"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.
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In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more. Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east. They all ran from it, they had to.
“We go now and we go on foot!” Virgil shouted. Nobody knows how to swim, he thought, but the wagon will just slow us down. “Leave everything,” he called to Lizzie who had climbed onto the horse that was slowly sinking into the mud.
While the others rushed to join the lines of people heading east away from the rising tide, carrying whatever they could, Sol ran directly for the shed and jumped up for the highest nail where he’d hidden his slide whistle from his father. He’d made it himself from an old bicycle pump, fashioning it on a picture he’d seen in a magazine. Someday he would play the slide in his own band, but his father thought the slide was nonsense and talk of a band was even worse. He thought singing should be confined to church.
Sol felt the river seeping into his shoes. The floorboards were turning red. It was coming to get him! He stuck the slide whistle into his shirt and splashed his way out. The water soaked his legs, the slosh and grit of it, the sweat of it in the swelter of day, the cold and chill of it at night. Added to that was everyone’s abiding terror that the white people might do anything at all in their panic. They were never safe when white people were scared.
He spied his mother and grabbed her hand to calm the panic expanding inside him, higher in his body with a faster heartbeat, each time it rose. “Sol-o-mon!” Lizzie sang out, tugging his arm to pull him to one side of her with Virgil on the other. “Stay close. That beast is fast and it is deep.”
They joined the line with the others, holding onto each other, trudging the flat land east, away from the river with its creeping, rising tide, slipping on mud banks, climbing levees, whatever high ground they could find, and always watching where the birds flew to follow and rest with them on a roof or in a treetop. Stories passed among them about black men in Greenville being taken at gunpoint to the levees, forced to dig, to pile sand, to be back enslaved to the white man’s will, shot dead if they refused, drowned if they faltered, and to survive if they were lucky.
Sol was silent. His heartbeat began to slow to an even rhythm, from knowing his mother was there. He didn’t have to be touching her or even see her to feel her presence. He’d learned from an early age, even when he was left alone in the shade, lying in an old crate stuffed with cotton while Lizzie was pumping at the washboard or spreading cotton sheets across clotheslines. He could hear her breathing hard and it comforted him. He could smell the sweat of her body, the bite of milk that had soured on her apron. His tongue would begin to suck his cheeks and his lips would quiver just from her nearness. Sol learned to whimper instead of crying out for his mother. He knew early in his life that she would always come to him. If not at once when he wanted her to, then eventually. As a young boy, Sol never minded his mother kissing him, even in front of other boys who would scrunch their noses and turn away, mocking him. Lizzie’s hands were as big as a man’s, but they were hands that had never struck him. As Sol grew into a man he began to appreciate his mother’s beauty hiding in all that Mississippi dirt and sweat. When she relaxed in the evening under a tree or dressed herself for church, he felt a stiff, reliable kind of pride-- her face framed by a straw hat, her teeth large and strong, her arms smooth and her step steady. Who wouldn’t love a mother like that? he thought. I’ll find me a wife just like Lizzie.
On that first day Solomon, Lizzie and Virgil clung to each other like mud on shoe bottoms. Linked together through their arms and hands, the three of them were like one silky machine humming along with the others. Virgil led the singing with his enormous voice, but first he said those special words to everybody: “I dedicate this song to my son, Solomon.” And then everybody sang into the night air.
Walk together children
Don't you get weary
Walk together children
Don't you get weary
Oh, talk together children
Don't you get weary
There's a great camp meeting in the promised land
Sol Later they liked to brag about how they outwalked the Mississippi, how they found dry land and kind, generous people along the way who offered a cup of clean water, or a roasted potato, maybe a dry place to sleep. They were even happy then, when Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hand, pointing to the thin line of pink along the horizon at sunset—“God’s paintbrush,” she said reverently, and Sol searched for anything that would burn so they could have a fire. Then Virgil’s enormous voice filled the air as night drew closer, and Sol felt the comfort, singing along quietly under his breath.
