Novella by Steve Wick

Porchlight is proud to continue the American tradition of serialization by offering a novella, Mr. Wilson by Steve Wick. Following is the fourth installment. 

Steve Wick is a journalist and writer living on eastern Long Island. His stories about the last farm labor camp in the region ran as a series in Newsday, where he was a longtime reporter and editor. He shared in Newsday's Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. He is the author of four works of nonfiction and one novel, The Ruins, which was published in February 2025 by Pegasus Books.

While what follows is fiction, some aspects of the stories of the people and places are true, and are based on newspaper accounts, public records, family oral histories, and interviews conducted by the writer.

 “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”  –-Zora Neale Hurston

Mr. Wilson

The bus passed across South Carolina, stopping once for about a half hour, and proceeding with greater speed, as if the end of the journey was near and the driver was in a hurry to get there. The story Wilson heard in his head also moved with greater speed, too, as his mind caught up with his past, providing him with images of being a young boy in that turpentine camp. He could hear Miss Julia’s and his grandfather’s anxious voices. He could feel—actually feel—the deep seated fear in their everyday lives.

Wilson used the bathroom on the bus frequently, and when it stopped in Charleston he got off and used the bathroom inside the station. It was obvious to him, heavily influenced by his mood as the bus traveled south, that his overall health was in the process of failing.

The deeper the bus moved into the South, the more Wilson experienced some sort of mental and emotional change, slow at first, but the mounting milage added to it. He noticed it again when the bus crossed South Carolina, not far from the Georgia state line. What he had always thought would be his experience—a kind of disgust at returning to where he said he would never return to—faded away. 

Replacing it was a feeling of inevitability; not quite a sense of place, but something that mimicked it, that he was here, that he should be here, and that here he would stay because there was nowhere else to go, and only here could his questions be answered. His last home in the north was a pile of burnt wood and brick.

It was late in the afternoon, the sun had begun to retreat in the west, when he woke to the driver’s shouts, “Atlanta! We’ll be here about an hour! Take your belongings inside! Do not leave anything on the bus!” A murmur passed through the bus as passengers grasped where they were after a long ride.

At the Greyhound station, the driver stepped out onto the curb to help passengers step down. As each one passed, he repeated the same thing: “The colored section of the station is to the far right as you pass through the doors.”

When he was done in the bathroom, Wilson walked outside. The air was warm, the setting sun bright as it made its way across a clear-blue sky. He didn’t want to wander far, but he wanted to find a place to sit and eat something. But within sight of the bus, so he wouldn’t miss anything.

He had walked less than a block when he saw a diner that looked welcoming. Inside, he found a booth facing the street. By turning around in the seat, he could see the front of the bus. He ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee.

An hour later, he felt relieved when the bus pulled away from the station, next stop Macon. What if the bus had broken down and he was stuck in Atlanta? Where would he go? He had put no thought at all in where he would go in Barwick, but being a small place, he figured he could find his way. It would be far easier than in a big city.

He slept again, and he missed the brief stop in Macon. This produced a measure of panic, that he could miss a stop and end up nowhere. He leaned forward in his seat to catch the attention of the driver.

“Is Valdosta next, sir?”

“Why, yes, it is,” the driver said. “Is that where you get off?”

“No. I’m going on to Thomasville,” Wilson said.

The driver thought for a moment. “That might be a problem,” he said. “Unless the schedule’s changed, there’s only one bus a day between Valdosta and Thomasville.”

Wilson leaned back in his seat. This was unwelcome news.

“But then again,” the driver said, “I might be wrong.”

“What time do we reach Valdosta?” Wilson asked.

“Early evening,” he said, without giving a specific time. 

The Valdosta bus station occupied a building at the south end of town that had once been a Sinclair service station. Part of the sign was still attached to a pole, rusty but the letters still visible. The station was one room, a few seats, a ticket counter manned by a parttime employee. That was made clear by a handwritten sign taped to the counter that said, I WORK IRREGULAR HOURS. The employee was not at his desk. The chalkboard on the wall by the desk said the bus to Thomasville, Barwick and Pavo left at 8 a.m. the next morning. 

