I+Can+Never+Go+Back

Dear Journal, It is William writing to you again. Today was probably one of the hardest days I have faced since I started to ride the rails a couple years back. It’s been two weeks since I left in 1932, and I remember what my life was like before I left. It was the day after my seventeenth birthday when I left.. Before I was seventeen I was happy at home with my family members. I was able to make friends, and hang out and play stickball with them. I had relationships that lasted long enough where I could remember their names. After seventeen, I have been wearing the same pants for a week. I have been switching off between my two pairs of pants. I may say that I am lucky to have two pairs of pants seeing others here although my pants have holes in them, and I am sure it gets cold in the winter time. I can’t remember the last time I met someone who I truly enjoyed being with. I don’t know if it is because I miss my family, and I don’t want to meet anyone, but what is life without family and friends? I ask myself this every day. I started to think what life would be like if I had not left home. What if I stayed? Would my parents have been able to feed me and my five other siblings? These answers I will never know. I am gone now.  My journey started in northern Mississippi, and many other teenagers were coming to Baton Rouge for work, but I could not find any work there. When I heard my parents arguing about money and the economic issues, I decided that I had to do something. I was the eldest sibling in the family, and I felt as though I was also responsible for my younger brothers and sisters that I loved so much. I left by choice, but only to help my family economically. When I told my brother that I was leaving he would not let me leave without him. The night I was departing my brother, Jeffrey, surprised me with his bags packed ready for an “adventure”. He thought it was going to be easy, but I knew it was going to be difficult with a previous failure finding work in Baton Rouge.  That night we caught a ride on the freight train heading north. I heard that it was on its way to St. Louis, but when I heard we were in Houston I was confused. One of the many boys also riding with us saw a puzzled look on my face and explained that we had to first go through Houston, and then the freight would take us to St. Louis. He told us that he had been riding the trains for over a year now. The dirt on his face, the rasp in his voice, the grime in his hair was all things that I was worried about happening to me. This boy became our closest friend on the trip. He helped us on our first trip on the freight trains. The first of many. He told us about the jungles that many of the boys would stay at. He described them as neighborhoods. He said everybody was doing something all the time at these jungles and he also explained the danger of these jungles sometimes. By this time I was starting to get covered in dirt from the floor of the train, breathing in dust constantly, and anxious to go to bed, but the train was crowded.  The next morning I woke up to yelling and screaming. The boy that had previously helped us was yelling at another young man. I couldn’t tell what they were arguing about, but my brother, Jeffrey decided that he was going to help our friend. Just as the anger was at its peak, Jeffrey tried to help when the other young man pulled out a knife and stabbed my brother. A rush of blood went through my body that I had never experienced before. Wrestling with my friends was casual back home, but I had never seen someone so carelessly stab someone like that. I tried to help. It was too late. My brother was killed on the freights from Houston to St. Louis. My first two weeks on these trains. I can never go back. How could I tell my parents that I allowed a stranger to kill their son, and I did nothing about it? Ever since that day I have not tried to contact my family, i have never thought about what it would be like if I never took my brother along. I never thought about what life would be like if I never left. All I know is that I still have not found a steady workplace, and I have not sent any money back home.