My mother never did. My father won her when he was young, before the sharecropper’s life had eaten the sweetness out of his heart. I have a photograph of them from those days. He is standing with his foot on the running board of a gleaming car that probably belonged to a friend, his trousers creased sharply enough to slice through paper, a fedora set just so on his head. He is smiling the smile of a man with possibilities. My mother is wearing a dress that I imagine is violet, splashed with oversize flowers. She is fifteen, although she looks older. Her efforts at sophistication have paid off everywhere except in the soft, girlish way she regards my father. There she reveals herself all too clearly to be a teenage girl with a crush. Perhaps that’s why my father punished her so—he couldn’t stand that light in her eyes.

When I was ten, she took the money she had been saving in a coffee can buried underneath the porch and came into the room I shared with my brother, Isaiah. She must have been saving—odds and ends, pennies from cakes she sold, money she filched from my father when he was drunk—for at least eight years. When she came to us, it was the dark middle of the night and the air was cool and filled with the sound of crickets. She whispered to us, “We’re leaving. Get your shoes on.”

We rode all night on the bus to Chicago, the road grinding away beneath the wheels, the air growing colder. She fed us pieces of fried chicken from a bag she kept on her lap and looked out the window with a fixed expression. I was too astonished to ask a single question. Isaiah, three years younger and more prone to talk, asked a few, but her answers were so monosyllabic that he too stopped talking and sat tensely next to me, his leg pressed into mine. I could not understand our sudden departure. Of course, I had heard my parents fighting bitterly on many nights. But I thought that was what marriage was—a series of barely moderated battles broken by the creaking sighs of bedsprings and soft sobs.

We arrived in Chicago at noon. I had never seen so much pavement in my life. I finally found my voice. “Mama, where we going now?” I asked. I have worked so hard to lose the accent I had then. But I remember what I sounded like, my voice echoing in the grand spaces of the bus station. I could hear how different it was from the voices all around us, and I began to feel ashamed. Already. The minute we arrived.