Chapter 3
We once had horses, but we sold them for a car. Before those days of machinery, Daisy and I would take the horses to the woods
to ride.
When I was too young to steer, I rode on Grandpa’s horse, facing the back of his suede leather shirt. I had no control—my
one job was to take in the surroundings, the trees that rose around in the shapes of fingers and veins, the stars that sugared
the night.
Then I turned six, and it was my turn to steer the horse myself. Grandpa tried to hoist me up in first position, but my boot
nicked her side. She reared up, causing Grandpa and I to fall backward, and the giant horse scraped its hooves against the
air in front of the sun.
I looked up at the animal, heart nearly stopping at the size of it from this angle.
Grandpa said, Get on up, and pulled me to my feet alongside him.
Grandma got off her horse and came to me, pulling me into her cloak. She rocked me, soothed my wincing, but only for a moment, once she realized there was no real pain.
Get back on, she said, so I got back on.
Her voice echoed in my ear as I opened my eyes, to the sun slipping through the train door cars. It was morning and Mr. Wallace
was gone, eyes closed and at peace.
We crossed into a different town, and the train passed a sign that said, Nigger don’t let the sun go down on you.
Wonderful. Terror coursed through my temples. Where were we going now? Would this nightmare ever end?
The engine stopped at a little barn surrounded by trees, and I got us off. I pulled my mentor down along with the money bags
we’d brought with us. As the train left me behind, I dug a grave with my hands and laid him in it as best I could.
I hummed a song to bring life to the moment—one I’d learned from Grandma. “Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world, troubles of the world, troubles of the world . . .”
Once it was done, I sat in the grass for a bit beside the mound of dirt, my skin covered in sweat and body half dead, but
still awake.
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 me and 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 a darky at 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 with the 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 more mature 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 shine up here like it did down South.
She approached with a pep in her step, but then she paused. She took me all in, her eyes treating me like something that could
break if mishandled.
“Nick. My cousin!” she said, hugging me carefully but no less warmly. “It’s so good to see you.”
“You too,” I said, forcing a smile.
She looped her arm through mine as if I were a designer bag and led me to a cab that was waiting on the street.
I didn’t speak during the ride into Harlem. I felt bad for it, but Daisy didn’t press. Our shared silence was an oasis of
peace.
The car stopped on Amsterdam Avenue in front of a two-story, peach-colored wooden house. It was almost joined to a tall brick
apartment building on its left and another on its right. The house was jam and the two buildings bread, coming to squeeze
its walls in.
I followed Daisy up the porch’s tiny staircase and through the front door. She didn’t give me a tour of the house—just showed
me straight to my room on the first floor.
She asked me how I felt. I lied and said I was fine.
I could tell Daisy didn’t believe me. “I’ll give you space,” she said. “But let me know if you need anything.”
I needed everything and nothing, so I chose silence again. And she left me about my silent business.
I curled into bed and slept for hours and hours. When I woke at night, I heard Daisy and Auntie Lorraine whispering outside
my door.
“Poor thing must be in pieces,” Auntie said. “His father was a heck of a man.”
“We’ll just give him more time?” Daisy returned.
Auntie Lorraine then knocked and opened the door to bring me my toothbrush, towels, and some of Uncle Beet’s old clothes.
She was tall and sturdy with a crown of springy curls half tamed beneath a colorful headscarf, and she wore an apron with
faint stains on it.
All she did when she came in was say, “I brought you some things,” and then she pulled me into a long hug. The hug was so
long and tight it made me weightless. I forgot about gravity. In those moments, the world wasn’t dragging me down.
And when she let go, I was alone in my room again, facing the mundane and unfeeling passage of time.
As the days passed, my cousin and Auntie left silent offerings at my door—sandwiches and soups, but the food didn’t hit like
it should’ve. My stomach was always hurting.
I spent my waking hours staring outside. I wrote poetry by the window, which faced a brick alley wall, where people had left
their mattresses and unwanted furniture leaning. A stray autumn leaf skittered across the hem of the bricks.
I felt as lonely as that leaf. Lonely as the homeless man digging through the garbage can and the three boys who came to throw
a rubber ball against the wall so hard it seemed the air inside the ball would rip out of its horsehide prison.
Pop! it said. Pop!