Andrew > Recent Status Updates

Perhaps the most significant measure of the Great Migration was the act of leaving itself, regardless of the individual outcome. Despite the personal disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant, the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever that journey led them.

She put the disappointments in a lockbox in the back of her mind and lived in the moment, which is all anybody has for sure. She had learned long ago, when things were so much harder in the Old Country she left behind, that, after all she had been through, every day to her was a blessing and every breath she took a gift.

As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, he has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something that he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.

The parents had come from the Old Country, had been happy to have made it it alive and make a few dollars an hour. What did they know of the frustration of the young people who had grown up in the mirage of equality but a whole different reality, in a densely packed world of drugs and gangs and disorder, with promises that seemed to have turned to dust?

Blacks in the North could already vote and sit at a lunch counter or anywhere they wanted on an elevated train. Yet they were hemmed in and isolated into…overcrowded sections of the city…restricted in the jobs they could hold and the mortgages they could get, their children attending segregated and inferior schools, not by edict as in the South but by circumstance in the North.

There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be.

She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself, where nobody could judge her, and inside the walls of their kitchenette apartment where she made turnip greens and peach cobbler and sweet potato pie flecked with nutmeg and sang spirituals like in Mississippi as often as she liked.

The story played out in virtually every northern city—migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters—the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing.

The receiving stations of the Great Migration were no more welcoming of the colored migrants than the South was—in fact, the arrival of colored migrants set off remarkable displays of hostility, ranging from organized threats against white property owners who might sell or rent to blacks to firebombing of houses before the new colored owners could even move in.

The changeover in Harlem was not a smooth one and went to the very heart of the basic difference between the North and South, between the authoritarian control over colored lives under Jim Crow and the laissez-faire passivity in the big, anonymous cities of the North and West.

Children all over the South were growing up, trying to comprehend the caste they were born into, adjusting or resisting, lying in bed at night and imagining a world that was different and free, and knowing it was out there because they had seen it in the casual airs, the haughtiness even, and the clothes and stories of the people from the North.

“The story of the Great Migration is among the most dramatic and compelling in all chapters of American history…so far reaching are its effects even now that we scarcely understand its meaning.”
- Neil McMillen

we rise, Chicago
this body
politic will rise
our fire will burn
again
- “Chicago Has My Heart”

Chicago, my heart
is all the people
who make it
who are making it
barely, in the 77 hoods.
i hate the viaducts
the millionaires
who urban plan them
from the suburbs
they resurrect
downtown
- “Chicago Has My Heart”

Oh, test tube of life! Crucible of the South, find the right powder and you’ll never be the same again—the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will be broken and men, all of a sudden, will shake hands, black men and white men, like steel melting steel!
- “Father and Son”

Bow down and pray in fear and trembling, go way back in the dark afraid; or work harder and harder; or stumble and learn; or raise your fist and strike—but once the idea comes into your head you’ll never be the same again.
- “Father and Son”

“The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks, is too much for me. I reckon they must be some good ones, but most of ‘em ain’t good—leastwise they don’t treat me good.
-Milberry Jones, “Berry”

That moment, that rainy morning, not even the whole day would last very long. Indeed, it might never repeat itself. Things had a way of moving swiftly with each of them, leaving memories, raising scars, and passing on. But they did not choose to remember now the aching loneliness of time, warm in bed as they were, with the rain falling outside.
- “Saratoga Rain”

It is so easy to be hopeful in the day time when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands.
- “Hurricane”

“Love is not created by service to mankind. But if the good be deemed sufficiently great, man sometimes erects little mountains of stone to the doer called monuments. They do this so that in the enjoyment of the benefit they forget not the benefactor. The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.”
- Moses, “The Fire and the Cloud”

Ya de por sí la vida se lleva con trabajos. Lo único que la hace a una mover los pies es la esperanza de que al morir la lleven a una de un lugar a otro; pero cuando a una le cierran una puerta y la que queda abierta es nomás la del Infierno, más vale no haber nacido…El Cielo para mí, Juan Preciado, está aquí donde estoy ahora.
- Dorotea

Este pueblo está lleno de ecos. Tal parece que estuvieran encerrados en el hueco de las paredes o debajo de las piedras. Cuando caminas, sientes que te van pisando los pasos. Oyes crujidos. Risas. Unas risas ya muy viejas, como cansadas de reír. Y voces ya desgastadas por el uso. Todo eso oyes. Pienso que llegaría el día en que estos sonidos se apaguen.
- Damiana Cisneros

Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

Life was scary; it was unknowable…Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all…sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.

He would be hurt again and again—everyone was—but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.

“The only trick of friendship…is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and you try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself…and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
- Jude St. Francis

There had been periods in his twenties when he would look at his friends and feel such a pure, deep contentment that he would wish the world around them would simply cease, that none of them would have to move from that moment, when everything was in equilibrium and his affection for them was perfect. But, of course, that was never to be: a beat later, and everything shifted, and the moment quickly vanished.

In those moments he would at times find himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words!—it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.

You spent so much time explaining yourself, your work, to others—what it meant, what you were trying to accomplish, why you had chosen the colors and subject matter and materials and application and technique that you had—that it was a relief to simply be with another person to whom you didn’t have to explain anything.

Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.