“May the Lord be the first in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”
She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north.
What were these things? He did not like them on his feet. Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him. She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did what she was told. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with. There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. None of them had been out of Mississippi. None of them had been on a train before–not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, “by the time you sit down, you there,” as Ida Mae put it. Edd over the worth of a year’s labor, and she did not know what would come of it.
She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. The night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The following excerpt is from “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” Listen to an interview with author Isabel Wilkerson and learn more about the book.Ĭhickasaw County, Mississippi, Late October 1937
0 kommentar(er)