David helped his mother to a seat inside and went to the phone on the wall by the back door and made a call. When he came back, he said, “Edward will be here shortly, mother.” 

He stepped towards Wilson. There was no ‘colored’ section in the station; it was far too small for that. The only sign Wilson recognized as ‘colored’ was over the water fountain, which he discovered wasn’t working when he went to the bathroom. Thirsty, he went to the ‘white’ fountain instead.

“Mr. Wilson,” David said. “I’d like you to meet my mother. Mother, this is Mr. Wilson.”

She reached out to shake Wilson’s hand. “She’s Mrs. Anderson,” David said.

“Very nice to meet you,” she said. “There’s no service until the morning. Where are you trying to get to?”

“Barwick,” he said. He looked over Mrs. Anderson, and concluded she was even older than he was.

“You from there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“I was born near there,” she said. “My father was an Anderson, my mother a Bradley.”

The surname caught Wilson’s attention. “My grandmother was Julia Bradley. Her brother was Richard Bradley.”

“I knew them both,” she said. “Their people came from up north.”

“I don’t know much,” Wilson said.

“Once again, you see the small world we all lived and grew up in,” she said. “But, tell me: why are you going to Barwick?”

He didn’t know how to answer that.

“You have people still there?”

“Nobody,” he said. “I got a letter from someone. He says he knew my people. I’m hoping to find him.”

“You came all the way south to find this one man?”

“Where I was living burned down,” he said. “Besides, I’m at the end.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “Only God knows that. Far as you know, you got years ahead of you.”

“Well, he ain’t told me yet,” Wilson said.

“You’re looking for something, is that it?” she said.

He was, but he didn’t respond.

“I’m good at reading people’s minds,” she said. “I can tell, you’ve come all this way to find something before you lay down and die.”

“You can’t get to Barwick tonight, Mr. Wilson,” David said.

He didn’t appreciate having his mind read.

“I know that,” Wilson said. “I thought I’d stay here, if they’ll let me.”

“Police come by during the night. They won’t allow that,” David said.

“Stay in my house for the night,” she said. “I got room. You can get the bus in the morning.”

He didn’t want to say yes, but he had no other options. When they arrived at her house, he found it was as tiny as any shed he’d slept in these past decades, but in far better shape. It was well maintained, spotlessly clean, with a kitchen and a table big enough to seat two people. It was obvious to Wilson that the house had been fashioned from something else and made into a home for Mrs. Anderson. Her son lived in an identical house on the same street, which backed up to open land.

Mrs. Anderson’s spare bedroom contained a cot and a dresser pushed against the wall. There was hardly room to move about without bumping into the walls. The door couldn’t open all the way without hitting the bed. Wilson felt an acute sense of embarrassment, as he was dependent on her for a night’s sleep. 

Without saying a word, Mrs. Anderson removed two pork chops from the refrigerator and began frying them on the stove. She chopped up two leftover potatoes into small pieces and put them in the frying pan. In a small bowl, she poured some apple sauce. At the sink, she filled two glasses of water and put them on the table.

“Have you been here long?” he asked as she flipped over the pork chops.

“I was born here,” she said.

“In this house?”

“On this land,” she said. “My parents were born here. My grandparents lived here when I was a child. I don’t know where they came from. South Carolina I was told. They are all buried a ways from here. It’s woods now, all overgrown. My son tried to find the graves to put flowers on them last Easter, but they’re all lost. If there were stones, they sunk into the ground. But, as I see it, Mr. Wilson, I’m close to my people, where we lived for generations, and that makes me feel I’m a part of them.”

When dinner was ready, she put plates on the table and they sat down. She lowered her head.

“Are you going to tell me why you’ve come all this way?” she asked.

It was another minute or so before Wilson managed an answer. “Where I was living, I got burned out,” he said. “I had nowhere to go.”

