The weekend drive Down South from Newark always started early and was relatively fast. Mom would have us on the road before the spring sun cracked the horizon. “I’m only stopping for gas. So if you have to go to the bathroom, you better do it then,” she would declare before every trip to my summer vacation with my grandparents in North Carolina. And she meant it. There was no shopping or supping at roadside diners like Aunt Annie and Uncle McKinley would do on their epic twelve-hour-plus drives from the Bronx. We would roll past the Severn City Limits sign five miles or so south of the lush green fields on the border with Virginia some eight hours later. Time was also of the essence since Mom had to get back to New Jersey for work on Monday.

My mom was born and raised in Severn, North Carolina, by Joe Nathan and Isla Mae. My grandparents and their seven children—five girls and two boys—lived in a simple, two- story four-bedroom house they bought for $3,000 from the local peanut company in September 1953 on an unnamed, unpaved street in the center of town. A town so small that you have to zoom all the way in on Google Maps just to make out the tiny layout of its streets. A town where Jim Crow was a prominent resident.

All around Severn are fields that burst in the summer heat with peanuts, tobacco, corn, and cotton. My mother and her siblings worked in the cotton fields when school was out, stuffing canvas bags with as much of the puffy fiber as would fit. On occasion, Aunt Elsie once reminisced that they would add water to their bags. More weight meant more money. Every cent helped.

Joe Nathan and Isla Mae married when he was twenty-three and she was sixteen. By then, Grandma had already had one child, my Aunt Lillian. A daughter Granddaddy raised as his own, who called him “Daddy” with such affection that it would be decades before I learned he was not her biological father. My grandparents’ education stopped at grade school. They could both read and write and worked constantly. Joe Nathan hauled peanuts for the Severn Peanut Company, the major employer in town whose factory loomed like a corrugated metal Godzilla beyond his beloved pecan tree in the backyard. Granddaddy was a slim man of average height who always seemed to be clad in the blue uniform of the blue- collar worker, his dark chauffeur’s cap snug about his full head of curly hair, until he entered the house or a store.

Granddaddy’s voice was akin to a low growl, the kind I’d hear after the initial ignition of my Boxster decades later. Saying grace magnified its solemnity. One too many drinks increased his voice’s volume and magnified its menace, as he alternated between rambling pronouncements and commands that we sit and listen. I always tried to slip from the kitchen, the preferred venue for his monologues, to the front porch, or any place out of his sight line. My little legs usually didn’t move fast enough to be successful.

Grandma worked inside the peanut factory on the assembly line, plucking out the bad nuts from the good that came her way. When things slowed in the summer at the factory, Grandma would take the unpaved street from her house to the paved boulevard and sidewalks that led to the homes of white families that she’d clean. Homes that were visible through the morning mist from her backyard.

She was a zaftig woman with a proud bearing, a lazy right eye, an easy smile whose prominent feature was a big bottom lip that I inherited, and a love for Simplicity patterns. But Grandma always made the same thing: a sack dress that she slipped on with her arms raised in the air after her head went through the opening. The chrome kitchen table with its white enamel top and elaborate red pattern down the middle sometimes serving as a runway for my collection of toy airplanes or a track for my Matchbox cars was Grandma’s sewing studio. Her metal scissors crunched on the tabletop as she cut her way across the tissue- papery pattern pinned to the fancy fabric. The Singer sewing machine hummed as she stitched the pieces together to reveal a creation she always thrilled over. She loved looking good, especially on Sunday, with her new dress, earrings, faux white pearl necklace, a little bit of makeup, and one of her wigs carefully transplanted from the Styrofoam head on her little bedroom dresser to her own.

Slowing down her convertible Mercedes 450SL to match the town speed limit on Route 35, my mother would take the first right. A perplexing habit to my young mind when the next right would take us right to her ancestral front door. Past Aunt Ercell’s house, where daylight never penetrated its window shades. Past Aunt Essie Mae’s with its screened-in front porch, where she would wave hello and call your name. Past the one- story, three-room shack where Aunt Annie was born. The growing family had moved there from their faded red shack behind the peanut factory they shared with Granddaddy’s mother. Home now was the two-level, multiroom home closer to downtown, just on the other side of the freight train tracks where the post office, supermarket, and general store were. An old loading area near a commercial building became the end-of-the-day meeting spot for Granddaddy and his friends to talk, drink, and wait for me or my cousin Rita, my summer sibling, to come tell him dinner was ready.

But for my mother, that first right turn on Route 35 was defiance at 25 mph. Her slow roll down Main Street in her brown German ride with red interior was sending a message to the white citizens of Severn. The girl whose mother worked for them was home, now a woman with a Northern address and nursing degree. Once state-sanctioned discrimination was declared illegal, she was able to slip the educational and cultural limitations imposed by Jim Crow by earning a BA in special education from then-Kean College in New Jersey and a master’s in audiology and communication from the same school in the years ahead.

My mother strongly believed that education was a prison key. If you grabbed on to learning, freedom and advancement were yours. Amassing as many academic credentials as possible, she believed, was vital for an African American to have a fighting chance of defying expectations and moving forward. But there was a catch. Because you’re Black, you have to work twice as hard to prove you are just as smart as your white classmates. That meant sick days from school were rare for me, even when I had a cold. Not doing my homework was not an option. A’s were expected. B’s were tolerated. The rare C or lower was punished. No television, no friends until there was a turnaround on the next test or pop quiz. And there was no question that I was going to college. “If you’re eighteen and not in college, you better have a job!” she would warn. “And if you don’t have a job, you’re not living here. I’m not taking care of a grown man.”

Mom was tight with a dollar when it came to buying toys. But Washington, Lincoln, and Jackson always made an appearance at bookstores. Fairy tales, atlases, puzzle books, Agatha Christie novels, she indulged them all. I had two sets of encyclopedias. The colorful Random House Encyclopedia was a great addition in the late 1970s, although I did have to use it to prop up my mother’s bed after some forbidden jumping broke off the left wheel from the box spring and mattress frame. She was none the wiser until she asked me a historical question neither of us could answer.

“Go get that Random House book,” she said, sitting in bed with me at the foot. The dilemma was playing out in my head. She’d demand to know where it is if I said I didn’t have it. She’d kill me if she knew her bed was broken. “Boy, go get that book,” she said, half annoyed at my delay. So I bent down, lifted the blanket and top sheet with their nurse’s corner still intact. The left front of the bed thudded to the floor as the encyclopedia appeared. We couldn’t stop laughing. I, at having gotten away with it undetected for months. She, for not having noticed.

Excerpted from the book Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home by Jonathan Capehart. Copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Capehart. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.