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Connie Williams is a granddaughter of South Carolina sharecroppers who chopped cotton and worked in tobacco before heading north in the “Great Migration” of black Southerners in the mid-20th century.

But the recent Greensboro transplant — part of what demographers call a “reverse” influx to the South — was, at heart, a Jersey girl.

Every June growing up, when school let out in the asphalt canyon where the Hudson River smelled of Sabrett bakery in the morning and the My-T-Fine Pudding plant in the afternoon, Williams watched her playmates leave to spend summer vacations with grandparents in the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama.

Williams’ father would shake his head in disapproval.

“They still lynch black people down South,” he would say.

So for Williams, the South remained a strange, far-off, forbidding land she never set foot in until age 42. That was the year she traveled with Global Volunteers to a little hell town called Jonestown, Miss., population 850.

There, like Stanley in search of Dr. Livingstone, Williams set forth one morning in the glancing Delta heat and came nose to nose with the part of the world her grandmother had forsaken on a railroad platform two generations before.

Leaving Bowman, S.C., in 1938, the family had been one small story in the greatest mass exodus in human history — the 6.5 million black people who left the rural South for factory jobs in the industrial North between the 1930s and 1970.

So, 53 years after that train trip, Williams played accidental anthropologist one Mississippi morning and did her first field study at Mrs. Moore’s Store. It was a little brick place with a faded Pepsi mural on the side. The store also sold Peach Nehi — something you couldn’t find in Jersey City — next to jars of pickled pigs’ feet and barrels with onion skins in the bottom.

Mrs. Moore looked up.

“Good mawning,” Williams said, her accent virtually stamped with her downtown Jersey City ZIP code, all nine digits.

“Honey,” Mrs. Moore replied, “where you from?”

It was that plain. Williams wasn’t part of this place — not part of the juke joint across the street, where the newest 45 rpm hit record was a dusty “Midnight Train to Georgia,” this being 1991.

Nor was Williams part of Bennie’s, where she was about to get her first serving of deep-fried catfish, and not the farm-raised kind. It was handed through a walk-up window that the Board of Health would have shut in a Jersey City second, as if any germ could have survived Bennie’s hot grease.

No, Williams wasn’t part of this place. But something else grew plain. The South was part of her.

She watched the sun rise in a red ball off the horizon — a sight she couldn’t see up North, not even from her desk on Chase Manhattan’s 34th floor.

She walked among wooden grave markers sunk two feet in the black silt, dating to 1848, before realizing: These were slaves. Maybe born here, died here, never left this place.

That was the forbidding part, and her grandmother’s words echoed. Explaining why they got on the train with their bags of fried chicken and potato salad for the journey north, leaving everything they knew. Because it was everything they would ever know — “stoop work,” as her grandmother called it, work one did stooping over, from the age of 5 on, and it was all the future held for them in that South.

No school. No factory whistle summoning people to work. No factory. No pension plan. Sharecroppers’ hours never changed. Start before dawn, end after dark.

“We worked from 'Can’t see’ to 'Can’t see,’ ” Williams remembers her grandmother saying. “My grandmother lived a life of drudgery. It was all work, work, work, work. She wanted to be a doctor.”

Williams’ mother, on the other hand, was only 13 when the family left South Carolina for New Jersey in 1938, and she still had girlish memories. She spoke of fish fries, hog-killing time, the exotic beauty of the land, the clean simplicity of life beyond the Jersey asphalt — a little like the wild tales Williams’ playmates brought back from summer vacations down South.

In her retirement, Williams began to feel the pull of what she had never known — “my grandmother calling me” — but not to Mississippi, or any place a person needed a puddle-jumping prop jet to reach.

Instead, Williams decided on some nice, central city with “Green” in its name. Somewhere temperate, where her grandson from Jersey could come spend summers in the South, listening to men of leisure in straw Kangol caps jaw-boning at the public golf course, or where he could learn violin at the summer music festival. Williams’ daughter, the economist in the family, frowned on the idea, even when presented with what appeared to be the ridiculously low cost of housing and property taxes compared with Jersey City.

“Those are made dollars. That’s retirement income,” she pointed out to Williams. “You go ahead. I’m staying here.”

'I got what I came for here’

Nobody, Jennette Silverthorne determined, would ever slam a door in her face.

Born in a tiny crossroads down east called Blount’s Creek, Silverthorne graduated from St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh in 1956 and was offered a ticket out — a job teaching science in Mississippi. But the fare was less than coach class for a woman with a four-year degree: The salary quoted was less than a domestic made in New York City.

So that became Silverthorne’s destination: New York. She made a choice between Garden City, where she worried that the U.S. Census showed only 15 families who were nonwhite, and Great Neck, a wealthy area that was 90 percent Jewish. She picked Great Neck.

“One of the best decisions I ever made,” Silverthorne says. “I learned that you know what it is to be oppressed if you’ve been there yourself.”

