The Journey: Decatur, last night in Illinois

I called Chicago and talked to my mother. Actually, she talked mostly about the foolish things I had done in my life. Giving up a stable good life for something unknown had to be one of the top foolish things. We ended the call planning to meet the next day at her brother’s house in Markham, Illinois which wasn’t too far from route I-80 we would be taking east.

It took a while for me to go to sleep. At first I thought it was because I was in a strange bed. But, in the middle of the night it came to me that the reason was because I knew we wouldn’t be getting up and going home. Breakfast the next morning was like a last meal, emphasizing our doubts of the next time we would have a cooked meal in our home.

We took I-72 east from Decatur to Champaign then north up I-57, which ran into the Dan Ryan expressway. We didn’t talk much on the drive, just looked at the flat countryside pass by.

I was named after my Uncle, Thomas. My mother’s brother had been the first black electrical contractor in Peoria, Illinois. A very courageous act back then, the white labor leaders in town worked hard to make it as difficult as possible for him. There were no black electrical people in the union so most of his workers were non-union common laborers. I worked during the summer with him when I was a teenager.

After a tight hug my mother didn’t try to hide her concerns or her anger. As usual, the word crazy was used quite a bit. Like Carol’s mother she didn’t understand where we lost our senses. We not knowing how to explain it didn’t help. Mother’s love is a special thing. Not matter how dumb or crazy you are they love you and wish you the best.

My life started with my mother when she was a teenager, a scared black unmarried girl with a baby in a small southern river town. My father’s family thought he should go to college without the distraction of a family. She left that town and went North ending up in Chicago. Many of the street folks called her “The Queen of 63rd street” when I was growing up. She had survived a hard life and knew the strangeness of people. When we left, my mother had no tears, but I could see the coils of fear tightening her face and in her eyes.

We were finally on the road. We had said goodbye to family and friends. The only people we could expect to see would be strangers. We were on our own with no expectations of familiar faces, sights or scenery.

We took Route 80 east when we left Markham. Living in central Illinois, even if you’re black, you had a sense of cornfields. You couldn’t go very far without seeing one. If you worked in state government, which most folks did in Springfield, you had conversations with farmers who talked about crops, bitched about the weather and their kids. We laughed as we talked about not expecting to see anymore fertilizer commercials.