What made you want to tell their story?

 I think the story that I really wanted to write is, well, what happens to these people now? This is all they’ve ever known. This is the life they’ve had since they were children, coming up and down the coast, living in camps. And now there’s no more. There’s no more potato grading. The barn was gone, and the camp got shuttered … So for me, there was just a world of great stories to be told, and a kind of historic story to be told, really about the last of these people here.

It honors the people who live in that camp, who otherwise were kind of ignored. A lot of these Black camps were just kind of left on their own. And then as the farming industry changed and they closed, these people were just kind of left to their own wits … So this history will be preserved, and their stories will be told.

Who were some of the people you encountered?

Frank. He wasn’t sure what his name was, he’d lived there so for so long, and it took a long time to find his family in South Carolina, but we eventually found that he had a mother and a brother and a couple of sisters in very rural South Carolina, and he wanted to go home. He had no identification, no money. The only clothes he had were clothes in a plastic bag. And the photographer and I picked him up on Saturday night, and drove him all the way to South Carolina. He’d been gone for 35 years or so.

Oliver Burke. One of the first days I was reporting in there, he asked me to see if I could find his birth certificate. And while I never found his birth certificate, I did find that where he was born. I ended up finding his mother, and when I talked to her, she said she gave up her son when he was a baby to another couple she knew. [They were going north] to pick blueberries in New Jersey. And this boy then grew up in these camps. He ended up in this camp on Depot Lane, and he wanted to go home, and he had an ID so he could actually fly. We went with him on the plane and took him home with his mother, who we hadn’t seen since he was a baby.

Jimmy Wilson. The oldest guy there, Jimmy Wilson, was born in 1918 and he left rural Georgia as a five-year-old because there was so much violence against Blacks. There were so many lynchings. And he went into Florida with his grandmother, where there were even more lynchings. And he ended up getting on a truck going north as a 14-year-old, picking potatoes in New Jersey and ending up out on Long Island, and he never went back. And I asked him 100 times, I said, “Jimmy, there’s nothing here. The place burned down. What are you going to do? I’ll be glad to drive you to rural Georgia,” and he said to me emphatically, “I will never, ever go back to rural Georgia.” His experience there was so bad.

What makes this story significant?

To me, there was something incredibly American about those people. They represent a history of the North Fork and eastern Long Island that has gone ignored for too long. We wrote about the farmers’ history. Who wrote about the workers? Who wrote about these Black men and women? This book is an effort to save a unique part of the history of this place. But beyond that, this is also the story of America … So, to me, that camp encompasses a lot of local history that’s been ignored and a lot of American history that we really haven’t dealt with in an upfront way.