“Why come back to Barwick?”

“I got a letter from this man. I don’t know how he found me. He said he knew my mother. I thought I’d end my life down here.”

“You don’t know when your life will end, Mr. Wilson. What’s the real reason you came south?”

“I want to be where my mother was buried,” he said. 

She put down her knife and fork and stared at Wilson. Her gaze was so intense he looked away, uncomfortable. 

“I understand that,” she said. “I do. I think about this place and how it holds so much of us. Land is like people, Mr. Wilson. It holds on to the stories of the people who lived on it, and never lets it go. It can’t be erased. Their story is always there.”

He found it difficult to eat. He leaned back in the chair, staring up at the ceiling.

“Do you know where your mother is buried?”=

He shook his head.

“This man who wrote you, does he know?”

No answer.

It was another five minutes before Wilson returned to his dinner. He poked at the potatoes and cut off a piece of the chop, but his appetite was on hold. 

“I’ve supported myself since I’m eleven or twelve,” Wilson said. “I provided for myself. I worked every day.”

Mrs. Anderson was puzzled by Wilson’s comments.

“I think I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Wilson. Would you rather be here or sleeping in a bus station?”

No response.

“This isn’t a handout,” she said. “You can do the cleaning up if it makes you feel better.”

In Mrs. Anderson’s house, he was on a real bed with a real mattress, with comfortable sheets and a weighty blanket he welcomed for its warmth and security.  It seemed to him he never fell asleep, that he lay awake all night listening to the noises outside the house, and wondering if he’d said something wrong to Mrs. Anderson.

He sat up on the bed when he heard noise in the kitchen, which was only a few feet from his bed. He got up, quickly dressed, and with his socks on shuffled to the bathroom in the corner opposite the sink. He was grateful it had a door he could close. His piss appeared less red, or maybe that was wishful thinking on his part. What was true was that the pain in his right side was not as acute. 

I’m not dead yet, he thought.

When he came out of the bathroom, Mrs. Anderson was scrambling eggs and frying bacon.

“Good morning,” she said. “You slept well?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I take it, Mr. Wilson, you’re used to taking care of yourself and when someone gives you something, it makes you feel like you’re in line for a handout.”

“I suppose,” he said.

She put his plate on the table and filled a cup from the coffee pot on the gas stove.

“Do you take milk in your coffee?” she asked.

“This is fine, thank you.” He looked at her for a long moment and muttered, “I appreciate all you’ve done for me.” 

She heard it, and smiled.

“David will pick you up at 7:30 and take you to the bus station. You will be in Barwick later in the morning, Mr. Wilson. Do you have any idea what you can expect? Or where you will stay?”

“I haven’t thought about any of that,” he said.

“You mean, you just got a bus when your home burned down and came to the South? Is that right?”

“Yes,” he said. 

Wilson could see she felt he was proceeding without any sort of plan. The look on her face suggested she thought he was wandering aimlessly in search of a past he would almost certainly never find. 

As she put the breakfast dishes in the sink, the silence between them grew and was broken only when David arrived to take Wilson to the bus stop. Wilson got up from the table and grabbed his pack. He stood behind Mrs. Anderson, who turned and walked with him out the door to David’s car.

“Goodbye, Mr. Wilson,” she said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Anderson,” he said.

Ten minutes later they arrived at the bus station. The bus was parked at the curb, the engine idling. David walked with Wilson into the station to the ticket counter. Wilson withdrew the envelope from his pack, carefully removed a ten-dollar bill, and handed it to the clerk.

“I’m going to Barwick,” Wilson said.

The man nodded. “You may board now,” he said.=

The bus pulled away and headed west towards Thomasville. The morning was bright, the land and woods on both side of the road open and bathed in sunlight. It felt to him he could see into his past on this land, that the land held something extraordinary and he, seated on a moving bus, was a part of it. He was no stranger.

What was around him, the direction he was moving, was strangely familiar for being gone so long. He had dreamt of this place; this morning, he was no longer dreaming.