She ended up studying the more lucrative medical technology, working at Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island for 32 years, and happened to send her last two children back to her native state, North Carolina, to college — one to UNC-Chapel Hill, the other to Duke.

An odd thing happened when she spoke to her two sons in college in North Carolina, Silverthorne recalls.

“I started hearing, 'We ain’t coming back. We like it here.’ ”

Like Rust Belt residents of every ethnic background, the Silverthornes looked at the numbers: Property taxes. Air quality indexes. Commuting times. The whole rat race that overpopulated Long Island had become — the struggle just to survive.

Maybe it was time to close the circle, go back South.

“I got what I came for here in this town,” Silverthorne, now a Greensboro real estate agent and relocation specialist, recalls saying of New York.

“We picked by computer between Greensboro and Asheville. But Asheville had too much snow.”

A train bound for Greensboro

It is now 2009, two generations since Olenda Johnson’s grandparents got on the train in Georgia and Alabama for points north — Hartford, Conn., and Pittsburgh — to start new lives in the steel mills and shipyards that built up around World Wa­r II.

But Johnson, a confident, up-and-coming business professor at N.C. A&T, is here to tell her own migration story. On a rainy March morning on Elm Street, she slides into a booth at her favorite Thai place, a brisk walk from her house in Southside, and recalls the move from Cheyenne, Wyo., where she taught organizational behavior for the Air Force.

Her father, a retired Air Force officer, also lived in Cheyenne with her mother. The joke was that when the daughter left, Cheyenne’s black population would drop by 30 percent. But her father’s first response to her news was no joke.

“His first reaction was, 'I’m not sure I’m comfortable with you moving to the South,’ ” Johnson recalls. “I think you’ll need to hear this part from him.”

The thing we need to understand about Olen Johnson, the retired officer who named his daughter after himself, is that he was born and raised up North. It was the Air Force that dictated his young family’s brief “reverse migration” in 1961 to Albany, Ga. — ironically, the birthplace of Olen’s wife, Thelma, before her mother’s family migrated north when she was 5 years old.

Recalls Thelma Johnson of the couple’s Air Force reassignment: “Being around my aunts, my mother’s family again, that part was nice. But the way segregation in the South was, it was frightening to me.”

The Air Force stint in Albany coincided with the so-called civil rights “Albany Movement” that drew frequent visits from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The church the family attended received a bomb threat in 1963, the year Olenda Johnson was born.

Johnson’s mother, a nurse, recalls that the VA hospital was under orders to integrate the patient wings, but administrators were frequently caught wheeling patients around on gurneys, trying to resegregate the wings between black and white after federal inspectors had left.

So 33 years later, when the Johnsons’ daughter, a woman with a doctorate who has taught at the U.S. Army War College, announced that she planned to move South for a post at a historically black university, maybe that explains the father’s initial reaction.

Olen Johnson wasn’t replaying a newsreel, or some story he had heard from his parents about the 1930s. He was replaying the voice on the other end of the phone line the day he was ushering at Shiloh Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., in 1963: “There’s a bomb in that church. You better get all those n-----s outta there.’ ”

Olenda Johnson wasn’t even born when that happened. Her pregnant mother wasn’t even at church that day.

So when Johnson took the A&T professorship, assuring her father it was the smart choice, she invited her parents to visit for their 40th wedding anniversary, and had them stay at her place in downtown Greensboro.

They took a walk by themselves on South Elm Street one morning. When they came back, they were happy, chatty. People they met were friendly. Later, they went to T.J. Maxx. An older white woman sat down on a bench beside Olen Johnson and told him the whole story of the Woolworth sit-in.

He was amazed. Not at the story. Just that this woman sat down and talked to him, here in Greensboro, N.C.

When he and Thelma got home to Cheyenne, to the cold and the early snow, they called their daughter. They had been thinking: How would she feel if they moved to North Carolina, too? Maybe not Greensboro, but High Point, perhaps?

Not long after, the couple packed their things and took a train, which is the way they like to travel, and came from Wyoming to North Carolina, their new year-round residence. Olen Johnson is the first to point out that he hasn’t come “home,” because the South never was home — he was born and raised in Pittsburgh.

But what of all the other Johnsons whose portraits look down in rueful patina hues from the walls of the couple’s smart new house off Skeet Club Road? They are Johnsons, Hurts, Hogans, people who stooped and labored, men like Olen Johnson’s father, angry and bottled-up; or Thelma’s father, who died at 39; people who knew what it was to be black in the South in the 1930s.

In 2009, have they come home to grandmother South, stepped off the train and laid that baggage down?

“It dawned on me,” says Olen Johnson. “We were visiting a new South. It was a 360-degree turn, a new generation of people that were more respectful, a mixture of people, a politeness of people. These were some of the things we saw in a new South.”

And what Thelma Johnson saw, looking to the southern view from her door: The rain was finally letting up. In a few days, it would be time to think about the garden again.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com