There was a time, before Sol’s voice changed to a man’s, father and son used to harmonize. Virgil was the bass and Sol was the tenor then. Then Sol’s voice began to change, at first cracking and unable to find its steady course, then settling into a baritone, until finally, as the boy reached his late teens, it fell into the bass range. No longer did Virgil want to sing with Sol since their sounds were no longer unique or harmonious. Virgil said they sounded like two pigs in heat. Once Sol tried to fake a higher voice just so Virgil would sing with him. He missed his father’s attention. There was nothing he wished for more than to sing as they had. Virgil said that Sol sounded like a weasel in heat. Sol walked away from his father’s taunting with a bitterness and blame that spoiled the harmonious sweetness they had shared. And a competition ensued with tense, unwritten rules. One never sang when the other was singing. One never admired or praised the other for their singing. They never spoke of it. The competition included both singing and Lizzie.
Many days later Sol, Virgil and Lizzie found their way to her family—the Moores—where, farm outside of Starkville, at last they could rest. Maybe they would stay there or maybe they would go on up to New Albany where Virgil’s people, the Brysons, lived. One thing for sure, they knew they were not returning to the Delta.
Lizzie’s family stayed on the farm--Sol’s grandfather, Dick (everybody called him Granddaddy) and grandmother Emma (everybody called her Big Mama), plus his aunties—Mollie, Lelia and Lucy--all except the oldest, Julia, who had disappeared the previous year. Nobody knew where she was. They had stopped looking, stopped asking.
Dick Moore had fought with the Union Colored Troops during the Civil War, and still, sixty years later, visitors respectfully referred to him as Corporal. He carried himself like a soldier, straight- backed and grim. He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to--he had made much of his life, and everyone could see that. After the war, in January 1868, Emma Parham had married Dick Moore on a warm day, years after they had met when Dick escaped the Alabama planation during the war that ripped open the land, the people, everything, after the old man in Washington emancipated them, and after Dick fled to the Union Army and enlisted for two and a half years, mustering in at Corinth in 1863 and mustering out at Baton Rouge on the last day of 1865. Eventually Dick and Emma harnessed a mule and rode for days to Starkville where Dick claimed the acres Lincoln had promised freedmen for their service to the Union.
It was beautiful, rolling farmland. There was a creek full of sunfish at the bottom of a hill, and there were six houses—a larger cabin that Granddaddy and Big Mama lived in and five identical small ones, all in a row, leading downhill to the creek. The cabin sat across from a straight row of daughters’ houses and a bit up the hill from them, “so we can keep an eye on you,” Dick had said when he finished the last one. He’d built them one by one in the girls’ age order, with Julia’s first, then Lizzie’s, and so on. “That way,” he told Emma at the time, “maybe they’ll stay.”
There was one called “Lizzie’s House,” where Lizzie and Virgil and Sol stayed, two rooms and a front porch with a view of the woodland, the ducks, the sunset. To Sol, Granddaddy meant safety and Big Mama meant plenty. Pale rhododendrons and bright azaleas bloomed wild, bits of cotton floated through the warm air, and even the mosquitoes were kind and left him alone. To Sol this place was a bit of heaven. Big Mama kept chickens, so he could have an egg every day if he wanted one, and he and Lizzie could bake cornbread together. Granddaddy gave the blessing at every meal, just like a pastor, which he was not.
On that first morning home, even though each sister had her own little house, they all came to Big Mama’s kitchen to eat. Lizzie was up early with her mother, rolling out the dough and patting the biscuits. Soon the cousins, Ernest, Suda and Corene pushed open the screen door, letting it slam, and busying themselves with pumping water, clattering pans, passing biscuits and eggs. Uncle J.D. and aunties Lelia and Lucy were there, too, all the females in aprons, all the males in denim, all hands washed as Big Mama required at her table. The men announced they were hungry and Suda could not find her doll and Corene needed someone to tie her bow.