That feeling of place, of being here, gripped him. He had spent the past decades loathing his past and this place, yet here he was, moving closer to Barwick, and he felt calm. The voice in his head told him what he was doing was right.

He stayed on the bus when it stopped in Thomasville. Barwick and Pavo were next.

The road to Barwick was lined with stands of pine trees broken up by open fields. Some were lined with pecan trees planted in neat rows. He tried to remember when his grandmother, Julia Wilson, had taken him out of Barwick to northern Florida to be near her brother, Richard Bradley. The best he could come up with was that he was seven, maybe eight years old. 

I know this place, he thought. The familiarity spooked him, but not enough to upset the sense of place he felt.

The bus pulled down what passed for a business strip in Barwick, a disjointed block of brick buildings offering farming supplies, farming equipment, and a post office. A railroad warehouse stood next to a packing station, where bales of cotton were waiting on a platform. 

If he had come here as a child, with his mother or grandmother, he had no memory of it. Their home was a shack among a cluster of shacks in the back of the Barwick farm, or a shack in the Bradshaw turpentine quarters. 

Before the bus pulled away, Wilson said to the driver, “I need a place to stay.”

The driver pointed to the tiny brick building across the street. “Go in there; they should be able to help you. The Village clerk is good people.”

Across the street was Village Hall, and he hesitated before going there. Inside, he stepped to a counter and a woman got up from her desk and greeted him.

“Good morning,” she said. “Can I help you?” She had the air of an official, but one who presided over the day-to-day affairs of a small community where everyone knew everyone’s business.

“My name is Wilson. I was born here. I don’t remember much, but we lived in a turpentine camp right here in Barwick.”

Her head tilted in surprise, followed by a smile.  “Are you Jimmy Wilson?” she asked. “From up north?”

“Yes,” Wilson said. 

Another woman got up from her desk and approached the counter. 

“We’re the ones who tracked you down to Long Island,” the second woman said. She extended her hand. “I’m Evelyn, the village clerk. This is Audrey, my assistant. Just the two of us here. Mr. Manley spent many months trying to find out what happened to you. His family owned the Bradshaw quarters where you lived as a child. He’s putting together a history of his family and the quarters.”

Wilson tried to collect himself, his surprise at this development getting the better of him. Finally, he said, “I got a letter from him.”

“Audrey can tell you, it took us many months and many letters to find where you were living,” Evelyn said. “You had a cousin here. Did you know that? Belle Williams. She had not seen you in many years, and said you never came back. She remembered a town on Long Island where you lived in a labor camp of some sort. We finally connected with someone at a church there, Shiloh Baptist, and they told us how to find you.”

He stumbled backward, falling onto a bench by the counter.

“Are you alright, Mr. Wilson?” Evelyn said.

He nodded.

She went back to her desk and returned with a glass of water. He drained it quickly. 

“Mr. Wilson?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

“We’d like to introduce you to Mr. Manley,” Evelyn said. “And there’s an older gentleman here in Barwick. Mr. Pope. He’s almost a hundred years old. Mr. Manley wants you to meet him, too. He said he knew your mother.”

He looked up. “My mother?”

“Was your mother Ada Wilson?”

He nodded.

“Mr. Pope said Ada Wilson worked for his family,” Evelyn said.

She went and got Wilson another glass of water. He emptied the glass and handed it back to her.

“Where are you staying in Barwick?” Audrey asked.

“I don’t have anywhere,” he said. “I didn’t know I had a cousin in Barwick.”

“I’m sorry to say, Mr. Wilson,” Audrey said. “She passed away just last week. She was eighty-nine. I used to see her around Barwick. Her family has land here.”

“They had land?” He couldn’t see how that was possible.

“Oh, yes. And very proud of it. Without her, we wouldn’t have found you.”

Evelyn went back to her desk and came back with an address book. “Mrs. Young, is she still renting rooms out of her house?”

“Far as I know,” Audrey said.

