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 second 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

A Novella 

Eastern Long Island

There were all those late afternoons in his garden, after the packing in the barn had ended for the day, when he tried to get Frank to tell him something, anything at all, about himself.

“Where were you born?” Wilson asked, laughing at the question because it was probably the one thousandth time he’d asked it. 

“I don’t know,” Frank said. 

“How come you don’t know?”

“I can’t remember.”

“What’s your momma’s name?”

“I can’t remember.”

“What state were you born in?”

No answer.

“How old are you?”

No answer.

“Big Willy bring you up from the South?”

“In his bus. With Curly. Wilfy. Me. Clara. Robert. Fuzzy and Slim.”

“Where did Big Willy find you?”

“I don’t know.”

The packing barn loomed high over Wilson like a massive, cavernous fortification left over from a long-forgotten land war. Since the day he arrived, he had been awed by its size, its footprint large on the landscape. It functioned as a factory with a railroad siding of its own. It was his workplace, his paycheck, his present and his future.

As he turned towards the barn, thick, black, oily smoke billowed out from under the eaves, curling and crawling up the steep roofline. In disbelief at what he was seeing, he took three steps towards the barn and as he did the roof exploded in flames, the timbers crashing into the interior with a noise like a thousand trains passing at once.

“Frank! Frank!” Wilson shouted. “Frank! Get everyone out of the camp!”

In his own panic, Frank hurried towards the back door of the camp building, but his right leg dragging behind him tripped him as his torso pushed ahead. He could not speed up the broken mechanics of his body. As Frank stumbled to the ground, Wilson yelled as he ran towards the back doors of the barn, his arms pin wheeling over his head. Frank tried to stand, but got twisted up in his bad leg and he fell face first into the dirt.

Inside the rear of the barn, the smoke and heat scorched Wilson’s face. He pushed through towards where he kept a freezer that he’d filled with meat from his butchered pig. The smoke was so thick he could not draw in a breath. He collapsed to the dirt floor. 

On all fours he crawled to the freezer and, pushing open the lid, reached in and retrieved the metal cash box. He threw it across the dirt towards the open barn doors, crawling as fast as he could until he reached the doors and the yard. Once outside, he rolled over onto his back, wheezing and hacking until he could get clean air through his mouth.

Every part of the barn burned, as black smoke climbed into the sky, bending northeast as the wind picked it up and sent it out over Long Island Sound. The intense, roaring heat pushed everyone one hundred yards back into the plowed potato field behind the camp building.

Fire sirens erupted in the distance. First one police car and then another appeared along Depot Lane, followed by a line of fire trucks. The first truck turned into the yard but stopped and backed up towards the street to stay away from the heat and flames. Wilson came around the north side of the camp as cars stopped on the road. 

A police officer, a woman, ran towards him shouting, asking if anyone could be inside the barn. As she stopped in front of him, her voice drowned out by the noise of the fire, Wilson pitched forward onto his knees, staring up at the barn as the north wall collapsed into the fire. 

Everything he had known for so long was gone in the flames. Bea fell to the ground next to him, draping her left arm around his shoulders. 

“No, no, no!” Bea said.

Wilson planted both hands on the ground, his face turned downward so that his forehead touched the dirt like a supplicant begging for mercy. Propane tanks on the south side of the barn exploded, first one, then a second, a third and a fourth. Frank fell to the ground screaming, his arms over his head. 

Bea tried to pull Wilson off the ground, but he was all dead weight. He leaned back on his heels, banging both hands into the dirt.

“No!” he screamed. “No!”

Opening his eyes from deep sleep, he could see a man, dressed in farmer worker clothes, one strap of his overhauls missing, asleep in a chair opposite him. 

The bus waiting room’s a miserable place, he thought. Floor’s filthy. What’s that in the corner by the door? Puke? Shit?  

Wilson sat up, looked at the sales counter—which was a single window, nothing more than that – and could see the curtain had been raised. They were open for business. A man came out from a side door, went to the whites-only bathroom, and came back and through the same door. Wilson could see him behind the counter.        

Seated in the waiting room, he shook off the dream about the fire. He didn’t want that vision haunting him as he moved south. He knew he had to find a way to escape the past, but with every mile he moved south, that task became more and more difficult. The South was his past; he couldn’t escape it. Nor could he turn around and go back north.

Shaking his head, there was a smell that seemed glued to the walls, the seats and the floor.  He figured the odor came from the man stretched out on the chair, his head hanging down to his chin, his mouth wide open. Looking over the man, he came to the conclusion it was the waiting room itself, filled some hours of the day with people trying to get somewhere.

He stood up. Give me another day, he thought. Don’t let me die here in this awful place.

 His back, his legs, his neck, all ached like open wounds. The man across from him stirred. When Wilson returned to his seat from the bathroom, the man was sitting up, a confused, blank look on his face. 

“Where you getting to?” the man said to Wilson.

“South,” Wilson said, not looking at the man.

