Walter+Junior


 * Great Depression Diary**

Levi Feigenbaum

Diary of Walter Junior July 12, 1936

My name is Walter Frazier Junior and today was the first day I ever rode the rails. Earlier in the day my father, confident with booze, had told me I was to travel up to Chicago to live with my uncle in the South Side of Chicago. Pops never mentioned exactly how I would make the journey because he didn’t need to. The majority of the kids I knew from Greenwood, Mississippi were riding the rails in search of a meal and a warm bed. After I left the house with nothing but a sandwich and two dollars I headed straight to the spot where most of the colored boys from my section of South Greenwood hopped on the freight trains heading north and out of the Jim Crow south. I nervously waited for the train not knowing what lay ahead in my future when I saw Clarence Thurman, a friend and teammate of mine from my local high school. I was glad to see his familiar face and even more excited to know that his parents too had sent him up to Chicago. Clarence is exactly the same age as me, fifteen and lived on my block for a couple of years before moving. We jumped on the train as it rode by and hoisted each other into an empty cargo section on the train; we slid the heavy wooden door and entered the dingy compartment. We sat on the train before realizing, sitting across the compartment was a large white man holding on to a burlap sack and staring directly at us. He didn’t speak a word to us the entire ride until he broke the silence, roughly four or five hours after we had gotten on, “You boy’s best leave this here train, the bulls is searching for stowaways, and they don’t take too kindly to Negroes in these parts.” Clarence, who had a dangerous trait of talking back to the white folks, retorted, “How you know that?” “First time son?” Said the white man. Without another word, he swung the cargo door open, and dove of the train. He spun out of sight as the heavy door slammed shut. Leaving Clarence and I in the moist darkness. I stood up blindly and felt for the metal handle, I took grip of it and ripped the door open. The train was passing over a field of tall grass; I looked once at Clarence and dove off the train. I hit the ground with momentum and rolled for what seemed like close to twenty-second. Dazed I stood up and looked for Clarence, I saw his crumpled figure lying a short distance away. He soon rose and walked over to me. “What now?” He said. “I’m not sure,” I said back, scanning the field with my eyes. My eyes were quickly drawn to a jumble of tents, junk and campfire. Holding our heads high and our fists a little tighter we made our way down. The camp was half the size of a football field, a jumbled assortment of tents and tin shacks. Kids, who looked no older then Clarence and I were shuffling about. No one gave us a second look as we traversed the encampment, looking for a place to sleep. Eventually we came across a tarp stretched between two saplings. Blankets covered the ground and a few people were fast asleep beneath it. A small white boy, around the same height as me, approached us and began to speak. “I may be down and out, but over my dead body am I going to sleep under the same roof as a bunch of monkeys.” Clarence, standing a good six inches taller then the boy, and weighing north of two hundred pounds stepped to the white boy. Reacting instinctively, I pulled him back and away from the boy. He called me a few names and walked away fuming. I followed him and eventually we sat down, on the edge of the encampment, right next to a group of colored boys. The colored kids had a small tin shack erected, but said they had no more room. Clarence and I fell asleep that night, under the stars with our minds racing, uneasy of the future that lay before us.