BREAKING AWAY

I was leaving without a qualm,
without a single backward glance.
The face of the South that I had known was hostile and forbidding,
and yet out of all the conflicts and the curses …,
the tension and the terror,
I had somehow gotten the idea that life could be different.…
I was now running more away from something than toward something.…

My mood was:
I’ve got to get away;
I can’t stay here.
— RICHARD WRIGHT, Black Boy

Wilkerson, Isabel (2010-09-07). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Kindle Locations 3122-3132). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.