“South? Where?” the man said, managing a stiff laugh.

Wilson looked him over with a measure of contempt. It felt to him the man was mocking him. 

“Georgia,” Wilson said.

“Georgia?”

“That’s right.”

“Why you want to go there?”

Why’s this man asking me questions? Wilson thought. I don’t need this.

“If you got anywhere else to go, I’d go there. Georgia, anywhere in Georgia, wouldn’t be my idea of going south.”

“Where you from?” Wilson asked. He cautioned himself not to take on a tone, something like sarcasm.

He shook his head. “Hell if I know,” the man said.

Wilson had heard this before from so many farm laborers over the years he’d lost count. He couldn’t remember one who knew more than a few scant facts about his own life.

“What are you doing here?” Wilson asked.

“I was living in a farm labor camp. A big farm. Here in Exmore. Shacks lined up along the side, by some woods. I left a while ago and I can’t get back.”

“How come you can’t get back.”

“Long story,” he said.

“Well, how’d you get there?”

“Boss man pick me up somewhere, put me in his truck, brought me here and sold me to the farmer,” the man said.

Wilson watched as the man retrieved a small bottle from under the coat on the chair next to him, yanked out the cork, and took several deep swallows with enthusiasm. 

“That ain’t doing you no good,” Wilson said.

“You telling me that?”

“Just saying,” Wilson said.

“How old are you, anyway, old man?” the man said. He tried to stand up as if going to confront Wilson but collapsed back into the seat. “You too old to be spending the morning in this shithole waiting on a bus to take you—what did you say? South?”

“I don’t need you telling me that,” Wilson said.

He walked over to the counter to talk to the clerk. He’d had enough of that fool.

“This ain’t your line,” the man said without looking up from his paperwork. He repeated it: “Not your line!”

Wilson didn’t know how to respond.

The man pointed to the end of the counter. “There’s a counter around the corner for the colored line,” he said. He pulled down the curtain on his window to reinforce the point.

Wilson walked ten steps, turned a corner, and saw the same man pull up the curtain on another window, over which was a sign: COLORED.

“May I help you?” the man said.

“I need to go south,” Wilson said.

“That’s a direction, not a destination,” the man said, smiling, as if he’d surprised himself with a clever comeback.

“Southern Georgia.”

“Any town in particular?”

“Barwick. It’s on the Florida border.”

“Yes, I do know where the border is.” He picked up a folder of maps and notes and spread it out over the counter. 

Behind him, Wilson could see a metal desk and a filing cabinet, one side of it pushed in.  

“Well, let me see here. Barwick, Georgia. I myself have never been there. Been to Atlanta, sure enough. Thomasville’s a nice place. Been to Florida to see my cousins. But never in this out of the way place you trying to get to.”

Wilson didn’t know what mumbo jumbo the man was talking about.

“You born there?” the man asked.

Wilson ignored the question. 

Looking up, staring for a moment at Wilson, the man said, “Were you born there? Or don’t you know where you were born?”

Wilson stared back at him and a long moment passed between them until the man behind the counter finally said, “I guess you don’t know. Anyway, all I can say is you need to get yourself to Cape Charles. From there, you catch the ferry – if you have the money, I mean – to Norfolk. They won’t tolerate freeloaders. From there, I’d say get a Greyhound to Atlanta. From there, it’s anyone’s guess how you can get to this Barwick place.”

When Wilson didn’t say anything, but continued to stare at the man, the man said, “Where is Barwick, anyhow?”

“As I told you, near the Florida border.”

The man nodded dismissively. For a moment he stared at Wilson with a look on his face, his dark eyes squeezed tightly together, as if he felt Wilson had disrespected him.

“When does the bus leave from here to Cape Charles?”

“You’re shit out of luck on that, my friend,” the man said. He looked at his watch, then the clock on the wall over his desk. “Not until this afternoon. You got quite a long wait, and I won’t allow you to linger here like it’s some kind of lay-around place. You understand?”

Wilson returned to his seat. The man had remained seated in the same spot and waited for Wilson to sit down before he spoke. 

“You can’t get anywhere with that man,” he said. “He’ll call the cops on you and they’ll put you in the tank and throw away the key, or rent you out to some farmer to work off a fine, although you’re too old for that.”

“He let you stay here, didn’t he?” Wilson said.

“I got here when another guy was working and he let me sleep here.”

“Where are you going to now?”

“Going to try and go back to quarters, on the farm.”

“They’ll let you come back?”

“Just going to go and find the shack and see what happens. I got nothing else.”

“I gotta get to Cape Charles,” Wilson said. “I can’t stay here.”

The man—Wilson had no interest in getting his name, or any personal information—got up and went to the bathroom. When he came out, he gathered his belongings, stuffed some clothes into two paper bags, and walked outside. 

At that point, the man behind the counter shouted out, “You can’t stay here, mister.”

