Get on up,said Grandpa’s voice, as clear as if I were still in my dream.
I got to walking under the dry sun, looking for signs of human life. Another Negro man was hiking the railroad tracks the opposite way with a walking stick, all alone. We nodded at each other but did not speak.
My arms grew sore from carrying the loot. Should I need to kill a cow, I lacked the strength for it—my hunger took it out of me. Out where there was no one, my throat went dry, and meand death played a game of tag. I was strangely apathetic to it, because how much crueler could death be than this? A life that could swat you with grief like a switch and ask,How will you deal with this? Who else will understand its pain but you?
I had no answers, but my questions followed me to an inn, where a woman was smoking on a bench outside. It gave me some relief that she too was shrouded in an unpleasant stench. I could smell the odor on myself and so could the circle of flies that followed me.
The woman watched me as if I were a monkey in a freak show—in interest and humor. She went into a check-in booth as I walked up.
I emptied some dollars and coins in the slot under the glass between us. “Could you point me toward Harlem, miss?”
“This is Peoria,” she said. “There’s a bus to New York tomorrow morning, six a.m.” And then she offered me a room the size of a walk-in closet, but I was too happy for both the bed and privacy to care.
On the cot, I lilted like a soldier in a lonely boat floating out to sea. The wallpaper swirls made me dizzy. I was hungry and hollowed out and stunned by my past as if it were a grenade actively blowing me to pieces.
But some people were still nice. The innkeeper here was kind, and it was a relief she didn’t call me adarkyat the door and send me on my way.
I walked to the bathroom and found it was nice too, with lovely pink tiling. It was shared by the guests of the inn, so I quickly took a shower before someone else came around withthe same thought. Afterward, I returned to the room to read some papers.
There was one report on the massacre, saying how maybe a dozen people died. But that was not true; it was maybe a dozen per building. Or at least it felt that way.
I thought,It’s a miracle you can still read! It’s a miracle you can process information with the loose strings in your brain.
And that’s because I was a human despite the invaders’ efforts to make us think we were not. I was not the lesser color. That was a myth. A rumor.
This is what got me to keep moving. The awareness, or maybe the foolish hope, that this world was big and that not everyone in it would want to kill me.
I began looking around the room for a way out and found a phone book on the lower shelf of the nightstand table, but in it, I only found local names.
“My name is Nick,” I said to myself, as I closed the book, folded the papers, and tucked in to sleep. “I got some family in Harlem.”
The next day, I picked up the receiver at the inn’s phone, located in a little booth near the lobby. After a few clicks, a woman’s voice came on the line.
“Operator.”
“Yes, I need to place a long-distance call to New York,” I said. “Harlem. The name is Lorraine Whitley.”
There was a pause—some background voices, papers shuffling.
And then she said, “I’ll connect you.”
A girl answered. Her vocal cadence was familiar but moremature than when I’d last heard it. “Hello?”
I hesitated at first. “Hi, um... Daisy? It’s Nick. Your cousin? From Greenwood?”
“Oh, Nick!” she said. “We’ve been trying to call your dad since the news came in! We couldn’t get in touch. Please tell me everyone is okay.”
I was silent. I could not form the words,He is dead.It would make it real, and I wasn’t ready to accept that both of my parents were gone. So I didn’t say anything. But somehow, she picked up on it.
Her tone turned somber when she said, “Where are you?”
“I’m in Illinois. I was wondering if I could come up and stay with you and Uncle and Auntie for a bit? I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
I took the train out of Illinois to Grand Central Station in New York. There was clearly a great influx of people coming into New York City. I could barely navigate my way through the crowd at the station to find the arriving bay and Daisy.
She was as cultured as she imagined herself to be as a kid, as if all her planning made her dreams come true. Her hair was short and wavy, a far cry from the braids she wore when we were kids.
This version of Daisy had lost no hope in her eyes, but young adulthood seemed to turn her rough-and-tumble energy into daintiness. Her white nail polish looked too perfect to go digging in the mud, and her day dress would not take to stains well either. Her skin was cinnamon with golden undertones and looked lighter than it used to. Perhaps the sun didn’t shineup here like it did down South.
