ABSTRACT
The road from home leads out to the world and back. The people in this chapter who returned to the poor southern communities I call Burdy’s Bend and New Jericho in Powell County, and Chowan Springs and Rosedale in Chestnut County, had not made one-way pilgrimages to northern cities. For generation upon generation, black men and women had been leaving such places, flooding away especially in the 1940s and 1950s. But in the 1970s and 1980s the sea changed, the tide of migration turned homeward, and the story of all the decades in between can no longer be represented as a simple narrative of a people packing up and heading north. What has never been told, we know now, is the tale of the bonds that were never broken; of the ways in which the people never entirely departed and in fact foreshadowed their homecomings.
