We left our mother’s house much earlier than we had ever on a Thanksgiving. It was in 1993. A week later, on a cold, windy Sunday morning the phone rang, feeling like a ten-pound barbell when I lifted it to my ear. I heard the voice of our family’s messenger, my sister Ruby.

"Jimmy went to the hospital this morning." Her voice faded into the dense morning air circulating in my bedroom. "They found cancer. It doesn’t look too good."

My heart was heavy, my breathing fast. I wanted to be strong.

"He went this morning?" I asked, feeling empty when the words left my mouth.

I was no longer listening, just squeezing the phone tightly, my eyes welling up with tears. The Lord will see us through. He always does. My sister’s voice ran through me like water. After I hung up the phone, I tried to make sense of what was happening. Warm tears rolled down my face. My stepfather had died of cancer in 1982 and I remembered Ma’s silence during that time. Death was knocking, returning again.

The next five months took a toll on the family, full of emotional swings of sadness, fear, and hopeful prayers, as the cancer moved through my brothers body. He didn’t curse having cancer; he never would have looked at it that way, even though he had reason.

When he could no longer care for himself, my sisters Margie and Ruby took over—guiding him through the agonizing trips to the hospital, making sure his health insurance and important papers were in order. One winter day as they sat in Margie's kitchen, emptying several shopping bags of insurance and legal papers, I found myself watching him closely, hoping to see the flash of his once brilliant smile, the glow that used to spring from his eyes. His muscular body had been a symbol of our family journey from North Carolina.

Jimmy had fled to New York in 1964, a time when many young black men rushed to the cities of the north in search of work and relief from the Jim Crow South. He was eighteen and moved in with mý sister Doris, who had moved to New York three years earlier. Like my brother, floods of black men fled the south rather than endure the dehumanizing racism and that drowned their ambitions, killed their souls. The south had no use for rebellious, defiant negro boys like my brother.

One scorching hot summer afternoon, my brother Jimmy and Uncle Nate were plowing peanuts when Bessie the mule collapsed. They tried giving her water from the well, but it was too late. The mule was old and slow, and had barelý made it through the last harvest season. But that did not matter to the landowner, Herbert Pittman, who rented the land to our famiy. Losing a mule was costly, too much for a family that had no savings and owned very little. Instead of calling the law, as landowners often did to keep their sharecroppers in line, Herbert Pittman took another angle.

"Look here now," he said. "I’m a tell y’all something. Y'all can stay, but that there boy Jimmy gots to leave from here."

If Jimmy stayed on the farm, the Sheriff might be called and arrest him. Worst, he might disappear on some dark road in the way of Emmet Till in Mississippi. Fearful of what might happen, Jimmy stuffed a small shopping bag with several pairs of pants and shirts. The next day he left Whitakers, North Carolina, catching a ride with a cousin for the 900 mile journey to New York.

Weeks later, on a cold Saturday in December, several months before I turned five, my grandfather loaded a wagon for the ride into Rocky Mount. It was time to settle for the year's harvest with Herbert Pittman. The 126 bags of peanuts and 240 bales of cotton should have earned several thousand, but Herbert Pittman figured it differently. My grandfather left with only seven hundred dollars, far short of what it would take to survive the cold winter months. On the way home, he tried making sense of what happened, how an honest year’s work had turned into nothing.

The cost of the mule had been taken from the year's wages, leaving my grandparents with no choice. We owned none of the land, and thought of another season in the cotton fields pointed only in one direction. Jimmy was in New York. My sister Doris was there. Several of my mother‘s siblings were also in New York.

On Christmas Eve, Grandma gathered everyone around the wood stove. It was also her fifty-eighth birthday. Outside, the cold December winds banged against the loose clapboards of the house.

"We’re leaving this behind," she said, flatly. "We can’t do this no more. Herbert says we got to move from his place."

I was only five, but I remember that early Sunday morning when I was awakened by furniture and large boxes sliding across the worn floorboards. A thin layer of snow covered the frozen dirt yard just beyond the front porch. Two of my uncles were loading a 1957 Chevy and a U-Haul trailer with everything we owned. The next thing I remember was being shuffled into the back seat of Uncle Short‘s Chevy with two of my sisters. The car inched its way up the narrow dirt road leading to the main highway, a large mattress hanging from the car roof. Another car followed closely behind with my other five sisters and two brothers.

When we reached the main highway, I looked back at our old house until I could see nothing but white dust falling rapidly to the ground. The large fields, once full of cotton, were covered with a white blanket. As we sped up the main highway, I stared into the woods where I had seen my uncles hunt squirrels and rabbits. Soon, the house where I had spent my first five years disappeared behind a curtain of snow.

In a few hours we had passed through what must have been Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and then the darkness of New Jersey fell onto the car windows. Chugging through the wet snow on Interstate 95 and the Jersey Turnpike, hundreds of lights painted the dark sky and reflected against the dew on the car windows. The farm had always been pitch black at night with only one or two lights from the houses across the field. I followed the bright lights, zeroing on one star and tracking it until I could no longer make out where it faded into the darkness.

We drove through the darkness for several hours and arrived in the upstate New York small city of Poughkeepsie at about eleven o'clock that Sunday night. It was a cold night and the bitter January wind flung hardened snow past our faces as we walked toward my Aunt Bell‘s apartment in Building Number 5. The chain links surrounding the three story red brick buildings that made up the projects moved swiftly with the wind at our backs. We must have looked like strangers from a distant land, moving in a pack toward Aunt Bell’s.