“There’s a lady over on Kendrick Street. She rents rooms,” Evelyn said. She went to her desk, made a call, and returned and said Wilson could stay with Mrs. Young. Five dollars a night. Two daily meals included.

To reach the house, Audrey drove down Coffee Street. The moment Wilson saw the shacks in a field of the Bradshaw quarters, with railroad tracks running down the middle, the familiarity took his breath away.  

That thought, more of a flash of bright light than a clear image, seemed impossible to him. He left here with his grandmother after Ada Wilson’s death, and yet this location, along with the collection of shacks, barns and outbuilding where pine sap was boiled into turpentine, was so familiar.

Audrey turned down Kendrick Street and slowed the car. The house was small, shed-like, and set back from the road in a grove of oak trees. Beyond it was a field of pecan trees in straight lines. It was late in the afternoon. The sky still glowed a bright blue. 

“Does she know I’m coming?” Wilson asked.

“Yes, Evelyn told her your name,” Audrey said. “I will pick you up in the morning, Mr. Wilson. Ward Manley is the man who wrote you. I’m his wife.” 

Chickens pecked the ground in front of the house. Farther down the street cows grazed. Wilson got out, holding his pack, and stood before the house, his mind a jumble of visions and thoughts. The front door opened, and a woman in a flower dress and apron stepped outside.

“You’re Mr. Wilson?” she said.

He nodded.

“Good afternoon,” she said.

Wilson walked to the door, stepped up and inside, entering a living room, with a couch and several chairs. A man was asleep in one of the chairs, a blanket over his legs and chest. A dining table occupied the next room, and next to that was the kitchen, which was bright from the sun setting in the west. The house was a few hundred square feet, well maintained, with a bedroom by the front door and a second one next to the kitchen.

“I hope you brought your appetite,” she said, taking his pack and putting it in the bedroom by the front door. “I have a pot of stew on the stove. If you want to wash up, the bathroom is in the kitchen. Mr. Martin will be eating with us and staying over as well.”

Peering into the room, he could see there were two single beds. He would be sharing the room with the man asleep in the chair.

When Wilson came out of the bathroom, Mrs. Young was stirring the stew in a big pot on a wood-burning stove. A pile of logs sat by the back door. 

“Help yourself to a class of water, Mr. Wilson. I don’t serve alcohol. And you’re not allowed to bring any into my house. Am I clear on that?”

He didn’t respond. When she turned to stare at him, waiting on an answer, he nodded in agreement.

“Do you have an idea how long you will be staying?” she asked.

“l don’t know, Mrs. Young.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was born here.”

She turned back to the pot on the stove. “You’re the man Mr. Manley spent several years looking for,” she said. 

She reached into a cabinet and withdrew three bowls. She put them on the table along with spoons and called out to Mr. Martin to join them. The man pushed the blanket off and, with great effort, freed himself from the chair. He walked in short steps, reaching out to grab the back of a chair, and sat down.

Neither Wilson nor Mr. Martin spoke during dinner. Mrs. Young talked about the stew and how she made it and how her daughter, in Macon, Georgia, has three grown children and how she wished they were closer. When they were finished, Wilson carried his bowl to the sink, rinsed it out, and put it on a drying rack. Mr. Martin returned to his chair, pulled the blanket up, and closed his eyes.

Wilson was standing in the kitchen, keeping warm by the stove as Mrs. Young put dishes and utensils away. When she took off her apron, she folded it and placed it on the counter. She turned to face him.

“You say you were born here?” she said.

He nodded. 

“There were shacks over there a ways,” he said, pointing out the window over the sink and past the rows of pecan trees. “I remember walking through a cantaloupe field to get to the church. I haven’t touched a cantaloupe ever since.”

“The Barwick plantation?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. 

“My people lived there,” she said.

“They grew cantaloupe, raised cotton, some peanuts,” she said. “You won’t eat a cantaloupe because you walked through a field of them when you were a child?”

He nodded.

