Between the River and the Railroad Tracks: A Memoir

Meticulously crafted and unflinchingly vulnerable, Nicole R. Fleetwood’s multigenerational family portrait braids the intimate life of a neighborhood with the historic arc that shaped it to offer an untold story of the black Midwest.

In 1973, Hamilton, Ohio, was a mill town so typical it prided itself on being quintessentially American. In harder times, it proved to be a bellwether. Here, young Nicole is born into a fourth-generation household in the second ward, a segregated neighborhood between the river and the railroad tracks.

In this tight-knit community, most of Nicole’s neighbors are like her relatives: large, intergenerational families a few decades up from the South. They build their own institutions, create music with global influence, and uphold a code of conduct centered around safety and belonging.  

But the legacy of slavery and the entrenched racism of the Midwest cast a shadow over the second ward. The Fleetwoods bear their struggles as an ancestral curse, one that dooms their menfolk and burdens their women. The family lore echoes in Nicole’s earliest memories. 

As Nicole grows up, the curse spreads through her community. She witnesses the second ward undergo devastating changes that impact her family and neighbors. The loss of factory jobs, growing political divides, and the crack epidemic wreak havoc, seeping through the walls of her family home and replacing the sense of community and familiarity with destitution and violence.  

Nicole nurtures her intellectual curiosity and independence, dreaming of college and the world beyond. But she fears that leaving the second ward means abandoning everything she’s known—the neighborhood map that kept her safe, the community that raised her, and the family that loves her. In a powerful testament to black love and inheritance, Between the River and the Railroad Tracks asks whether we can ever leave home.