Excerpt from Buses Are a Comin' by Charles Person, Richard Rooker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up on Auburn Avenue all of four hundred steps from my home. Auburn was known as "the richest Negro street in the world." But today I know "richest Negro street" meant poor and undesirable by white standards.

A half mile down Auburn Avenue from the King home, the Royal Peacock nightclub brought national talent to "Sweet Auburn Avenue." Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, Dizzy Gillespie, Big Mama Thornton transformed that lounge into a volcanic celebration of music. In our young teens, Kenneth and I sneaked there at night. We crouched outside and heard the music, felt the vibrations, and imagined what we were missing. Every kid we knew wanted to be old enough to enter the Royal Peacock.

This was our world.

Men worked jobs paying $40 to $50 a week. Women worked as domestics. That brought another $5 a day. It's hard when a woman is mother to two sets of children—her own four kids (eventually seven) and her white family's children. Ruby Person hid the hardness. My siblings and I were not aware of Mom's world—a world where Jim Crow sat on her as she and Dad tried to make it up from the Bottom.

After a long day of working for someone else's family and a long evening of tending to her own, Mom gathered Jimmy Dale, Norma Jean, Carole, and me to her bedside. She sat on the bed. We sat on the living room floor next to the bed and listened to the Bible reading. Sometimes, we got to pick the story.

"Tell us about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego," we said in chorus. Like most kids, we wanted to hear the same story over and over.

"Here's a story of brave people just like the four of you," she said.

Still at nine, that made me proud. I wanted to be brave like Bible heroes, like Dad fighting Nazis, like Mom.

We finished Bible-reading time by memorizing verses together. This night it was Joshua 1:9:

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

"Be strong." "Be not afraid." Those were words I wanted to live by. Where would I be without Mom?

At bedtime, Jimmy Dale and I slept in the same bed and fought over who got to sleep next to the wall. Somehow that felt more private. I won. Sleep took its time setting in. It was hard falling asleep because home had two rooms, seven people, and three of them were adults talking late into the evening. I remember hearing them say things that made me wonder. Things like "They aren't old enough. They don't need to know that yet" or "It doesn't have to be that way for them, so why tell them?" I'd try to stay awake to find out what the "that" and "that way" were, but sleep did come, and when I awoke, it was a new day on Bradley Street.

* * *

Yonge Street Elementary School was a half mile west of our place—a ten-minute walk there and a faster run home for Mom's blackberry pie or hot, roasted peanuts. When I got close enough for my nose to figure out what was in the oven, my ears could hear what was on Mom's mind that day.

Some days, plaintive melodies accompanied the yearning words Swing low, sweet char-reee-ahht, Com-in' for to car-ry me ho-o-o-o-me. Other days, the cheerful buoyancy of Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart, in my heart … spilled out of the apartment. I was too young to know what troubles Mom had seen and was too caught up in other things to wonder about Mom's faith, but her singing was a constant during my growing-up years. When I think of my mom, I think of her working and singing.

As early as elementary school, math and science fascinated me. By nine I knew about the illusive dream of a perpetual motion machine. It captivated me. I learned it was an impossible idea because the expenditure of energy exhausts the source. I remember thinking my teachers must not have known my mom. She was always working, always producing, always moving … perpetually.

Excerpted from Buses Are a Comin' by Charles Person and Richard Rooker. Copyright © 2021 by Charles Person and Richard Rooker. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.