Lizzie laughed at the sudden and unfamiliar commotion, the warmth of her family rising inside her like liquid. She wiped her hands to embrace them one by one, to look each one in the eye, as it was her way to do. She tied Corene’s bow and sat at the long oak table.
“Been way too long,” J.D. started.
“Brother, yes,” she said, whispering, “Anybody heard from Julia?”
The two younger sisters shook their heads and rolled their eyes to let Lizzie know there was more to the story than could be told at the table.
“I hear you’re planning a wedding,” she said to Lelia, who was about ten years her younger. “Make it like mine, Lelia. You were just a kid, probably don’t remember when Virgil and I were hitched.”
“Tell us,” said Lelia, “tell us.” She had both girls’ attention and J.D. was listening too.
“Well, it’s not that it was such a big wedding. More that it was true love—meant to be,” she began and the girls swooned. “We met here in Starkville when Virgil was laying tracks and cross ties.”
“Pounding spikes and hammering the timbers, Virgil used to brag,” said her sister, Lucy. “I remember that like it was yesterday.”
“Well, Big Mama invited the whole railroad crew to supper after church one Sunday to meet her daughters.” At the sound of her name, Big Mama came to the table, a bowl on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand, and they turned their eyes to watch her.
“And Virgil, he liked Emma and Mollie and Lizzie, but Lizzie was the one we wanted married next,” said Big Mama. “Uh huh. She was fourteen already.” Big Mama nodded and nobody said a word. “And Virgil knew there was an order to such things,” she added, catching each listener’s eye and turning her back. Lizzie broke the silence.
“Solomon was born the next year,” she explained.
“And you never had another child after that?” asked Corene, and J.D. felt mortified by the question. He cleared his throat to change the subject when Lizzie responded.
“The Lord never saw His way to making that happen,” Lizzie said. “Or maybe it’s on account of my “woman problems.” And she didn’t tell it to them, but she had to agree with her husband who had told her he always wondered if there was something wrong with his seed, and if God was punishing him for spilling it in too many wrong places. As God-fearing a man as he was, he had his weakness—women. The screen door slammed shut and Virgil came inside.
“Morning, everybody,” he said, cheerful as a chipmunk. The girls replied all around and Big Mama bought Virgil a cup of coffee. Big Mama was a dark-skinned woman with hair straighter than the others, on account of some Chickasaw blood, she said, and she pulled it back and tied it in the back to keep it from falling into her face and their food.
“Thank you, M’am,” he said, smiling, bringing the hot, black liquid and its sweet steam right under his nose.
“I was trying to remember,” began J.D. “When was it you all left here for the Delta anyway?” Lizzie waited for Virgil to reply because he had been the one who wanted to get away from her family, especially from the tension between him and her parents.
“Well, it was when Solomon was old enough to do his share,” said Virgil in a light voice, not wanting to complain about the backbreaking work they’d done in those hot, buzzy fields, plowing and planting cotton in one season, chopping the next, and picking the last. “I didn’t mind the work. Honed the edge of my hoe splinter thin and iron strong,” he said proudly. Yep. One year, in my rush to get the most cotton bolls into the machine, I lost three fingers,” he said, holding up his right hand. They all knew the story—the whizzing saws inside the cotton gin. How he was unable to pick cotton that fall, so Lizzie and Sol picked his share and their own, too.
When the Moore sisters began to fight, the fighting infested the others, too. “The girls are at it again,” Big Mama said, “and only a week since Lizzie’s been back.” “Every time a new man comes onto this land, Mollie starts. It’s a shame.”
Over the years Lizzie had gotten used to the fact that Virgil was a pretty man and women liked him. He wasn’t a big man or a fancy man, but he was a charmer with a dimple in one cheek and an easy smile. His eyes had a way of talking that his mouth lacked. So this time Lizzie didn’t say a word to him, but when she saw Mollie leaning into him, making herself and her little house open to Virgil, she warned her younger sister.
