“Elwood, I’m tired.”

“Hush up down there, Lucille, else I’ll fetch you a slap up side your head.” He looked down at Reverend Bradshaw. “No, go on.”

“Elwood, I’m tired.”

The father turned to his wife. “Woman, can’t you keep that child’s mouth closed? You go on now, Reverend…what was your name?”

“Bradshaw. I just wanted to ask you where you’re going.”

“We’re going to Boston, I reckon. Got some people live in Roxbury.”

“I still thinks this is crazy, we packing up and going North. What’ll we do when we gets there?” The wife leaned over and spoke to both Reverend Bradshaw and her husband.

“Quiet now, I told you we going because it’s right to go.” The husband looked at the woman menacingly.

“Yes, well, that’s what I’d like to know. Why do you think it’s right to go? Whatever gave you the notion?” We moved on as the man thought of his answer. I noticed from time to time small knots of whites standing along the edges of the crowd, their hands in their pockets. They didn’t look like city people; they must have come in from the small towns in the country. They looked dazed, realizing, I imagine, there was nothing they could do to stop the Negroes. They may have been afraid to try, for anything they might have done could be turned violently against them by the quiet, steadily moving crowd of dark faces.

Finally the man we had been talking to spoke. “Well, now, I reckon I don’t know where I got the notion. Yesterday, I was coming from work—I sweep up in the Marsails Market, you know—and I meets a cousin of mine. ‘How do, Hilton,’ I says.

“ ‘How do, Elton,’ he says. ‘When you leaving?’

“ ‘Leaving where, man?’ I says.

“ ‘Why, ain’t you heard?’ he says.

“ ‘Heard what?’ I says.

“ ‘man,’ he says, ‘man, don’t you know what’s happening? All us black folk is moving out. We all leaving, all over the state we just a-rising up and going away.’

“Well, you know, I reckoned he was fooling, so I just looks at him for a while, but I sees he ain’t busting out all smiles; he’s serious as a naked man sitting in a barrel of razor blades, so I says, ‘Say, Hilton, what’s this all about?’