*The semester was ending at LSU. My thoughts had gone beyond the state of Louisiana or even New Orleans. I was indeed unhappy. I had failed in my hopes. Mona Lisa and I had grown even more distant. I had gotten into irreparable arguments with several professors. I wanted out. My fellowship was renewable, but obtaining the degree was not motive enough to hold me there in Louisiana. 

Even New Orleans had lost its fascination for me. I had a great yard sale. I sold all the furniture, including the armoires of Yusef Komunyakaa. I had lugged it from New Orleans and I did not have the resources to store it any place. I also sold my books that I had brought from home to Monroe to New Orleans and then to Baton Rouge. I sold my school books, including those for the classes I had that semester. Oddly, one of the professors, a writer who taught the techniques of literature, bought his own book. We talked. I talked to him man to man, rather than as student to professor. I still do not think that he got it. He made no attempt to find out what was going on with me and why I was leaving the doctoral program. Nor did he attempt to persuade me to stay a bit longer.

I was carrying only that which could fit into to my Volkswagon bug. I, however, shipped Mama’s quilts by bus to Emporia, Virginia. .I took the long, slow way home. I knew that I would never drive this way again. I drove up Route 61, through the Mississippi delta. In one long flat stretch of land, there was cotton to my right, cotton to my left, and cotton behind me and before me. I did not see one tree, not even a live oak leaning. Then there were the lonely crossroads. I began to understand Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson and the existential wailing of their blues. The black people who hoed these fields and picked the cotton in the hot steamy sun, doubtless, took their meals in the fields. There was no shade. There was nowhere to go but into another cotton field. 

I understood how Robert Johnson could have mystical experiences at the crossroads and be desirous of making a pact with the Devil. Anything was better than the Mississippi sun in some white man’s fields. I understood the anxiousness to go somewhere else, to get away, to go north to Chicago and begin anew. Was not that the existential theme of black life in America? It was always better somewhere else. I drove through Memphis and Nashville. I spent no time in these places. I then crossed the mountains into Virginia and drove Route 56 toward Emporia. I came down the hills at an average speed of about thirty-five miles an hour. But it was a wonderful descent because I was on my way home to Mama and my "peoples."