“You stay away from him. I’ll kill you, I will.”
“I’ll kill you, I will,” Mollie taunted back.
Something in Sol liked to hear his mother fight like that, to see a fire explode in her, make her not just his mama, but something more. Silently he took her side, but he didn’t believe she’d kill anybody--why, her heart was so big she had trouble wringing the necks of chickens when it needed doing.
At night Sol fell asleep on the floor beside his parents, where he could feel their silent coldness. He was used to feelings coming and going, crossing like trains on the tracks. But when he woke in the night and his daddy’s side of the bed was empty, and he saw a lamp in Mollie’s window and his mama sliding a shotgun underneath the bed, then Sol knew then that this bit of heaven was ending and they would have to move on.
He got up to use the outhouse. Low sounds came from the cabin window of Mollie’s house. On his way back he could hear his father and his aunt talking. Sol tiptoed to the spot beneath the window to listen. He heard his father say to Mollie, “Well, the boy never could carry a tune anyway.” Sol didn’t cry or whimper, but ran back to Lizzie’s house.
The next morning Sol grabbed an apron and boiled coffee, adding a beaten egg and crushed shells to the grounds to make it smooth. Virgil sat at the table devouring blackberry jam and biscuits like he’d swallowed so much Mississippi dirt that he needed something sweet to go with it. Sol saw Granddaddy coming from the bedroom and he poured a steaming cup of coffee for him, too. Granddaddy dropped a metal strongbox on the table right by where Sol stood. It looked like something he might have salvaged from a Confederate garrison during the war. Inside was a roll of ten dollar bills the size of Big Mama’s fist. Granddaddy counted out some of the money slowly, like he knew just how much things cost.
“Here you go, little man,” he said, putting a pile of bills in the pocket of Sol’s apron. “It’s time you began taking care of your mama.” Virgil glanced at the roll of bills. “Now, “ Granddaddy continued, “you go to town and get two tickets on the Illinois Central so you and your Mama can ride all the way to New Albany.” He stared at Virgil who did not look up from his plate. “Your daddy here,” he nodded at Virgil, “looks like he’s got more energy than one man needs. Why he can just walk to New Albany. The road will do him good.” Sol knew that Virgil had heard what Dick said, but he also knew his father would not react to being shamed in front of his own son. Maybe he’d walk to New Albany and maybe he wouldn’t, thought Sol, but he wouldn’t let them know. That’s for sure.
That night Virgil visited Mollie’s cabin again and the whole farm knew it, what with the windows open and Mollie singing Bessie Smith and Virgil backing up a chord in bass harmony—announcing their dirty stuff for everybody to hear.Sol saw Lizzie softly close the door to her house up the hill and he felt that sharp cut in his gut again. “You hurting my mama!” he cried outside of Mollie’s house. He knew he couldn’t out-fight the man, but maybe he could out-sing him. He started with the “St. Louis Blues.”
The door to Mollie’s cabin popped open and Virgil appeared on the porch, pulling his suspenders up around his small shoulders and scanning the yard. He stepped down to the grass and circled the cabin, slowly, deliberately, looking for Solomon. Leila and Lucy raced to get Lizzie and they all three hurried to the big porch to where Dick and Big Mama were sitting in their rocking chairs.
“I’m gonna go stop those two now,” Dick said reaching forward for the railing to pull himself up. His body teetered as he rose.
“No, Daddy!” shouted Lizzie. “This is something Solomon’s going to do for himself at last.” Her words surprised them.
