One Night in Mississippi by Craig Shreve

and white. His eyes were in shadow, as if they had sunken deeper into their sockets. The gate slammed once more, then he stepped back, panting, reaching up to put the rebellious lock of hair back into place. The arms beneath me let go, and I fell to the ground, curling up and bringing my arm in against my chest. The dark-haired girl was crying in the doorway of the service station. Before the boys got in the truck to drive away, one of them went back for his Coke.

◀ 14 ▶
    Chicago, 1965
    A few weeks after Graden’s funeral, I packed up and headed north. No one tried to stop me. Mama unfurled the apron in the cupboard and gave me everything she had saved up, a total of seventeen dollars, but she didn’t argue against my going.
    The money was enough for bus fare to Chicago. I sat by the window. I wouldn’t look at any of the other passengers. Instead I watched as the landscapes rolled past — Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana — places I had never expected to see. I remember little. I stepped off the bus into the cool Chicago air and felt my skin constrict. I had never owned a jacket. It was early morning when I arrived, not yet light out, and I pulled what few clothes I had out of my bag and covered myself with them so that I could sleep a few hours, huddled against the station wall.
    I walked the city by day, starting by the waterfront and working my way out further and further in exploratory circles, then returning each night to the relative safety of the bus station to sleep. The station master woke me once, cap in hand and a stern look on his face. I could see the words ready to form on his lips to send me away or possibly to call the police, but after staring at me for a few moments, he placed his cap back on his head and walked off. It was the first act of kindness that I had been shown by a white man, and I slept that night without fear for the first time in a long time. When I woke up, there was a piece of paper curled inside my shirt pocket, with a name and the address of a northside diner.
    I was dirty and tired when I entered the restaurant, bag in hand. The owner looked at the note, studied me, then nodded for me to come around the back.
    â€œYou’re a southerner?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œYou ever work in a restaurant before?”
    â€œNo, sir. I can read, though, and I know some math.”
    The owner wiped his forehead and laughed.
    â€œWell, none of that is going to help you much here.” He looked at my gnarled right hand. “Can you hold a mop with that?”
    He brought me in through the kitchen and put me to work washing dishes and mopping the floors and bathrooms. At the end of the shift, he gave me directions to a shelter. It was the first time I’d slept in a bed other than the crooked wood-framed cot back home in Mississippi. I woke in the middle of the night and listened to the sounds of the men resting in the darkness around me. I had never been so lonely. I looked across at the spot where Graden would have been sleeping, but in his place was a grizzled and sickly thin man in a tank top. I pulled a journal and a pencil from my bag and angled myself into the moonlight to practice the mathematics that he’d taught me.
    I wanted to thank the station master for his kindness, but I never went back. I continued walking the city in the mornings, then working at the diner afternoons and evenings. I stole books. I picked them up from café patios when people left them at an unwatched table or forgot them on buses or park benches. I read them at the diner at night whenever the owner stepped out, or I pulled the journal from my waistband and scribbled out problems.
    One night, a man tapped me on the shoulder while I was mopping. It was early, and I was rushing to get the floor cleaned before the supper crowd came in.
    â€œI think you dropped this.”
    I turned to see a man holding my journal. He was about my height, but thin. In his sweat pants