Wilson wanted to say something back but hesitated long enough to lose his nerve. He gathered his belongings and walked outside. The sun was up, the sky brightening. The air was warm, and had a flowery smell to it, which was familiar to him. 

Outside a flatbed truck pulled up, driven by a white man. The man who had been inside the station knew the driver. They exchanged a few words and the man threw his bags up onto the flatbed behind the cab.

“Are you going farther south?” Wilson called out to the driver. “I need to get to Cape Charles to catch the ferry to Norfolk.”

“We’re going to the quarters where I was living,” the man who had been inside the station said. “After that, it’s up to you.”

Wilson needed help climbing up on the flatbed. He raised one leg and put his foot up on the big tire. He tried to raise up but fell back.

“You got no business traveling south by yourself,” the driver said.

Wilson ignored the comment.

The truck pulled away from the curb and passed through the business district of Exmore. A diner, a grocery store, a feed store, and a store that advertised overalls and boots for farm workers. 

South of the town, the truck turned off Highway 13 and proceeded down a rutted dirt road, bouncing past farm fields and fifteen minutes later stopped at a series of shacks at the edge of woods. Only one of the dozen or so shacks still standing was in any sort of decent shape, with walls, a roof, and a door of sorts that hung off one set of screws. A slight push on the door would send it toppling. 

The familiarity of the shacks, the look of the pine forest behind it and the flat farmland in front of it, even the smell in the air, struck Wilson. His mind was unsettled. The scene, his memories of being here, slapped him across the face. He felt a hurt in his chest that breathing hard did nothing to lessen.

Jumping down, the younger man didn’t turn to help Wilson off the flatbed. Wilson pushed himself to the side, reached out with his left foot to plant it on the top of the tire, and slid down. But the distance to the ground was too far and he pitched forward, landing on his face in the dirt.

The physical damage from the awkward landing paled next to the humiliation he felt. Nothing worse than an old man who can’t take care of himself, or needs help on everyday things. Laying in the dirt for another ten or so seconds, Wilson tried to pull his knees up so he could rise up on his hands. Slowly, from that position, and by reaching out to grasp the side of the truck tire, he managed to stand.

“I need to find a bathroom,” Wilson said to himself, but it was loud enough that the man heard him. He pointed to the tree line and turned his back on Wilson.

“You ever show an old man any kind of respect?” Wilson said.

The younger man ignored him.

The driver stepped out of the cab. He walked around the front of the truck to find Wilson brushing dirt off his pants.

“Why are you here?” he said. “I’m Roger. My family once owned this farm. Many years ago.”

“I once lived here,” Wilson said.                 

If the man heard him, he ignored it. He pulled a toolbox out of the cab and walked down the line of shacks towards the first one. At this point, Wilson saw heads sticking out doors of the shacks.

It took Wilson a few minutes to collect himself. He watched Roger with his toolbox go to the second shack in the line of shacks and begin work on a door hanging off its bottom hinge. Wilson could see a child’s face in the door watching the man work.

As he was standing in the dirt road, feeling a strong sense of confusion as to what he should be doing, he heard a voice behind him. He couldn’t make out the words. He turned, awkwardly, his feet and legs not fully cooperative, to confront a woman hovering over her walker.

“Is that you?” she said, her voice sanded by the erosion of advanced age. Wilson stared at her, unable to come up with a recognition. “Do you remember me?”

He shook his head.

“I’m Constance,” she said. “Margaret’s sister.”

The comment took Wilson by such surprise he was sure he had heard it wrong. He stared at her, shaking his head.

“We live in a small world, people like us,” she said as if offering an explanation for meeting Wilson. “Every camp I ever lived in had people I saw somewhere else along the road. So many lost in so many places. It was that Mr. Kemp who brought you here. I never liked him. He brought people here every year from all over the South. You were the baby in that group. Never saw a child living in a place like this.”

 She pointed with her left arm to the shack nearest her. It was in no better or no worse shape than the other shacks. 

“That’s where you met Margaret,” she said. “Right there. The first night you were here.” 

Wilson took a half dozen steps towards the shack. Sheets of plywood were hammered onto a makeshift frame. Part of one wall held a frayed piece of insulation. 

As he approached the piece of plywood that served as a step into the shack, he saw that day when he stepped off the truck. He could hear his voice saying, ‘Edith is dead,’ and the older woman urging him to come into the shack to get away from the authorities.

“You’re Margaret’s sister?” he said, breaking nearly a minute of silence between them. 

To the east he could hear the grinding noise of a tractor tilling a field. Or maybe it was an irrigation pump running. He wasn’t sure, nor could he see where it was, as the far side of the flat farmland was lined with a thick windbreak of pine trees.

“Why don’t you come inside,” she said, turning towards the step into the shack, pushing her walker ahead of her. “There’s a chill in the air. We’ve had a lot of rain.”

He followed her in, helping her reach up to grab the doorknob. Inside, he folded her walker and leaned it against the wall by the door. Nothing had changed. Same straw beds on cedar stumps, same toilet sitting all by itself in a corner, same wood-burning stove on which to cook meals. 