Unlike his usual pattern of repenting to the Lord and of begging Lizzie for forgiveness, Virgil returned to Mollie’s cabin and closed the door without a sound. Soon the kerosene lamp glowed in the window behind the curtains. Then the singing began. The family listened in the dark as Mollie’s high notes and Virgil’s low notes strained to be heard, then turned to full-throated tones that seemed to rumble down the hill past Lizzie’s house. Sol was in the yard, still circling, then standing still, putting all of his life into his voice, deep and dark, he sang “I hate to see that evening sun go down,” like he was the one making it go down against his own will, and the other voices soon faded and Sol’s was the only one in the night. That was when he reached inside his shirt between the buttons that Lizzie had sewed on the front, wrapped his fingers around the slide whistle and pulled it out into the air. He wet the reed that he had shaved thin until it fit perfectly into the mouthpiece at the top of the tube. He brought clean saliva from the back of his throat, let it fall lazily in whatever pattern it made, and wet his lips inside and out, pulling the reed through them over and over until it was just the right mix of soft and stiff. Then he began to blow into the whistle, softly at first, until he had the slide arm in place; then he filled his chest with air and softened his wet mouth again, blowing with all might so the sound would carry back to the Delta. He pulled the whistle’s slide slowly so that its taunting would rise and fall in a mocking rebuke, announcing to the world that his father was a mean-talking, hypocritical SOB. Sol did not have to say a disrespectful word. The shadows fell over him and slipped past Leila’s house into the foundation of Lucy’s house at the bottom. Julia’s house stood empty at the top of the hill. Mollie’s shadow stood by the window to her cabin as she closed the windows and Sol’s last clear note sounded in the damp Mississippi air. It wasn’t long before the farm was so silent that only the crickets and the frogs had anything to say.
In the cooling night air, Sol turned toward his mother’s house. There was a kerosene lamp shining in the window but the wick was burning low. Could Lizzie be asleep? he wondered. He needed her strong arms around him and climbed the two wooden steps to the little porch. He was worried about entering the house. How would his mother feel about his shaming his father? He was her husband and she was a loyal wife, after all. Afraid to know and afraid not to know, he sat on the old bench and leaned back against the house. There was no pleasure in this victory, if it was a victory, and he could only find that out from Lizzie. He got up and tiptoed to the door. He turned the knob and stepped inside. He looked around. Was she there? He went to the table to turn up the lamp. His pallet was tidy on the floor. His parents’ bed covers were messy and nobody was there. He looked out the window—maybe she was out there looking for him—but there was not a sound or a sight to be had. Just dark and quiet. He could not sense Lizzie anywhere and he began to panic. Had his father killed her? Taken her away? There were no big hands to hold his, no arms to comfort, no approving kiss. Sol was too old to cry and too tired to go searching for her, but he would not stay in that place of No Lizzie. He ran outside, slamming the door, cracking the night’s silence as he went.
In the morning, when Big Mama stepped out in the damp grass and growing light, she thanked the Lord for the day He’d given them. She found her grandson leaning against the outhouse, humming to himself. Solomon’s a man now, she thought. That little boy is gone, dammit, he’s a goddam man.
“Come on now,” she said gently and brought him in.
Granddaddy was only partially dressed, still in the long johns he wore year round. He was pulling up his overalls when Sol stepped inside the cabin and sat at the table. “Well, young man,” Granddaddy said. “You sure gave your Daddy your own brand of a what for.” He looked up at his smirking grandson.
An emotion stuck in Sol’s throat and Dick recognized it—the moment before a grown man breaks into tears. The old sofa creaked as Dick leaned against a pillow and pulled his grandson’s body up against his own, holding him firmly in both arms like he did frightened, homesick soldiers during the war. Sol’s fists opened slowly then and rested gently on the folded quilt that lay across the sofa’s back. His breathing quickened as hurt rolled down his cheeks in thick lines and fell wet and heavy onto the cloth of Dick’s overalls.
“Well, well, well,” said Dick, like it was just another day. Sol looked up at him. “Unfortunately, you had to be the one to teach your daddy not to take what is not given. The seventh’s commandment, you know. And the sixth,” he added. “It’s the Lord’s Word.” The old man drew a deep breath. “Solomon, where’s that money I gave you for train tickets you so you and your mama can ride to New Albany? Did your daddy take it from you?”
