LORAIN, OHIO

1942–1953

There are a couple of different stories about why Henry went to the rail yard one day not to go to work but instead to hop on the first and fastest train, headed true north for the steel factories of the Midwest. Maybe he killed a white man, and they were going to come lynch him. Maybe he messed around with a white girl and they were going to come lynch him. In any case, they were coming for him, and he was not about to sit around and wait.

He wasn’t alone. By 1942, millions of Black Americans had flocked toward the industry and relative lack of segregation in the Northeast and Midwest during the First Great Migration. Henry had even heard of folk who went as far as California. They migrated north in droves from the impoverished southern rural communities that offered them little opportunity other than wage slavery, even if actual slavery had technically been abolished eighty years earlier. Henry heard rumors the war had created good jobs in steel, and steel was due north, in Ohio. He’d heard tell they were so desperate for workers, they’d give good jobs to Negroes and even women.

“I’ll send for you,” he told Fanny. “And bring our Sam.”

Their unexpected treasure. He was so hungry all the time, a bottomless pit of need, but adorable. And the eyes—you looked at that baby and it was like he could see your soul. They loved the wild little thing, brought to them by God’s grace.

You never know, when a man gets on a train…

Two years later, Henry made good and sent for Fanny. She packed a suitcase and a box of her famous biscuits, put the toddler on her back, and walked two miles to the rail yard.

She had anticipated a tougher trip, but Sam seemed unusually content, watching the landscape change from minute to minute. He gazed at the dense foliage, ramshackle piles of houses, redbrick factories spewing smoke, covered bridges, towering spires of silvery cities in the distance. The movement calmed the fussy child. When they arrived in Lorain by morning, a barely budding spring greeted them, fresh and full of promise, even if it was covered by a steel-gray sky and the air held the whiff of something sharp and metallic, belched from the rows of factory smokestacks.

Henry met them at the station. He had secured them a house at 223 East Thirty-Third Street on a predominately white, middle-class block, surrounded by families who would have little truck with them. He was ambitious and determined to bring his family up. He assured Fanny a short walk down the alley to Thirty-Second Street would bring young Sam to a neighborhood where he would find Black friends.

In 1942, the sidewalks outside the Victorian-style houses in the McDowells’ neighborhood were largely bereft of young men, mostly off at war. Those left behind found plentiful work at the steel plants.

Jeminah and Henry Jr. soon followed. Paul was still over in Germany. Fanny prayed on her knees every morning and again at night, begging God for his safe return. Jeminah’s husband was over there somewhere too, but Fanny thought less of that one.

In a matter of years, the McDowell family was firmly planted in the Rust Belt town on Lake Erie, with a picturesque lighthouse on the sound and a sparkling river flanked by the factories whose workers prowled its colorful, bumping main drag, Broadway, on Friday nights, looking for an escape from the grind of their days.

When men came home from the war in 1945, there was essentially a game of musical chairs, a rearranging of gender and color lines, but Henry managed to keep his job. Sam grew up believing he was the youngest son of Henry and Fanny rather than the bastard progeny of their youngest. When Paul returned from the war in 1945, there was a tacit agreement not to correct the error. Paul quickly scooped up a young wife named Betty. He was a brickmason by trade, and he built a house around the corner from Henry and Fanny, where he would eventually father seven children, who Sam believed were his nieces and nephews rather than his half siblings.

Another man who came home from the war that fall was Jeminah’s husband, James, Navy veteran and soon-to-be father.

Fanny and Henry loved Sam, but they were well past child-rearing years. Sam was more of an indulgence than a responsibility. Paul didn’t want him. What new wife wants a constant daily reminder of her husband’s sordid past? Fanny and Henry resigned themselves to raise Paul’s child as their own. Fanny fed Sam when she remembered. She changed out his too-small shoes when she could, dressed him in whatever ill-fitting clothes fell on their porch from one relative or another.

One twilight, in early June, a handful of neighborhood families gathered in the backyard of a very pregnant Jeminah’s house. They chatted as Betty bounced a baby on her knee and their kids chased the fireflies dancing through the darkening sky. Five-year-old Sam had said he was going to the bathroom. He peered around the corner of the kitchen door, weighing his options. He had been hungry for hours, had asked for food several times and been ignored. He wasn’t allowed to rummage in the icebox in Jeminah’s house. They would eat when they ate. Unlike her own children, he hadn’t eaten all day. He could hear her lilting laughter and that of the children playing in the backyard floating on the wind through the kitchen window.

Behind him, the light switched off in the hallway. He froze. He’d always been scared of the dark. He turned to see Uncle Jimmy, silhouetted by the porch light coming through the back door. The man grabbed the boy by the arms and pulled him into a corner of the darkened kitchen. A few feet away was the door to the basement few of the children would even go down to on a dare, because that was where the monsters were supposed to live. Maybe they were wrong about the monsters, because they weren’t in the basement at all, but there was Uncle Jimmy, unzipping his fly.