The toilet, sitting a few feet from the stove, turned his stomach. He’d go outside before he’d use that in front of her. A clear image of Margaret when he had arrived that night, her books beside the straw bed, blossomed in his mind.

“You took Margaret north,” Constance said. She made the comment in such a way as to suggest she thought Wilson had acted improperly with her sister.

“I married her,” Wilson said. He looked around the shack for someplace to sit. Contance took a chair by the bed.

“You both went north with that other crew boss,” she said. “I don’t remember his name now. A damn drunk, you ask me. He died somewhere in Maryland or Delaware, is what I heard. Took you to Red Bank, New Jersey.”

“I don’t recall you being here when we left,” Wilson said. “In fact, I don’t recall you at all. This don’t make a bit of sense, you being here like this.”

“I came up on a bus from South Carolina,” she said. “Whole bunch of us. We got here the day before you took my sister north.”

“I don’t believe Margaret had a sister,” he said.

“You’re looking at her. I was one of twelve. Margaret was the baby in the family. Daddy couldn’t feed us all. He sent the boys out on trucks going north. I never saw any of them again, and don’t know what happened to them. When I came here was the first time I’d seen Margaret in years. I didn’t know what had happened to her. Then you took her away.”

What had he said to Margaret about the two of them going north? He couldn’t remember. Did she even want to go, now that she’d found her sister? His memory was a foggy mess of overlapping memories, confusion over times and places, and what promises were made or not made. At his age, he was past the point where he could sift through everything and make sense of it.  

“Margaret died?” she asked.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re alone, aren’t you? I figured as much. Unless you abandoned her.”

“I don’t appreciate that,” Wilson said.

“She died?”

When he wouldn’t offer an answer, she got up and went to the stove, pushed some sticks and several logs into its mouth and pushed the heavy iron door shut with her foot. From where he sat on what was once some sort of recliner, he could see hot coals glowing and feel the heat. 

A unique smell—it had always been something that never needed an explanation—filled the room as Constance stirred the pot atop the stove with a long wooden spoon. 

Chitlins, he thought. 

He had no memory of his mother, but he remembered his grandmother cooking a pot of pig intestines several days a week, the smell pungent and foul. Julia would wash them to flush out the waste and boil them over and over, dropping in whole onions to kill the smell. She served the rubbery guts in a bowl with the yellow-pink liquid from the pot.

“You’re headed somewhere?” she asked.

“Trying to get to southern Georgia,” he said.

“What for?”

Here we go again, he thought. “I was born there!”

“I figured as much, but why go back? Why would a man as dark as you go back to southern Georgia. What are you running from?”

“I’m not running from anything!” He was angered by the question.

“Sure you are. Why else would you go back to southern Georgia?”

Wilson looked away from her. He would have walked out of the shack to avoid her sermonizing but he had nowhere else to go.

“My father,” she said. “They put him in a turpentine camp. The worst kind of work, the worst kind of conditions. They didn’t bother to send his body home to my mother. They buried him in the piney woods, threw dirt on top of him, and forgot about him. Like he never existed.”

She stared at Wilson, her eyes and focus so intent it made him nervous. “And here you’re going to the Deep South? Explain that to me when you got the time.”

She spooned the yellow liquid and lumpy cuts of intestine into two wooden bowls. She handed one to Wilson, along with a spoon and a dish towel that had seen better days.

He sat in the chair, the bowl balanced awkwardly on his lap. Holding the bowl in his left hand, he dipped the spoon in the liquid and raised it to his mouth. He saw himself as a young boy, maybe five or six years of age, in a shack in Barwick, Georgia. The vision played out in front of him with such clarity he thought—once again—he was staring at the doorway to death. God was showing him his past just before the end came.

Constance was no longer in the room; he was inside the shack, one of hundreds on the back of a plantation in Barwick, being told by his grandmother that his mother, her daughter, was dead.

“Well, are you going to?” She had gone to her chair, spooning up sections of pig intestine with great gusto.

“Am I going to do what?” His irritation was rising.

“Explain to me this…journey, or whatever you want to call it,” she said.

He’d do no such thing. Her presence, her being Margaret’s sister, rattled him, but offering up memories was not his way any more than explaining himself at this point in his life. It was better to keep his mouth shut than to blab on and sound like a fool.

“Huh?” she said, in an edgy tone.

He spooned several pieces of gut and chewed on them. It was challenging for him to steady the bowl on his thighs and dip the spoon in.

“Okay, I get it. But tell me this, Wilson: where’s my sister buried?”

“In the back of a Catholic cemetery,” he said.

“What’s she doing there?”

He had no idea how to answer that, so he ignored it.

“She died up there? Did she want to be brought home to be buried where she was born?”

“I did what I could,” Wilson said.

“Where they gonna put you in the ground, Wilson?”