The projects consisted of ten buildings and hundreds of lights shone through apartment windows, coloring the cold night. Once inside Aunt Bell’s building, the echoing sounds from the slamming metal doors and the crashing, thumping sound of garbage being thrown down the incinerator at the end of the bright hallwaz were nothing like I’d heard on the farm. When I woke up the next morning, my cousins were eating a mushy, grainy substance soaked in cold milk. Outside, the wind howled through the bare trees like one continuous whistle.

The next day we moved into a third floor apartment at 36 North Perry Street in the downtown section off of Main Street, four blocks from the river. One of my uncles had found two apartments at sixty dollars a month—one for my mother and the second floor apartment for my grandmother. The building was covered with brown granite shingles, and the rusted kerosene tanks near a back door gave the backyard a smell I'll never forget. From our apartment I could see the tops of other houses, the thick branches of Maple trees lining the block. Cars pulled through the snow covered road.

To this day, I have a hard time remembering where we all slept or how my mother squeezed us all into that apartment. Margie was fifteen; Roy, fourteen, Ruby was thirteen, James was ten, Rosalind was eight, and I was five. Ann was three and my mother was pregnant with my younger brother Frank who would be born that June. I slept with Roy and James in a back bedroom overlooking the kerosene tanks.

My first nights at 36 North Perry Street, I did not sleep well. Our living room had a worn wood floor with remnants of linoleum rug that my mother eventually replaced. Late at night when I laid across the couch, squeaking and scratching sounds kept me awake. The room was dark except for a thin ray streak of light coming from the kitchen. With one eye open, I notice several grayish objects, the size of an egg. They moved with jerky, creeping motions, dragging a pink, shoestring-like piece behind them. One by one, more of them moved slowly across the floor toward the window. I opened both eyes. There were at least a dozen—nibbling away at the bread crumbs.

I lay there, afraid to get up and pee.

Thuummp! Thuump! I slammed my hand against the bottom of the couch and the rats scattered in all directions, leaving the crumbs behind. I waited for them to return and, one by one, they crept back toward the crumbs, pulling their tails with them. Seconds later, the full pack had reached the center of the floor again.

Thump! Thuummp! Thump-thump! Thuummp! They fled into two small holes near the back bedroom, into the plaster walls where they hibernated. Minutes later they returned—one by one.

The came back every night, like clockwork---scratching, creeping, sneaking across the floor When the apartment became badly infested, my mother placed small, wooden, mouse-traps along the baseboard, hoping to get rid of them. But, it seemed as though they were going to be there as long we were, claiming the space as their own.

That first week in New York made me long for the farm.

Known as the The Queen City, Poughkeepsie was a small, working class, river city on the Hudson River, just a two-hour ride north of New York City. The city sat in a valley, surrounded by mountainous hills of thick trees to the west and east. Across the river were the highlands and further west perched the Minnewaska mountains, named after a tribe of New York Indians. Later I’d learn that the name Poughkeepsie was a Native American name taken from a tribe in that part of the state.

Journeying from a town of no more than 500 to a city of 39,000 was like suddenly waking up from a dream and realizing that your world has changed. Over 900 miles separated the two places, and while other black families from North Carolina had also made their way to Poughkeepsie, still were strangers to the city. Uncle Short, Aunt Bee, Aunt Bell, and my mother’s youngest sister, Aunty, had all left the farm by 1955. First, second, and third cousins had left the farm too, sending back news of better paying jobs in factories, hospitals, on the metro-north railroad, and as domestics. Aunt Bea was among the first flood of black women who left farms after answering agency ads for live-in domestics in northern cities, settling in White Plains, New York and later in Brooklyn. On weekends she rode the rain for two hours to Poughkeepsie to visit us.

After we'd been in New York a little more than two weeks, Ma found work at a frozen fish factory. Ted’s Fish Place was a twenty-minute car ride across the Hudson river. She caught a ride with other women and came home late in the afternoon, tired and worn down. One day she missed her ride and, faced with the prospect of walking across water on the massive, steel bridge, waited for hours on the road’s narrow shoulder until my sisters sent a car for her. Years later she told me that she was so scared she never looked down at the water.

After the bridge incident, she took on domestic work, a line of work that many of the city’s black women had flocked to--cleaning the homes of white folks Whites on the south side of town hired black women by word of mouth and through ads in the local newspapers.

Long before we got out of bed, Ma walked to Main Street and caught the city bus to Hooker Avenue or South Road and then walked several blocks to houses with large front yards and two car garages. By three o’clock she was stepping off the green and gray city bus with other black women who made the daily treks aross town. Sometimes she came home with large shopping bags packed with clothes and shoes. One day, there might be a heavy wool sweater or a pair of sturdy jeans tagged with LEE, LEVI or WRANGLER on the waist. The next week--a pair of shoes, almost new sneakers that my brother James and I wrestled over, tearing the bag to pieces, to try them on first. The well-stitched, durable hand-me-down clothes became a part of our wardrobe, clashing with the worn clothing we’d brought from North Carolina.

When Ma wasn’t cleaning homes on the southside, I stayed cramped inside our third floor apartment, gazing from our third floor window. The streets below were usually quiet. Fumes from the kerosene tanks on the side of the house floated up to our living room, making my nose tickle. To pass the boredom, I played with a three-foot wooden ashtray, turning it’s cylinder left and right as if it were one of the Oldsmobile that whizzed along Perry Street. In the background, the radio spat out melancholy songs and the soft, soothing voice of a woman whose words drifted through our apartment. Don't hang around and let your problems surround you. There are movie shows – downtown. Maybe you know some little places to go to. Where they never close – downtown. It was as though she was singing about the streets that stretched beyond Perry Street, the busy sidewalks of Main Street, the city life would consume us in that first year in New York..

Years later when I would hear the song on the radio, it took me back to the cozy streets of downtown where we’d been transplanted like fish out of water, like strangers to a new land.

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