The story's first-person point of view tells the reader Read the excerpt from "A Journey West."
It was all my fault. I'm the one who told Momma and
Daddy that we should travel west, I saw the handbills,
which said there was good land in Kansas, I heard a
man say that if we could live on the land and improve it
we'd own it, which is not something a black family can
do in Louisiana
The man said that the people going to Kansas were like
the slaves leaving Egypt in the biblical Exodus. He said
we should all raise some dust and make our own
exodus, out of the injustice of the South and into the
freedom of the West Well, my mind filled up with so
many dreams and beautiful visions that I just about ran
home to tell my folks
how hard it was for the enslaved people to escape
Egypt .
how to farm land that was available in Kansas,
about Nate's thoughts when he discovers that land is
available in Kansas
about Note's parents and their hopes of escaping the
injustices of the South