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.

The story’s first-person point of view tells the reader

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 Nate’s parents and their hopes of escaping the injustices of the South.