“I’m not dead yet,” he said.

“I can see that,” she said. “But you’re convinced it’s close, the door is beginning to shut and you have a headful of questions you want answered. Am I right?”

He ignored her.

“What she die of?”

“Cancer.”

Wilson took his bowl to the sink and turned towards the door. He pushed it open and stepped down onto the plywood step.

“Wilson,” she called out. “Listen to me: tell me about my sister. My brothers are lost. Tell me about Margaret.”

Outside, Roger was putting tools in the back of his truck. Wilson walked a few feet behind the shack and pissed. When he approached Roger, he said. “I’m trying to get to the ferry at Cape Charles.”

The man stared at him. “What for?”

“Because that’s where I need to go,” Wilson said.

“Well, the ferry to Newport News runs once in the morning. I could come back here and get you. But what about tonight? Where you gonna be?”

Wilson looked around but didn’t come out with an answer.

“The second shed down there,” the man pointed down the line. “It’s empty. There’s an old mattress in it. You could stay there. For one night. After that, you owe me money.”

“I don’t have much money,” Wilson said.

“I will come by at seven tomorrow. Okay?” 

He walked towards the shed the man pointed out, stepped up and pushed open the screen door. The stale, damp air in the room smelled of mold and something long dead and left to rot. Several dead mice, and a large rat, lay on the floor. 

A bucket in one corner had been used as a toilet and had not been properly cleaned out since its last use. A bedframe sat along one wall, its back two legs rusted off and the frame sitting on the floor. On top of it were two hay bales, soaked with rainwater that had poured through the crippled roof.

He was at a loss for what to do when he heard Constance saying something. She was outside by the screen door, hovering over her walker, looking in at Wilson.

“You can’t stay there,” she said. “Besides its condition, Wilson, the last person who stayed in there died and no one found him for days. He was from Forrest City, Arkansas. Herbert something. A tall man, bone thin. He had no idea how he got here and one day he was dead. Undertaker took him away. It would be bad luck for you. One thing I learned in life is, you have to respect the dead. They’re still all around us. I don’t want to be bothered by them. I got enough problems.”

“I’ve nowhere else to go,” Wilson said, his back to Constance.

“Sure, you do,” she said.

They walked back to her shack, Inside, she said, “You can stay here, in that chair. I’ll put a blanket on it.”

There was the toilet in the corner, sitting atop a sagging wooden floor. He’d have to deal with it, since he had to piss frequently during the night, usually every two hours.

“I can heat up grits if you’d like some,” she said. “Or more of the chitlins.”

He fell back into the chair, exhaustion pinning him down. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Many, many years,” she said.

“Working for the same people?”

“Yeah, mostly. Cotton. Potatoes. Some melons. Some tomatoes.”

“Did you ever get home?”

“What do you mean?”

“Back to where you come from, where your people were.”

“No, oh, no,” she said. “That wasn’t going to happen.” She turned to look at Wilson, holding a stare for several moments. “Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?”

He didn’t answer.

“After a while, I didn’t know where I was from,” she said. “How was I to get back there? Here, you work. You get some money, when they want to pay you, whatever they want to pay you. There was no getting on a bus and finding my way home. Who would have been there when I stepped off the bus? I will die here, I know that much. And the undertaker will take my body away and put me where I don’t belong. Being buried with your own people, on familiar ground, is what I want for myself.”

She retrieved a blanket from a shelf by the sink, unfolded it, and placed it over Wilson’s legs. It smelled of cooking oil and pig grease. He had a hard time looking up at her as she stood over the chair.

“You think you’re going to find where you’re from?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “I’m afraid you’re in for disappointment. Whatever you left behind, it’s long gone by now and long forgotten. The past isn’t something that can easily be found again.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“You need the toilet?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” he said, not meaning it.

“I doubt that. How about if I step outside for a minute?”

“Okay,” he said. 

When she had maneuvered out the door, and couldn’t see back inside, he walked to the toilet, dropped his pants, and sat down. When he was finished, he pulled up his pants, washed his hands in the sink, and called out the door that she could come back inside.

In the dead of night, Wilson pulled himself off the chair, his body shaking from the nightmare that evaporated as soon as he opened his eyes. Breathing heavily, he tamped down the panic. He’d experienced these before – they revealed themselves as full blown attacks – and each time one erupted his fear level rose. Often it would take several minutes sitting in the darkness for him to gain control.

She was asleep on the hay bales under a blanket. He went to the toilet to relieve himself. From his pack, he retrieved a clean shirt and a sweatshirt. It had rained during the night; he’d heard it striking the roof. At some point it stopped; he was grateful for that. 

He was standing by the front door, mindful Roger would return at 7, when he heard her sit up on her makeshift bed.

“You sleep?” she said, her voice early-morning hoarse.

“Yes, I did, thank you.”

“I heard you during the night, Wilson. You were going through something in your sleep. Let me ask you: what are you afraid of?”

He dismissed the question with a broad sweep of his arm.

