Bradford knew one thing, he would not live another day in his mother’s house and he would find a place to live that suited his sensibilities. Maybe there was a nice mansion in a forest of well groomed trees and a garden maze that he could find to live. But when he tried to run away from home after the whooping incident with his mother, Bradley realized the old perception of the pastoral south was just an ideal aesthetic created in the books he loved, books like Shiloh and Cold Sassy Tree. His neighborhood was empty lots of tall, brittle grasses that seemed to collect dust and heat. And there were houses in rows, lined with chain link fences that protected him from vicious neighborhood dogs. And there was the hard concrete and asphalt, the only places he could sit without someone shooing him away or bothering him. He knew then that the neighborhood where he’d lived all his life was not really his home.
“I just don’t belong there. She doesn’t want me there.” Bradford said to Ms. Davis the day she asked him about his acrimonious relationship with his mother.
Ms. Davis said solemnly, “I don’t think that’s true, Bradford. You should think, are there things you do that make your mother upset? Are you agitating her?”
“She thinks everything I do is annoying. She think I’m pretending to be something that I’m not. But I’m me, Ms. Davis. She just doesn’t like me. Am I bad Ms. Davis?” Bradford collapsed in tears in Ms. Davis’s arms who was very conflicted. Bradford was obviously persecuted, but could she work to remove him from his mother’s home? Maybe it’s the best thing for the both of them, she thought, and eventually, Bradford was placed into the custody of the local office of social services, where he was visited every day by Ms. Davis who brought him new books every time she saw him; until the day he was placed into a foster home.
Bradford would continue to learn, determined not to be limited by the things he did not know. He would never know that his removal from his mother’s home was the best thing that could have happened to his brother Randall, who would grow to become a professor at a small university. His mother lives with him and his wife, their children, and he would blame her early onset Alzheimer’s on his brother, who had filled their home with trouble because he thought he knew more than she did.
The new home where Bradford finally found himself just as he turned thirteen, was not a better home than the one he’d left; in fact, it was filled to the brim with evil; but Bradford finally felt that he received the veneration that he deserved. It was in that house of evil that he would change his name for the first time, when he became Bradley.
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