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“Yeah, I reckon it’s getting a mite warm.” There’s another Negro on the bus now, an old coal miner on his way back to Philadelphia. He unbuttons his sweater, as if agreeing with me about the temperature. “But you ain’t felt heat until you’re mining in a six-by-six shaft with twelve other men.”

“Well, at least you’re out of the sun down there,” I say.

He laughs. “I reckon. So you’re a silver-lining kind of lad, huh?”

I wouldn’t say that. Nothing I’ve ever touched is lined with anything but lead.

He reaches across the aisle with an open hand. “Name’s Earl Willis.”

I flinch. Hope the old guy doesn’t notice. It’s strange, hearing Papa’s first name on people who aren’t him. There was a kid in my class at Mason Junior High called Earl. Every time he got called on, I got goose bumps.

Across the bus aisle, Earl Willis’s hand hangs there, waiting. I stretch to meet it. His hand is warm and work-roughened. Big. I have long fingers, but his grip makes me feel small and tucked in. Maybe there are lots of old guys in the world called Earl. Maybe there’s only one that’s missing.

I tug away quick. “Malcolm Little.”

“Where you headed, Malcolm Little?”

“Boston. My sister lives there.” I’ve decided to call Ella my sister instead of my half-sister. We all share blood, my siblings and I. I’m not sure it matters how much. It ties us together, although it doesn’t make us the same.

“The call of the big city,” says the old miner, shaking his head. “You young ’uns can have it. All that hustle and bustle’s too much for me. I like a small-town way of life.”

I just look out the window. I don’t really want to be talking to him, actually, but it does sort of pass the time. He sits across the aisle from me in his own spread of two seats mirroring mine. Except he sits in the aisle seat. I sit by the window, keeping watch so I won’t miss anything.

“Ain’t nothin’ to see,” he says. “Just more and more o’ the same.”

So far, he’s not exactly wrong about the scenery staying the same, but I look anyway. Everything’s new to me. Every cornfield under its wide-open sky seems fresh and broad and exciting. The world unrolling like a carpet in front of my feet.

I pull out the map my siblings gave me and turn it right side up. It’s the eastern United States. I see Michigan right away, shaped like a mitten, near the top. Under it, Indiana and Ohio. To the east, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. All the states we’re going to pass through on this ride.

“Do you know where we are?” I ask the old miner.

“Not far outside Toledo, Ohio.”

Outside the window, there’s still nothing but corn. “How can you tell?” With my finger I trace an imaginary path until I find the dot marked
TOLEDO
.

He smiles. “I’ve ridden this route once or twice. You’re pretty sharp,” he says. “Where you from, little man?”

“Nowhere.” It’s what comes to mind. It’s what comes out of my mouth.

The old miner laughs. “Everyone’s from somewhere.”

I shake my head.

He frowns. “To understand a man, you have to know where he comes from.”

“Nowhere,” I answer. “I’m starting over.”
Words have power
, Papa used to say.
Speak what you want to be true.

“Where’d you get on the bus, then?” he tries.

“Where I used to live.”

He hoots with laughter. “You’re a wily one. You must be trouble.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

I can hear the voices.
Troublemaker. No account. Just a nigger.

I couldn’t ever be more than that in Lansing. Can’t ever be more anyplace, it turns out, as long as I wear this brown skin. I used to think things were different, because Papa used to tell me stories about all the great things I could be and could do, and how mighty this brown skin was. But now I understand. Now I know they were just stories. Just ideas in his head.

Lansing, 1930

A long time ago, when Papa was alive, I believed that I was special. I was so small, four and five years old, riding on the long seat of the old black touring car, with Papa at the wheel. These were the greatest days, when it was just him and me, going to one of his important meetings. It would be afternoon or evening, when the sun was dipping low. He would drive around the outskirts of Lansing, because Negroes weren’t allowed inside the city limits after dark. He would park alongside somebody’s house, look down at me, and say, “Keep quiet, remember?”

He might have been talking about my behavior in the meeting. Or he might have meant,
Don’t tell anyone that we were here.

