On the Road

In my dreams faraway places soothed the demons of sleep and made life on a poor dirt farm a little easier. Life was hard and backbreaking. Picking cotton, priming tobacco, gathering sweet potatoes, cantaloupes, cucumbers and corn for market was all I knew. One could work all week picking cotton and not earn ten dollars. If one was a real go getter one could pick over 200 pds. of cotton and make a whopping 3 dollars per hundred pounds. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pick a hundred pounds of cotton? September, October and part of November was spent in Harvest. School boards allowed farm children too many days out of school for harvest. My report card was empty for nearly two marking periods. I had to work especially hard to catch up every year when harvesting was over. The absences started again in spring with planting. My life was filled with dreams of far away places and knights in shining armor. My hands were bloody and filled with calouses most of the time.

I Moved to New Jersey when I was 16 years old. It was the summer and I thought I was going to a whole new world. Leaving the farm had been a necessity. My life was taking a new turn. When the big clunky cadillac turned onto the treelined street, I was astonished. I had never been North of Richmond Va.

My joy soon turned to something quite different when I realized my living conditions. Directly across the street from my Grandma's place was a bar. The Blue Moon kept some late noisy hours. Even though we inhabited the third floor attic apartment, the noise made sleeping quite difficult. My grandma's bedroom was directly above the most popular spot on the corner. She didn't seem to hear the noise at all.

My Grandmother invited me to live with her, because she didn't want me to join a girlfriend of mind whose family had already moved North. My Mother was concerned that I would get eaten up by the big bad north. My Grandmother just wanted me to have the baby and go to work to support myself.

In case you are wondering, no, I wasn't pregnant. My Grandma was still waiting for me to give birth 1o months later. In her mind, that had to be the only reason I would leave home without graduating high school first. It never dawned on her that I was still having my monthly. Englewood, New Jersey became my new home. My Grandma became my new jailer. She charged me rent right away. I got a job 4 days after arriving in town. I paid my way from that moment on.

My father gave me an old Remington typewriter and I shut myself in a small closet off the kitchen on the otherside of the apartment. I wrote 2 plays, numerous poems and did my homework from that closet.

I still dreamed of going someplace. Every time I heard a bottle breaking beneath my window, I knew I wasn't there yet.