“You’re hungry?” asked Uncle Jimmy. “I have something for you to eat.”

He stroked his dick, hanging out of his sharply tailored pants, and it hardened. Sam hadn’t properly seen a grown man’s penis before. It was a mystifying thing, a piece of the human body that changed in front of your eyes. A milky white substance lined the ridge behind the tip.

“It’s cheese,” said Uncle Jimmy. “You’re hungry? Have some.”

Sam hesitated.

“I won’t tell anyone that you’ve been stealing food.” Uncle Jimmy held out a shiny silver coin. “And you can even take this and go get some candy.”

Uncle Jimmy instructed him to suck and held the back of the boy’s head until Sam sputtered and choked, arms flailing, unable to breathe. When Uncle Jimmy abruptly stopped, Sam gulped in air, only to find his throat was coated with some salty glue that only closed it further. He gagged.

“Hold that down now. And you won’t have to go hungry.”

Sam rinsed his mouth in the sink and put his hand into his pocket. Uncle Jimmy had never given him the coin.

Three years later, Sam had the run of the neighborhood. He’d walked down the alleyway to Thirty-Second Street, and they were like the Little Rascals. They built houses out of cardboard and played pretend family. Other parents tolerated Sam, but behind Fanny’s back, they called him bad news. When the lights shut off at the baseball park at sundown and all the other children ran home for dinner, Sam wandered off toward nowhere, pushing a handcart. Why would an eight-year-old have a handcart?

A few blocks away, the factories were booming. It wasn’t like it had been in Georgia, when there had been a real chance of going hungry. Fanny was a hell of a cook, with famous biscuits and cobblers and fried chicken to die for, but she cooked for Henry, and he worked erratic hours. Dinner was as likely to be served at 10 p.m. as at 6 p.m. No one cared if Sam came home anyway, and the streets were far more interesting.

Sam was hungry plenty. If you get hungry enough, you begin to hunt. Sam took to it naturally. He was a lousy student, he’d quit trumpet, he had dreams of playing baseball, but he could never keep track of where to show up for a game or when. Here, finally, was something he was good at. He loved the thrill of the hustle, the bittersweet taste of adrenaline in his mouth when he was getting away with something.

Sam had boosted the handcart from a hardware store. He learned to make himself invisible, stopping to peep in the lit windows of houses and watch the picture show that was other people’s lives. When he was sure they were occupied, he popped the hoods of their shiny, bulbous cars, and silently lifted the batteries. Sam slid through the shadows of the leaves on the moonlit sidewalks as he’d wheel them to the dump, where a white man with six teeth would give him seventy-five cents for each one.

“Got paws like a Saint Bernard puppy,” he said to Sam, placing the quarters in his palm. “You missed a quarter.”

He never once got caught.

Somewhere inside, he knew that despite what people said, it wasn’t for lack of intelligence that he failed at school. Though he wouldn’t argue with their assertions of his laziness and insolence. Why try if you were just going to fail and no one cared either way?

At least that was what he thought until he saw Carol Messenger. Carol was a thing you might try for.

They’d been in school together since kindergarten, but in the fall of third grade, she was something totally new. He couldn’t explain the difference. From clear across the schoolyard, anyone could see that Carol glowed, with nearly transparent skin and a spray of freckles over her nose. Her red hair fell in ringlets around her face that seemed to annoy her, as she spent half the school day adjusting them. Sam sat behind her and to the left. She’d pull her hair to the side as she chewed her pencil, exposing the delicate knobs of her spine, turning once in a while to glance back at him.

When Mrs. Harris faced the board and wrote THEY’RE THERE THEIR, Sam’s gaze never wavered. Carol put her thumbs in her ears, stuck her tongue out, and wagged her fingers at Sam. Sam turned hot. Stuck his tongue out right back at her, but Carol was already facing the front of the room, wide green eyes trained on their teacher.

Mrs. Harris, who Sam had often noted had a lovely neck also, smiled at the peach of a girl and turned on the class clown with holes in his shoes, the discipline problem.

“Samuel McDowell, you may stand and face the back of the room until you can control your gaze.”

Sam stood. Bitches. He faced the back wall, studying the posters of maps of the United States, the Founding Fathers with their creamy skin and strange hair that looked like rolls of toilet paper, the letters swimming together.

Just thinking about Carol, Sam’s penis was erect. He didn’t know how he was going to turn around when the bell rang, and he certainly had no idea what to do with the erection. No one had talked to him about masturbation or anatomy. No one talked about anything, really. But he knew one thing, even if he didn’t understand what it meant yet. He knew necks gave him that same feeling he got when he browsed the candy aisle at the five-and-dime.

In the reflection in the back, Sam saw Mrs. Harris adjust her scarf, clear her throat, and continue with the lesson.

THEY’RE THERE THEIR

I don’t know about all that, thought Sam as the letters swam in the shifting light of the reflection.

MINE, he thought. I like that word better. MINE.