“Before you leave, I want to know about my sister.”

She got up and went to the toilet. The noise she made set his teeth on edge. When she was up and dressed, he returned to his chair. She pulled a slab of pork belly out of a bucket on the floor and dropped it in a frying pan.

“I got two eggs, Wilson,” she said.

Soon, the pork was sizzling in the pan, a crackling sound and a smell so familiar to Wilson. He could see as clearly as if they were all here, in this shack, his mother Ada Wilson over the cook stove, her mother making biscuits, Shedrick Wilson, pulling his suspenders over his shoulders. \

“Some days, momma would tell me or Margaret where a field had been plowed up,” she said as she stood over the frying pan minding their breakfast. “She’d say, ‘There some corn or tatoes in the field the plow missed. Go fill up a basket so we got something to eat. It was always like that, day after day. Momma told us, when she was a child, she and her friends would climb a hill on the plantation to where there was a shack. No one lived there, but it was filled with spirits.

“Sometimes there’d be a light on in that shack and they’d hear music playing. Momma said she’d look in the window and she’d see girls in pretty dresses dancing and the devil was playing the fiddle.”

Woman believes in spooks, Wilson thought.

“You understand what I’m saying, Wilson?” she asked.

He nodded, more out of not wanting to hear anymore.

“The devil, he likes to play games with people. Whisper in their ear they can do whatever they want, it don’t matter. He was playing the fiddle and the little girls in their dresses were dancing around him. That’s the devil, Wilson. You ever hear a fiddle sound, you’re good as dead. Only momma turned out right, and she made sure me and Margaret turned out right. You took her north.”

Several minutes passed as Constance fried two eggs. She put a slab of pork belly and one egg on a plate and brought it to Wilson.

“You going to tell me or not?” she said.

“I met her here, in this shack,” Wilson said, navigating the egg and pork belly with a fork and a dull knife. “She’d come up with her mother—"

“That wasn’t our mother,” Constance interjected. “That was my mother’s cousin. She told her cousin to take Margaret out of where we were living and bring her north.”

“I believe that was her mother,” Wilson said.

“It wasn’t!” Constance said. “Surely, Margaret knew that, too. Momma stayed in the south, moving around to find work and feed all of us. All those early years, Wilson: they are lost, they are a mystery.”

“I understand,” Wilson said.

“You married her?”

“When we got to New Jersey, on a farm,” he said. 

“In a church?”

“Yes,” he said.

“How long were you there?”

“Twenty years.”

“Then what?”

“Eastern Long Island,” he said.

“Children?”

“A daughter.”

“Where is she?”

A long silence. Constance knew enough not to continue with the question. He had trouble balancing the plate on his lap, never looking up at her, until he finally said, “Margaret died of cancer. I did all I could for her.”

She put her plate on the floor.

“I never got over it,” Wilson said. “She was all I ever had.”

“She was the only sister I ever had,” Constance said. 

He cut the last piece of pork belly, putting it in his mouth and savoring it.

“I never got over her dying,” he repeated. “I guess I thought it would never come to that. And then it happened. It’s all I think about.”

“And now you’re going south—to find what?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Why you doing this? Dear God—why?”

“I have to,” he said. Using the arms of the chair, he pushed off and carried the plate to the sink. “I got nothing else. It’s this, and then the end.”

“You don’t have to do anything, Wilson!” she said. “There’s no life here, unless you like field work under a hot sun. Dragging that long bag behind you. You too old for that anymore. Mr. Roger can find you a shed to live in. He manages this place. He always needs the help.”

Wilson went to the door. Light was brightening the eastern sky, sifting through the dense stand of pine trees that lined the edge of the farm field.

“I’m going to ask you again: Why you doing this?”

“I have nothing up north. Not Margaret, not a place to live. There’s something I want to do before I die, and I have to do it down south, in Barwick, Georgia.”

“Ain’t nothing in this world that would take me back to where I was born,” she said. “No, sir, indeed. You gonna tell me what it is that you have to do there?”

He shook his head. Stepping to his chair, he grabbed his pack and turned towards the door.

“Listen to me, Wilson. We’re family. You know that? You loved my sister. So we’re family. Stay here and die here. I’ll make sure you have a proper burial. You die on some bus or in some little town down south, they’ll dump you in woods with all the rest of the forgottens.”

Outside, he stood by the step to the shack. The morning air was chilly and damp, perfumed with the smell of overturned earth.

He muttered “thank you,” but it was too soft for Constance to hear. He walked towards the far shack to wait on Roger.

Roger was more talkative than Wilson had expected. The half hour drive to the ferry in Cape Charles was a nonstop talk session, with Roger going on about everything under the sun. The price of cotton. How tractors break down all the time and parts are too expensive. What a bunch of dumb asses run government.

His family no longer owned the land, he went on, with a sadness in his voice. His grandfather, who had inherited the land from his grandfather, who had inherited it from his grandfather, had died young when a horse drawn harvester fell over and crushed him, the spinning blade tearing off his right arm. He lay in the field and bled to death.