Then we would go inside, and there would be a living room full of black people waiting. Quietly. They would speak together with Papa about the tragic lynchings of young black men and women, and other challenges afflicting the black community. Papa would quote the great leader Marcus Garvey, saying: “Up, up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!”

But the meetings were still kept quiet.

There were always secrets to keep, it seemed. And so many rules for how to be a black person; you could not say how you felt or what you thought, and you had to keep your head down low when a white person passed you on the road. You had to use a low, dirty water fountain, right next to the high, clean one for the whites. You had to ride in the back of the bus or the streetcar, and you couldn’t sit down unless no whites were on board.

Papa was different, though. He went ahead and said the forbidden things and did them. Black people looked up to him because of it. He preached and he promised better days. A whole new world for all of us. He talked about the beauty and wealth of Africa. About how, before we were enslaved, we governed ourselves and ruled our own land.

After the meeting, it would be very late at night. Papa would say, “Time to go home and go to sleep,” and I would let him scoop me up, because it was nice to ride so tall and be protected by my papa.

We rode home on the long bench seat in the big black car, and by the time we got to the house, sure enough, I felt sleepy. Papa picked me up and held me against his shoulder, and in the circle of those strong arms, nothing could touch me. He whispered, “Pay attention, Malcolm. One day you will preach and teach like I do.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” he said. “You’ll go to school and learn and grow, and then when the time is right, you’re going to be a great leader. Even greater than I could hope to be.”

“OK,” I said, even though he was being silly. No one was greater than Papa. I snuggled against him, warm and sleepy, halfway dreaming of all the things I could become. A preacher. A lawyer. A businessman. With Papa there to show me the way, anything was possible.

On the Bus, 1940

I didn’t think Papa could ever be wrong, but he was wrong about me. Of all the things he promised, none have come true.

I’ll always be there.

You’re meant for great things.

You have nothing and no one to fear, for God is with you.

I hate the feeling that Papa lied to me. I don’t want to think of it like that, but it creeps in under my skin anyway. He lied. He told me these things about myself and about the world like they were true. But they were only his hopes. Wishes for some dark and distant future only he could see. I know Papa was trying to build such a world, a world where we could be treated as men. But he died long before it got done.

Up, up, you mighty race!

The thing he forgot to mention is, in order to come up, you have to be coming up from somewhere. And that place is pretty far down.

Case in point: we’re in a small town somewhere in Ohio. Bus parks right on Main Street, in front of a storefront station that’s in line with all the shops and businesses. I get up to stretch my legs and use the bathroom, and the old miner says, “Don’t wander from the station, you hear?”

“I know.” I hear the nervousness in his breath.
Don’t get uppity. Don’t get out of line. Act like a good Negro, and everything’s going to be fine.

I’ve told him one too many stories, I guess. About how I got expelled from school for putting a thumbtack on my teacher’s chair — he had it coming — and how I almost went to reform school because of it. And how good I was at figuring out exactly how much food I could steal from Doone’s Market without anyone noticing. And how Philbert and I, and some of the white boys from school, would pull pranks on the townsfolk back in Lansing. Tip their outhouses. Swipe melons from their gardens. That kind of thing.

So he’s nervous about me making trouble at the bus stop. It makes me want to laugh. Just as truthfully, I could’ve told him I was class president. On the football team. Straight-A student. But what was interesting about any of that?

“I’m serious,” the old miner says. “They might have known you around your hometown, but you can’t go around acting up in these parts.”

It makes me want to break a window or something. Just to show him. What I do is up to me now.

Coming back, I see we have a new bus driver. He’s a skinny man in the same green jacket and cap the first one wore. He thumps up the stairs and plays with the mirrors, then walks up the aisle, surveying all the passengers.

When he gets to me, he stops, looks me up and down, and says, “You all by yourself?”

I nod, open my mouth to speak. The glint in his eye and the curl of his lip scare me a little. He leans in toward me.

“Ain’t anyone ever tell you the road is a dangerous place for a lone little nigger?”

