stood together in the sun amid a bank of melting snow.

The play had entered previews, and her schedule was grueling. Rehearsals at midday were followed by a short break for dinner then the nightly performance. But work clearly simultaneously relaxes and energizes Jackson. She was open and voluble that day, ruminative. Her large hand lay open on the table between us, like a flower. Stories from her childhood came tumbling out on top of one another, the one and only time her father raised his voice to the children, when one of Jackson’s sisters dressed up the cat in doll clothes; the way her mother would check her daughter’s shoes when she came home to visit to make sure she had enough money. “It’s a curious thing,” she said. “It’s an absurd thing to say. Of course she’s dead. I mean — all of my family apart from one sister — my immediate family is dead. But I still find myself walking past a shop and thinking, I must get that for my mum.”

A friend of hers was in the audience the previous night and told her how moved the audience had been by Jackson’s performance, by “the age thing,” as Jackson puts it, that intimation of what was to come. I asked her if she ever feared getting older. She shook her head, mouth full of waffle. The invisibility of youth had been the indignity. Age has been more annoyance than anything else. “The essential you is on the inside, it stays the same,” she told me. “I mean, the envelope you inhabit doesn’t respond as it should. My handwriting is appalling, this arm shakes for no good reason. I have backache. You’re getting old, so what? But it’s irritating.”

Gloria Steinem once said that getting older was like falling off a cliff; there were no women she thought she could emulate. I wanted to tell Jackson this, about having had this feeling and not having it anymore. I wanted to tell her something about her beauty and asperity, about watching her catch the lightning in her hands onstage, but she would have yelled at me and told me to stop being sentimental. Plus, she was getting up to go. “I can leave you a cigarette,” she said, pulled a Dunhill from the pack and slid it across the table. “But I won’t leave you my lighter. You’ll have to find someone to help you.”

I smoked her cigarette outside the diner and scanned the streets for her silhouette, the way she would move quickly but carefully through the slushy sidewalk, shoulders back, duty discharged. Jackson hums as she walks. It’s an old habit. Once, as she walked through her constituency, humming, two young girls started following her. They trailed her for some time. They told her they wanted to hear what happened next. I was embarrassed by my desire to do the same. Tell me what happens next, Glenda.

I returned to the table to gather my things and pay the bill, only to be interrupted by her for the last time. In my open notebook, I saw her words in my hand. We had been talking about Shakespeare; “the man,” she calls him affectionately, “Mr. William.” “I’ve held in my hands a folio edition of ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ ” she had said. “There is one full stop in that play. It’s after the last line.”