The grandfather’s son, Roger’s father, kept it going for several more years, doing modest improvements to the shacks for worker housing, but after a while took an offer from a land company and bailed out.

“I knew your grandfather,” Wilson said. “I was here the day he died. He was pinned under the blades.”

Roger pulled his truck over to the side of the road. “You were here that day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My father was there?”

“He heard all the screams and ran over,” Wilson said.

“Did he die quickly?”

“No,” Wilson said. “He was bleeding badly. Me, the others, we did everything we could.”

Roger shook his head from side to side as if having difficulty with the information, staring out the windshield to the road ahead.

“My father never got over it,” he said. He looked at Wilson. “You tried to help him?”

“A bunch of us were in the field when it happened. We all ran over and tried to get him out from under it. But it was too heavy.”

“I didn’t know that.”

No one spoke the rest of the way to Cape Charles. When they arrived at the ferry terminal, everything about it was familiar to Wilson. He had first come across the bay when he was barely a teenager; now he was going back over it as an old man. 

Of the many things Wilson wrestled with, the passage of time, his long life, it was all impossible to comprehend. His life was a pile of puzzle pieces he’d never learned to fit together and see, right there in front of him, what his life was all about. 

Roger pulled into the parking lot. The ferry was tied up at the dock. Cars were loading and people were walking onto the boat. The sun was up, warming the air. The sky was cloudless. It would be a good crossing. Both men got out of the truck. 

They stood facing each other until Roger reached out to shake Wilson’s hand. 

“I don’t know where you’re going, Mr. Wilson,” he said, his voice cracking. “Or what your purpose is. But I’m glad I could meet you. You’ve told me something I didn’t know.”

Wilson turned and walked to the ferry.

He found a seat inside, where other men and women were seated. He didn’t need to look for the ‘colored section’ sign; he knew it was there and he had no interest in seeing it. He heard a boy say to his father, “How many miles is it?” The father said, “I don’t know, son.”

Wilson spoke up. “It’s thirty-six miles across the bay,” he said, surprised that he had remembered that from so long ago.

The trip was pleasant, the bay a shimmering blue that calmed Wilson. In spite of not knowing what the coming days would bring, he felt a measure of peace. It felt to him he was doing the right thing, that whatever he found would be a benefit to him. 

Several times he walked around the passenger area, careful not to wander where he wasn’t welcome. He watched as the ferry approached the dock at Newport and all the passengers gathered up their belongings and prepared to disembark.

Walking off the ferry, he mentally calculated how much money he had with him at this moment: $510.75. The three quarters were in his pants pocket, the bills in an envelope in his pack.

He followed the passengers down one street, and when he turned, he found himself a half block from the Greyhound bus station. He could see the big neon sign, which, in spite of the brightness of the morning, glowed as if darkness had settled in. Next to the bright GREYHOUND sign was the image of a racing dog. 

Good news, he thought. 

His legs were heavy, fatigued; he couldn’t walk more than a short distance without finding somewhere to sit and rest. He made his way to the bus station, and was relieved it was brightly lighted, with dozens of people inside waiting on schedules yet to be filled.

The line to the colored-only counter was short. The man behind the counter was business-like and courteous. 

“What is your destination?” the man asked.

“You haven’t heard of it.”

“You might be surprised. I’ve heard of a million places most people never knew existed.”

“Barwick, Georgia.”

The man’s face showed a moment’s hesitation. “Ah, well, that’s a first,” he said.

He opened a folder and pointed to a small dot on the map of Georgia, tight to the Florida border.

“Well, there it is,” the man said. “Population sixty-six.”

“How do I get there?” Wilson asked.

“I’d say take the Greyhound all the way to Atlanta. That’s a long one. From there, the Greyhound to Macon. And there to Valdosta. I believe, although I am not certain, that from Valdosta you can go straight across the southern part of the state to Thomasville. I’ve been there. It’s quite a fancy place these days. Rich northerners come down for quail hunting and to stay in the old plantations. It looks to me like this Barwick you are seeking is just a short distance from there.”

“How much would all that cost?” Wilson asked.

“I’d recommend you only pay to get to Atlanta. From there, you’d buy separate tickets. At Greyhound, Mr. Wilson, we serve the public. All of the public, if you get what I’m getting at.”

He did.

“So, to Atlanta?” He looked over a chart of numbers and destinations. “Forty-six dollars, total.”

Wilson reached into his pack, pulled out the envelope—shielding it with his hands from nosey eyes—and counted out forty-six dollars. He handed it to the man.

“Well, you’ve booked passage to Atlanta!” he said with a measure of joy. He banged a ticket with a stamp and handed it to Wilson. “You do have time, though. That bus doesn’t leave”—he turned around to look at the big clock on the wall—“for another seven hours and twenty minutes.”

“How long is the trip?”

