Chapter One

When I was forty-two years old, I decided to run away from home. Just pack up and go.

Wouldn't take dishes or nothin', no "household goods," stuff like that. Just my own stuff. What I could get into two suitcases.

Wasn't runnin' away exactly, just movin' on. I wanted to see things I'd never seen before, go places different from here.

I had been here too long.

Wasn't nothin' happenin' here. Not a damn thing.

Sometimes, you hear people say they want to find themselves. Well, I didn't need to do that. I knew where I was. That was the problem.

When I was a kid, I watched the Popeye cartoons on Saturday mornin' before my momma waked up. Swee' Pea, the baby, he was my favorite. He would feel like he wasn't bein' treated right, so he would tie up all his things in a bandanna (like the ones my son Rashawn wears on his head now) and put it on a pole and crawl away, him in his pjs. And he'd see monsters and China and the ocean-the exciting things he'd never seen before.

It was like a big adventure.

That's what I wanted. A big adventure, all my own.

Now, you know there was a lot workin' against me. I'm not what you call educated or nothin' like that. I ain't never been nowhere, don't have much of a life as it is. Got a COTA bus life-I go where the bus go: to work, to the carry-out, then home.

And I'm not the kinda woman that you would think could have adventures. I'm not brave or smart. Not pretty or important. I ain't nobody you ever heard of. Ha! I'll never be anybody you heard of!

And to most folks, I ain't much. But that's OK. I was smart enough to know that I couldn't stay here. Couldn't keep living the sa