My parents were not educated people, so I suppose that is why they are so proud of me.  My father was a slave, just as his father was before that and his father before that.  One day, though, he made his escape from his plantation in Mocksville, North Carolina, and somehow, by the luck of the devil or the grace of God, he made his way unscathed to New York.  He arrived penniless, falling into the arms of my mother.

I mean that directly.  My father had had nothing to eat for two days, and was quite weak with hunger,  He happened to be standing near an open window, through which he fell into the arms of my passing-by mother.

Now, my mother was not much better off than he.  She was a seamstress for a large clothing factory deep in the heart of downtown New York.  For her, it was love at first sight.  For him, well, at the time he was unconscious, but upon awakening, he too was struck with that disease that love cannot cure.

They spent several years together, crammed tightly into a two room apartment shared with my mothers father.  Once they had saved enough money (and how much money it took), they traveled with their meager possessions to the west, to the wide open plains.

Des Moines, Iowa, was their destination.  Ah, how it makes my heart ache still to remember miles and miles of grass, all ready for a young boy to play in, an older boy to lay in, and a young man to lay with a young lady within.

My parents fell quickly in love with a small house outside of the city.  So much in love, in fact, that not a scant nine months had passed before I entered the earth.  They could not believe I had come to be, and named me after my Mothers father, as thanks, I suppose, for putting up with them all those years (we received a letter shortly after I was born.  Turns out that he had passed on on the same day I had come into this world.  A coincidence to be sure.)

My life as a young child was like any other: I played and ran around and explored while my mother and father struggled with farming and milking.  We had a cow named Bethel, a pig named Roger (my fathers slavemaster...my father thought it a deserving name) and two chickens named Polka and Dot.  Life was grand.

As I grew older (and so did my parents) they got around less and less.  Slave life is hard on a man, and my mother had never had much experience in the fields.  As a result, after doing farm work, they'd send me into town to barter and buy what we needed, on the horse that we had traded Bethel for.  We never gave the horse a name, for every time we did, it would buck us off until we took back the name.

While I was in the town, I'd scramble and search among the trash to find bits of metal and such to be sold, fabric for bandages, and empty bottles.  Sometimes, if there was a good light and I had made a good profit on whatever we had to sell, I'd sit down for a spell to see what I could win.  One day I nearly lost the horse, it was a good thing I knew just when to quit.  Still, even though I was seventeen, my papa still whipped me for loosing all the money.

One day, however, things turned for the worse.  My mother quickly grew ill with a disease, and my father fell soon behind.  I rode into town, crying for the doctor.  He came, and he listened gravely, and told me there was nothing he could do.

"What do you mean, nothing you can do?" I shouted at him, "There must be something!"

"No sir, not a thing." he shook his head.

"There's always something you can do!  There always is!"

"Boy!  Listen to me!  Your parents are dying!  Quiet yourself."

I left the house.  He watched my parents die, while I could not stand to come back.  I suppose I should thank him for that.

I buried them, and I sat down and thought.  What could I do now?  I couldn't run a farm by myself.  The doctor had, in the kindness of his heart, offered me a place to stay, at the very least, a place to get food.

I sold the farm.  I sold off Polka and Dot, and I butchered Roger and dried him for jerky.  And I moved in with the doctor.

It was an interesting life.  I realized that maybe he had tried his best, in fact, as time grew on, I was sure he had tried his best.  But his best wasn't good enough.

I told him I was leaving one day, to go back to New York.  To study, to become a better doctor to he.

He asked why, and I told him that I would one day find somebody in my situation, and this time, the parents he had failed to save would be saved.

Several years later, I took a train out west.  I no longer had a home in Des Moines, the doctor had died two years back.  As I stepped out in a nameless town, I bought a horse, who I didn't name, and I headed off, hoping to one day find the two people I was too late to save.