“He’s with me,” says the old miner, coming up from behind the driver. He slides into the seat row in front of me, because the driver is blocking the aisle. There’s a fierce expression in his eyes, tucked behind a thick layer of contrition. I only see it because I’m sitting. His head is bowed respectfully, as every “good” Negro knows instinctively to do.

I think:
This is the one thing Papa couldn’t do.
Papa only knew how to stand up, how to never bow down. Mom, too. So the white world sliced and diced them.

“This is your boy?”

“Yeah,” says the old miner. “He’s my —”

I hold my breath, hoping.
Don’t say “son.”

“Nephew.”

I glance out the window, relieved.

Other passengers start reboarding the bus. The driver checks our tickets and starts to return to the front. He turns back as the old miner eases into his regular seat across the aisle.

“Hey, now,” the driver says. “If you’re traveling together, you sit together, niggers.”

Never mind that the bus is nearly half empty. Almost everyone has a seat to themselves.

“Yes, sir,” says the old miner. He gathers his things and moves across the aisle to join me in my seat. I squish myself against the window. He’s not a huge man, but big enough to stop me from sprawling the way I have been. Our knees and elbows bump.

“Sorry, son,” he whispers.

The word “son” burns like a little fire sizzling my skin. “You didn’t have to do that,” I tell him. “I can take care of myself.”

“Maybe,” he says. “If the world was fair. As it is, we got to look out for each other.” He looks at me slant, not smiling, but clearly tempted to. “If you came from somewhere, you might know that.”

Here is what I know: Papa was wrong, about all of it. Day after day, there’s more and more proof. The values he taught me were only things he wanted to be true.

Lansing, 1939

I believed in Papa’s stories a lot longer than I should have. He’d insisted I was exceptionally smart, and I always got perfect grades in school easily. He said I was going to be a leader, and people tended to look to me like I was in charge without me even trying — my siblings, the welfare people, my classmates. Not just black people — white people, too.

When I got expelled from school in Lansing, I got removed from regular foster care and sent to live with the Swerlins, who ran a pre-detention foster facility twelve miles away in Mason. Mrs. Swerlin enrolled me in the all-white Mason Junior High. I still got straight As. They elected me class president my very first year there. Destined for greatness? Sure. It was easy to believe everything Papa ever told me.

The English teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, was definitely my favorite person at Mason Junior High. Some of the things he talked about even reminded me of Papa in some ways, as much as any white man could. From time to time, Mr. Ostrowski would clap me on the shoulder and say I had potential. I liked to pretend it was someone else saying it. Someone who loved me. I missed Papa’s deep, strong voice, and being away from home, away from my siblings, it was extra nice to hear something so familiar and uplifting.

Mr. Ostrowski was always asking us — the whole class, I mean — what our dreams were and what we wanted to be. The way Papa had always done, telling me the sky was the limit.

So it was no real surprise when Mr. Ostrowski motioned me up to his desk after class one day, saying, “Malcolm, have you given any thought to your future?”

“My future?” I echoed. I mean, I was used to hearing him talk about stuff like this in general, but not really one-on-one.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s have a little talk about that.”

While the other kids cleared out of the room, laughing and joking and starting their after-school games, I gathered up my stack of books and came to stand by Mr. Ostrowski’s desk.

“You’re working now, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes. I’ve started a job over at a restaurant in Lansing.” Mrs. Swerlin had recommended me for it, knowing I wanted some spending money.

“Well, that’s just fine, for now, isn’t it?” he said.

“I suppose.” I didn’t especially like doing the work, but I sure didn’t mind the little bit of pay I was getting. A handful of cash that was just my own. That was the key to the good life, as far as I could see.

“I wanted to talk to you because I want to be sure you’re thinking about what you want to do for work in the future.”

“Sure.” I nodded eagerly.

“Have you given it any thought?” he said. “You have a lot going for you.”

“Well, yes, sir,” I answered. “I suppose I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a lawyer.” I certainly didn’t want to wash dishes in a sweaty kitchen for the rest of my life. I won all of the debates at school, and I wanted to help people like Papa had; being a lawyer seemed like a good fit.