“Do you wear cotton shirts?” she asked.

Wilson ignored her. “Then we were in the turpentine quarters here in Barwick, down on Coffee Street. My mother, my grandmother and my grandfather.”

“There were a number of Wilsons here. Was your grandfather Shadrack Wilson?”

He nodded.

“He cleaned stables here in town,” she said. “I’d see him there. He was too old to work in the pine woods, tapping trees for sap. My husband did that until it killed him. Who was your father?”

“Berry Wilson,” he said.

The mention of the name changed the expression on her face. Wilson saw it plainly.

“You knew him?”

“My husband did,” she said. “They were working in the woods tapping trees when a mob came looking for a Negro to lynch.”

“How do you know that?”

“My husband ran away from the posse after Berry Wilson was taken away by the mob. He hid for a while in the Bradshaw camp over on Coffee Street. The fear killed him. He couldn’t do anything after that.”

November/Barwick

Berry Wilson finished his work a half-mile into the woods from the Williams turpentine camp with a cup-hanging crew of five other men. They marked a dozen trees with distinctive slashes and hanged cups and aprons on a number of them for the resin to collect in. As the sky began to darken, Berry was grateful for the cool temperatures. Midday when the sun was straight up, he sweated profusely, but the temperature dropped quickly after 2 p.m., and now it was cool enough for him to roll his sleeves down. 

The camp would soon shut down for the season, and he’d catch a ride back to Barwick to the Bradshaw quarters. As he walked to the wagons carrying his broad axe, he heard men screaming at the top of their lungs accompanied by the roar of truck engines and dogs barking. He pulled up short.

Turning to the other men, he said, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Berry,” Stephen Young said.

Headlights bounced through the trees as trucks maneuvered over the rough ground between the stands of yellow pines. Groups of white men stood in truck beds, shotguns sticking up.

“Where’s Mr. Williams?” one of the men asked. “He know about this?”

“I got my own people here. Anybody seen my cousin this morning?” Berry said.

He had not seen Ralph Wilson since sunup in the commissary, when Ralph said he was going to try and leave the camp to visit his father. The first truck reached the clearing where the men stood. A white man with a head as big as a pumpkin shouted, “You all stay put now! Put down them axes!”

Berry dropped his axe and took two steps towards the truck and the driver, who stepped out holding his shotgun, one hand high over his head. 

“Don’t be doing nothin but staying right here,” the man shouted.

Berry knew the man, Mr. Hugh Vonier, a justice of the peace. He’d seen him talking to Mr. Williams and the white families who lived on Coffee Street near the Bradshaw quarters. He regarded him as a man who could be talked to.

“We looking for a particular man,” another man shouted as he stepped out of a second truck.

“We’ve been to several camps so far, taking people back to be identified,” Vonier said.

“Sir,” Berry said. “We been here all day.”

“What happened?” the man next to Berry said. 

“A vicious attack on a young white girl, that’s what happened!” Vonier said.

“We don’t know nothing about that, sir,” Berry said. “No, sir. We been in the woods all this time. Matter a fact none of us been out a here for a good long while.”

Under a barrage of shouted orders, the men walked down the sandy path in front of the trucks escorted by men pointing their shotguns at them. Dozens of armed men stood around idling trucks, while packs of howling dogs lunged madly at the ends of long ropes. A dozen men in striped prison garb were chained together to a pine tree. A boy lay on the ground wrapped around the whipping post, his hands and ankles tied in front of him.

Berry could see Mr. Williams talking to a group of men. The cacophony of dogs barking bounced angrily off the pine trees as if a pack of four-legged monsters had been loosed. Men shouted in anger at the dogs. Berry looked around, but could not see his cousin. 

Berry’s friend Robert, a slight, light-skinned man who spoke in whispers, sat on a tree stump by one of the shanties, a white man standing guard over him. When Robert saw Berry, he dipped his head, and Berry, tentatively at first so as not to alarm the hounds, stepped towards him. Robert’s hands were tied behind his back.

