But you couldn't just pick up and go to visit New York from Lansing

　　But you couldn't just pick up and go to visit New York from Lansing, or Boston, or anywhere else-notwithout money. So I'd never really given too much thought to getting to New York until the free wayto travel there came in the form of Ella's talk with old man Rountree, who was a member of Ella'schurch.
　　What Ella didn't know, of course, was that I would continue to see Sophia. Sophia could get away onlya few nights a week. She said, when I told her about the train job, that she'd get away every night I gotback into Boston, and this would mean every other night, if I got the run I wanted. Sophia didn't wantme to leave at all, but she believed I was draft age already, and thought the train job would keep meout of the Army.
　　Shorty thought it would be a great chance for me. He was worried sick himself about the draft call thathe knew was soon to come. Like hundreds of the black ghetto's young men, he was taking some stuffthat, it was said, would make your heart sound defective to the draft board's doctors.
　　Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: "Whitey owns everything. Hewants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight."Anyway, at the railroad personnel hiring office down on Dover Street, a tired-acting old white clerkgot down to the crucial point, when I came to sign up. "Age, Little?" When I told him "Twenty-one," henever lifted his eyes from his pencil. I knew I had the job.
　　I was promised the first available Boston-to-New York fourth-cook job. But for a while, I worked therein the Dover Street Yard, helping to load food requisitions onto the trains. Fourth cook, I knew, wasjust a glorified name for dishwasher, but it wouldn't be my first time, and just as long as I traveledwhere I wanted, it didn't make any difference to me. Temporarily though, they put me on "TheColonial" that ran to Washington, D.C.
　　The kitchen crew, headed by a West Indian chef named Duke Vaughn, worked with almostunbelievable efficiency in the cramped quarters. Against the sound of the train clacking along, thewaiters were jabbering the customers' orders, the cooks operated like machines, and five hundredmiles of dirty pots and dishes and silverware rattled back to me. Then, on the overnight layover, Inaturally went sightseeing in downtown Washington. I was astounded to find in the nation's capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I'd ever seen in thepoorest sections of Roxbury; in dirt-floor shacks along unspeakably filthy lanes with names like PigAlley and Goat Alley. I had seen a lot, but never such a dense concentration of stumblebums, pushers,hookers, public crap-shooters, even little kids running around at midnight begging for pennies, half-naked and barefooted. Some of the railroad cooks and waiters had told me to be very careful, becausemuggings, knifings and robberies went on every night among these Negroes . . . just a few blocks fromthe White House.
　　But I saw other Negroes better off; they lived in blocks of rundown red brick houses. The old"Colonial" railroaders had told me about Washington having a lot of "middle-class" Negroes withHoward University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, porters, guards, taxi-drivers, andthe like. For the Negro in Washington, mail-carrying was a prestige job.