Dr. Booker yelled at us from the last flat car. Rondal hoisted me up, then climbed up himself. We sat with our legs dangling over the side. The train jerked, then moved slow and smooth. I smiled at Rondal, happy to be so close to him. But he was looking across the bottom at the miners breaking up camp.

“Take a heap more trains,” he said.

We stopped in Danville around noon. Someone had decided we could take on cars there and pick up more of the men who had already made their way to Coal River. Dr. Booker and I entered a restaurant with a crowd of miners while Rondal went to see about the train. We squeezed around a table in the corner. The owner hovered uncertainly in the middle of the room, tried to walk in two directions at once, then called out in a voice that cracked, “Listen here! Listen! I dont serve no colored in here. Yall go on back outside.”

A dark Negro at the lunch counter swung around on the stool. He made sure the man saw him lay his pistol on the counter.

“Mister, yall going to serve this here colored, or else I going to serve myself. And I guarantee, I’ll give myself a bigger helping than you would.”

“We’re all rednecks!” someone yelled from the back.

The man retreated to the kitchen.

“Better go make sure he dont do nothing to the food,” another Negro said. He and a companion followed the man into the kitchen. One of them returned shortly with a telephone in his hand, displayed the frazzled ends of its wires.

“I carried me away a little souvenir,” he said.

We applauded. The food began to arrive soon after, trays of hamburgers, sandwiches, and fried potatoes. We paid for everything we ate, and the Negroes at the counter left a tip.

At Danville we took on twenty more flatcars and twelve boxcars. Men rode up top of the boxcars because of the heat. They seemed to float in the shimmering air, their hair smoothed back like birds’ feathers by the wind.

I gave up trying to keep my cap on my head, and crushed it inside the bib of my overalls. It was speckled with cinders from the smokestack.

We passed through the middle of a large coal camp. Rondal yelled that it was called Ramage. Children raced alongside the train on long, skinny brown legs and waved their arms above their heads. They were lovely, their eyes large, their faces narrow, their gait awkward as they navigated across the jagged red dog on their bare feet.