Suddenly, the dogs erupted in a frantic, barking riot, with men shouting at them to shut up. The loud voices shattered the men as if they’d been descended upon with baseball bats. Some of the men fell onto their knees. There were shouts of “No!” and “Jesus save us!” 

Berry’s knees wobbled and piss drained down his leg. His hands and arms shivered, his voice disappeared in his throat. Men around him wept. He looked again at Robert, and saw one of the camp axes with its huge blade made to mark the pitch pines leaning against a stump. He thought of running for it, picking it up, and swinging it wildly through the mob, killing as many people as he could before he was gunned down. 

 Three armed men led by the camp’s whipping boss walked among the workers, focusing intently on skin color, pulling aside some and pushing them towards the trucks. The boss forcefully pulled Robert off the stump, steered him towards the back of a truck, and shoved him onto the bed of the truck. To Berry’s eye, it looked like they were taking the lightest men and leaving behind the darkest. 

He shook his head from side to side trying to make himself understand what was going on. He looked at the backs of both of his hands, relieved at his dark skin. Without thinking it through, he walked towards the truck and climbed up next to Robert as five other workers were brought in and told to sit in the truck bed and shut up. A teenage boy holding a shotgun came up behind the truck and stared at the men. Berry didn’t look at him. 

The truck moved down the sandy road, followed by a line of other trucks, their headlights piercing the darkness and bouncing off the trees like angry ghosts. On down a long, dirt road, clouds of dust rising in the air. When the first truck reached a paved road, it began to turn left but abruptly stopped. Ahead a quarter-mile were the bright lights of torches held high and trucks blocking the road. Men shouted and the truck backed up and turned around, followed by the other trucks. The caravan drove for twenty minutes before slowing and turning onto another dirt road into the Bradshaw quarters. 

Peering over the side of the truck, Berry could see where they were. His wife and father’s home was a short distance north from where the truck stopped. He watched as the driver got out and shouted to another truck pulling in behind them with more men in the back. The light of a torch over their heads flickered to reveal the face of his cousin, Ralph Wilson. His hands were pulled behind his back so severely the tops of his arms seemed about to pop out of the shoulder joints.

Around the truck came Ada and Jimmy, but Berry did not immediately see them. One of the men held out his arm to keep Ada away. Jimmy kept walking, away from his mother, to the truck. Now Berry saw his son. Shaking his head from side to side, he moaned loudly, “Oh, no, no, no.”

Ada tried to go by one man but he held her back. When she pressed against him, the man shoved her so hard she fell back into the dirt. Behind her Julia and Shadrack stood, their feet imprisoned to the ground. 

In full blown panic, Stephen Young summoned the courage to jump off the truck. The confusion was such that no one saw him. But no one else on the truck dared to try to escape. He ran to one of the shacks. The driver put the truck in gear and the two trucks moved out of the quarters and onto Coffee Street. The boy followed the truck, first in a walk, then a run. Berry lowered his face to his knees as the truck pulled away and into the darkness of a south Georgia night.

AUTHOR’S NOTE 

The residents of a farm labor camp on the North Fork of Long Island were the focus of reporting I did for Newsday. The camp was the very last of its kind and was home to Black men and women who had long been separated from their southern birth places and families. James Wilson was one of the residents of that camp, as were Bea, Oliver, Frank and Clara.

When the camp was shuttered after a disastrous fire, these people had to find new lives. Some went South; others had long lost any connection to where they were from. Bea was murdered by a man who broke in her apartment. Mr. Wilson, who had been a farm laborer since he was in his teens, refused to return to where he was born, in Barwick, Georgia. He died of a heart attack, never having ventured south to find his beginnings, or the ground where his mother was buried.

Those stories, and a series of photographs taken by Viorel Florescu, were compiled into a book called All That Remains. It was published by the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Free Library in 2024. 

The story of the arrest, trial and acquittal of Ralph Wilson is told in newspaper accounts in Thomasville, Georgia.