SYLVESTER BOYD JR.
Author - Actor - Historian - Motivational Speaker
Inside the Novels
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The Road from Money, The Journey to Find Why - Part 1
​CHAPTER 1
Why?
It was 1925, on a very warm spring day in Money, Mississippi. The sound of a steam locomotive puffing its way down the tracks pierced the calm that lay like a blanket over the small town. The locomotive left a tail of white, gray, and black smoke behind that mixed with the mist from the nearby Tallahatchie River. Two rabbits scurried across the tracks just before the slow-moving train. Beside the track an old mule-drawn wooden wagon moved slowly. Inside, eight-year-old Estella and her grandfather, Paul Reynolds, a sharecropper, were making their way into town.
ISBN-9781478730309
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The Road from Money, The Journey Continues - Part 2
CHAPTER 1
North at Last
The warm fog surrounded the young woman from Money, Mississippi as she hugged her uncle she had not seen in years. Tears rolled down Estella’s cheeks like rain falling from the sky. The train ride from her small home town to Chicago had been long but fun. It was the fall of 1937, she was in the North at last.
“Gal, you hug me any harder; you goin’ to break me in half!” Her uncle Leamon chuckled. Hearing his familiar deep voice, made her feel so safe. She released her hold on her uncle and wiped the tears from her face.
“You know all my life I have wanted to come north and now I’m here! Now I’m here,” she repeated; as if to convince herself she was in the north.
Her uncle looked down at his niece with a wide smile on his face, adding, “I know how you feel, gal, I felt the same way when I got here.”
ISBN-9780578197975
The Road from Money, The Journey Continues - Part 3
CHAPTER 1
Reflections
One summer day in 1956 Estella sat at her kitchen table thinking about the conversation she had with her mother, Julia, earlier in the day reminiscing about the last few years. Now she began to reflect on a conversation she had with her sister Elizabeth about getting divorced, remarried and having a new baby. Elizabeth and her children had just moved from her basement apartment on 56th street to the new public housing projects on 22nd and State, near Chinatown.
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The last time Elizabeth visited, they argued about her having so many babies with her new husband, Joe. There was four children already – Sonny, Charles and Anthony from her first husband, Sylvester. Now there was Joe Junior, and she was pregnant again. In addition, her sister didn’t let the family know that she had been remarried for quite some time.