The train entered the tunnels leading to the New Marsails Municipal Depot. The darkness was lit in round patches by dim bulbs in steel shades. Men worked by lantern with picks and shovels, and one, the foreman, held a blood-colored lamp and waved it as the train went by. Dewey got to his feet, stretched, searched for the tangled arms of his suit coat and the cigarettes he was certain he had left in his breast pocket. And then it was once again late afternoon, and the roar of the tunnel was replaced by the murmuring in the car.

Afterwards, when Dewey thought of how the station had looked that afternoon, he could not remember whether he had taken notice of the great number of Negroes on the platform, in the colored waiting room; could not remember the many thoughtful dark faces of the men or that they wore newly pressed suits and clean shirts or that most of them carried chipped leather suitcases or frayed cloth carpetbags or shopping bags crammed with clothing, sheets, blankets, and pictures; could not remember the women in their summer dresses carrying sweaters and coats, their own and their children’s, or the picnic baskets in the crooks of their arms, or the walking shoes cleaned until the scars and scratches were hidden; could not remember the scampering, skipping children, running ahead of their parents or the littler ones hanging onto their mothers’ dresses; could not remember the babies sleeping in the grownups’ arms or on the benches; could not remember the old people hobbling proudly on canes, or sitting quietly waiting for the trains to be called; could not remember that the Negroes spoke in whispers, avoided the glances of white people, and tried not to be remembered.

He remembered there had been Negroes, there had always been Negroes at the depot, the porters in their gray suits and red hats, but he had not taken notice of the many others there that day or that most of them were boarding outgoing trains. All he could really remember was looking through the dirt-streaked window, finding his family amid the crowds as the train’s air brakes threw him forward, and his happiness at seeing Dymphna, his sister—whom he was old enough now to appreciate and like—for the first time since Christmas; his disappointment at not seeing Tucker and Bethrah anywhere on the platform; and finally, his surprise, no, it was a far more wrenching sensation than that, his utter shock at seeing his parents, his mother and father, smiling at one another and HOLDING HANDS (!) as gleefully as teen-agers. When he had left home after a dreary Christmas holiday, his mother had been muttering constantly about getting a divorce.