Date: April 18, 1936
Location: East Side of Detroit, Michigan
The morning cracked open with a cough of dust and diesel. The WPA truck that carried Henry Booker to the Indianapolis highway rolled down Concord Avenue at 6:03 AM, backfiring twice before disappearing into the haze that hung over the city like last night’s tired breath.
Aaron Booker stood in the front yard with his sleeves rolled and a small brown suitcase in his hand. He didn’t wave. His father never looked back.
Inside the house, the floor creaked.
“Elijah,” Aaron called. “You up already?”
A small face peeked around the edge of the bedroom door. His little brother, barely awake, still in his nightshirt. “You leaving now?”
“In a minute,” Aaron said. “You should be asleep.”
“I wanted to say bye.”
Aaron crouched and rested the suitcase on the stoop. Elijah stepped outside barefoot, arms folded across his chest against the chill.
“Don’t let Mama find you like that,” Aaron said, tugging gently at his sleeve.
Elijah ignored him. “You said you’d take me on the train sometime.”
Aaron smiled. “Next time.”
“You said that last time.”
“I’ll say it next time, too,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “’Til it’s true.”
Elijah looked down at the gravel. “Do they have radios in Cleveland?”
Aaron stood. “Everywhere does now. If you know where to look.”
A screen door slammed from across the street, and a neighbor cursed at his dog. The city was waking up, slowly and without charm. The factories hadn’t started their morning shift yet, but the smell of coal was already in the air.
Aaron took one last look at the house—its patched siding, its leaning porch post, the broken pane above the door covered in cardboard. He’d helped fix all of it at one point or another. It never stayed fixed.
Elijah yawned.
“Go back in. Keep Mama from worrying.”
“You coming back?”
Aaron hesitated.
“Not for a while,” he said.
He turned and started walking down the street. Behind him, the front door opened, then shut again. The little house swallowed his brother whole.
The train left from the Michigan Central Station, its platform buzzing with early motion—suitcases thudding against concrete, porters shouting, pigeons scattering. The glass and steel canopy above filtered in a pale, reluctant sun.
Aaron bought his ticket in cash. No questions. Just the weight of two dollars and the soft clack of receipt paper. He had a job waiting in Cleveland—small firm, mostly machine maintenance and some wire-laying. Not glamorous, not stable, but better than holding a shovel for forty cents an hour.
He found a seat near the back, opened his sketchbook, and thumbed through the pages. Schematic diagrams. Relay coils. Notes about a relay pump motor he had taken apart last winter and rebuilt better.
The car filled up slowly—laborers, salesmen, a woman in a long blue coat with a baby in her lap. Everyone carried something they didn’t say aloud.
Across from him, an older Black man with a trim mustache and a pressed jacket tipped his hat.
“Cleveland?”
Aaron nodded.
“Work?”
“Something like it.”
The man chuckled. “Ain’t it always.”
The train hissed once, then again. The platform began to slide past the window, slow as a thought, then faster, until the city broke apart and gave way to trees and fields painted with April’s first attempts at green.
Aaron stared out the window, sketchbook resting on his lap. He thought about the road to Indianapolis, where his father would spend the day hauling gravel and fighting a rusted backhoe. He thought about Elijah sitting by the radio, waiting for a baseball game that might never come on.
He thought about America—its noise, its ambition, its machinery—and how much of it was built by men whose names were never written down.
And then he looked back at the notebook and started sketching again.
