Leaving Lymon

When we first got to Milwaukee and I walked with Aunt Vera into town for groceries, I thought there was so many colored folks up North you wouldn’t hardly know you weren’t in Mississippi. Running straight through the center of town is a street colored folks call Chocolate Avenue. And that’s not ‘cause there’s a sweet shop selling candy. It’s ‘cause there’s colored folks all up and down Walnut Street. Colored folks here ain’t got to go ask the white folks to buy nothing from their stores ‘cause they got their own stores for everything you need, and even things you don’t.

[…]

Just like Vicksburg, Milwaukee’s like two towns in one. North Side for colored folks and South Side for whites. Aunt Vera told me it wasn’t safe for a colored boy to step foot out of the North Side, but with all that was going on here, I didn’t know why I would. A lot of the streets here had numbers for names and the town was laid out like one big puzzle.