You're listening to Chapter 2, Finding Home.

They did what human beings looking for freedom throughout history have often done.

They left.

An excerpt from Isabel Wilkerson's 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns,

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

Okay. story of America's Great Migration. We were driving from Cleveland, so we drove through Indiana, and it was like some rural parts, but we kept

going, and then we drove to Illinois, and once you hit past the Chicago part, from there on,

it's just so much rural stuff. Like, it was like, I was like, Dad, maybe I made the wrong

choice. He was like, maybe. Like, and this was us driving there in the summer to go to orientation.

Anasia Sturtevin is a 35-year-old queer, single mother, and foster parent in Ames, Iowa.

And those coos you hear?

Well, that's her one-year-old son Isaiah, or Zaya, she calls him.

Anasia works in social services as a domestic abuse youth advocate, but outside of work,

she's super engaged, and I mean like with both sides of the brain. In her downtime, she paints,

draws, does slam poetry, but she also might catch her watching sciencey videos on YouTube or

conducting her own experiments. Basically, she's a lifelong

learner. And her thirst for knowledge would end up taking her all the way to Iowa State University.

Back in 2005, she was on the road with her dad heading to freshman orientation. This black Cleveland

native was about to experience rural life in a way she never had before.

As they drove deeper into the heartland, her dad tried to convince her it wasn't too late to turn around.

And he was like, well, can you change?

And I was like, I don't think so, Dad, I got to go here.

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