Sol grinned. “Oh, no, Granddaddy. I bought the tickets and buried them in a box by the henhouse.”
No one ever spoke of the victory Sol had over his father, because Virgil had started it, because two wrongs don’t make a right, because it is a confusing thing to defeat your own father and, strangely, Sol thought, pride is not a part of it. Sol knew what he liked and arguing was not one of those things. He’d been shocked by the intensity of what had happened. He kept quiet about it. Big Mama brought Sol some buttermilk and they left him on the sofa to sleep.
Out on the porch of Lizzie’s House, Virgil was whimpering, begging Lizzie for forgiveness.
“Your pride is hurt,” Lizzie said. “That’s natural. Solomon out-sung you and you couldn’t enjoy the night the way you’d planned it. “
“But darlin’, you know it’s only you. You and me. We should take those tickets back home ourselves. Leave Solomon here. He likes it here, you can tell. And the country would be good for him.” He tried to catch her eye, but Lizzie wasn’t letting him. She poured the last bit of whiskey she could find into him and let Virgil lie in her lap one more time.
“I know, honey, I know,” she said, stroking his foolish head, sighing, thinking that they’d run away from one nightmare in the Delta right into another.
“And it’s a long, long walk to New Albany. I just don’t think I could walk that far.” Virgil smiled and settled into her lap, finding his place again, like he always did.
“Oh, it is a long way, isn’t it?” she replied.
Virgil woke to the fading sound of a train whistle, crazy from not being in his own charge, and without his wife and unable to speak. He thought of Mollie and knew that for Lizzie’s sake, he had deserved what he got. He forgave himself, but could he ever forgive Solomon? That day he sought everywhere the comforting heat of the sun on his face while he sipped Big Mama’s sweet tea through a straw. Days later, Virgil decided to follow the railroad tracks to New Albany instead of taking the road through Tupelo. The day he left the Moore farm, Mollie stayed out of sight all day, moving aside the curtain on her window only one time to peek. She had her own shame to work out. Big Mama and Leila and Lucy were in the kitchen while Dick just kept rocking on the front porch, keeping his eye on Virgil’s back until he saw it disappear up and over the hill.
Along the way Virgil met hobos in their camps and joined them in a careful, but friendly way, sharing the food Big Mama had packed for the trip, turning his pockets inside out to show himself penniless, not worth robbing. There were five men and they all seemed to be loners, but they shared their smokes and their campfire. They took turns keeping watch for wolves and worse while the others slept. In the morning, the men showed Virgil how to hop a freight train, how to judge its speed and measure your own, avoid the railroad guards, stay away from the coupling, find the open door, a steady handle, locate the right-size mound next to the track to take off from. It involved complicated maneuvers and it took Virgil all of one day and most of the next before he gave up and decided to walk. He laughed. His farming days were over, he knew. He would try to get his old railroad job back. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Lizzie and to see his parents. But he didn’t care if he ever saw Solomon again.
Over the next few years, as Sol grew into a New Albany Bryson, he stayed out of his father’s way and spent most of his time at the local colored school trying to catch up with what his cousins had already learned. In the Delta, he’d been unable to attend school most of the time because of crop schedules, and the fearsome distances he’d have had to walk not knowing if white people would bother him, and because his parents couldn’t pay the heating fee that was required by the colored schools in winter. When he wasn’t doing reading and writing lessons, he sometimes hauled water and peeled vegetables with Lizzie in white people’s kitchens. On Sundays they attended church together at Hall’s Chapel on the corner. Although Virgil stayed home, Virgil’s father, called Daddy Bob, his brother, called Uncle Henry, his mother, Granny Siller, and all the others gathered outside to walk down the dirt road together, meeting other families along the way, making small talk. The women and girls in the family committed the sin of pride on Sundays when they adorned their natural beauty in layers of pastel cotton that Granny Siller had dyed herself. They wrapped soft sashes around their slim waists and tied woven bonnets with ribbons to keep the sun off their faces. They flirted with Sol who wore a blue suit and sang a solo in the Sunday choir.