“Oh, it’s a long one. Sixteen hours, with stopovers. At times, once nightfall comes, it’ll feel like you’ll never get there. If you know what I mean.”

I can do that, Wilson thought.

“Is it okay if I stay here, in the station?”

“Yes.” The man pointed across the room to a back corner. “Follow the signs. As long as people understand their place in life, everything will go smoothly.”

He said the words in such a pleasant, nonchalant voice that it came out with a routine set to it, a habit acquired after repeatedly saying the same thing to countless people over many years. The colored section was teeming with people, young and old, men and women, and a number of small children. The adults were in their best clothes, as if enroute to Sunday morning church services. 

On the opposite side of the room sat a dozen or more men and women, also nicely dressed. Rows of seats and long-held social customs kept them apart, as if they were residents of two vastly different countries.

Wilson found a seat in the corner, next to the front window. He sat down, his pack securely between his feet. The sun coming through the window warmed his face, and it was only a matter of minutes before he fell asleep, in spite of the noisy children around him. 

He dreamed of Shadrack Wilson.  

The old man was standing in front of him, in the bus station, as clear as the flashing neon sign on the front of the building, in the same circle of warm sunlight in which Wilson was seated. No one else saw him. No child looked over at him. Only Wilson saw him. Then he was gone.

He went to the bathroom to relieve himself. He picked up his pack and walked to the ticket counter. A different man from before stood behind the window.

“What can I do for you?” the man asked in an exaggerated sing-song of a voice that Wilson took as rude. The man didn’t bother to look up at him, but stared at his list of schedules with such attention he might as well be in a bible study class.

“I have some time to wait—"

The man cut him off. “Yes, you do!” Anticipating the question, the man pointed out the front door of the station. “Turn right. Up half a block, on the far side of the street. Smokey’s Place, it’s called. Grits. Collards. Pork bellies.”

The diner was half full. There was a counter, but he didn’t want to sit on a stool, so he found his way to a table in the back. No one paid any attention to him before the waitress came over to his table.

“What can I get you, hon?”

Hon? he thought. He felt embarrassed.

There was no menu, but the woman with the apron mentioned some items that were available. Boiled corn. Corn bread. He thought about it for a moment.

“Corn bread, thank you,” he said. “And coffee if it’s hot.”

“Oh, it’s hot,” she said.

When she came back with the coffee, she said, “You’re not from around here?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Where you going?”

“South.” He said it in such a way as to cut off any further questions.

“This is the South,” she said. “You’re already here.”

“Further south,” he said. He sipped the coffee, hoping she’d take the hint and go away.

He finished the corn bread, put one dollar and one quarter on the table, and headed for the door. Outside, he was confused how to get back to the bus station. First he turned in one direction, then corrected himself. He felt a sense of frustration when he returned to the station, beating himself up over briefly losing his way in the street.

The clock on the wall told him he still had three hours to go before he boarded the bus for the long ride to Atlanta. Most of the families he’d sat with were gone. He missed the bus pulling out when he was in the diner. 

So be it, he thought.

Perhaps it was the meal, or the setting sun and approaching darkness, but exhaustion once again overtook him, dragging him headfirst into his past. He saw a young boy, no more than six, standing in a field, next to a deep, rectangular hole. 

He was holding his grandmother Julia’s hand. She was weeping. The boy didn’t know how to take it all in. The boy in the vision spoke to him.

Barwick, Georgia

Tall pine trees lined the back edge of the cemetery. A forest went on forever. People called them slash pine. Labor camps were set up to cut the trees and make resin and turpentine. That was my father’s fate. He was picked up for something and sold to one of the camps and he died. No one told me this, but that’s what happened.

Then my mother died. Ada Wilson. She worked for a white family. I don’t remember their names. We lived in one of the shacks in the Bradshaw turpentine camp. My grandmother Julia woke me up and said momma was dead. We went to church. And walked to the cemetery down the street from the church. The box was in a deep hole. So many people cried. I didn’t cry.

Richard Bradley was at the burial. Shadrack was there. Two very old men. Richard told his sister to bring me to Florida, across the line. It would be a better life. Fewer people were being lynched there. Away from south Georgia. We went to Ormond, Florida, where Uncle Richard had a little grocery. He and his wife lived in the back of the store. That part of town was called Sudan. Up the street was called Liberia.

Then Julia Wilson died. Uncle Richard took me to church and the graveyard. I looked in the hole. It was filled with water. Up over the box. My grandmother was in knee deep water like that. The white dresses, gloves, fancy hats. They were all looking at me, thinking the boy’s lost everything.

Another day word spread through Ormond. A black boy named Claude Neal was lynched by a mob. His body was torn apart. The next day Mr. Kemp’s truck pulled into Ormond and I climbed on to go north. How could I stay there?

I looked out the back of the truck, under the tarp, and I saw Uncle Richard screaming for me to get off the truck. Get off the truck. Please—get off the truck!