It was 1949. I was eleven. Mama got on the bus with us five children, the youngest a baby in her arms. We left Georgia, went across the time-zone Chattahoochee River which at that time ran free, undammed. Into the future, an hour and a lifetime ahead. Daddy was trying again at a new job as a bread truck driver in a little Alabama town. He would try for three more years at which point he would desert us, leaving us in a slum house with broken windows back in Georgia from whence we came. The new-to-us Alabama rental had no furniture when we arrived. A fire was built in the grate of the chimney in the living room. That first night we slept on pallets on the floor. Bit-by-bit we put a new life together in that town.
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