Sol liked to brag to his cousins about the juke joints in the Delta, acting like he’d frequented them. He hadn’t. Lizzie never would have allowed that kind of devil’s work, but that hadn’t kept Sol from standing outside and listening. When they all sat around in summer after sunset, if someone else started an evening blues tune or a work song, he’d add his bass to it, and some workhouse song gutteral, “a note or two, here and there, to taste,” he’d say, “the way a good cook adds pepper.”
Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain, ( Uh!)
Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)
Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)
Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone.
Virgil never joined the singing, but Lizzie could tell he wanted to.
“Tell that boy to get himself into trade school,” Virgil told Lizzie one day, right in front of Sol, not speaking to him directly. Sol wasn’t interested in learning a trade. He had a natural talent he intended to use—his voice, a round tone, smooth as sunflower oil rolling down the throat. Daddy Bob had bought a radio for the house—they were the first Negroes in New Albany to own one. The cousins would come over in the evenings to listen to music coming out of Chicago and Harlem. They danced to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s tunes to get the music out of them and into their limbs, into their feet, but when Paul Robeson’s voice came over the airwaves, everybody stood completely still to let the mood soak deeper inside. Paul Robeson, Sol thought— football player, Broadway star, the man with the voice, another singer from Harlem. “That’s what I want,” he said. That’s where I’ll go. That’s who I’ll be.”
“Chicago,” they insisted to Sol. “Not New York. We know people in Chicago. We don’t know anybody in Harlem. Why that’s another country.”
“Harlem!” Sol smiled. Everybody could see the stars in his eyes. “I’ll find Paul Robeson, I’ll sing spirituals. I’ll be on Broadway like him.” Sol’s mind was made up and they could respect that—the boy was a man now and everybody knew he had real talent—if he had a chance, he should take it.
Virgil was working out of town the day Sol said goodbye to Mississippi, and the rest of the family, Uncle Henry and the cousins all came to the station to see him off. They’d seen lots of young men leave New Albany, and the scene was a common one. A boy might have to travel alone, but no one left without family seeing them off. They even pooled their money for Sol’s ticket, but they came up short.
“That’s alright,” he said, upbeat. “It’s enough to get me to Washington, D.C. Why that’s almost next door to New York. I’ll find a job and get the rest of the way on my own. Much obliged.”
At the platform by the colored car, he turned to face Lizzie. His mother had worn her Sunday best, even the straw hat he’d once found, cleaned up and given to her one Easter. There they stood, their arms around each other, their eyes drinking in a long last look.
Suddenly, Lizzie pushed Sol away. “You go on now,” she said. She took a deep breath then and exhaled a hum as strong and long as the train he was about to board. “You come back,” she sang out to him, but Sol did not hear.
On the train Sol took an aisle seat and looked around at the crowded car that had come up all the way from New Orleans. By the door at one end of the car he saw a Pullman porter in a dark suit with shiny buttons down the front. The porter straightened his cap and eyed Sol, approaching him with a broad smile and a crisp ten-dollar bill, folded lengthwise. He held it between his fingers as if paying for something. He leaned in, whispering to Sol.
“I used to work with your daddy. He asked me to give this to you.”
Sol Bryson joined the great migration north, taking a train from Union County, Mississippi and arriving at Union Station, Washington, D.C. where he found a white marble city full of black people--with a respected university, a vibrant community, and a spirit of freedom and insistence that became his own. Sol rented a room for ten dollars per month at 726 Second Street N. W., and he looked for a job. Two things he knew for sure--how to cook and how to sing. Everybody needs to eat, he thought. And everybody needs a song.
Author’s Note: Sol Brtyson was my father-in-law who was blessed with a beautiful baritone voice. The dates, places, and characters in this story are real, but the facts are imagined. I call this form “family fiction.”