Shoe Box Meal
Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
Nora Burns White migrated from Blaney, South Carolina, to New York City in 1942 with two other girls at the age of fourteen! One of the girls lived in the Bronx and she was down in South Carolina visiting her cousin. “Luis was going back with Mary and I said to my mama ‘Could I go?’ and for some reason or another she said ‘yes.’” White’s older sister Luella had already migrated to Harlem the summer before. But, “Luella did not know that I was coming to New York.” White recalls, “My mother was a very smart person. But how she let me come to New York with two other girls,” the same age seems perplexing in retrospect. White’s mother likely realized that her daughter, Nora, would have better opportunities in New York than as the daughter of a single tenant farmer in South Carolina. So she packed a shoe box meal full of “fried chicken, bread, and cake,” for Nora to eat during the train ride, “enough to last us all the way to New York,” which was a twenty-four hour trip back in 1942.
