In a clapboard house with brick chimneys at the sides, the two dormer windows on the second floor are now boarded closed. A child's red wagon sits empty in the yard, and a wooden farm wagon sits empty over rows of sprouting green. It is early spring. A tire swing hangs from a tree just coming into leaf. A slate grey bird with wings spread has just taken off.

"Old Home" was almost the only image in Jerry Pinkney's 50-year retrospective exhibit that did not center on people — and yet people are still its focus. The painting came out of the Great Migration, the movement of millions of black families out of the deep south in the early 1900s. They left to find work and a place less steeped in prejudice. And this painting drew me to pay attention to the people who are no longer in...

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